Net Zero: It Ain’t Gonna Happen

15 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Environmental Fascism, Renewable Energy

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Backup Capacity, Brad Allenby, Carbon Capture, Cost Parity, Decarbonization, El Hierro, Ezra Klein, Francis Minton, Geothermal, Green Energy, Green Mandates, Hydrocarbons, Intermittancy, Joseph Sternberg, Land Use Requirements, Legal Insurrection, Lithium Batteries, Manhattan Contrarian, Mark P. Mills, Murtaza Hussain, Net Zero, Rare Earth Minerals, Renewable, Solar Power, The Intercept, Tuomas Malinen, Walter Jacobson, Wind Power

A number of countries have targeted net zero carbon dioxide emissions, to be achieved within various “deadlines” over the next few decades. The target dates currently range from 2030 -2050. Political leaders around the world are speaking in the tongues favored by climate change fundamentalism, as Brad Allenby aptly named the cult some years ago. The costly net zero goal is a chimera, however. The effort to completely substitute renewables — wind and solar — for fossil fuels will fail without question. In fact, net zero carbon emissions is unlikely to be achieved anywhere in this century without massive investments in nuclear power. Wind and solar energy suffer from a fatal flaw: intermittency. They will never be able to provide for all energy needs without a drastic breakthrough in battery technology, which is not on the horizon. Geothermal power might make a contribution, but it won’t make much of a dent in our energy needs any time soon. Likewise, carbon capture technology is still in its infancy, and it cannot be expected to offset much of the carbon released by our unavoidable reliance on fossil fuels.

Exposing Green Risks

The worst of it is that net zero mandates will inflict huge costs on society. Indeed, various efforts to force conversion to “green” energy technologies have already raised costs and exposed humanity to immediate threats to health and well being. These realities are far more palpable than the risks posed by speculative model predictions of climate change decades ahead. As Joseph Sternberg notes at the link above, climate policies:

“… have created an energy system of dangerous rigidity and inefficiency incapable of adapting to a blow such as Russia’s partial exit from the European gas market. It’s almost inevitable that the imminent result will be a recession in Europe. We can only hope that it won’t also trigger a global financial crisis.”

Escalating energy costs are inflicting catastrophic harm on businesses large and small throughout the West, but especially in Europe and the UK. A Finnish economist recently commented on these conditions, as quoted by Walter Jacobson at the Legal Insurrection blog:

“I saw this tweet thread by Finnish economist and professor Tuomas Malinen:

I am telling you people that the situation in #Europe is much worse than many understand. We are essentially on the brink of another banking crisis, a collapse of our industrial base and households, and thus on the brink of the collapse of our economies.”

Jacobson also offers the following quote from Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept:

“If you turned the electricity off for a few months in any developed Western society 500 years of supposed philosophical progress about human rights and individualism would quickly evaporate like they never happened.”

Where’s the Proof of Concept?

This is not all about Russian aggression, however. We’ve seen the cost consequences of “green” mandates and forced conversion to wind and solar in places like California, Texas, and Germany even before Russia invaded Ukraine and began starving Europe of natural gas.

Frances Minton at the Manhattan Contrarian blog points to one of the most remarkable aspects of the singular focus on net zero: the complete absence of any successful demonstration project anywhere on the globe! The closest things to such a test are cited by Minton. One is on El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Islands, which has wind turbine capacity of more than double average demand, It also has pumped storage with hydro generators for more than double average demand. In 2020, however, El Hierro took all of its power from the combined wind/storage system only about 15% of the time. 2021 didn’t look much better. Diesel power is used to fill in the frequent “shortfalls”.

Land Use

The land use requirements of a large scale transition to wind and solar are incredible, given projected technological capabilities. Ezra Klein explains:

“The center of our decarbonization strategy is an almost unimaginably large buildup of wind and solar power. To put some numbers to that: A plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar using up to 590,000 square kilometers – which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together. ‘The m footprint is very, very large, and people don’t really understand that,’ Danny Cullenward, co author of ‘Making Climate Policy Work’, told me.”

That’s a major obstacle to accelerating the transition to wind and solar power, but there are many others.

A Slap of Realism

Mark P. Mills elaborates on the daunting complexity and costs of the transition, and like land use requirements, they are all potential show stoppers. It’s a great article excepting a brief section that reveals a poor understanding of monetary theory. Putting that aside, it’s first important to reemphasize what should be obvious: shutting down production of fossil fuels makes them scarce and more costly,. This immediately reduces our standard of living and hampers our future ability to respond to tumultuous circumstances as are always likely to befall us. Mills makes that abundantly clear:

“… current policies and two decades of mandates and spending on a transition have led to escalating energy prices that help fuel the destructive effects of inflation. The price of oil, which powers nearly 97% of all transportation, is on track to reach or exceed half-century highs, and gasoline prices have climbed. The price of natural gas, accounting for 40% of all industrial energy use and one-fourth of global electricity, has soared past a decadal high. Coal prices are also at a decadal high. Coal fuels 40% of global electricity; it is also used to make 70% of all steel and accounts for half its cost of production.

It bears noting that energy prices started soaring, and oil breached $100 a barrel, well before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. The fallout from that invasion has hardened, not resolved, the battle lines between those advocating for and those skeptical of government policies directed at accelerating an energy transition. …

Civilization still depends on hydrocarbons for 84% of all energy, a mere two percentage points lower than two decades ago. Solar and wind technologies today supply barely 5% of global energy. Electric vehicles still offset less than 0.5% of world oil demand.”

As Mills says, it surprises most people that today’s high tech sectors, such as electronic devices like phones and computers, and even drugs, require much more energy relative to product size and weight than traditional manufactured goods. Even the cloud uses vast quantities of energy. Yet U.S. carbon intensity per dollar of GDP has declined over the past 20 years. That’s partly due to the acquisition of key components from abroad, mitigation efforts here at home, and the introduction of renewables. However, the substitution of natural gas for other fossil fuels played a major role. Still, our thirst for energy intensive technologies will cause worldwide demand for energy to continue to grow, and renewables won’t come close to meeting that demand.

Capacity Costs

Policy makers have been deceived by cost estimates associated with additions of renewable capacity. That’s due to the fiction that renewables can simply replace hydrocarbons, but the intermittency of solar and wind power mean that demand cannot be continuously matched by renewables capacity. Additions to renewables capacity requires reliable and sometimes redundant backup capacity. At the risk of understatement, this necessity raises the marginal cost of renewable additions significantly if the hope is to meet growth in demand.

Furthermore, as Mills points out, renewables have not reached cost parity with fossil fuels, contrary to media hype and an endless flow of propaganda from government and the “green” investors seeking rents from government. Subsidies to renewables have created an illusion that costs that are lower than they are in reality.

So Many Snags

From Mills, here are a few of the onerous cost factors that will present severe obstacles to even a partial transition to renewables:

Even with the best battery technology now available, using lithium, storing power is still extremely expensive. Producing and storing it at scale for periods long enough to serve as a true source of power redundancy is prohibitive.
The infrastructure buildout required for a hypothetical transition to zero-carbon is massive. The quantity of raw materials needed would be far in excess of those used in our investments in energy infrastructure over at least the past 60 years.
Even the refueling infrastructure required for a large increase in the share of electronic vehicles on the road would require a massive investment, including more land and at much greater expense than traditional service stations. That’s especially true considering the grid enhancements needed to deliver the power.

The transition would place a huge strain on the world’s ability to mine minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel, and rare earths. Mills puts the needed increases in supply at 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900%, and 700%, respectively, by 2040. In fact, the known global reserves of these minerals are inadequate to meet these demands.
Mining today is heavily reliant on hydrocarbon power, of course. Moreover, all this mining activity would have devastating effects on the environment, as would disposal of “green” components as they reach their useful lives. The latter is a disaster we’re already seeing played out in the third world, where we are exporting much of our toxic, high-tech waste.
The time it would take to make the transition to zero carbon would far exceed the timetable specified in the mandates already in place. It’s realistic to admit that development of new mines, drastic alterations of land use patterns, construction of new generating capacity, and the massive infrastructure buildout will stretch out for many decades.
Given U.S. dependence on imports of a large number of minerals now considered “strategic”, decarbonization will require a major reconfiguration of supply chains. In fact, political instability in parts of the world upon which we currently rely for supplies of these minerals makes the entire enterprise quite brittle relative to reliance on fossil fuels.

Conclusion

The demands for raw materials, physical capital and labor required by the imagined transition to net zero carbon dioxide emissions will put tremendous upward pressure on prices. The coerced competition for resources will mean sacrifices in other aspects of our standard of living, and it will have depressing effects on other markets, causing their relative prices to decline.

For all the effort and cost of the mandated transition, what will we get? Without major investments in reliable but redundant backup capacity, we’ll get an extremely fragile electric grid, frequent power failures, a diminished standard of living, and roughly zero impact on climate. In other words, it will be a major but unnecessary and predictably disastrous exercise in central planning. We’ve already seen the futility of this effort in the few, small trials that have been undertaken, but governments, rent-seeking investors, and green activists can’t resist plunging us headlong into the economic abyss. Don’t let them do it!

