Cleaned by Capitalism
Policraticus is right to point out some of the many statements made by the Popes in recent years on the importance of protecting the environment. It’s only fair, however, to note just how much technological progress, spurred on by the free economy, has led to a cleaner, healthier, and all around more pleasant environment. As Don Boudreaux has put it:
[S]mallpox, dysentery, and malaria – once common threats to humankind – are today totally conquered in the industrial world. (Smallpox is no longer a threat even in the poorest parts of the world.) Antibiotics regularly protect us from many infections that routinely killed our ancestors.
Before refrigeration, people ran enormous risks of ingesting deadly bacteria whenever they ate meat or dairy products. Refrigeration has dramatically reduced the bacteria pollution that constantly haunted our pre-twentieth-century forebears.
We wear clean clothes; our ancestors wore foul clothes. Pre-industrial humans had no washers, dryers, or sanitary laundry detergent. Clothes were worn day after day without being washed. And when they were washed, the detergent was often made of urine.
Our bodies today are much cleaner. Sanitary soap is dirt cheap (so to speak), as is clean water from household taps. The result is that, unlike our ancestors, we moderns bathe frequently. Not only was soap a luxury until just a few generations ago, but because nearly all of our pre-industrial ancestors could afford nothing larger than minuscule cottages, there were no bathrooms (and certainly no running water). Baths, when taken, were taken in nearby streams, rivers, or ponds often the same bodies of water used by the farm animals. Forget about shampoo, clean towels, toothpaste, mouthwash, and toilet tissue.
The interiors of our homes are immaculate compared to the squalid interiors of almost all pre-industrial dwellings. These dwellings’ floors were typically just dirt which made the farm animals feel right at home when they wintered in the house with humans. Of course, there was no indoor plumbing. Nor were there household disinfectants, save sunlight. Unfortunately, because pre-industrial window panes were too expensive for ordinary families and because screens are an invention of the industrial age sunlight and fresh air could be let into these cottages only by letting in insects too. Also, bizarre as it sounds to us today, the roofs of these dwellings were polluted with all manner of filthy or dangerous things.Here’s the description by historians Frances and Joseph Gies, in Life in a Medieval Village, of the roofs of pre-industrial cottages: “Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes. . . . Thatched roofs had formidable drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed.”
One consequence is described by French historian Fernand Braudel: Fleas, lice and bugs conquered London as well as Paris, rich interiors as well as poor. (See Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life.)
Our streets are clean. Here, again, is Braudel, commenting on Parisian streets in the late-eighteenth century: “And chamber pots, as always, continued to be emptied out of windows; the streets were sewers.” Modern sewage disposal has disposed of this disgusting pollution. And that very symbol of twentieth-century capitalism the automobile has further cleaned our streets by ridding us of the constant presence of horse dung and of the swarms of flies it attracted.
Consider, finally, a very recent victorious battle against pollution: toilets and urinals that automatically flush. Until a few years ago, every public toilet and urinal had to be flushed manually. Not so today. As automatic flushers replace manual flushers, we no longer must pollute our hands by touching filthy flush knobs.
Indeed, the development brought by the free economy has even led, paradoxically enough, to an increased ability to appreciate nature itself. As Thomas Macaulay put it more than 150 years ago:
law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develop in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveler must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. . . .
It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of robbers . . . that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain tops.
No system is perfect, of course, and we should always strive to make improve things, whether the subject is the environment or poverty or war. But there is still a lot to be thankful for, particularly when one considers the alternatives.
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It’s also worth pointing out that before you could move into a “clean” economy, you first had to pass through a “dirty” one. On the whole things have improved, but it is not an inexorable increase. At the very least an economically developing area must first pass through a period of filthy industrialization. (see China, America circa 1880s, London circa 1830s)
Good post =) Three cheers to the human spirit and free enterprise! They used to say that you can smell London before you see it. Speaking of hygiene – I’m in Versailles, with all the gigantic splendor, they still had feces in the hallways. Not to mention bodily hygiene. Egads. Still seems to be leaving a bit to be desired in France, as a metro ride will demonstrate.
