Politics – Page 108 – a sibilant intake of breath

Taking one action

Talking with my friend Meaghan, the question arose: what is the single most useful thing individuals can do easily to help address climate change? Almost certainly, it is taking some action to influence the politics in their country. For those living in democracies, there is probably nothing more useful they can do than nudging their elected representatives a bit toward understanding climate change, wanting to curb it, and being aware of how to do so.

As BuryCoal argues, the key to dealing with climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels. The more coal, oil, and gas stay underground, the less the climate will change. At the moment, I think that is probably the most important message people can convey to their representatives.

Of course, anyone who you tell that to is likely to come back at you with various objections. Fossil fuels power the world economy, for instance. It may be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to prepare counter-arguments for the major objections they will hear – which range from the realistic to the completely deluded. This major counter-argument, however, seems to have two responses. First, we do have alternatives. The total amount of renewable energy out there is huge, and we have many different ways to capture it. Second, nothing about the universe guarantees our current level of energy use. It may well be that future generations experience leaner times. That is far preferable to a world where they are trying to deal with catastrophic or runaway climate change.

The degree to which members of the general public need to understand climate change and its solutions is debatable. It may well be that the problem can be solved by stealth, without much input from the average individual. My fantasy climate change policy doesn’t call for much in the way of voluntary action. For those individuals who are concerned, I would say that first and foremost they should be expressing their deep concern to their elected representatives, highlighting how climate change is the challenge facing humanity and the most important current force that will determine how future generations live.

Once you have done that, you can go on to take actions that reduce your personal contribution to the problem, like improving the efficiency of your home, going vegetarian, reducing travel, etc. Ultimately, the emergence of society-wide mandatory solutions seems to have a much greater chance of addressing the problem than hoping for bottom-up voluntary actions to do the job.

One North American group focused on encouraging ordinary citizens to lobby their representatives for action on climate change is the Citizens Climate Lobby.

Poll: should the president have a six pack?

By now, I am sure everyone has seen the photographs of President Obama shirtless on the beach, sporting an abdominal six pack. It is my understanding that achieving this particular feat of human anatomy requires two things: being unusually thin and doing a lot of crunches.

Should the president be doing crunches? I can see a case for it. If nothing else, it must confer a certain level of humility for the most powerful man in the world to have to spend the time moulding the largely useless muscles in front of his intestines. At the same time, I cannot help but feel like he should be using his time more productively, working on pressing issues of domestic or foreign policy.

Perhaps he finds crunches to be similar to how I find cycling – a good bodily distraction that aids with thinking. If so, perhaps he is getting his attractive photo shoots without a productivity cost.

One other thing that occurred to me recently is that Democrats in the United States must find young voters a bit maddening. If their turnout rate wasn’t so abysmal, Democrats would win more elections. At the same time, U.S. laws and policies overall would be more aligned to the needs and preferences of young people. When young voters stay home on election day – at least in most areas – they are probably sabotaging both the Democrats and themselves.

TAL on the credit crunch

For those seeking to understand the subprime mortgage crisis, there are a couple of episodes of This American Life which explain important aspects in an accessible way:

#355: Giant Pool of Money
#405: Inside Job

Both are available for $0.99 through the iTunes Store.

Update [2021-05-23]: Direct links: The Giant Pool of Money, Inside Job, Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Today’s poor versus everyone tomorrow

In Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future, Tim Flannery raises the question of intergenerational ethics and poverty reduction. He does so with reference to the 90,000 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired electricity generation capacity India is planning to install by 2012 (compared with 478,000 MW installed in China between 2004 and 2010). Flannery writes:

It is futile to tell Indians that they should defer development of power plants until cleaner technologies are available, so that we can spare unborn generations climate change. Why, Indians ask, should they penalize people living today for future, uncertain gains, and do this to help solve a problem that is not of their creation?

I do think there are good answers to those questions. For everyone to refuse to act is to create a suicide pact. Further, what we now know about greenhouse gases obligates us to take action in a way that ignorant previous generations didn’t have applied to them.