Interventionists Love You and Demand You Change, or Else

19 Friday Aug 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Industrial Policy, Uncategorized

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CHIPS Act, David McGrogan, Dierdre McCloskey, Don Boudreaux, Industrial Planning, Inflation Reduction Act, Jason Brennan, Joseph Stiglitz, Lionel Trilling, Lockdowns, Pandemic, Paul Krugman, Scientism, Solyndra

Statistics and measurement might not be critical to the exercise of the authoritarian impulse, but they have served to enable the technocratic tyranny idealized by contemporary statists. Certain influential thinkers have claimed our ability to compile statistics helps give rise to the bureaucratized state. I ran across a great post that led with that topic: “The Brutalization of Compassion” by David McGrogan. The mere ability to compile relevant statistics on a population and its well being (income, jobs, wages, inequality, mortality, suicide, etc… ) can motivate action by authorities to “improve” matters. The purpose might be to get ahead of rival states, or the action might be rationalized as compassion. But watch out! McGrogan quotes a bit of cautionary wisdom from Lionel Trilling:

“‘When once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest,’ he put it, something within us causes us to then ‘go on and make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’”

Ultimately, to pursue their vision, interventionists must impose controls on behaviors. In practice, that means any variance or attempted variance must be penalized. Here’s McGrogan’s description of the steps in this process:

“The conceptualisation of the population as a field of action, and the measurement of statistical phenomenon within it – the taking of an ‘enlightened interest’ in it – gives rise to both ‘pity,’ or compassion, and the application of ‘wisdom’ to resolve its problems. What is left, of course, is coercion, and we do not need to look far to identify it in the many means by which the modern state subjects the population to a kind of Tocquevillian ‘soft despotism,’ constantly manipulating, cajoling and maneuvering it this way and that for its own good, whether through compulsory state education or ‘sin taxes’ or anything in between.”

Follow the Scientism

I can’t neglect to mention another important condition: the hubris among apparatchiks who imagine the state can improve upon private institutions to achieve social betterment. They will always fail in attempts to replace the action of the private markets and the price mechanism to process information relating to scarcities and preferences. Absent that facility, human planners cannot guide flows of resources to their most valued uses. In fact, they nearly always botch it!

Government provision of public goods is one concession worth making, but the state capacity needed to fulfill this legitimate function is subject to severe mission creep: we frequently see efforts to characterize goods and service as “public” despite benefits that are almost wholly private (e.g. education). Likewise, we often hear exaggerated claims of “harms” requiring state intervention (e.g. carbon emissions). These situations often hinge purely on politics. Even when legitimate external benefits or costs can be identified, there is a pretension that they can be accurately measured and corrected via subsidies or taxes. This is far-fetched. At best, it’s possible to vouch for the directional appropriateness of some interventions, but the magnitude of corrective measures is variable and essentially unknowable. Too often we see government failure via over-subsidization of politically favored activities and over-penalization of politically disfavored activities.

One of the most egregious errors of intervention is the over-application of the precautionary principle: if risks are associated with an activity, then it must be curtailed. This often relies on measurements of highly uncertain causes and effects, and it involves aggregation subject to its own biases.

Just as questionable is the ability of “experts” to model natural or behavioral processes such that outcomes can be “predicted” over horizons extending many decades forward. That interventionists tend to ignore the uncertainties of these predictions is the most blatant and damaging conceit of all, not least because the public and the media usually have limited knowledge with which to assess the phenomenon in question.

Public Health Tyranny

The Covid pandemic presented a compelling excuse for precautionists in government and even private institutions to impose radical controls under a set of claims they called “the science”. These claims were often false and really antithetical to the principles of scientific inquiry, which calls for continually questioning hypotheses, even when they represent “consensus”. Yet a series of questionable scientific claims were used to justify abridgment of basic freedoms for the general population, most of whom faced little risk from the virus. This included lockdowns of schools and churches, business closures, cancellation of public events (except of course for protests and riots by Leftists), deferred medical care, vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. The damage these measures inflicted was fierce, and in the end we know that it was almost entirely unnecessary. Still, the public health establishment seems all too willing to ignore the facts in its readiness to repeat the whole range of mistakes at the slightest uptick in what’s now an endemic infection.

Standard Issue Cronyism

In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed a surge in calls for government to enhance the security of our nation’s supply chains. Too large a share of the critical goods required by domestic industries are produced overseas, which has made supply disruptions, and the threat of future disruptions, especially acute. Right on cue, advocates of industrial policy and planning have arranged for the federal government to provide $85 billion to domestic producers of semiconductors under the so-called CHIPS Act. But semiconductor producers are in no need of government incentives to “re-shore” production:

“… there has been even more chipmaking investment dedicated to the U.S. market, even as federal subsidies have languished. Construction is now underway at four major U.S. facilities and will continue with or without subsidies—something even Intel reluctantly acknowledged when it delayed the groundbreaking ceremony on its much‐ballyhooed Ohio facility to protest congressional inaction. This is because, as numerous experts have explained over the last year, there are real economic and geopolitical reasons to invest in additional U.S. semiconductor production—no federal subsidies needed.”

Moreover, the global shortage of computer chips appears to be ending. The subsidies will unnecessarily enrich industrialists and their shareholders, provide a source of graft to bureaucrats and various middle men, and likely over-allocate resources to domestic production of chips. Industrial planning of this kind has a long history of failure, and this time won’t be different.

Climate Fascists

We also see repeated over-application of the precautionary principle and rising dominance of industrial policy in climate and energy policy. Enormous sacrifices are imposed on consumers for the sake of minuscule changes in global carbon emissions and the “expected” long-term path of future “global” temperatures. The interventions taken in pursuit of these objectives are draconian, limiting choices and raising the cost of virtually everything produced and consumed. They distort the direction of physical investment, disfavoring reliable sources of base load capacity needed for growth, and also disfavoring the safest and most reliable zero-carbon alternative: nuclear power. The renewable energy sources foolishly pushed by the state and the ESG establishment are environmentally costly in their own right, and they don’t work when natural conditions are unfavorable. As one wag says about the climate provisions of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, “Gonna be a lot more Solyndras coming”.

And talk about sloppy! Our “trusted representatives” in Congress could hardly be bothered to pretend they’d done their homework. They neglected to provide any quantitative carbon and temperature impacts of the legislation. This must be a case of true honesty, because they really have no idea!

Delusions of Central Planning

One great weakness (among many) of arguments for state industrial planning is the assumption that government agents are somehow more competent, efficient, and “pure of heart” than agents in the private sector. Nothing could be more laughable. On this point, some of the most incisive commentary I’ve seen is provided by the masterful Don Boudreaux, first quoting Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan before adding his own entertaining thoughts:

The typical way the left argues for the state is to describe what economists in the 1850s thought markets would be like under monopoly or monopsony, and then compare that to a state run by angels. Both halves of the argument are bad, and yet philosophy treats this as if it were rigorous and sophisticated.

“Far too many policy proposals are nothing more than prayers to the state-god. ‘We entreat you, Oh Powerful and Sacred One, to relieve our people of this or that misery, blemish, and market imperfection! We beseech you to bestow upon us – your faithful servants – cosmic justice, safety from new pathogens, unkind thoughts, and microaggressions, and protection from each and every burden of reality that we can imagine being cured by an omniscient, benevolent, and omnipotent deity! If we obey – and sacrifice to you without complaint our treasure and our freedoms – you will provide!’

I do not exaggerate. Pick at random any proposed government intervention offered by the likes of Progressives or national conservatives, and you’ll discover that the workability of this proposed intervention, when evaluated honestly, rests on nothing more solid than the above absurd faith that the state is – or, when in the right hands, will be – a secular god.”

On the idealization of government’s ability to “plan the economy” rationally, here is more from Boudreaux, first quoting the great Deirdre McCloskey:

Deep in left-wing thought about the economy, and in a good deal of right-wing thought, too, is the premise, as Isaiah Berlin once put it with a sneer, that government can accomplish whatever it rationally proposes to do. As has been often observed about leftists even as sweet as John Rawls, the left has no theory of the behavior of the government. It assumes that the government is a perfect expression of the will of The People.

“And nothing is more unscientific – indeed, more mystical – than is this still-commonplace practice of most Progressives, and also of very many conservatives, to analyze the economy and society, and to offer policy recommendations, using such a juvenile ‘understanding’ of the state. Yet such an ‘understanding’ of the state permeates the work even of some Nobel laureates in economics – laureates such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. This ‘understanding’ of the state is inseparable also from the work of pundits too many to count…

That these professors and pundits think of themselves as scientific – and are widely regarded as being especially intelligent, thoughtful, and scientific – testifies to the strength of the cult of democratically rubber-stamped coercion.”

Conclusion

Humans have proven to be incredible documentarians. The advent of measurement techniques and increasingly sophisticated methods of accounting for various phenomena has enabled better ways of understanding our world and our well being. Unfortunately, a by-product was the birth of scientism, the belief that men in authority are capable not only of measuring, but of fine-tuning, the present and future details of society and social interaction. Those pretensions are terribly mistaken. However, the actions of Congress and the Biden Administration prove that it’s adherents will never be persuaded, despite repeated demonstrations of the futility of central planning. Their words of compassion are no comfort — they must coerce the ones they “love”.

New Theory: Great Woke Filter Conceals Life In the Cosmos

03 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Extraterrestrial Life, Space Travel

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Asymptotic Burnout, Baumol's Disease, Club of Rome, Equilibrating Process, Fermi Paradox, Grabby Aliens, Hard-Step Model, Homeostatic Awakening, Innovation, Interstellar Travel, Limits to Growth, Market Incentives, Michael L. Wong, Robin Hanson, Selection Bias, Singularity, Stuart Bartlett, Superlinearity, Thomas Malthus, Unbounded Growth, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, William Baumol

A recent academic paper seeks to explain the Fermi Paradox by asserting that all civilizations must either collapse or reach a point of homeostasis. The paper cites tensions between population growth, resource scarcity, limits to technical innovation, and ultimately political resistance to growth. The Fermi Paradox (FP) is the observation that by now, we should have detected or heard from an alien civilization if the universe has so much potential for intelligent life. But if those civilizations fail to advance beyond a certain level, they don’t develop the technical prowess to explore outside their own stellar neighborhoods or even become detectable from great distances.

