The new school year has started, and with that, the inevitable slowdown of posts on this blog. However, with a little bit of time scraped together in the past couple of days, I wanted to talk about a broad subject that I’ve thought about for years, reflecting on my own anecdotal observations. This will be a story of my experience with Republican resistance to the idea of anthropogenic climate change and why I think it was so strong.
I finished college in 2007, and, within a couple of weeks, had a job with the Japanese equivalent of the National Science Foundation, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, or, much more simply, NEDO. The organization had several offices around the world that were set up to monitor policy developments in several fields in the host country, and staffed with NEDO employees, locals (like me), and workers from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). My job was to follow developments in energy and climate policy in the US and Canada, sending back daily to Tokyo news updates, occasional topic reports on things like renewable energy tax policy, and records of events I attended at NGOs, think-tanks, embassies, and on Capitol Hill. I also managed contractors writing reports on things like California’s climate and energy policy. It was an amazing job, where I had the freedom to largely determine which events and issues deserved my attention. I spent my days learning all I could about renewable energy, climate change, and mitigation strategies. In meetings or at events where most attendees had some kind of agenda reflected by the industry or organization they represented, I was there as an observer, just to record what happened and occasionally ask questions. My time in the job coincided with some fascinating developments, too. When I started, the Bush Administration was fully denying climate change by doing things such as refusing to acknowledge EPA’s ability to determine whether CO2 is a pollutant, but they were having to contend with a Democratic Congress. Then, the Obama Administration took over in 2009, and the feeling was pervasive inside the Beltway that a government in total control of the Democrats would certainly pass legislation that would place a price on carbon emissions. However, it was also an era in which Republican opposition to such policies was not yet uniform. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, for example, were sponsors of bills that would seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by pricing them. But, the denial of climate change that we see in spades today among Republicans was beginning to blossom in Congress, too. In some cases, this was understandable. Whenever I attended House Energy and Commerce Committee hearings, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) would bring out a poster-sized photo of coal miners in his district whose jobs he said had been killed by the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. He would not be a party to further legislation that would hurt the coal industry in his district, he would say. But other officials, like Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), denied climate change even though they were from districts with little or no fossil fuel extraction. I remember Rep. Blackburn mocking the idea of anthropogenic climate change and proclaiming that surely any temperature changes were the result of variations in solar activity. I was taken aback at this seemingly nonsensical (though perhaps now typical) hostility to something that seemed so obvious: climate change is real and caused by humans. In order to avoid widespread damage and economic harm -- even in Republican districts! – serious emission control policies would have to be put in place. Indeed, in 2000, then-candidate George W. Bush suggested that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants be curbed. Perhaps some of this newfound resistance could be explained simply by lobbying contributions from the fossil fuel industries. But I think it also went deeper than that, as evidenced by the fact that opposition to any sort of climate policy among the GOP at the federal level has hardened greatly over the past decade. At the core of this is, I think, an understanding on the right that any method of seriously controlling greenhouse gas emissions opens the door to massive state intervention in the economy, and that is unacceptable to many people. When the sincere belief that the government inevitably makes a mess of things whenever it gets involved in the economy comes against the notion that with a problem like climate change, such involvement is necessary, the skepticism of government wins out. Additionally, I believe it was clear to conservatives by the time I came along that pricing carbon would lead to other kinds of government involvement that they so disliked. In order for climate policy to be successful, it must make fossil fuel energy more expensive so that people will use less of it. People, naturally, do not like spending more on energy, and so there were calls even during the climate bill debates, to include measures like energy assistance for the poor and subsidies for research into renewable energy and electric vehicle technology (and that famous, stalled champion of the Bush Administration, hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars). Conservatives came to see climate change as an excuse by the left to grow government and enhance redistributive programs, and this probably explained some of the enthusiasm that the left had for the issue. But I saw practically no recognition of this dynamic in the writings of flummoxed liberals at the time. Instead, there were calls for education on the issue, which were misplaced. That assumed the opposition was born of honest ignorance rather than severe cognitive dissonance. Conservatives refused to believe in human-caused climate change because it would ruin their worldview to do so. Today, that has morphed into a question of identity; many rank-and-file conservatives seem to deny climate change because it is part of their identity as those opposing the arrogant and corrupt coastal elite. This explains such terrible practices as rolling coal. It seemed then to me that one point of agreement across the parties is that strong action against climate change would lead to a society that is both more sustainable and more equitable, and I believe this is still the case. However, for one group, such a society would be an utter tragedy, as it would mean a far more active role for government in the economy than they are comfortable with. And such cognitive dissonance in the area of climate change served to pave the way for the post-truth politics we face today.