Also, if we continue on the world’s present course of unbridled emissions, it will not be abstract future generations that see the first massive consequences. Children born today may live to see the great icesheets of Greenland and Antarctica disintegrating in their lifetimes, alongside enormous other changes that are more challenging to predict.

All that said, Henry Shue makes an excellent point about sustenance versus luxury emissions. Even in an emergency, you sell the jewelry before the blankets. As such, the heavy discretionary emissions of rich places like Canada (things like foreign trips, huge inefficient houses and cars, etc) would be cut before Indian development, in any kind of fair world.

Given the choice between a fairer world that produces disaster, however, and a less fair world that gets the job done, the latter still seems preferable.

Sovereign debt crises in the EU

I find all the economic anxiety in the European Union (EU) to be rather worrisome, from a long-term historical perspective. I think the last 500 years of history demonstrate pretty convincingly that the most benign possible way for European states to spend their time is arguing over agricultural subsidies and cheese standards. It’s definitely a lot more congenial than building tanks and smashing through Poland and Belgium over and over.

As such, I rather hope the EU is able to sort things out and set up systems that prevent these problems in the future. There definitely need to be ways in which the actions of less responsible governments can be prevented from requiring frequent bailouts from more responsible governments, but I don’t think the risk of that happening from time to time is so severe that it is worth derailing the whole European project over.

The wastrel child effect

Talking with Lauren the other day, it occurred to me that the strongest force redistributing wealth across human history has quite possibly not been progressive taxation of income or estate taxes. Rather, it may be the tendency of the children of the wealthy and powerful to be hopeless wastrels. One generation builds up a gigantic fortune and the next one (or two, or three) disperses it again with some combination of bad decisions and lavish living.

It seems plausible to say that really gigantic fortunes only build up when some new factor unbalances the existing economic system. For instance, companies realize that it will only be possible to train staff in the use of one computer operating system. In the process, Microsoft and Bill Gates make colossal fortunes. Similar explanations can be used when it comes to railroad barons, the current wealth of Gulf oil states, and so on.

The people who build up these fortunes probably always need a combination of talent and good luck. They need to have the giant fortune opportunity in the first place, and then they need to act effectively to realize it. The sort of people who are able to do that are probably pretty unusual, for the most part. By contrast, their offspring are more likely to be normal in traits like intelligence (regression to the mean). It is also entirely possible that they will live seriously distorted lives, as the result of parental success. This is as true of the heir to a major fortune or family business as it is to the heir to a particularly successful hereditary monarch. Once in a while, they may be able to build on the success of their predecessor. More often – I would wager – they either start or perpetuate the decline of that success.

All told, it is probably an extremely good thing that the children of people like Elizabeth I or Bill Gates don’t generally rise to the level of success of their parents. Given how limited most states are – when it comes to putting checks on income inequality – it seems plausible to me that a world with a high probability of hereditary success would probably be one ruled by powerful families reminiscent of the Middle Ages. The fact that there is at least the occasional mad or incompetent person who ends up in a position to squander the family’s wealth and influence is probably a significant reason why we don’t all live like peasants, ruled over by feudal lords.

If it hasn’t already been done, somebody should undertake a statistical analysis of the relative financial success of the children of highly wealthy individuals. It could cover as long a span as we have good records for (which would vary by country) and would help to establish the significance of this hypothesized wastrel effect. As I said, I would not personally be surprised if the total economic effect has been redistribution on a greater scale than that achieved by taxation.

Obama the schemer?

Writing in The Ottawa Citizen, David Warren echoes an interesting hypothesis about Barack Obama first expressed by Charles Krauthammer: namely, that Obama is a lot more strategic than he seems.

He claims – among other things – that Obama might be intentionally alienating the most left wing voters, in order to improve his electoral prospects by appealing to centrists.

I don’t know how convincing the hypothesis ultimately is. For one thing, if Obama was secretly a brilliant election-winning political operator, he would probably have done better in the midterms.

Social consequences of a real lie detector

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris raises the possibility of an accurate lie detector based on neural imaging: a machine that could accurately determine whether a statement someone makes accurately reflects their belief on the matter at hand.
Harris discusses the social consequences of the existence of such a machine, and generally thinks they would be positive. They would, for instance, reduce the number of false convictions and false acquittals in the criminal justice system.