The new paper, by Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett (WB), says these outcomes might be the result of “asymptotic burnout” — followed by either civilizational collapse or a “homeostatic awakening”. Never has “get woke, go broke” been so palpable! Certain sections of the WB paper read like an encyclopedia of leftist apocalyptic speculation, dressed up in mathematics and assumed to generalize to any civilization of intelligent beings in the universe. The incredible vastness of outer space suggests that it might never be possible for us to detect these kinds of homebound, low-tech civilizations, whether constrained by scarcities and moribund technologies or hamstrung by their own politics. Similarly, they might not be able to detect us.

Great Filters

There are other, similar explanations of FP. All of those fall under the heading of “Great Filters”, and I’m not sure WB have come up with anything new in that regard except for the “woke” spin. Great filters can be extinction events, such as intra-planetary hostilities culminating in the reckless use of weapons of mass destruction. Or unfortunate collisions with massive asteroids, which are a matter of time. Malthusian outcomes have been discussed in the context of great filters as well. In the past, I’ve discussed the limitations imposed by collectivist social structures on a civilization’s potential to achieve interstellar travel. I’m not the only one. The kind of “awakening” posited by WB would certainly demand the centralization of economic decision-making, though they envision conditions under which the “awakening” is a rational and enlightened decision.

Grabby Civilizations

A bit of a digression here: one of the most interesting explanations for FP that I’ve heard is from economist Robin Hanson and several co-authors. Hanson, by the way, wrote the original paper on great filters. His more recent insight is the likelihood of an earth-bound selection bias: there must be reasons why we haven’t seen alien activity in earth’s backward light cone, assuming they exist. The light cone defines an area of space-time we have observed, or could have observed had we been looking. To have been within our light cone, an event coordinate’s distance from us in space must have been less than or equal to the time it takes for its light to arrive here. For example, we can see what happened on the surface of the Sun fifteen minutes ago because at the Sun’s distance, it takes just ten minutes for its light to reach us. However, an event on the Sun that occurred five minutes ago is still outside our backward light cone. Likewise, if a star is 100,000 light years away, we cannot see events that occurred there within the past 99,999 years.

Hanson and his co-authors focus on the timescales and “hard steps”, or critical evolutionary transitions, necessary for intelligent life to develop in a solar system. They construct a probability model suggesting that the birth of human civilization was likely on the early end of the time distribution of civilizational beginnings in the universe. That means there probably aren’t many distant civilizations we could possibly have seen in our light cone. We’d be more likely to detect them if they are sufficiently advanced to be so-called “grabby” civilizations, but that kind of technological development takes a long time. “Grabby” civilizations (or their machines) are capable of expanding their reach across the stars at high speed, some significant fraction of the speed of light. They can be expected to visibly alter the volume of space they control by settling, mining, building large structures, etc…. An interesting (and perhaps counterintuitive) result is that the faster such a civilization expands, the less likely we’d have seen them in our backward light cone. And we haven’t, which argues for a higher speed of alien conquest, all else equal.

In another post, Hanson estimates that the time until we meet another grabby civilization centers on about 1 billion years if we expand. So grabby civilizations are quite rare if they exist. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that we might detect or encounter a much less technically advanced civilization. Nevertheless, Hanson strongly believes in the reality of Great Filters and believes that human civilization is likely to encounter certain filters that we cannot even anticipate.

The explanation for FP offered by Hanson, et al is nuanced, and it is my favorite, given my fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Even if the development of human civilization is not especially “early”, the number of interstellar civilizations, grabby or not, is probably still quite small at this juncture. And no doubt space travel is tough! These civilizations and their interstellar pioneers might not endure long enough to cover the distances necessary to reach us. Even more pertinent is that we’ve really only been “looking” in earnest for maybe ten decades at the most, and without complete coverage or much precision. Alien origins or spatial conquests within the last 100 years at distances exceeding 100 light years would not yet be visible to us. And again, it’s remotely possible that there is a grabby civilization whose expansion will intersect with us sometime in the near future, but it is still too distant to be within our backward light cone. If closing on us fast enough, it could have been within a single light year six months ago and we would not yet know it!

Do Civilizations Scale Like Cities?

Now let’s return to the kind of great filter put forward by WB. They first appeal to the observation that cities scale superlinearly. That is, in cross-sectional data, the relationship between city population and various measures of income or output (and other metrics) are linear in logs with a coefficient greater than 1. That means a city with twice the population of another would generate more than twice as much income.

There are reasons why we’d expect city size to be associated with greater productivity, such as an abundance of collaborative opportunities and economies of agglomeration. However, WB assert that it is impossible for a city to sustain a superlinear growth relationship over time, requiring “unbounded growth”, without periodic bursts of innovation. Otherwise, a city encounters a growth “singularity”. WB maintain that the inability of innovation to sustain unbounded growth manifests in a cascade of failure in such a city, or at least homeostasis.

WB go on from there to claim that a civilization, as it advances, will become so interconnected via technology that it can be treated analytically like a single super-city. This assumption, that whole worlds scale like cities, offers WB an analytical convenience. They assume that population growth outstrips the supply of finite resources with an inadequate pace of innovation. WB further propose that civilizations confronting these barriers might undergo “awakenings” under which zero growth is accepted as a goal.

Of course, the growth of a city will stagnate when its size overwhelms its ability to meet demands. A city might be under severe resource constraints. There are external phenomena that can cause a city to languish. All this depends upon the unique vulnerabilities of individual cities. Certainly a widespread dearth of innovation could do the trick. A planetary civilization might be subject to similar constraints or limiting events. Some planets might be resource poor or have especially hostile natural environments. Aliens unfortunate enough to be there will not and cannot become “grabby”. But WB’s hypothesis amounts to the assertion that no civilization can hope to achieve “grabbiness”.

Faults In the Clouds of Delusion

The WB argument is misguided on several levels. First, there is only limited evidence that the scaling of cities is time invariant — that the relationships hold up as cities grow over time —no singularity required! After all, the super-linear relationship referenced by WB is based almost entirely on cross-sectional data. Moreover, the scaling assertion is atheoretic. Rationales are offered based on human social connections and presumed, fixed technical relationships between city population and such things as energy use and infrastructure requirements. However, the discussion is completely devoid of the equilibrating processes found in market economies and the guidance of the price mechanism. Instead, growth simply rages on until the pace of innovation and limited resources can no longer support it.

WB appear to assume that a planet’s finite pool of resources places a hard limit on the advancement of civilization. This is more than a bit reminiscent of the Club of Rome and it’s “Limits to Growth”, or the popular understanding of Thomas Malthus’ writings. That understanding is based on a purely biological model of human needs. which was spectacularly wrong in its prediction of worldwide famine. But that was only a starting point for Malthus, who believed in the power of markets. And even in primitive markets, the very scarcity with which biological needs conflict is what incentivizes greater efficiencies and substitutes. When something gets especially scarce, the market signals to users that they must conserve, on one hand, and it also incentivizes those able to commandeer resources. The latter act to fill the need with greater supplies, close substitutes, or inventive alternatives. Again, these kinds of equilibrating tendencies don’t seem to be of any consequence to WB.

The focus on super-linearity and the relationship between population and economic and other metrics obscures another reality: global fertility rates have been declining for decades and are now below replacement levels in many parts of the world. In addition, we know that birth rates tend to decline as income rises, which directly undermines WB’s concern about super-linearity. The unsustainable population growth envisioned by WB is unlikely to occur, much less overwhelm the ability of resources and innovation to provide for growth in human well-being. WB also ignore the fact that in-migration to cities is a primary contributor to their population growth, whereas in-migration has not been observed at the global level… at least that we’re aware!

What is never in short supply is human ingenuity, if we allow it to work. It enables us to identify and extract new reserves of resources previously hidden to us, and every new efficiency increases the effective reserves of resources already available. Mankind is now on the cusp of an era in which mining of scarce materials from the moon, asteroids, and other planets will be possible.

WB are correct that there are obstacles to urban growth, but they seem only dimly aware of the underlying reasons. Cities must provide myriad services to their residents. Many of those services will experience meager productivity gains relative to goods production, and consequently increased costs of services over time. This is an old problem known among economists as Baumol’s disease, after William Baumol. While it is not limited to cities, it can be especially acute in urban areas. The cost escalation may be severe for services such as education, health care, law enforcement, and the judicial system, which are certainly critical to the economic viability of cities. However, there will be future innovations and even automation of some of these services that boost productivity. Still, they are bound to mostly rise in cost relative to sectors with high average growth in productivity, such as manufacturing. Baumol’s disease is unlikely to tank the world economy. It is simply a fact of economic evolution: relative prices change, and low productivity sectors will suffer cost escalation.

The kind of “awakening” WB anticipate would only occur if individuals are willing sacrifice their liberties en masse, or if elites coerce them to do so. Perhaps there are beings who never imagine the kinds of liberties humans expect, or at least wish for. If so, I’d wager their average intelligence is too low to accomplish space travel anyway. We’ve learned from theory and history that socialism imposes severe constraints on growth. That’s why I once proposed that civilizations capable of interstellar travel will have avoided those chains.