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I was struck by a blog post from The Economist a couple of weeks ago that discussed the necessary politicization of academic arguments in macroeconomics. The post argues that macroeconomics (and I would argue all of economics) needs to be a politicized field in order to settle academic disputes:
“[A]s scientists, they have an obligation to state their hypotheses as clearly as possible, to make testable predictions whenever possible, and to be rigorous and transparent in gathering evidence to support or falsify those predictions. But macroeconomics is also inherently political, and the practitioners who seek to ‘politicise’ their ideas and make them a political reality play as vital a role in the advancement of the field as the scrupulously apolitical academics who never write a public word outside a peer-reviewed journal.” Fundamentally, economics involves considering how society organizes itself to enhance well-being in the population. This is, at its heart, a political activity; people will have disagreements about the best ways to organize, and, in the modern era at least, they will largely use political means to settle those differences. As the beginning of the fall semester draws near, however, my mind has been focused on preparing my courses and, after the summer of Brexit, on the appropriate role and responsibility of economists as teachers, at least at the introductory level. That is, if one accepts that academic arguments will be necessarily politicized, how should one treat such ideas in the classroom while still respecting and encouraging independent thinking by students? Wrestling with these ideas is a work in progress, but I have thought through a few principles that seem to work well when discussing methodology and epistemology with students. First, I strongly reject the notion that economics should be seen as a “value-free science” as many economists would like. Portraying the discipline in this way is, I believe, both intellectually lazy and misleading. If economists are prescribing what is “best” for society, then it necessarily implies some sort of conception about how to rank alternatives, and that criteria for ranking requires value judgments. Using Pareto-optimality as a criteria, for example, is generally considered to have a status quo bias. More famously, making GDP growth a primary macroeconomic goal prioritizes the market transactions that are included in the measure while ignoring things like home production or environmental degradation that may have an impact on economic well-being, too. Most academic work, even if the author claims to be apolitical, will be at least an implicit endorsement of some value-based concept. As the post cited above notes, however, having values does not mean abandoning social scientific principles. If one advocates for a policy because they believe it will have certain impacts, one should be willing to change that recommendation if methodologically sound work does not show those impacts. The best example of this is, perhaps, the minimum wage, which most economists long argued against on the grounds that it would reduce employment because people are working for a higher wage than the market would otherwise assign them. However, many empirical studies have shown that this is not the case for “moderate” minimum wages. Most economists have therefore changed their opinions on the matter. Focusing on this approach to teaching, where values are transparent and there is an openness to change as further evidence is gathered, leads to good intellectual habits in students. They can learn to be clear about stating assumptions and constructing a rigorous and logical argument to support what they are saying. This can also help them to more critically think about their own views, which are often vague and inconsistent economic models largely taken from their parents – things like: deficits are always bad or government spending is always bad. Of course, it should go without saying that teachers should do their utmost to respect differences of opinions between themselves and students. But this does not prevent us from challenging students to make intellectually rigorous arguments, no matter their place on the political spectrum. It may be helpful to think of this as an investigation of ideology, which I do not think is a “bad” word. An ideology is a lens through which we view the world; it is the theory that fills in the gaps between pieces of empirical evidence and assigns relative importance to that evidence. Without ideology, empirical findings about the world have no connection, and we cannot have a coherent view of society and the economy. The goal of economics education at the introductory level should be, through the teaching of various concepts and skills (which can have lots of side benefits for things like professional development), to enable students to have a clearer and more consistent ideology. Learning about economic concepts may almost inevitably lead to some near-consensus on policy questions (like the notion that something should be done to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid widespread economic damage from climate change), but it is not faculty responsibility to tell students what that ideology should be. None the less, through leading by example, it is likely that, for many students, their professor’s ideology will rub off a little. This means that all the more care should be taken in how material is presented and discussed in class, not so that the professor gives equal weight to all political sides in an argument – that’s nonsensical for something like climate change or the gold standard – but so that students understand why a certain group of economists holds a given position. In so doing, my hope would be that economists can help produce a more thoughtful citizenry ready to express preferences for better policy than we have been seeing in many places. |
AuthorEconomist. Professor. Environmentalist. Archives
July 2017
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