It truly is amazing what humans have created. I’m sitting next to the castle and am online. I have a cellphone that works in every country on the planet and one of my cameras shoots 10 photos per second, the other 22MP. It transfers photos wirelessly. Everything is developing so much faster, too. Imagine living in an agrarian society. No electricity. No cars. Kant never left Koenigsberg.
Not to mention the ‘global village’. Took 10 hours to fly from San Francisco to Paris. Just a hundred years ago such a trip would have been endless and you might croak somewhere along the way, losing your scalp, eating each other etc.
Positivism.
This is really weird. All you are really showing is that technical progress reduces the incidence of disease and increases sanitary conditions. You completely pass over the great by-product of a “free society” (you use ‘free’ in a utilitarian sense) — the massive increase in pollution, and carbon emissions– with the obvious knock-on effects on global warming (something which nearly everybody outside the narrow domain of the United States Republican party accepts as fact).
Just another capitalist fairy tale. Two words will do to successfully debunk it: mountaintop removal.
What you say gives rise to an interesting question. Which is better, if you had to choose: 7/10 of a degree of global warming, or a world without electricity (without which most medical care — which you seem to think important — would be difficult or impossible)? This is a serious question: I’m asking whether you’d be willing to go back to the world of the 1600s if you could get rid of the global warming that has occurred since then (and that has necessarily accompanied most of the material progress made in that time).
No fair evading the question, and no fair pretending that the material progress made since the 1600s could have been accomplished via nuclear power or windmill-operated MRI machines or something.
There are always problems with arguments such as these, that is why I wrote “positivism” above, because they usually neglect the other side of the coin and look at issues with an overly optimistic lens.
What Boudreaux doesn’t mention is how urine even though may not smell great is a heck of a lot better for the environment, animals (and humans!) than the surfactants used in detergents. The effects of many chemical compounds found in everyday products remain largely unknown, especially polycarboxylates, PEG, ammonium Chloride compounds among many others. And then we wonder why we have so many cases of cancer.
I can also write a post that says how Capitalism caused an increase in cancer incidence and the argument would be just as flawed.
SB who are you addressing
I think the Pope addressed this when he said, in his UN address:
Indeed, questions of security, development goals, reduction of local and global inequalities, protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate, require all international leaders to act jointly and to show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law, and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet. I am thinking especially of those countries in Africa and other parts of the world which remain on the margins of authentic integral development, and are therefore at risk of experiencing only the negative effects of globalization.
To a large extent, the dirty aspects of capitalism have been moved from Western countries into undeveloped countries, or at least the out-of-the-way parts of Western countries (such as with the mountaintop removal mentioned by Michael). And as we see in China and many other countries, Capitalism is coexisting quite nicely with political oppression and environmental destruction.
Morning’s Minion. You posted while I was writing out that question. (Note to self: Never respond just to “you.”).
Ack. I mean, “Michael Iafrate posted while I was writing out that question,” not “you.”
Feel free to answer my question, though. It’s a hard question, I think, as long as one tries to answer it with any seriousness.
JohnH, those are good points.
When we are presented with these questions as Christians, we need to look at the whole picture. What this guy Boudreaux argues is that we are much better off because of the “comforts” we enjoy right now when compared to our ancestors. That’s an anachronism in itself, but anyway, at what expense are we enjoying these comforts? Gerald fails to mention that in his comment above. We cannot fail to see that in a globalized economy as the one we have today we are so tightly linked together that the nice clean clothes I’m wearing right now might have been manufactured by abused and oppressed labor (well, it’s more of a fact, because Ann Taylor has had child labor issues in the past, I just didn’t know at the time I bought it) and that the surfactants contained in the detergents that I use to clean my clothes may be produced in places where dumping of toxic waste to waterways may be just OK (also a fact).
We need to look at the whole picture and ask at what expense we are having the luxuries Boudreaux and Gerald mention. It’s only Christian to do that.
What is being described in this article is primarily a function of public health, not capitalism.
Arguing that capitalism caused an increase in the cancer rate would be flawed, if for no other reason than that there hasn’t been any such increase.