Conclusion

Wong and Bartlett attempt to explain the Fermi Paradox based on the “asymptotic burnout” of civilizations. That is, they believe it’s extremely unlikely that any civilization can ever advance to interstellar travel, or as Hanson would put it, to be “grabby”. WB rely on an analogy between the so-called super-linearity of city scales and the scales of planetary civilizations. They generalize super-linearity to the time domain. In other words, WB make the heroic assumptions that the economic aggregates of planetary civilizations scale over time as cities scale cross-sectionally.

WB then claim that civilizations will confront limits to advancement based on their inability to sustain their pace of innovation. This amounts to Malthusian pessimism writ large. Today, human civilization, while not without its problems, is nowhere near the limits of its growth, and we are nearly ready to reach out beyond the confines of our planet for access to new stocks of resources. There are vast stores of unexploited energy even here on earth, and there are a number of relatively new energy technologies that are either available now or still in development. And there will be much more. Like the Club of Rome, WB lack an adequate appreciation for the power of markets and incentives to solve economic problems, which includes spurring innovation.

Finally, WB make the wholly unsupported conjecture that some civilizations will undergo “awakenings”, choosing to adopt homeostasis rather than growth. WB might or might not realize it, but this implies an abandonment of market institutions in favor of centrally-planned stagnation, and not a little coercion. Perhaps we should view WB’s hypothesis as a cautionary tale: get woke, go broke! Certainly, a homeostatic civilization that relies upon the ignorance of central planners will never develop the capacity for interstellar travel. It simply cannot generate the wealth or expertise necessary to do so. In fact, they are more likely to suffer bouts of mass starvation than any sort of middling prosperity. We probably haven’t seen other civilizations yet, and maybe we’re “early” on the development time-scale for civilizations, but when and if aliens arrive, it won’t be thanks to socialist “awakenings”. WP are at least correct in that regard.

Rejecting Fossil Fuels at Our Great Peril

18 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Energy, Risk, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bartley J. Madden, Biden Administration, Dan Ervin, Don Boudreaux, Electric Vehicles, Energy Mandates, Energy subsidies, EV Adoption, External Benefits, External Costs, Fossil fuels, Grid Stability, Intermittancy, Kevin Williamson, Markets, Power Outages, Price Controls, regressivity, Renewable energy, Russia Sanctions, SEC Carbon Mandate, Sustainability

The frantic rush to force transition to a zero-carbon future is unnecessary and destructive to both economic well-being and the global environment. I do not subscribe to the view that a zero-carbon goal is an eventual necessity, but even if we stipulate that it is, a rational transition would eschew the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels and adopt a gradual approach relying heavily on market signals rather than a mad dash via coercion.

I’ve written about exaggerated predictions of temperature trends and catastrophes on a number of occasions (and see here for a similar view from a surprising source). What might be less obvious is the waste inherent in forcing the abandonment of mature and economic technologies in favor of, as yet, under-developed and uneconomic technologies. These failures should be obvious when the grid fails, as it does increasingly. It is often better to leave the development and dispersion of new technologies to voluntary decision-making. In time, advances will make alternative, low- or zero-carbon energy sources cost effective and competitive to users. That will include efficient energy storage at scale, new nuclear technologies, geothermal techniques, and further improvements in the carbon efficiency of fossil fuels themselves. These should be chosen by private industry, not government planners.

Boneheads At the Helm

Production of fossil fuels has been severely hampered by the Biden Administration’s policies. The sanctions on Russian oil that only began to take hold in March have caused an additional surge in the price of oil. Primarily, however, we’ve witnessed an artificial market disruption instigated by Biden’s advisors on environmental policy. After all, neither Russian oil imports nor the more recent entreaties to rogue states as Iraq and Venezuela for oil would have been necessary if not for the Administration’s war on fossil fuels. Take a gander at this White House Executive Order issued in January 2021. It reads like a guidebook on how to kill an industry. In a column this weekend, Kevin Williamson quipped about “the Biden administration’s uncanny ability to get everything everywhere wrong all at once.” That was about policy responses to inflation, but it applies to energy in particular.

Scorning the Miracle

Fossil fuels are the source of cheap and reliable energy that have lifted humanity to an unprecedented level of prosperity. Fossil fuels have given a comfortable existence to billions of people, allowing them to rise out of poverty. This prosperity gives us the luxury of time to develop substitutes, not to mention much greater safety against the kind of weather extremes that have always been a fact of life. The world still gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels. These fuels are truly a miracle, and we should not discard such valuable technologies prematurely. That forces huge long-term investments in inferior technologies that are likely to be superseded in the future by more economic refinements or even energy sources and methods now wholly unimagined. There are investors who will still wish to pursue those new technologies, perhaps with non pecuniary motives, and there are a few consumers who really want alternatives to fossil fuels.

Biden’s apparent hope that his aggressive climate agenda will be a great legacy of his presidency is at the root of his intransigence toward fossil fuels. His actions in this regard have had a profoundly negative psychological effect on the oil and gas industry. Steps such as cancellations of pipeline projects are immediately impactful in that regard, to say nothing of the supplies that would have ultimately flowed through those pipelines. These cancellations reinforce the message Biden’s been sending to the industry and its investors since his campaign: we mean to shut you down! Who wants to invest in new wells under those circumstances? Other actions have followed: no new federal oil and gas leases, methane restrictions, higher drilling fees on federal land, and a variety of climate change initiatives that bode ill for the industry, such as the SEC’s mandate on carbon disclosures and the Federal Reserve’s proposed role in policing climate impacts.

And now, Democrats are contemplating a move that would make gasoline even more scarce: price controls. As Don Boudreaux says in a recent letter to The Hill:

“Progressives incessantly threaten to tax and regulate carbon fuels into oblivion. These threats cannot but reduce investors’ willingness to fund each of the many steps – from exploration through refining to transporting gasoline to market – that are necessary to keep energy prices low. One reality reflected by today’s high prices at the pump is this hostility to carbon fuels generally and to petroleum especially. And gasoline price controls would only make matters worse by further reducing the attractiveness of investing in the petroleum industry: Why invest in bringing products to market if the prices at which you’re allowed to sell are dictated by grandstanding politicians?”

The kicker is that all these policies are futile in terms of their actual impact on global carbon concentrations, let alone their highly tenuous link to global temperatures. The policies are also severely regressive, inflicting disproportionate harm on the poor, who can least afford such an extravagant transition. Biden wants the country to sacrifice its standard of living in pursuit of these questionable goals, while major carbon-emitting nations like China and India essentially ignore the issue.

Half-Baked Substitution

Market intervention always has downsides to balance against the potential gains of “internalizing externalities”. In this case, the presumed negative externalities are imagined harms of catastrophic climate change from the use of fossil fuels; the presumed external benefits are the avoidance of carbon emissions and climate change via renewables and other “zero-carbon” technologies. With those harms and gains in question, it’s especially important to ask who loses. Taxpayers are certainly on that list. Users of energy produced with fossil fuels end up paying higher prices and are forced to conserve or submit to coerced conversion away from fossil fuels. Then there are the wider impediments to economic growth and, as noted above, the distributional consequences.

Users of immature or inferior energy alternatives might also end up as losers, and there are likely to be external costs associated with those technologies as well. It’s not widely appreciated that today’s so-called clean energy alternatives are plagued by their need to obtain certain minerals that are costly to extract in economic and environmental terms, not to mention highly carbon intensive. And when solar and wind facilities fail or reach the end of their useful lives, disposal creates another set of environmental hazards. In short, the loses imposed through forced internalization of highly uncertain externalities are all too real.

Unfortunately, the energy sources favored by the Administration fail to meet base-load power needs on windless and/or cloudy days. The intermittency of these key renewables means that other power sources, primarily fossil-fuel and nuclear capacity, must remain available to meet demand on an ongoing basis. That means the wind and solar cannot strictly replace fossil fuels and nuclear capacity unless we’re willing to tolerate severe outages. Growth in energy demand met by renewables must be matched by growth in backup capacity.

A call for “energy pragmatism” by Dan Ervin hinges on the use of coal to provide the “bridge to the energy future”, both because there remains a large amount of coal generating capacity and it can stabilize the grid given the intermittency of wind and solar. Ervin also bases his argument for coal on recent increases in the price of natural gas, though a reversal of the Biden EPA’s attacks on gas and coal, which Ervin acknowledges, would argue strongly in favor of natural gas as a pragmatic way forward.

Vehicle Mandates

The Administration has pushed mandates for electric vehicle (EV) production and sales, including subsidized charging stations. Of course, the power used by EVs is primarily generated by fossil fuels. Furthermore, rapid growth in EVs will put a tremendous additional strain on the electric grid, which renewables will not be able to relieve without additional backup capacity from fossil fuels and nuclear. This severely undermines the supposed environmental benefits of EVs.

Once again, mandates and subsidies are necessary because EV technology is not yet economic for most consumers. Those buyers don’t want to spend what’s necessary to purchase an EV, nor do they wish to suffer the inconveniences that re-charging often brings. This is a case in which policy is outrunning the ability of the underlying infrastructure required to support it. And while adoption of EVs is growing, it is still quite low (and see here).

Wising Up

Substitution into new inputs or technologies happens more rationally when prices accurately reflect true benefits and scarcities. The case for public subsidies and mandates in the push for a zero-carbon economy rests on model predictions of catastrophic global warming and a theoretical link between U.S. emissions and temperatures. Both links are weak and highly uncertain. What is certain is the efficiency of fossil fuels to power gains in human welfare.

