Austrian-leaning economist Bob Murphy, whose efforts last year to discount the work of Yale's William Nordhaus on how cost-benefit analysis merits current action on climate change I previously examined, is back with more, this time defending Nordhaus' work from the criticism that I alerted him to by Martin Weitzman with respect to limits on the usefulness of CBA in the event of uncertainty ('fat tails").
Bob, in a post on MasterResource, explains that Nordhaus has reviewed Weitzman's work and found limits to it. But he fails both to address most of the points I raised previously, including whether CBA is consistent with Austrian perspectives, and to note that Nordhaus still supports action now to price carbon.
I left the following comment with Bob at the MasterResource thread:
Bob, while you’re shoring up “cost-benefit analysis” - the tool of states and bureaucrats everywhere - perhaps you may care to address the point that, under traditional libertarian analysis, if anyone can demonstrate that others’ GHG emissions negatively affect his property (by altering temperatures, rainfall or causing flooding), he has the right to enjoin ALL such activities (and is not compelled to suffer them, subject to whatever compensation he can collect)?
Perhaps the “excitableness” of the “alarmists” may have something to do with the problems of collective action and public choice - viz., in circumstances where pollution laws and regulations provide effective “rights to pollute”, and where emissions are worldwide, how does one deal with existing rent-seekers and move the state, and do it in a meaningful way? There are plenty of private initiatives underway, and even though Austrians dissaprove of efforts to use the state, surely they can understand calls to group action, and that many of the “alarmists” sincerely believe that a fight over the wheel of government is inescapable.
Fundamental Austrian analysis straigthforwardly discussed the problems of conflicting preferences in the absence of property rights and where states are involved, but your lack of understanding or sympathy is rather striking. Why you think it helpful to label one side - a huge swath of people and organizations including Exxon and the Catholic Church - as “alarmists” while ignoring not only the institutional problem but those who profit from the status quo is rather beyond me.
Also, why so little interest in exploring policy options that you would support, like allowing immediate depreciation of capital investment and further public utility deregulation?
Roger Koppl, another commenter, raised similar questions:
How do you square Nordhaus’s CBA with “Austrian” (or computable economics) arguments about complexity and the difficulty of prediction? Why shouldn’t we chastise Nordhaus for hubris? The pretense of knowledge and all that.
More later.