There’s no necessary trade-off between clean clothes and oppressed laborers; I’d bet anything that the number of genuinely oppressed laborers was much higher in the 1600s (if only because of slavery).
Whereas if we look at the past few hundred years, there really would have been some hard tradeoffs between causing a small increase in global warming vs. making an awful lot of material progress via burning oil and coal (which were necessary to create the computer on which everyone is typing, the X-ray machine that tells the dentist whether to fix your teeth, and a million other things that people now take for granted and even argue should be a “basic human right”).
Blackadder,
Asbestos started to be used during the industrial revolution in the 19th century and many years after that. I still work at facilities that still contain asbestos, but have the needed warnings to prevent from it becoming airborne. My point is that I don’t think the approach of the post is particularly helpful, because it overlooks so much such as the case of asbestos brought about by capitalism. Nobody knew it was so harmful until after the fact. We see it all the time with FDA recalling medicines that have the exact opposite effect on patients that they were supposed to have as in the case of VIOXX.
The question remains, which is going to be the next asbestos? We may be breathing it, swallowing it, who knows? You’d be surprised how little research is done to understand the effects of common chemicals we are exposed to on humans.
“I’d bet anything that the number of genuinely oppressed laborers was much higher in the 1600s (if only because of slavery).”
Actually, the number of genuinely oppressed laborers was probably lower in the 1600s, since most people back then didn’t live long enough to become laborers, oppressed or otherwise. But the percentage of the population who faced such conditions was undoubtedly larger.
Katerina,
Since you mention Vioxx, let’s take prescription drugs as an example. Over the last decades thousands of different drugs have been created that have saved untold numbers of lives and has lessened the suffering of countless others. In my opinion, arguing that, because some of these drugs have had harmful side effects in a small number of cases, therefore the development of all of these drugs hasn’t been a great boon to humanity, shows a fundamental lack of perspective.
Similarly, I think a lot of talk about environmental problems in the West today suffers from a similar lack of perspective. All of the progress we have made over the last few hundred years is taken for granted whereas any negative environmental effect is taken as proof that things have gotten worse.
Are there environmental problems today? Of course. Many of the problems Boudreaux describes are still common in many parts of the world (and since, as he notes, these problems were common everywhere until quite recently, trying to blame them on the West doesn’t make much sense). No doubt there are new problems as well. Global warming is a problem (though it looks as if at least in the short term more people are going to die because of efforts to fight global warming than from the warming itself). The key to solving these problems, though, is to unleash the enormous creative power of human beings, and the best way to do that is through the free economy.
Still, there has to be a more balanced approach to Capitalism than the post you quote. Like Gerald C. mentioned above, the post in itself is not about the achievements of capitalism, because if it were so, then we would be saying that human capacity can only be used at its fullest through capitalism (which is what you said in your last sentence above) and that is as dangerous as the claims coming from Marxism.
To attribute all the “achievements” mentioned above to capitalism only is quite a blind jump. Boudreaux’s arguments as well as Gerald’s are quite positivistic–and hence dangerous. They sound very much like blind pre-WWI optimism in human progress.
Reduce carbon emissions. Hold your breath. Hold it. Hoooold it…
One isn’t required to put together a lot of thought to find examples of innovation absent capitalism. The Manhattan project comes immediately to mind. While private industry was used, it wasn’t used competitively. Civil aviation is almost purely a product of first the military and then a closed market created by the governement. Even the road building mentioned in the post is not a product of competition. If we are going to speak purely of innovation, we are compelled to speak of the anti-competitive rent seeking that is patents and trademarks. One can certainly support patents and such, but they are an interference in the free market. And as far as patents go, many of them belong to public universities.
Incidentally, the latest EconTalk podcast is about the claim that capitalism requires a certain number of people to be poor so they can do the “dirty work.” It’s about an hour long, but there’s a lot of economic wisdom packed into it.
ncidentally, the latest EconTalk podcast is about the claim that capitalism requires a certain number of people to be poor so they can do the “dirty work.”