This Bartley J. Madden quote sums up a philosophy of progress that is commendable for firms, and probably no less for public policymakers:

“Keep in mind that innovation is the key to sustainable progress that jointly delivers on financial performance and taking care of future generations through environmental improvements.”

Madden genuflects to the “sustainability” crowd, who otherwise don’t understand the importance of trusting markets to guide innovation. If we empower those who wish to crush private earnings from existing technologies, we concede the future to central planners, who are likely to choose poorly with respect to technology and timing. Let’s forego the coercive approach in favor of time, development, and voluntary adoption!

The SEC’s Absurd Climate Overreach

04 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Global Warming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

capital costs, Carbon Emissions, Carbon Forcing Models, carbon Sensitivity, central planning, Corporatism, Disclosure Requirements, ESG Risk, ESG Scores, Green Energy, Greenhouse Gas, Hester Peirce, John Cochrane, Litigation Risk, Paris Agreement, Regulatory Risk, Renewable energy, Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3, SEC Climate Mandate, Securities and Exchange Commission

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently issued a proposed rule for reporting on climate change risk, and it is fairly outrageous. It asks that corporations report on their own direct greenhouse gas emissions (GHG – Scope 1), the emissions caused by their purchases of energy inputs (Scope 2), and the emissions caused by their “downstream” customers and “upstream” suppliers (Scope 3). This is another front in the Biden Administration’s efforts to bankrupt producers of fossil fuels and to force the private sector to radically alter its mix of energy inputs. The SEC’s proposed “disclosures” are sheer lunacy on several levels.

The SEC Mandate

If implemented, the rule would allow the SEC to stray well outside the bounds of its regulatory authority. The SEC’s role is not to regulate emissions or the environment. Rather, as its web site makes clear, the agency is charged with:

“… protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.”

Given this mission, the SEC requires management to disclose material financial risks. Are a firm’s GHG emissions really material risks? The first problem here is quite practical: John Cochrane notes the outrageous costs that would be associated with compliance:

“‘Disclosure’ usually means revealing something you know. A perfectly honest answer to ‘disclose what you know about your carbon emissions’ is, ‘we have no idea what our carbon emissions are.’ Back that up with every document the company has ever produced, and you have perfectly ‘disclosed.’ There is no asymmetric information, fraud, etc.

The SEC has already required the production of new information, and as Hester Peirce makes perfectly clear, the climate rules again make a huge dinner out of that appetizer: essentially telling companies to hire a huge number of climate consultants to generate new information, and also how to run businesses.”

In a separate post, Cochrane quotes SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce’s response to the proposed rule. She emphasizes that companies are already required to disclose all material risks. Perhaps they have properly declined to disclose climate risks because those risks are not material.

“Current SEC disclosure mandates are intended to provide investors with an accurate picture of the company’s present and prospective performance through managers’ own eyes. How are they thinking about the company? What opportunities and risks do the board and managers see? What are the material determinants of the company’s financial value?”

Identifying the Risk Causers

Regardless of the actual risks to a firm caused by climate change, the SEC’s proposed GHG disclosures put a more subtle issue into play. Peirce describes what amounts to a fundamental shift in the SEC’s philosophy regarding the motivation and purpose of disclosure:

The proposal, by contrast, tells corporate managers how regulators, doing the bidding of an array of non-investor stakeholders, expect them to run their companies. It identifies a set of risks and opportunities—some perhaps real, others clearly theoretical—that managers should be considering and even suggests specific ways to mitigate those risks. It forces investors to view companies through the eyes of a vocal set of stakeholders, for whom a company’s climate reputation is of equal or greater importance than a company’s financial performance.”

In other words, a major risk faced by these firms has nothing to do with climate change itself, but with perceptions of “climate-related” risks by other parties. That transforms the question of climate risk into something that is, in fact, regulatory and political. Is this the true nature of the SEC’s concern, all dressed up in the scientism typically relied upon by climate change activists?

The reaction of government bureaucrats to the risks they perceive is a palpable threat to investor well-being. For example, GHG emissions might lead to future regulatory sanctions from various government agencies, including fines, taxes, various sanctions, and mitigation mandates. In addition, with the growth of investment management based on what are essentially shambolic and ad hoc ESG scores, GHG or carbon emissions might lead to constraints on a firm’s access to capital. Just ask the oil and gas industry! That penalty is imposed by activist investors and fund managers who wish to force an unwise and premature end to the use of fossil fuels. There is also a threat that GHG disclosures themselves, based (as they will be) on flimsy estimates, could create litigation risk for many companies.

Much Ado About Nothing

While there are major regulatory and political risks to investors, let’s ask, for the sake of argument: how would one degree celcius of warming by the end of this century affect corporate results? Generally not at all. (The bounds described in the Paris Agreement are 1.5 to 2 degrees, but these are based on unrealistic scenarios — see links below.) It would happen gradually in any case, with ample opportunity to adapt to the operating environment. To think otherwise requires great leaps of imagination. For example, climate alarmists probably fancy that violent weather or wildfires will wipe out facilities, yet there is no reliable evidence that the mild warming experienced to-date has been associated with more violent weather or an increased incidence of wildfires (and see here). There are a great many “sacred cows” worshiped by climate-change neurotics, and the SEC undoubtedly harbors many of those shibboleths.

What probabilities can be attached to each incremental degree of warming that might occur over several decades. The evidence we’ve seen comes from so-called carbon-forcing models parameterized for unrealistically high carbon sensitivities and subjected to unrealistic carbon-concentration scenarios. Estimates of these probabilities are not reliable.

Furthermore, climate change risks, even if they could be measured reliably in the aggregate, cannot reasonably be allocated to individual firms. The magnitude of the firm’s own contribution to that risk is equivalent to the marginal reduction in risk if the firm implemented a realistic zero-carbon operating rule. For virtually any firm, we’re talking about something infinitesimal. It involves tremendous guesswork given that various parties around the globe take a flexible approach to emissions, and will continue to do so. The very suggestion of such an exercise is an act of hubris.

Back To The SEC’s Mandated Role

Let’s return to the practical problems associated with these kinds of disclosure requirements. Cochrane also points out that the onerous nature of the SEC proposal, and the regulatory and political threats it embodies, will hasten the transition away from public ownership in many industries.

“The fixed costs alone are huge. The trend to going private and abandoning public markets, at least in the U.S. will continue. The trend to large oligopolized politically compliant static businesses in the U.S. will continue.

I would bet these rules wind up in court, and that these are important issues. They should be.”

Unfortunately, private companies will still have to to deal with certain investors who would shackle their use of energy inputs and demand forms of diligence (… not to say “due”) of their own.

The SEC’s proposed climate risk disclosures are stunningly authoritarian, and they are designed to coalesce with other demands by the regulatory state to kill carbon-based energy and promote renewables. These alternative energy sources are, as yet, unable to offer an economical and stable supply of power. The fraudulent nature of the alleged risks make this all the more appalling. The SEC has effectively undertaken an effort to engage in corporatist industrial policy benefitting a certain class of “green” energy investors, exposing the proposal as yet another step on the road to fascism. Let’s hope Cochrane is right: already, 16 state attorneys general are preparing a legal challenge. May the courts ultimately see through the SEC’s sham!

Infrastructure Or Infra-Stricture? The Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Bill

16 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by pnoetx in Big Government, Central Planning, infrastructure, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Antonia Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Biden Administration, Budget Reconcilation Bill, Capital Gains, Civilian Climate Corps, Clean Energy, corporate income tax, dependency, Federal Reserve, Fossil fuels, Green Cards, infrastructure, Joe Manchin, Legal Permanent Residency, Paid Family Leave, Physical Investment, Productivity Growth, Social Infrastructure, Tax the Rich, Tragedy of the Commons, Universal Pre-School, Welfare State

The Socialist Party faithful once known as Democrats are pushing a $3.5 trillion piece of legislation they call an “infrastructure” bill. They hope to pass it via budget reconciliation rules with a simple majority in the Senate. The Dems came around to admitting that the bill is not about infrastructure in the sense in which we usually understand the term: physical installations like roads, bridges, sewer systems, power lines, canals, port facilities, and the like. These kinds of investments generally have a salutary impact on the nation’s productivity. Some “traditional” infrastructure, albeit with another hefty wallop of green subsidies, is covered in the $1.2 trillion “other” infrastructure bill already passed by the Senate but not the House. The reconciliation bill, however, addresses “social infrastructure”, which is to say it would authorize a massive expansion in the welfare state.

What Is Infrastructure?

Traditionally, public and private infrastructure are underlying assets that facilitate production or consumption in one way or another, consistent with the prefix “infra”, meaning below or within. For example, a new factory requires physical access by roads and/or rail, as well as sewer service, water, gas and/or electric supply. All of the underlying physical components that enable that factory to operate may be thought of as private infrastructure, which has largely private benefits. Therefore, it is often privately funded, though certainly not always.

Projects having many beneficiaries, such as highways, municipal sewers, water, gas and electrical trunk lines, canals, and ports may be classified as public infrastructure, though they can be provided and funded privately. Pure public infrastructure provides services that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, but examples are sparse. Nevertheless, the greater the public nature of benefits, the greater the rationale for government involvement in their provision. In practice, a great deal of “public” infrastructure is funded by user fees. In fact, a failure to charge user fees for private benefits often leads to a tragedy of the commons, such as the overuse of free roads, imposing a heavier burden on taxpayers.

