The problem with Economists
2009-07-05 · Original WordPress address
We have an incomprehensible, to most, outside-in view of the world. David Friedman says something correct but incomprehensible:
Climate aside, we do not live in a static world—consider the changes that have occurred over the past century. The shifts we can expect to occur due to technological progress alone, even without allowing for political and demograpic shifts, are much larger than the shifts required to deal with climate change on the scale I am discussing.
A few months back I was debating a petroleum engineer about peak oil. It occurred to me that if petroleum engineers didn't get excited about hard problems in energy production, maybe those hard problems wouldn't get solved. This, I think, is the problem with the assumption of exogenous technology and this is the problem with economists giving policy advice.