Tonight St. Louis TV Channel 9-3, one of the set of PBS channels now available, will run an update of the free-market propaganda series, Free to Choose, created by Chicago School economist and Nobel prize winner, Milton Friedman and his wife Rose in the 1980s. According to tonight’s program description, Cato Institute scholar, Johan Norberg, will attempt to interpret recent events such as economic globalization and the 2008 financial crises from the point of view of Friedman’s radical free market ideology.

In case you think I’m up in arms about this program given its conservative economic bias, I most emphatically am not. Anyone who would watch a program on economic theory at 7:00 p.m. on a lovely labor day weekend, is either already a true believer or more than capable of evaluating the content all by themselves. I intend to watch because I expect I will enjoy parsing the claims Norberg will put forward and I wish more people would do the same. The only unregulated markeplace I do unequivocally approve of is the one referred to (ad nauseaum perhaps) as the marketplace of ideas, and I assume that that is where this program will be located.

What I am doing, though, is asking if there is any parallel effort to present popular expositions of other economic theories that perhaps counter the free-market religion that Friedman promulgated in his later years, and that his acolytes, such as Norberg, continue to promote. To illustrate how overdue such an effort is, some time ago, I put up on this blog a short YouTube video in which random folks attending a political rally are asked if the president is a Keynesian. To a person, they all protested that no, indeed, the president was certainly born in the U.S.!

I do wonder, of course, if there will be any effort to demonstrate balance in this program? Friedman was a great economist whose mathematical approach to the behavior of consumers rightly earned him his Nobel. But as Paul Krugman, also a Nobel prize winner, observes (in an essay that has driven several on the right to apoplexy) that:

There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism-finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

On the topic of these diverse aspects of the economist, he adds:

… there’s an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

I haven’t seen tonight’s program yet, but, given the little I know about Norberg, I doubt that there will be much balance in the presentation. I am sure that the distinctions that Krugman makes will probably be ignored.  I may be pleasantly surprised, but whether I am or not, I would just love to learn that there is a good popular explanation of Keynes’ theories out there that could also be broadcast, a corrective to the Friedmanesque ideology with which we are now saturated. If it exists, please let me know, but if it doesn’t, isn’t there some foundation or something somewhere that could address the need to present economic education, from all points of view, in a popular, easily accessible format?

Crossposted from Antemedius

“Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.”

“The only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession.”

— Tim Jackson

British Economist Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.

He currently serves as the economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission and is director of RESOLVE – a Research group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment. After five years as Senior Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Jackson became Professor of Sustainable Development at University of Surrey, and was the first person to hold that title at a UK university.

He founded RESOLVE in May 2006 as an inter-disciplinary collaboration across four areas – CES, psychology, sociology and economics – aiming to develop an understanding of the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment.

In 2009 Jackson published “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet”, a substantially revised and updated version of Jackson’s controversial study (.PDF, 136 pp.) for the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK Government. The study rapidly became the most downloaded report in the Commission’s nine year history when it was launched in 2009.

Filmed at TEDGlobal 2010, here is Tim Jackson’s economic reality check, a 20 minute talk he gave for the TEDGlobal audience…

I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question — and we’ll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each years as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart. On the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It’s around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It’s a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we’ve ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it’s possible — who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we’re going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement?

http://www.antemedius.com/files/flvplayer.swf

full transcript here…  

On May 16, 2009 a collaboration between the British medical journal The Lancet and University College London released the first UCL Lancet Commission report, assessing the impact of global warming on global health, and on populations.

Titled Managing the health effects of climate change (.PDF), the year long study highlights the threat of climate change on patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population migration. The report also highlights the action required by global society to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

“Climate change,” the report concludes, “is the biggest global health threat of the 21 century.”

The report presents the two distorted maps shown below  – density equalizing cartograms depicting a comparison of undepleted CO2 emissions by country for 1950-2000 versus the regional distribution of four climate sensitive health consequences (malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and inland flood-related fatalities).

expand image

The first image shows the world in terms of carbon emissions. America, for instance, is huge. So is China. And Europe. Africa is hardly visible.

The second map shows the world in terms of increased mortality — that is to say, deaths — from climate change. Suddenly, America virtually disappears. So does Europe. Africa, however, is grotesquely distended. South Asia inflates.

In Barack Obama’s commencement address Sunday May 17, 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Obama exhorted the graduates to recognize that “that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a ‘single garment of destiny.'” and “Your generation must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it.”

But the peoples of the world are not bound equally.

“Loss of healthy life years as a result of global environmental change (including climate change) is predicted to be 500 times greater in poor African populations than in European populations,” states the UCL Lancet Commission report bluntly.

In other words, for every million deaths related to climate change in Europe – and North America, btw – there will be five hundred million deaths in Africa and other countries.

……….

I have feet. They were free.

And though they sometimes smell, they don’t pollute.

Since the human race doesn’t seem to be able to get it together on using our heads, maybe if we all got together and used our feet more often, we wouldn’t have so many problems to think about?

Ever wonder how Republicans (and Democrats like Claire McCaskill) get away with their stupidity and/or duplicity on the subject of the deficit, spending cuts and the stimulus? This video should give you an idea about what’s going on:

And you wonder why Americans can be so easily stampeded on economic issues that they’d return the folks to Washington who crashed our economy just because the clowns promised to do the same things they did before? Did I tell you, Roy Blunt is going to the Senate?