The use of the term “infrastructure” to describe forms of public support is not new, but the scope of government interventions to which the term is applied has mushroomed during the Biden Administration. Just about any spending program you can think of is likely to be labeled “infrastructure” by so-called progressives. The locution is borrowed somewhat questionably, seemingly motivated by the underlying structure of political incentives. More bluntly, it sounds good as a sales tactic!

$3.5 Trillion and Chains

Among other questionable items, the so-called budget reconciliation “infrastructure” bill allocates funds toward meeting:

“… the President’s climate change goals of 80% clean electricity and 50% economy-wide carbon emissions by 2030, while advancing environmental justice and American manufacturing. The framework would fund:
• Clean Energy Standard
• Clean Energy and Vehicle Tax Incentives
• Civilian Climate Corps
• Climate Smart Agriculture, Wildfire Prevention and Forestry
• Federal procurement of clean technologies
• Weatherization and Electrification of Buildings
• Clean Energy Accelerator”

The resolution would also institute “methane reduction and polluter import fees”. Thus, we must be prepared for a complete reconfiguration of our energy sector toward a portfolio of immature and uneconomic technologies. This amounts to an economic straightjacket.

Next we have a series of generous programs and expansions that would encourage dependence on government:

“• Universal Pre-K for 3 and 4-year old children
• High quality and affordable Child Care
• [free] Community College, HBCUs and MSIs, and Pell Grants
• Paid Family and Medical Leave
• Nutrition Assistance
• Affordable Housing”

If anything, pre-school seems to have cognitive drawbacks for children. Several of these items, most obviously the family leave mandate, would entail significant regulatory and cost burdens on private businesses.

There are more generous provisions on the health care front, which are good for further increasing the federal government’s role in directing, regulating, and funding medical care:

“• new Dental, Vision, and Hearing benefit to Medicare
• Home and Community-Based Services expansion
• Extend the Affordable Care Act Expansion from the ARP
• Close the Medicaid “Coverage Gap” in the States that refused to expand
• Reduced patient spending on prescription drugs”

Finally, we have a series of categories intended to “help workers and communities across the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and reverse trends of economic inequality.”

“• Housing Investments
• Innovation and R & D Upgrades
• American Manufacturing and Supply Chains Funding
• LPRs for Immigrants and Border Mangt. • Pro-Worker Incentives and Penalties • Investment in Workers and Communities • Small Business Support

I might suggest that a recovery from the pandemic would be better served by getting the federal government out of everyone’s business. The list includes greater largess and more intrusions by the federal government. The fourth item above, grants of legal permanent residency (LPR) or green cards, would legalize up to 8 million immigrants, allowing them to qualify for a range of federal benefits. It would obviously legitimize otherwise illegal border crossings and prevent any possibility of eventual deportation.

Screwing the Pooch

How many of those measures really sound like infrastructure? This bill goes on for more than 10,000 pages, so the chance that lawmakers will have an opportunity to rationally assess all of its provisions is about nil! And the reconciliation bill doesn’t stop at $3.5T. There are a few budget gimmicks being leveraged that could add as much as $2T of non-infrastructure spending to the package. One cute trick is to add certain provisions affecting revenue or spending years from now in order to cut the bill’s stated price tag.

A number of the bill’s generous giveaways will have negative effects on productive incentives. It’s also clear that some items in the bill will supplement the far Left’s educational agenda, which is seeped in critical theory. And the bill will increase the dominance of the federal government over not only the private sector, but state and local sovereignty as well. This is another stage in the metastasis of the federal bureaucracy and the dependency fostered by the welfare state.

Taxing the Golden Goose

But here’s the really big rub: the whole mess has to be paid for. The flip side of our growing dependency on government is the huge obligation to fund it. Check this out:

“American ‘consumer units,’ as BLS calls them, spent a net total of $17,211.12 on taxes last year while spending only $16,839.89 on food, clothing, healthcare and entertainment combined,”

Democrats continue to dicker over the tax provisions of the bill, but the most recent iteration of their plan is to cover about $2.9 trillion of the cost via tax hikes. Naturally, the major emphasis is on penalizing corporations and “the rich”. The latest plan includes:

increasing the corporate income tax from 21% to 26.8%;
increasing the top tax rate on capital gains from 20% to 25%;
an increase in the tax rate for incomes greater than $400,000 ($450,000 if married filing jointly)
adding a 3% tax surcharge for those with adjusted gross incomes in excess of $5 million;
Higher taxes on tobacco and nicotine products;
halving the estate and gift tax exemption;
limiting deductions for executive compensation;
changes in rules for carried interest and crypto assets.

There are a few offsets, including the promise of tax reductions for individuals earning less than $200,000 and businesses earning less than $400,000. We’ll see about that. Those cuts would expire by 2027, which reduces their “cost” to the government, but it will be controversial when the time comes.

The Dem sell job includes the notion that corporate income belongs to the “rich”, but as I’ve noted before, the burden of the corporate income tax falls largely on corporate workers and consumers. Lower wages and higher prices are almost sure to follow. This would deepen the blade of the Democrats’ political hari-kari, but they pin their hopes on the power of alms. Once bestowed, however, those will be difficult if not impossible to revoke, and the Dems know this all too well.

The assault on the “rich” in the reconciliation bill is both ill-advised and unlikely to yield the levels of revenue projected by Democrats. Like it or not, the wealthy provide the capital for most productive investment. Taxing their returns and their wealth more heavily can only reduce incentive to do so. Those investors will seek out more tax-advantaged uses for their funds. That includes investments in non-productive but federally-subsidized alternatives. Capital gains can often be deferred, of course. These penalties also ensure that more resources will be consumed in compliance and tax-avoidance efforts. The solutions offered by armies of accountants and tax attorneys will tend to direct funds to uses that are suboptimal in terms of growth in economic capacity.

What isn’t funded by new taxes will be borrowed by the federal government or simply printed by the Federal Reserve. Thus, the federal government will not only compete with the private sector for additional resources, but the monetary authority will provide fuel for more inflation.

Fracturing Support?

Fortunately, a few moderate Democrats in both the House and the Senate are balking at the exorbitance of the reconciliation bill. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said he would like to see a package of no more than $1.5 trillion. That still represents a huge expansion of government, but at least Manchin has offered a whiff of sanity. Equally welcome are threats from radical Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Antonia Ocasio-Cortez that a failure to pass the full reconciliation package will mean a loss of their support for the original $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, much of which is wasteful. We should be so lucky! But that’s a lot of pork for politicians to walk away from.

Infra-Shackles

The so-called infrastructure investments in the reconciliation bill represent a range of constraints on economic growth and consumer well being. Increasing the government’s dominance is never a good prescription for productivity, whether due to regulatory and compliance costs, bureaucratization of decision-making, minimizing the role of price signals, pure waste through bad incentives and graft, and public vs. private competition for resources. The destructive tax incentives for funding the bill are an additional layer of constraints on growth. Let’s hope the moderate Democrats hold firm, or even better, that the tantrum-prone radical Democrats are forced to make good on their threats.

Central Planning With AI Will Still Suck

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Artificial Intelligence, Central Planning, Free markets

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Artificial Intelligence, central planning, Common Law, Data Science, Digital Socialism, Friedrich Hayek, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Machine Learning, Marginal Revolution, Property Rights, Robert Lucas, Roman Law, Scientism, The Invisible Hand, The Knowledge Problem, The Lucas Critique, Tyler Cowen

Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) will never make central economic planning a successful reality. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania has written a strong disavowal of AI’s promise in central planning, and on the general difficulty of using ML to design social and economic policies. His paper, “Simple Rules for a Complex World with Artificial Intelligence“, was linked last week by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Note that the author isn’t saying “digital socialism” won’t be attempted. Judging by the attention it’s getting, and given the widespread acceptance of the scientism of central planning, there is no question that future efforts to collectivize will involve “data science” to one degree or another. But Fernández-Villaverde, who is otherwise an expert and proponent of ML in certain applications, is simply saying it won’t work as a curative for the failings of central economic planning — that the “simple rules” of the market will aways produce superior social outcomes.

The connection between central planning and socialism should be obvious. Central planning implies control over the use of resources, and therefore ownership by a central authority, whether or not certain rents are paid as a buy-off to the erstwhile owners of those resources. By “digital socialism”, Fernández-Villaverde means the use of ML to perform the complex tasks of central planning. The hope among its cheerleaders is that adaptive algorithms can discern the optimal allocation of resources within some “big data” representation of resource availability and demands, and that this is possible on an ongoing, dynamic basis.

Fernández-Villaverde makes the case against this fantasy on three fronts or barriers to the use of AI in policy applications: data requirements; the endogeneity of expectations and behavior; and the knowledge problem.

The Data Problem: ML requires large data sets to do anything. And impossibly large data sets are required for ML to perform the task of planning economic activity, even for a small portion of the economy. Today, those data sets do not exist except in certain lines of business. Can they exist more generally, capturing the details of all economic transactions? Can the data remain current? Only at great expense, and ML must be trained to recognize whether data should be discarded as it becomes stale over time due to shifting demographics, tastes, technologies, and other changes in the social and physical environment.

