Jimmy Akin

You ever see two puppies or kitties wrestling?

They do it naturally, and they have a high old time at it (at least until somebody bites or scratches a little too hard).

Why do they do that?

I mean: Why are they programmed to engage in fun, mock fights when they are young?

Because they’re going to have to engage in real fights when they’re grown. The rough-and-tumble play instinct lets them practice in a safe way what they will have to do in earnest later on. It exposes them to situations that are like real fights so that they can get accustomed to them, but without the danger that a real fight has.

That’s why this playful wrestling is fun. It’s to get the creatures to do it (they get the reward of fun) while they’re simultaneously learning about something that will not be so fun later on.

And humans have the same instinct, which is one of the reasons human boys wrestle and engage in rough-and-tumble play and play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers or whatever the local cultural variant of the game is.

It’s also part of why we get a thrill out of reading suspenseful or scary stories: We mentally put ourselves through dangerous situations in such stories (vicariously, through the characters) so that we’ll be able to better handle danger ifwhen we encounter it in real life.

This kind of play thus has an important function.

But what happens if you get a society full of parents that are overprotective of their kids and who think that is the duty of parents to completely shield children from risk rather than helping them learn how to accept and manage risk?

MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK.
(CHT: Instapundit.)

Economics is the study of the use of limited resources that have alternative uses. Any time you have to "economize"–limit the amount of resources you’re devoting to something–you’re dealing with economics.

There are so many needs in the world today that we can’t possibly address all of them–at least in the way that we’d like to address them if we had unlimited resources.

So we have to set priorities about where we’re going to spend our resources–what problems should get our attention first.

We can do this either unreflectively (kind of the way Congress tackles pork barrel spending, with legislators sticking in their pet projects without a real effort to ask "Do we really need a Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska?") or we can do it reflectively–trying to figure out a list of priorities systematically rather than piecemeal.

That’s what this guy is trying to do (CHT to the reader who e-mailed!). . .

Now, I’ll note that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, or even that he’s identified the right list of things to work on–and this is a rather theoretical question anyway since he doesn’t have the 50 billion dollars he uses in his example (or I assume he doesn’t). I’d also say that we do need to devote some funds to projects that we don’t yet have the technology to address (research, including basic research, is important)–though of course there are big questions about whether it should be handled in the public or private spheres.

I also have questions about whether this guy’s folks have taken adequate account of the effects of corruption and institutional resistance to letting people address some problems (e.g., sure we could provide clean water infrastructure for Africa, but will the corrupt African governments let us do it or will they put up barriers to letting it be done for disfavored groups or will the funds vanish into the pockets of African dictators?). And I certainly don’t like the idea of the UN–or any other single global agency–setting forth to do all this (I much prefer a distributed approach in which different individual groups feel call to do different things). And I have questions about precisely how they want to prevent AIDS (I’m guessing it involves the use of condoms). And then there’s the fact that people NEED FOR JESUS isn’t on the list at all.

But I appreciate the effort to try to think realistically about what temporal problems can be solved and at what cost and what that says about what our temporal priorities should be.

So why is this post in the "Science" category rather than the "Economics" category, you ask?

Because of what his different teams of prioritizers concluded about where global warming belongs in the list of priorities–and these were of experts who were assuming that human-caused global warming is real.

(WHAT THIS "TED" THING IS.)

(WHAT THE COPENHAGEN CONSENSUS IS.)

That’s not to say it’s not a good effort. (CHT to the reader who sent the link.)

What the gentleman in the video is doing, essentially, is applying decision theory to the question of global warming in the style of Paschal’s Wager.

The gentleman states his case well, has clear talent as a producer of online videos, and–best of all–he’s got a good attitude and a willingness to subject his argument to examination, which he expressly invites.

Unfortunately, I don’t think his argument works. There are two basic reasons.

First, he does not fully detail the cost and benefit analysis of the different options he explores. Under the option for global warming being false and us making vain efforts to stop a non-real phenomena, he treats the costs purely in terms of money, noting that there would be monetary costs that could (in a hypothetical and admittedly extreme scenario) lead to a global depression.

Opposite this on his diagram is the cost of global warming being true and us doing nothing to stop it. For that option he lists not only the monetary impact of global warming but also polical, social, and health costs (again, for purposes of the thought experiment, pushed to an extreme case).

The basic problem here is that he is cashing out the costs in detail in the latter possiblity but not in the former. In the "false and we waste our efforts" box he’s not fully attending to the fact that money is just a symbolic system used to regulate the flow of goods and services which have an impact on human existence. That means that if you divert monetary resources toward one goal you are thereby not pursuing other goals.

