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.