Policy Change Often Makes the Past Irrelevant: Planning algorithms are subject to the so-called Lucas Critique, a well known principle in macroeconomics named after Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas. The idea is that policy decisions based on observed behavior will change expectations, prompting responses that differ from the earlier observations under the former policy regime. A classic case involves the historical tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Can this tradeoff be exploited by policy? That is, can unemployment be reduced by a policy that increases the rate of inflation (by printing money at a faster rate)? In this case, the Lucas Critique is that once agents expect a higher rate of inflation, they are unlikely to confuse higher prices with a more profitable business environment, so higher employment will not be sustained. If ML is used to “plan” certain outcomes desired by some authority, based on past relationships and transactions, the Lucas Critique implies that things are unlikely to go as planned.

The Knowledge Problem: Not only are impossibly large data sets required for economic planning with ML, as noted above. To achieve the success of markets in satisfying unlimited wants given scarce resources, the required information is impossible to collect or even to know. This is what Friedrich Hayek called the “knowledge problem”. Just imagine the difficulty of arranging a data feed on the shifting preferences of many different individuals across a huge number of products, services and they way preference orderings will change across the range of possible prices. The data must have immediacy, not simply a historical record. Add to this the required information on shifting supplies and opportunity costs of resources needed to produce those things. And the detailed technological relationships between production inputs and outputs, including time requirements, and the dynamics of investment in future productive capacity. And don’t forget to consider the variety of risks agents face, their degree of risk aversion, and the ways in which risks can be mitigated or hedged. Many of these things are simply unknowable to a central authority. The information is hopelessly dispersed. The task of collecting even the knowable pieces is massive beyond comprehension.

The market system, however, is able to process all of this information in real time, the knowable and the unknowable, in ways that balance preferences with the true scarcity of resources. No one actor or authority need know it all. It is the invisible hand. Among many other things, it ensures the deployment of ML only where it makes economic sense. Here is Fernández-Villaverde:

“The only reliable method we have found to aggregate those preferences, abilities, and efforts is the market because it aligns, through the price system, incentives with information revelation. The method is not perfect, and the outcomes that come from it are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including ‘digital socialism,’ are worse.”

Later, he says:

“… markets work when we implement simple rules, such as first possession, voluntary exchange, and pacta sunt servanda. This result is not a surprise. We did not come up with these simple rules thanks to an enlightened legislator (or nowadays, a blue-ribbon committee of academics ‘with a plan’). … The simple rules were the product of an evolutionary process. Roman law, the Common law, and Lex mercatoria were bodies of norms that appeared over centuries thanks to the decisions of thousands and thousands of agents.”

These simple rules represent good private governance. Beyond reputational enforcement, the rules require only trust in the system of property rights and a private or public judicial authority. Successfully replacing private arrangements in favor of a central plan, however intricately calculated via ML, will remain a pipe dream. At best, it would suspend many economic relationships in amber, foregoing the rational adjustments private agents would make as conditions change. And ultimately, the relationships and activities that planning would sanction would be shaped by political whim. It’s a monstrous thing to contemplate — both fruitless and authoritarian.

Renewables and Preempted Prosperity

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Renewable Energy

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carbon Sensitivity, David Middleton, Economic Cost of Carbon, Fossil fuels, Intermittancy, John Barry, Los Angeles Eland Project, Martin Heidegger, Matt Ridley, Michael Schellenberger, Murray Bookchin, Renewable energy

Coerced conversion to renewable energy sources will degrade human living conditions. That’s certainly true relative to a voluntary conversion actuated by purely private incentives. It’s likely to be true even in an absolute sense, depending on the speed and severity of the forced transition. A coerced conversion will mean lower real incomes during the transition (one recent estimate: $42,000 total loss per U.S. household to transition by 2030), and the losses will continue after the transition, with little redeeming improvement in environmental conditions or risk.

The Reality

There are several underpinnings for the assertions above. One is that the sensitivity of global temperatures to carbon forcings is relatively low. We know all too well that the climate models relied upon by warming alarmists have drastically over-estimated the extent of warming to date. The models are excessively sensitive to carbon emissions and promote an unwarranted urgency to DO SOMETHING… with other people’s money. There is also the question of whether moderate warming is really a bad thing given that it is likely to mean fewer cold-weather fatalities, increased agricultural productivity, and significant reforestation.

Another underpinning is that the real economics of renewable energy are vastly inferior to fossil fuels and will remain so for some time to come. Proponents of renewables tend to quote efficiencies under optimal operating conditions, free of pesky details like the cost of installing a vast support infrastructure and environmental costs of producing components. Solar and wind energy are tremendously inefficient in terms of land use. One estimate is that meeting a 100% renewable energy target in the U.S. today would require acreage equivalent to the state of California. And of course rare earth minerals must be mined for wind turbines and solar panels, and fossil fuels are needed to produce materials like the steel used to build them.

But the chief renewable bugaboo is that the power generated by wind and solar is intermittent. Our ability to store power is still extremely limited, so almost all surplus energy production is lost. Therefore, intermittency necessitates redundant generating capacity, which imposes huge costs. When the winds are calm and the sun isn’t shining, traditional power sources are needed to meet demand. That redundant capacity must be maintained and kept on-line, as these facilities are even costlier to power up from a dead start.

LA Hucksterism

These issues are typified by the unrealistic expectations of Los Angeles’ plan to replace 7% of the city’s power consumption with renewables. The cost predicted by LA regulators is slightly less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and even less for battery power, which are unrealistically low. For one thing, those are probably operating costs that do not account for capital requirements. The plan promises to provide power 16 hours a day at best, but it’s not clear that the 7% estimate of the renewable share takes that into account or whether the real figure should be 4.2% of LA’s power needs. The project will require 2,600 acres for solar panels, and if it’s like other solar plant installations, the stated capacity is based on the few hours of the day when the sun’s rays are roughly perpendicular to the panels. So it’s likely that the real cost of the power will be many times the estimates, though taxpayers will subsidize 30% or more of the total. And then there is the negative impact on birds and other wildlife.

The Question of Intent

Michael Schellenberger goes so far as to say that a degraded standard of living is precisely what many fierce renewable advocates have long intended. Modern comforts are simply not compatible with 100% renewable energy any time soon, or perhaps ever given the investment involved, but a target of 100% was not really intended to be compatible with modern comforts. In fact, the renewable proposition was often intermingled with celebration of a more austere, agrarian lifestyle. Schellenberger discusses the case of Martin Heidegger, an early anti-technologist who said in 1954 that modern technology “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy....” Of course, Heidegger was not talking about the use of solar panels. Others, like Murray Bookchin, were ultimately quite explicit about the “promise” of renewables to dial-back industrial society in favor of an agrarian ideal. And here’s a quote from a new book by John Barry, Professor of “Green Political Economy” (!) at Queen’s University Belfast:

“The first question which serves as the starting point of this chapter is to ask if the objective of economic growth is now ecologically unsustainable, socially divisive and has in many countries passed the point when it is adding to human wellbeing?”

If that’s the question, the answer is no! The quote is courtesy of David Middleton. Green Professor Barry has one thing right, however: growing anything will be tough after crowding erstwhile farm and forest land with solar panels and wind turbines. But at least someone “green” is willing to admit some economic realities, something many alarmists and politicians are loath to do.

Welfare Loss

Involuntary actions always involve a welfare loss, as “subjects” must sacrifice the additional value they’d otherwise derive from their own choices. So it is that coerced adoption of renewables implies a starker outcome than zero economic growth. Objective measurement of all welfare costs is difficult, but we know that the adoption of renewables implies measurable up-front and ongoing economic losses. Matt Ridley notes that the impact of those losses falls hardest on the poor, whose energy needs absorb a large fraction of income. This, along with fundamental impracticality and high costs, accounts for the populist backlash against radical efforts to promote renewables in some European states. The politics of forced adoption of renewables is increasingly grim, but attempts to sell a centrally-planned energy sector based on renewables continue.

Ridley is rightly skeptical of carbon doomsday scenarios, but the pressure to curb carbon emissions will remain potent. He advocates a different form of intervention: essentially a carbon tax on producers with proceeds dedicated to new, competing sequestration or carbon capture technologies. Still coercive, the tax itself requires an estimate of the “economic cost of carbon”, which is of tremendously uncertain magnitude. The tax, of course, has the potential to do real harm to the economy. On the other hand, Ridley is correct in asserting that the effort to fund competing carbon-capture projects would leverage powerful market forces and perhaps hasten breakthroughs.

Mandated Misery

The attempt to force a complete conversion to renewable energy sources is meeting increasing political challenges as its cost is revealed more clearly by experience. Alarmists have long recognized the danger of economic damage, however. Thus, they try to convince us that economic growth and our current standards of living aren’t as good as we think they are, and they continue to exaggerate claims about the promise of renewable technologies. One day, some of these technologies will be sufficiently advanced that they will be economically viable without taxpayer subsidies. The conversion to renewables should be postponed until that day, when users can justify the switch in terms of costs and benefits, and do so voluntarily without interference by government planners.

The UN’s Mass Extinction Fiction

20 Monday May 2019

Posted by pnoetx in Biodiversity, Central Planning, Environment

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African Elephants, Beepocalypse, Biodiversity, Bird Eater Tarantulas, CO2 Emissions, Dan Hannon, Extinction, Gary Wrightstone, Global Greening, Habitat Loss, IPCC, IUCN Red List, Jimmy Carter, Matt Ridley, Non-Native Species, Paris Accord, Polar Bears

A big story early this month warned of mass extinctions and a collapse of the planet’s biodiversity. This was based on a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). A high-level presentation of the data by IPBES was constructed in a way that is easily revealed as misleading (see below). But the first thing to ask about bombastic reports like this is whether the authors are self-interested. There is big money in promoting apocalyptic scenarios and public programs to avert them. Large government grants are at stake for like-minded scientists, and political power is at stake for biodiversity activists worldwide. Like many other scare stories reported as “news”, this one feeds into the statist political agenda of the environmental Left.