Lemme guess, BA… The EconTalkers argue that capitalism has no such requirement. Those of us who come from peripheral regions know better.
Reduce carbon emissions. Hold your breath. Hold it. Hoooold it…
Ok… if you say that it means that you must know what is the net contribution of CO2 emitted by breathing? What is it then?
So can anyone answer my trade-off question?
Michael,
Maybe you should listen to the podcast, and find out. :)
I’d answer Stuart’s trade-off question if I didn’t think my answer was already obvious. I would be interested in hearing anyone else’s answer, though.
Which is better, if you had to choose: 7/10 of a degree of global warming, or a world without electricity (without which most medical care — which you seem to think important — would be difficult or impossible)?
The 7/10ths of a degree of global warming would be preferable.
I haven’t answered the question, because I don’t think the magnitude of the trade-off you are suggesting is real. What is your basis of the 0.7 degree? Would such reduction require an entire “world without electricity”? I just want to know the basis for the question, because there is no use in discussing hyperboles or hypotheticals that are not grounded in reality. If you have a good basis for claiming that we would have to all go without electricity to reduce 0.7 degrees in the atmosphere, then I’ll answer it.
I think both sides have some good points here…How about Capitalism, but “with a conscience”?
Capitalism doesn’t have a conscience. I don’t mean to say that all capitalists are evil. I mean to say that the parameters of capitalism concern only profit, are measured only in terms of individual gain. A company exists to make a profit, not to make it or anyone else feel better. A company is a corporate body that exists only for one reason — to enrich those who hold a stake in it. As soon as it stops making money, it is finished. With that kind of zero-sum logic, any factor other than profit becomes radically de-prioritized. So when capitalists act with some reference to conscience, they are not doing so a capitalists. In other words, they are obeying dictates that come from outside of the immediate exigencies of capitalism itself. So capitalism may be controlled and regulated by conscience (for example, the consciences of those who resist it or attempt to defend themselves from it) but capitalism never comes “with” or has its own conscience.
G. Alkon is right… Introducing a conscience into capitalism would be to take the “free” out of the free market. Individual capitalists may choose to abide by whatever consciences they may have, but “capitalism with a conscience” cannot, by definition, exist.
G. Alkon,
My experience in companies small and large would tend to suggest that most if not all of the time, treating employees and customers well is a benefit to a company rather than a loss. Even if one considers capitalism strictly as exchange of goods and capital out of self interest, once one takes the self-interest of all parties into account, treating people well is almost invariably more profitable than treating them badly.
I’ve seen a number of instances where attempts to follow strict ideas of corporate gain (say, by refusing to provide any help or replacement for products recently out of warranty) backfire and hurt the company far more than the original “loss” that the selfish policy was put in place to address.
Clearly, there is far more to life than the economic sphere, and companies are not engines primarily ordered toward “doing good” in the disinterested sense. But honestly, if it were the case that doing wrong were invariably more profitable than doing right, one would have to start to wonder if our understanding of human nature and morality was correct.
“Capitalism doesn’t have a conscience.”
I would agree with this. Capitalism doesn’t have a conscience. Socialism doesn’t have a conscience. Anarchism doesn’t have a conscience. The state, the market, the environment, none of them have consciences. You know why? Because they aren’t people, people. Only people have consciences, and to ask whether anything else can or should have one is to commit a category mistake.
Darwin – That may be true but the motivation for these companies treating employees “well” (whatever that means) is not from some “conscience” but, again, from profit alone.
Blackadder – That’s a different question all together. Socialism and anarchism are, in fact, motivated by “conscience” with regard to persons in a real sense. Capitalism systematically excludes any reference to conscience, as the bottom line is profit.
Michael,
Many socialists and anarchists are no doubt motivated by conscience. One could easily say that belief in socialism or belief in anarchism is motivated by conscience. But the ideas themselves don’t have motivations because an idea is not a person.
If the claim is that believers in the free market aren’t or can’t be motivated by something other than profit, or that people in a capitalist society aren’t or can’t be motivated by something other than profit, then this is factually inaccurate (I stand as a refutation of the first claim, and we both stand as a refutation of the second).
