Climate Change Economics and Politics
Paul Krugman has a nice column on climate economics. And here he's picking on Robert Samuelson, a columnist at the Washington Post. I've always found Samuelson's economics a little askew from the economics I know and teach. So I sympathize with Krugman here. In my own circles I hear that climate scientists sounding the alarm about global warming are simply pursuing larger federally-funded research budgets. I wonder if these people have thought carefully about the coordination problems involved with such a strategy, and compared it to, say, coordination by OPEC countries (which appears largely ineffective at controlling prices[ 1 ][ 2 ]). In my own experience, I find scientists and academics pretty shrewd and independent minded, a particularly tough group to coordinate. And besides, if they were just looking for more research dollars wouldn't they be emphasizing uncertainty and ambiguity over action? Maybe all the scientists are mistaken. But if conspiracy theori