Exaggerated claims of species endangerment are not a new phenomenon. We’ve heard grossly erroneous forecasts of polar bear extinctions, frightening but false warnings of a “beepocalyse”, and faulty claims about declines in the population of African elephants. These are headline-grabbing and more thrilling to report than mourning the prospective loss of an obscure species of cave lichen. But a mass extinction is something else! Dan Hannon reminds us of the following:

“In 1980, for example, the Jimmy Carter administration distributed to foreign governments a report claiming that, by the year 2000, 2 million species would be wiped out. In fact, by 2010, there had been 872 documented extinctions.”

Of course, that figure does not account for the multitude of new species discovered. There are many. Recent examples just gruesome enough to garner attention are the three new species of bird eater tarantulas discovered in 2017.

In the more general mass-extinction context of the IPBES report, the blame for the extremely pessimistic outlook is placed squarely on human activity. The authors allege CO2 emissions as the primary culprit, which is at best a theory and one at odds with the chief driver of extinctions during the industrial era. That is the introduction of non-native species into environments having flora or fauna unable to withstand new competitors. Matt Ridley elaborates:

“The introduction by people of predators, parasites and pests, especially to islands, has been and continues to be far and away the greatest cause of local and global extinction of native fauna.”

There is no question that the IPBES report on extinctions was intended to create alarm. As Gary Wrightstone demonstrates, the lack of rigor and misleading expositional techniques used in the report are a tell:

“… the data were lumped together by century rather than shorter time frames, which, as we shall see accentuates the supposed increase in extinctions. … The base data were derived from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List, which catalogues every known species that has gone the way of the dodo and the carrier pigeon. Review of the full data set reveals a much different view of extinction and what has been happening recently.”

The more granular charts Wrightstone presents are indeed contrary to the narrative in the IPBES report. And Wrightstone also highlights the following in a postscript:

“In an incredibly ironic twist that poses a difficult conundrum for those who are intent on saving the planet from our carbon dioxide excesses, the new study reports that the number one cause of predicted extinctions is habitat loss. Yet their solution is to pave over vast stretches of land for industrial scale solar factories and to construct immense wind factories that will cover forests and grasslands, killing the endangered birds and other species they claim to want to save.”

The enduring extinction racket is one among other fronts in the war on capitalism. The IPBES report must use the term “transformative” a thousand times, as it recommends “steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth“. Matt Ridley highlights the faulty attribution of alleged declines in biodiversity to “western values and capitalism”:

“On the whole what really diminishes biodiversity is a large but poor population trying to live off the land. As countries get richer and join the market economy they generally reverse deforestation, slow species loss and reverse some species declines.”

And Ridley also says this:

“A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too.”

It’s no coincidence that future extinctions foretold by IPBES are predicted to have drastic impacts on less-developed countries. It thus appears that IPBES exists in a happy synergy with the UN’s climate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as proponents of the Paris Accord and the entire climate lobby. An objective that helps them garner support around the globe is to redistribute existing wealth to less-developed countries in the name of environmental salvation. That would prove a poor substitute for the kinds of free-market policies that would truly enhance prospects for economic growth in those nations.

The threat of mass extinctions is greatly exaggerated by the UN, IPBES, climate change activists, and members of the media who can’t resist promoting a crisis. Any diminished biodiversity we might experience going forward won’t be solved by limiting economic growth, as the IPBES report claims. Instead, advances in productivity, particularly in agriculture, can allow expansion of native habitat, as recent experience with reforestation and global greening demonstrates. This principle is as applicable to under-developed countries as anywhere else.

The kinds of centrally planned limits on human activity contemplated by the IPBES report are likely to backfire by making us poorer. Those limits would impose costs by misallocating resources away from things that people value most highly. They would also force people to forego the adoption of innovative production techniques, leading to the substitution of other resources, such as inefficient land use. And those limits would deny basic freedoms, including the unfettered use of private property.

You’re Welcome: Charitable Gifts Prompt Statist Ire

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by pnoetx in Central Planning, Charity, Uncategorized

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Amazon, American Institute for Economic Research, central planning, Charity, Cloe Anagnos, Day 1 Fund, Doug Bandow, Forced Charity, Gaby Del Valle, Homelessness, Jeff Bezos, Redistribution, Russ Roberts, Scientism, Seattle Employment Tax, War on Charity

Charitable acts are sometimes motivated by a desire to cultivate a favorable reputation, or even to project intelligence. Perhaps certain charitable acts are motivated by guilt of one kind or another. Tax deduction are nice, too. But sometimes a charitable gift is prompted by no more than a desire to help others less fortunate. It’s likely a combination of motives in many cases, but to gainsay the purity of anyone’s charitable motives is rather unseemly. Yet Gaby Del Valle does just that in Vox, casting a skeptical eye at Jeff Bezos’ efforts to help the homeless through his Day 1 Fund.

“Last week, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, were donating $97.5 million to 24 organizations that provide homeless services across the country. The donation is part of Bezos’s $2 billion ‘Day 1 Fund, a philanthropic endeavor … that, according to Bezos, focuses on establishing ‘a network of new, non-profit, tier-one preschools in low-income communities’ and funding existing nonprofits that provide homeless services.”

Del Valle says Bezos deserves little credit for his big gift for several reasons. First, Amazon very publicly opposed a recent initiative for a $275 per employee tax on large employers in Seattle. The proceeds would have been used to fund public programs for the homeless. This allegation suggests that Bezos feels guilty, or that the gift is a cynical attempt to buy-off critics. That might have an element of truth, but the tax was well worthy of opposition on economic grounds — almost as if it was designed to stunt employment and economic growth in the city.

Second, because Amazon has been an engine of growth for Seattle, Del Valle intimates that the company and other large employers are responsible for the city’s high cost of housing and therefore homelessness. Of course, growth in a region’s economy is likely to lead to higher housing prices if the supply of housing does not keep pace, but forsaking economic growth is not a solution. Furthermore, every large city in the country suffers from some degree of homelessness. And not all of those homeless individuals have been “displaced”, as Del Valle would have it. Some have relocated voluntarily without any guarantee or even desire for employment. As for the housing stock, government environmental regulations, zoning policies and rent control (in some markets) restrains expansion, leading to higher costs.

Finally, Del Valle implies that private efforts to help the homeless are somehow inferior to “leadership by elected officials”. Further, she seems to regard these charitable acts as threatening to “public” objectives and government control. At least she doesn’t disguise her authoritarian impulses. Del Valle also quotes a vague allegation that one of the charities beholden to Amazon is less than a paragon of charitable virtue. Well, I have heard similar allegations that government isn’t celebrated for rectitude in fulfilling its duties. Like all statists, Del Valle imagines that government technocrats possess the best vision of how to design aid programs. That attitude is an extension of the scientism and delusions of efficacy typical of central planners. Anyone with the slightest awareness of the government’s poor track record in low-income housing would approach such a question with trepidation. In contrast, private efforts often serve as laboratories in which to test innovative programs that can later be adopted on a broader scale.

While selfishness might motivate private acts of charity in some cases, only voluntary, private charity can ever qualify as real charity. Government benefits for the homeless are funded by taxes, which are compulsory. Such public programs might be justifiable as an extension of social insurance, but it is not charity in any pure sense; neither are it advocates engaged in promoting real charity, despite their conveniently moralistic positioning. And unlike private charity, government redistribution programs can be restrained only through a political process in which substantial payers are a distinct minority of the voting population.

Public aid and private charity have worked alongside each other for many years in the U.S. According to Russ Roberts, private giving to the poor began to be “crowded-out” during the Great Depression by a dramatic increase in public assistance programs. (Also see Doug Bandow’s “War On Charity“.) It’s certainly more difficult to make a case for gifts to the poor when donors are taxed by the government in order to redistribute income.

The statist war on private charity can take other forms. The regulatory apparatus can crowd-out private efforts to extend a helping hand. Chloe Anagnos of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) writes of a charity in Kansas City that wanted to provide home-cooked soup to the homeless, but health officials intervened, pouring bleach into the soup. I am aware of similar but less drastic actions in St. Louis, where organizations attempting to hand-out sandwiches to the poor were recently prohibited by health authorities.

Private charity has drawn criticism because its source has driven economic growth, its source has opposed policies that stunt comic growth, and because it might interfere with the remote possibility that government would do it better. But private charity plays a critical role in meeting the needs of the disadvantaged, whether as a substitute for public aid where it falls short, or as a supplement. It can also play a productive role in identifying the most effective designs for aid programs. Of course, there are corrupt organizations and individuals purporting to do charitable work, which argues for a degree of public supervision over private charities. But unfortunately, common sense is too often lost to overzealous enforcement. In general, the public sector should not stand in the way of private charities and charitable acts, but real generosity has little value to those who press for domination by the state.

Sacred Cow Chips

Category Archives: Central Planning

Net Zero: It Ain’t Gonna Happen

Interventionists Love You and Demand You Change, or Else

New Theory: Great Woke Filter Conceals Life In the Cosmos

Rejecting Fossil Fuels at Our Great Peril

The SEC’s Absurd Climate Overreach

Central Planning With AI Will Still Suck

Renewables and Preempted Prosperity

The UN’s Mass Extinction Fiction

You’re Welcome: Charitable Gifts Prompt Statist Ire