I haven’t answered the question, because I don’t think the magnitude of the trade-off you are suggesting is real. What is your basis of the 0.7 degree? Would such reduction require an entire “world without electricity”?
The basis is the charts (available on too many websites to count) showing that the world has warmed about 0.7 degrees since the 1600s (assuming that the temperature records going back that far are so consistent that you can be accurate within a tenth of a degree). Actually, most of that warming occurred in the 20th century. So assume every bit of that 0.7 degree warming was caused by us humans in the 20th century, all because we invented electricity and started burning oil and coal.
So how about it — if we could erase the past 110 years of oil/coal burning, and go back to a world without electricity (and all the many things that depend upon it, including most of the useful medical care, etc.), would that be worth having a world that is 0.7 degrees cooler?
That should be— would it be worth it, to have a world that is 0.7 degrees cooler?
I ask this question only because MM responded to Blackadder’s post by claiming that Blackadder is wrong to admire the “technical progress” since the Middle Ages; after all, that progress was accompanied by “the massive increase in pollution, and carbon emissions.”
So my response is: OK, if that’s what you really mean, then have the courage to say it straight up — that you’d be willing to sacrifice the past few hundred years of material progress (such that universal health care would consist of a right to free leeches and a swig of whiskey) in order to spare the Earth the warming that it has experienced to date because of that progress (0.7 degrees or so).
BA —
The existence of the Church as Body of Christ means that there is one set-of-ideas/corporate-body that IS in fact a person, Who DOES in fact have conscience.
The Church is indeed a person, and a community, at the same time. We are all one in Christ Jesus. And that is why the Church can and must judge every other community, which lacks true personal being and is held together, extrinsically, by laws and ideas.
Now, I agree that the market, the state, capitalism, communism, etc., are not persons and that they lack consciences.
The issue of socialism is more complex, because it can be seen as a kind of Christian heresy. In other words, the ONLY true socialism is in fact the Body of Christ.
I am talking now about non-Marxian socialism. The origins of socialism are in the social thought of French Catholics and those influenced by them.
You may be interested in a big, great book by Henri De Lubac, SJ (the father of communio ecclesiology and teacher of Ratzinger and Balthasar), called “Proudhon: The Un-Marxian Socialist.”
The existence of the Church as Body of Christ means that there is one set-of-ideas/corporate-body that IS in fact a person, Who DOES in fact have conscience.
That doesn’t logically follow.
I still think it would be interesting if any of the more left-leaning people could answer my question. The reason why they don’t, of course, is this:
If you say that you’d erase the last 100 years of technical progress to save the world from the 0.7 degrees of warming it experienced, then it seems like quite an ideological position — you’re saying that you’d be willing to get rid of electricity and cars and the computer you’re typing on and modern medicine, just to save the world from a barely perceptible amount of warming.
On the other hand, if you admit that the last 100 years of progress have generally been worth 0.7 degrees of warming — well that’s going to be some serious cognitive dissonance if you’ve been acting as if global warming is the greatest of all evils, against which no benefit could measure up,
SB
The “progress” of the last 100 years has come at the cost of much more than .7 degrees of warming, or whatever.
Capitalist progress is inextricably bound to imperialism and war. For example, WWII and WWI are the linked outcome of 200 years of imperial competition between European states. The purpose of that competition was the capturing of markets and resources globally.
Imperial conquest and dispossession, and global war, is inseparable from capitalism.
G — I suppose you’re suggesting that you would indeed erase the last 100 years of material progress if you could get rid of other bad effects allegedly due to capitalism. Thanks for having the courage to admit that.
Still, I wasn’t really asking for a list of all the bad things that happened in the 20th century. My question was aimed at people who deride past progress for the sole reason that it was accompanied by a (very small amount of) global warming.
Imperial conquest and dispossession, and global war, is inseparable from capitalism.
FYI, it probably makes more sense to blame “humanity” for those things, given the much worse history of communism.
