2279 sats \ 18 comments \ @Undisciplined 11 Mar libertarian

This is the first installment of my attempt to answer a bunch of tough questions for libertarians posed by Bob Murphy. I made a post setting up this series, which has a list of all the questions.

Here is the clip of Bob posing the question on his show.

Question 1

Is there a similarity in the way many libertarians dealt with their false price inflation predictions after the 2008 financial crisis and how climate activists often deal with false predictions about climate change?

Context

Many libertarians were warning that massive price inflation would be the result of the Quantitative Easing policy pursued by the Fed during the last major financial crisis. For a whole host of reasons, that massive price inflation did not materialize, leaving many of us with egg on our faces.

Of course we sought to explain why the huge influx of new money didn't lead to high price inflation. Many of those explanations were saying that the money went to different places and never ended up in the hands of consumers.

During the same time period climate alarmists were predicting continued surface warming. This was the first loud wave of global warming alarmism. There were all kinds of fancy models predicting runaway warming. Almost on cue, what is known as "The Pause" began. Surface temperature remained steady for many years, despite continued predictions of dire warming. Some of the explanations offered were of the form "There was warming, but it went into the oceans instead of the troposphere."

The reason Bob is connecting these two cases is that many people who were wrong about price inflation and used the type of explanation given are critical of the climate people for being wrong about their predictions and offering a very similar sounding explanation.

My Answer

First off, I am someone who warned about QE causing high price inflation, so that part applies to me. I'm also quite critical of the climate crisis industry, so that part is a partial hit as well.

Where I don't quite fit is that I'm not someone who ridicules climate activists for talking about those hypotheses for what happened to the warming they expected to see. Maybe it did go into the ocean. I don't know.

This question is more about personal examination than libertarianism (the series is called Tough Questions for Libertarians, after all). I think it's a pretty fair criticism and I'm impressed Bob noticed the parallel reasoning/rationalization going on here.

My response to this question is to implore people to be a bit more intellectually curious and charitable towards your opponents, rather than always looking to score points.

Let me know if you have a different take on this question.

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125 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 12 Mar

Good first post out of the gate.

At the risk of launching some kind of holy war, my ambient understanding was that the world had, en masse, actually experienced pretty significant climate change over the last few decades, and basically everybody agreed on that except for literal nut cases and conspiracy theorists. I know in my part of the world it's hard to deny, since the evidence is so tangible. Even my right-wing relatives acknowledge the change, they just attribute it to other stuff.

In fact, I'm genuinely surprised that the framing of the original question suggests that climate change people have egg on their face, but presumably that's the case, otherwise the parallel btwn the failure of inflation to materialize for so long makes no sense. So my actual question is: is it, in fact, the dominant view of this tribe that:

a) there has been no climate change, and the science shows this b) there has been no climate change, and scientific claims to the contrary are bullshit c) there has been climate change, but it's not anthropogenic, and science shows this d) there has been climate change, but it's not anthropogenic, and scientific claims to the contrary are bullshit e) something else?

I'm not asking to litigate the question, because I'm unqualified to participate in that litigation. But I would be interested in your assessment of the state of reality as pertains to the the nature of the disagreement.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

I tried to find a quick reference for you and discovered that the top search results take the position "Actually, there was no pause. Our data was just messed up." I don't particularly care one way or the other if that's correct, but it sounds fishy to me.

I'm not sure I know what the dominant view is on the scientific question of climate change. My sense is that it's somewhere around option d, but I've seen all of those options advanced by different people in different ways.

The point isn't about denying any particular scientific claim. It was more about pointing out that after years of claiming global warming was going to destroy the world, the warming trend stopped and it didn't seem to give the activists any pause. They just adopted a convenient explanation and continued making the same claims.

In other words, the Global Warming adherents seemed to be failing at falsifiability.

25 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 12 Mar

It was more about pointing out that after years of claiming global warming was going to destroy the world, the warming trend stopped

That's the part that I was asking about, though -- the warming trend stopped?

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

Yes, at least according to the official data.

I was studying atmospheric physics around this time. One of my professors was giving a general audience style presentation about global warming that was explaining the prevailing models. One of the points he made was showing that without anthropogenic warming the models showed flat or even declining temperatures, which meant that any warming was evidence of anthropogenic warming.

The fact that he and other climate scientists didn't reevaluate their stance on anthropogenic warming when the warming trend stopped was my first inclination that something other than pure science was going on. As a big psychology guy, I'm sure you're not surprised that scientists don't easily discard preferred hypotheses even when they're falsified, but as an idealistic scientist in training I expected conformity to the ideal of the scientific method.

Here's a national temperature graph from the EPA.Imagine looking at this before about 2015. You'd see a spike in the late 90's followed by a downward trend.