Personally, I think the social and cultural effects of such a machine would be extremely widespread, if there was general confidence in its accuracy. Inevitably, there would be calls to test how genuinely all sorts of people feel about things. Does this proposed Catholic bishop really believe in key elements of Catholic doctrine? Does this politician honestly intend to fulfill a particular promise? Does the man who just proposed marriage to a woman really think she is the most beautiful woman he has seen? Does he really want children? Does he really intend to stay with her into old age? Has be been entirely faithful during their courtship? Would he have taken the opportunity to sleep with someone else, if it had arisen?

Of course, the machine could then be turned on the other partner.

If it ever became culturally acceptable to subject people to impartial evaluation on these sorts of questions, it would have countless direct and indirect effects. For one thing, I think it would make hapless pawns more important. Rather than having cynical mob lawyers who know all about the family’s murders but exploit the legal system in every possible way regardless, there would need to be a lot more ignorant people defending important individuals and institutions. Similarly, corporate CEOs would no longer be able to hedge strategically to avoid liability, which could significantly affect the safety and availability of many products in the long-term. For instance, people would have a lot more trouble selling placebos as medicine.

To a large extent, I think society is based around the general acceptance of various kinds of lies. If the people who ran or represented the world’s governments, churches, and corporations had to be scrupulously truthful at all times, the public understanding of how the world operates would change radically. I don’t think this is because people are terribly ignorant about reality. More it is because there are many deceptions which we are comfortable with accepting. For instance, that we are already doing an adequate amount to help those who are starving around the world; that our governments do not commit war crimes or contribute to genocides; that our meat doesn’t get produced in exceptionally cruel ways; and so forth.

There would also be small-scale consequences. To me, it seems that politeness is fundamentally bound up with deception. At the very least, ‘being polite’ requires withholding genuinely held beliefs that would be offensive to other parties in a conversation. At most, it requires actively lying to them. The existence of an effective and credible lie detector would strip people of the ability to be polite. It is possible that would be liberating – allowing people to really express themselves without fear, and granting a better perspective into the real thoughts of others. It is also possible it would be devastating: breaking up businesses, families, and long-standing marriages when people learn things that they simply cannot handle – especially with the full knowledge that they are true (or as much confidence as the accuracy of the equipment allows).

All this relates to some of the issues raised by the film The Invention of Lying, which I commented on before. To have any hope of surviving in this world, we need to be able to accept the possibility that a person could be wrong about something. When someone says that the elevator has arrived, we check before stepping through the open doors into the elevator shaft. Even a perfect lie detector would do nothing to protect us from honestly mistaken beliefs. What it would probably do is have profound social and cultural effects, as a huge number of people found themselves in a position where they either had to submit to the test or foster the widespread view that they aren’t genuine in the claims they are making.

Blackadder Goes Forth

The fourth season of the British comedy series Blackadder focuses on the first world war and the efforts of Rowan Atkinson’s character to avoid going over the top into the machine gun and artillery blast of no man’s land. His cynical view of the war is contrasted with the naive patriotism of the upper class twit portrayed by Hugh Laurie who – right until the last episode – has a kind of exaggerated cheerfulness that mocks superficial public support for war efforts.

All told, the series is a pretty convincing demonstration of the pointlessness of WWI and the dangers of unthinking nationalism and militarism. The entire season is available on Netflix.

The identifiable victim effect

In the second chapter of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , Sam Harris describes the strange phenomenon in human psychology where we care less about a problem as the number of victims rises. When we see one little girl who is starving, we generally feel more concern and willingness to help than we do when it is her and her brother, or her and her entire village.

This seems deeply irrational. Bigger problems should motivate a larger desire to help. Perhaps it reflects our implicit awareness of our own limitations. Helping one little girl may be within our power in a way that helping a large group is not. Still, this quirk seems likely to be very damaging. If we don’t feel a strong moral impulse in the face of a big problem, we are unlikely to band together and provide a big solution.

That applies directly to climate change. It may also have something to do with our sometimes strange notions about the value of avoiding extinction and our thinking about apocalypse.