SB,
I think the way you’re phrasing your question is a bit unrealistic in the sense that I don’t think anyone who advocates action with regard to global warming is trying to go back to pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels or same atmosphere temperature.
My understanding of the efforts to “stop” global warming is to put the brakes on what may be an exponential increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere that may give rise to an “exponential” increase in atmospheric temperature. The efforts are not focused on necessarily returning to pre-industrial temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations. If we are able to do the latter with new technology without sacrificing the common good, then great, but I highly doubt it if you only take into account how much higher world population is in comparison to 1600s, then it is highly unlikely we can go down to those levels.
In other words, we have two facts: 1) like you said above, most of the warming has occurred in the 20th century 2) Greenhouse gases do in fact cause a warming effect on the earth (whether they are anthropogenic or not). Hence, if we are to put these two together and take into account that the warming in the 20th century occurred prior to a heavily industrialized China and India like we have right now (and will have in the future), then the future looks quite grim.
The short answer to your question is that efforts to stop global warming do not seek to go back to pre-industrial levels, but rather to 1) do better what we are currently doing, 2) to look for better technologies that will help us be more efficient and cleaner in our manufacturing processes among others and finally 3) to change our own lifestyles towards more sustainable ones in order to stop the current warming trend.
Katerina — I know that most — not all — believers in global warming don’t literally want to go back to “pre-industrial revolution.” They’re mostly thinking about moderating what happens in the future.
But since MM expressly attacked Blackadder for praising PAST progress — on the grounds that PAST progress was accompanied by global warming — the obvious question is whether he really means what he’s implying here (i.e., that it would be better for the world if the 20th century had never happened).
I doubt it, if only because elsewhere MM seems to love modern medicine, so much that it should be a universal human right. So I doubt that he REALLY wishes we were all living in the days when health care meant that if you got a bad infection, the treatment was someone sawing off your leg while you chewed on a piece of wood to keep from screaming.
Also, I don’t think you mean the word “exponential” literally there.
SB, your question assumes that we could not have “progressed” without the precise kind of environmental impact that in fact occurred. That’s a huge assumption.
It’s not a “huge” assumption at all. It’s pretty much indisputable: if you re-ran the 20th century without the burning of coal and oil, we wouldn’t have had electricity, cars, computers, etc. There’s just no way that would have happened; it’s not like anyone was capable of building massive nuclear plants all over the country in 1910.
You can ignore the question if you like, but you can’t pretend that there are no cost-benefit tradeoffs to be made. That’s cheating.
The increase in CO2 levels has been literally exponential since the late 1800s (per IPCC report), but we have not seen the same exponential increase in atmospheric temperatures, that’s why, yes, I put those in quotation marks.
OK, gotcha.
It’s not a “huge” assumption at all. It’s pretty much indisputable: if you re-ran the 20th century without the burning of coal and oil, we wouldn’t have had electricity, cars, computers, etc.
There is some truth to this, but Michael I. has a good point in that how this “progress” took place could have been executed more carefully. In the dark days of refining (which is what I’m familiar with), yes, we didn’t have the technology to have cleaner gases coming off the stacks and, for the most part, we just didn’t know any better (that SOx caused acid rain, etc.), but in many instances, the environmental footprint caused by refining operations was so devastating due to negligence alone rather than ignorance: contaminants in wastewater effluent to rivers that refiners (among others) knew about, but didn’t just want to clean their act out of their own good will.
The problem in the Erin Brockovich (sp?) movie about hexavalent chromium being discharged to local bodies of water, sadly, happened way too often in the past (not so much now due to regulations) with industry folks knowing about it. Why do you think refineries are usually located in little towns and “middle-of-nowhere” places? Because they could get away with doing certain things they couldn’t get away in big cities.
I’m not talking about everything bad that affected the environment. I’m just talking about the fact that oil and coal were burned, releasing CO2. But other bad things happened too, and if you’re so inclined, that gives you another reason to say that the 20th century should never have happened.
You can ignore the question if you like, but you can’t pretend that there are no cost-benefit tradeoffs to be made. That’s cheating.