250 sats \ 2 replies \ @tomlaies 12 Mar

Yes, they're similar.

Climate change is a big problem for humanity, central banking with fiat are a big problem for humanity
No climate change won't lead to the apocalypse, mass crop failures, floods in the next few years. No, the global financial system isn't going to collapse like a house of cards.

They also stem from the same human biases

Both recognizing a legit problem and being overly obsessive about them
Both are the human bias to underestimate timespans. No, societal collapse isn't any moment now.
But both are the human bias to underestimate long term consequences. Costs accumulate over the years.
Doomerism. The truth is, capitalism is leading to a better world. 200 years ago we had children in mines. In 200 years from human progress is going to be unbelievable. We'll solve all of this. Old saying: pessimists sound smart, optimists make money instead. We're taking win after win after win.

28 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 12 Mar

We‘re culturally so influenced by the concept of the rapture.

But realistically: the fiat system is x% of missed out gdp growth, technological advances coming y years later and everyone being z% poorer. Likewise climate change is a x% of missed out crop yields and $y of coastal protection.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

Great answer!

Part of being overly obsessed with a problem is not seeing how the system might adapt to it and mitigate the damage. I think that's at play here too.

35 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 12 Mar

IMO, the two are not comparable.

Why? Because of the suggested policy prescriptions.

Climate activists want to restrict human freedom for the sake of their hypothesis. Some will go as far as to say human life must be reduced.

Libertarians want to increase human freedom, including the freedom to fail, by taking monetary policy away from bureaucrats.

To me, it is axiomatic that the group who wants to restrict freedom must face a higher burden of proof than a group that wants to increase freedom.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

the group who wants to restrict freedom must face a higher burden of proof than a group that wants to increase freedom.

Great point. I make that argument frequently.

The point being that global warming was a justification to infringe on liberties, so it needs to be demonstrated at a high level. Similarly, QE was an infringement on our liberties, so it should have born the burden of proof.

25 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 12 Mar

My take is that we humans are notably bad about predicting the future, at any level. We try to see causation whenever there is some correlation. We fail to see that many problems, especially the ones based on human emotions (economy) or the ones that are very hard to model accurately due to their chaotic nature (climate), are very complex and usually don't lead to what we imagine in the short-term.

Paradoxically, I am still of the belief that in the long-term, we are heading to some pretty bad times due to price inflation and a paradigm-shift is necessary, similarly to how I believe the climate is changing and future generations will feel the consequences of our inactions.

I say paradoxically, because if one cannot predict the short-term accurately, it feels even more unlikely that one can accurately predict the long-term.

My bias is showing in both cases here as I believe in the dangers of QE and the impact humans have on climate change.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

It's not that unreasonable that long-term predictions could be more accurate than short. In the subjects at hand, there's a lot of timing uncertainty, so almost anything could happen in the short-term while fundamentals drive the long-term.

25 sats \ 1 reply \ @denationalized 12 Mar

Many libertarians were warning that massive price inflation would be the result of the Quantitative Easing policy pursued by the Fed during the last major financial crisis. For a whole host of reasons, that massive price inflation did not materialize, leaving many of us with egg on our faces.

Massive price inflation did not materialize. But it is also worth noting is that we didn't witness any substantial price deflation due to the quantitative easing policy pursued by the Fed and the European Central Bank. We were robbed of the benefit of the massive price deflation that would have happened if the policies of the central banks had been different. In other words, libertarians were right warning us about the institutions such as FED robbing us out of our savings, some of them just weren't precisely right about the exact numbers in dollar terms. This is to be expected in the future as it is impossible to predict future scientific discoveries and technological progress - the significant deflationary forces.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 12 Mar

This is a really good point about what happened. The problem is that we didn't address it in our dire predictions at the time.

25 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 11 Mar

Great idea for a post series. I wonder if the influencers on each issue play a role. Without a sense of urgency their books and videos are less dramatic and would be less popular. Perhaps they shorten the timelines of legitimate trends that would unfold more gradually-decades rather than years.

76 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 11 Mar

There's some amount of adverse selection going on for sure. Hysterics get more attention than the calm and measured.

In both of these cases, though, I think the issue was that people thought they had a solid understanding of the situation and these predictions seemed straightforward. Also in both cases, we're talking about extremely complex systems and it's just not possible to account for every relevant factor.

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 11 Mar

Yes. Perhaps alarmism and oversimplification both play roles.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elsalvador 12 Mar

Is there a similarity in the way many libertarians dealt with their false price inflation predictions after the 2008 financial crisis and how climate activists often deal with false predictions about climate change?

The libertarian says "do whatever the fuck you want but I'm getting off this ride."

The climate activist says "I'm going to make the decision about how everyone else should live their lives."

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 12 Mar outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.