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> By the way, don’t blame the forecasters. The forecast was reasonable, the reality is below expectation. Sounds like a macro-economist to me. There's a full-

> By the way, don’t blame the forecasters. The forecast was reasonable, the reality is below expectation. Sounds like a macro-economist to me. There's a full-blown, easily predictable and indeed predicted, environmental crisis that's *never* going away. Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world, *and* among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it.

unsigner 5y ago
But we are getting the drop in living standards before any significant effort is spent on the environmental crisis you are alluding to. And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.
RandomLensman 5y ago
Give it a billion years or so and the aging sun will boil/blow earth's atmosphere away. So not "never". That drop in living standards isn't required either. Some might want such a policy path, but that is a different issue.
Zababa 5y ago
> and among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it. I don't agree at all here. People in the developing world don't consume/pollute less because of some kind of moral virtue, they consume/pollute less because they physically can't consume/pollute more. If they had the ability to pollute as much as the developped countries, they would do it (and some are in fact already doing it).
Ericson2314 5y ago
> Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world Nope, unless you consider living in cities not suburbs intrinsically worse. GDP has some flaws as a metric, but the "real good thing" so-far correlates with it simply because we aren't doing shit about the environment. There's no reason we can ramp up electrifying everything and live nice lives. Hell, if the population actually goes down as expected, maybe we can reduce total land devoted to agriculture too which would be really nice. The best way to do it and feel rich is to not be so obsessed with expensive electric-battery cars, and do more public transit, which I why partly I say it's the suburbs that drag us down.

unsigner 5y ago

But we are getting the drop in living standards before any significant effort is spent on the environmental crisis you are alluding to. And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.

RandomLensman 5y ago

Give it a billion years or so and the aging sun will boil/blow earth's atmosphere away. So not "never". That drop in living standards isn't required either. Some might want such a policy path, but that is a different issue.

Zababa 5y ago

> and among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it. I don't agree at all here. People in the developing world don't consume/pollute less because of some kind of moral virtue, they consume/pollute less because they physically can't consume/pollute more. If they had the ability to pollute as much as the developped countries, they would do it (and some are in fact already doing it).

Ericson2314 5y ago

> Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world Nope, unless you consider living in cities not suburbs intrinsically worse. GDP has some flaws as a metric, but the "real good thing" so-far correlates with it simply because we aren't doing shit about the environment. There's no reason we can ramp up electrifying everything and live nice lives. Hell, if the population actually goes down as expected, maybe we can reduce total land devoted to agriculture too which would be really nice. The best way to do it and feel rich is to not be so obsessed with expensive electric-battery cars, and do more public transit, which I why partly I say it's the suburbs that drag us down.