I’m not pretending that at all. I am merely saying that we have no idea how things may have progressed in alternative ways. These alternative ways would have had trade-offs too, but we have no idea what they would have been. But your either-or — either electricity or global warming — is simply… not that simple.
That’s still avoiding the question. In the world that we have, electricity was a product of burning lots of coal and oil. In the world that we have, someone who says, “We shouldn’t praise the past century’s technical progress because it led to global warming,” should also be willing to admit the real implications of what he’s saying.
Anybody can invent an alternate past in which people back in 1900 came up with windmill-operated cars and nuclear-powered everything else. That’s the lazy way out of any hard question — just ignore any cost-benefit tradeoff, and make up a fairy tale in which your own preferred policy would have been all benefit and no cost.
“We shouldn’t praise the past century’s technical progress because it led to global warming,”
Who said this?
That’s what I read MM’s first post to mean.
SB,
Read it again. This is what he said:
All you are really showing is that technical progress reduces the incidence of disease and increases sanitary conditions. You completely pass over the great by-product of a “free society” (you use ‘free’ in a utilitarian sense) — the massive increase in pollution, and carbon emissions
So:
1. The post starts off from the premise that technical progress has improved our lifestyle, hygiene, etc.
2. The post overlooks the negative byproducts of this technical progress (e.g. pollution, emission of greenhouse gases)
Basically the same points I made above: the post is one-sided and we need a more balanced approach to capitalism rather than such a positivist approach. That’s all.
Where did he exactly say that we would’ve been better off without all the progress so we wouldn’t have global warming? I’m missing it. I think you’re completely misinterpreting his point 2).
Exactly! He didn’t EXPRESSLY say we would have been better off without the technical progress made in the 20th century. But he certainly hinted at it. Which is exactly why I’m wondering if he is posturing, or if he’s willing to take an express position — was the 0.7 degrees of global warming worth incurring or not? Again, no fair rewriting history (that’s the cheap way out).
And just saying that we need a “balanced” view doesn’t answer the question one way or the other. I’m all in favor of taking a balanced view — looking at ALL the costs and benefits of a policy — but that doesn’t say anything about whether you think the benefits exceed the costs or vice versa.
Exactly! He didn’t EXPRESSLY say we would have been better off without the technical progress made in the 20th century. But he certainly hinted at it.
Ok, you can read minds?
And just saying that we need a “balanced” view doesn’t answer the question one way or the other.
I’m sorry, but your question is just not very helpful. Our only point here, in case you missed it, is that the post talks about the good things that supposedly capitalism brought about overlooking all the side effects of this progress. That’s all. I have no idea why you’re going down the other route and I can’t follow your reasoning, because you’ve already made up your mind, so I’m done here.
Asking questions about the logical implications of someone’s post is not reading minds. Why would you say that?
Our only point here, in case you missed it, is that the post talks about the good things that supposedly capitalism brought about overlooking all the side effects of this progress.
OK, so you don’t want to answer a simple question about whether the benefits are worth the costs. That’s fine. I can understand not wanting to make that difficult choice either way.
To clarify: It’s a simple question in the sense that it demands a yes or no answer. Was the 20th century worth 0.7 degrees of global warming or not? All you have to do is say yes or no. Simple.
It’s a difficult question in the sense that saying yes or no is apparently so hard for some people that they’d rather just ignore the question altogether (MM), or just squirm around trying to change the subject.
Hmm . . . so no one has the courage to give a straightforward answer?
Sorry, maybe it’s not a matter of “courage,” at least not for anyone besides MM. Maybe you just don’t know. But why not say at least that?
MM, though, does owe an explanation as to whether he really intended to suggest that the “technical progress” of the 20th century wasn’t worth it, because the world had 0.7 degrees of warming.
Anybody can invent an alternate past in which people back in 1900 came up with windmill-operated cars and nuclear-powered everything else. That’s the lazy way out of any hard question — just ignore any cost-benefit tradeoff, and make up a fairy tale in which your own preferred policy would have been all benefit and no cost.
It’s also lazy to ask an either-or hypothetical question that assumes an either-or situation that simply does not exist.