In fact, that’s tied to the definition of economics itself, which is the study of the use of limited resources that have alternative uses.

Our presenter, as well spoken as he is, is not attending to the alternative uses to which the wasted investment to cure global warming would have.

Let me put it this way: Each billion dollars that you spend trying to cure global warming is a billion dollars that you don’t have to put toward feeding people, or doing cancer research, or doing AIDS research, or developing new technologies that will extend and improve lives, or buliding housing, or anything else.

The effort to cure global warming thus has not just a monetary cost but a human cost.

Or let’s look at it this way: What happens if we have the global depression that the presenter asks us to consider?

Well, what happens in major depressions? People starve to death. They don’t get medical care. They can’t get educations that will help them for the rest of their lives. They can’t get jobs. They lose their homes. There are riots and political indability. Wars can start. Governments can get toppled or become more restrictive and authoritarian to keep control of the populace. Crime and black markets soar.

What we see then is that if we cash out the "global depression" scenario in terms of its human costs, we find a picture not unlike that presented in the "global warming is real and we don’t do anything to stop it" disaster scenario. There will be monetary, political, social, health, and other costs in both worst case situations.

This makes it impossible to distinguish between them in the way that the presenter wishes us to.

How many people will die if we bring on a global depression by messing up the world economy in a vain effort to stop global warming? I don’t know, but most of them will be in the third world, where economic development is desperately needed to prevent people from dying for all sorts of reasons, from malnutrition to AIDS to malaria to war.

Allowing economic development to proceed globally by not messing up the world economy in a vain effort to stop global warming will save lives.

Will it save more lives than if global warming is real and we do nothing to stop it?

There is simply no way to know in the abstract, by pitting hypothetical worst case scenarios against each other. If you imagine a global warming horror story that kills X number of people, I can imagine a global depression that kills exactly the same number.

Which brings up one of the limitations of this application of decision theory. I’m a big fan of Pascal’s Wager, but Wager-type reasoning is useful in a limited number of situations, and this isn’t one of them.

When you can point to comparable hypothetical disasters on both forks of the logic tree, you have to start asking which disaster is more likely to occur.

The presenter actually invites us to do this, but he doesn’t explore the effects of that, presumably because he thinks that the global warming disaster scenario superdominates the decision, such that even if it isn’t likely, it is so bad that we just can’t take the risk.

But if we flesh out the global-warming-is-false-and-we-vainly-try-to-stop-it scenario, we realize that the alternative doesn’t superdominate, and so we must turn from looking strictly at possible results of our actions to the likely results of our actions.

We simply can’t look at hypothetical disaster scenarios and base policity decisions on the fact that they are possible, without asking how probable they are.

Consider this scenario: It is possible (certainly logically possible, and most would say ontologically possible as well) that there is an alien fleet speeding toward earth right now to destroy it with some kind of spiffy planetkilling technology (say, something that manipulates the sun to cause massive, instantaneously fatal global warming). The planetkiller will get here shortly, and the only chance we have to survive as a civilization is to throw the entirety of the world’s economic resources into building a massive planetary defense system to shoot down the planetkiller before it can mess up our sun.

While we already have the Apple computer needed for the effort, we don’t yet have all the other technology, and the only way we’ll get it is if we shut down absolutely all world economic activity and focus on this. That’s how tough the aliens are.

In contemplating this scenario, we could construct a grid like the one our presenter did and, if we paint the effects of the alien planetkiller in sufficiently vivid terms and then don’t explore in comparable detail the consequences of throwing all of our economic resources into developing a planetary defense system (like, for example, everyone starving) then it might look like the alien planetkiller scenario superdominates the discussion.

It would even superdominate manmade global warming!

But common sense tells us that we should not shunt all of the world’s economic activity into producing such a planetary defense system. The odds of there being such a fleet on its way to destroy us, and the odds of us being able to stop it if it gets here any time soon, are too remote.

It would be foolish and a waste of resources–and therefore a waste of human lives–to undertake that project.

And thus Pascal’s Wager can’t get us out of competing hypothetical disaster scenarios. If all a disaster has to be is possible in order to justify large-scale efforts being made to stop it then we will quickly run the world economy into the ground becaue there are a limitless number of possible-but-very-unlikely disasters that could happen.

What we have to do is go about the messy business of asking how likely are these disasters and what are the benefits and costs of undertaking particular projects to address them.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t engage in disaster preparedness or undertake specific projects to avoid potential disasters–even somewhat unlikely ones–but it is to say that hypothetical disasters of this sort–and global warming in particular–do not superdominate the decision.