Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com
particularly “clean” about cooking over an open fire.) Environmental quality is a
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Naked Economics Undressing the Dismal Science ( PDFDrive )
particularly “clean” about cooking over an open fire.) Environmental quality is a luxury good in the technical sense of the word, which means that we place more value on it as we get richer. Therein lies one of the powerful benefits of globalization: Trade makes countries richer; richer countries care more about environmental quality and have more resources at their disposal to deal with pollution. Economists reckon that many kinds of pollution rise as a country gets richer (when every family buys a motorcycle) and then fall in the later stages of development (when we ban leaded gasoline and require more efficient engines). Critics of trade have alleged that allowing individual countries to make their own environmental decisions will lead to a “race to the bottom” in which poor countries compete for business by despoiling their environments. It hasn’t happened. The World Bank recently concluded after six years of study, “Pollution havens—developing countries that provide a permanent home to dirty industries—have failed to materialize. Instead, poorer nations and communities are acting to reduce pollution because they have decided that the benefits of abatement outweigh the costs.” 23 Climate change is a trickier case, in that carbon emissions rise with economic growth, at least in developing countries in the near term. Big, rapidly growing countries like China and India have a voracious appetite for energy; to meet that need, they turn mostly to carbon-based fuels. China is heavily dependent on coal, which is a particularly bad CO2 offender. Trade makes these countries richer. As they get richer, they will use more energy. As they use more energy, their CO2 emissions will rise. That’s a problem. So what is the best remedy? If you think it is to curtail trade, let me present a slightly different version of the same basic challenge. China and India are sending more and more of their citizens to university (while extending basic education more widely, too). Education is making China and India richer. As they get richer, they use more energy . . . Do you see where this is going? Should we ban education? No. The answer to the CO2 problem is to promote growth—in India, China, the United States, and everywhere else—in ways that minimize the environmental damage. The best way to do that is to discourage the use of dirty fuels by imposing some kind of carbon tax that is harmonized across countries— sooner rather than later, because India and China are making development decisions, such as building power plants, that are going to be with us for fifty years. The case for keeping people poor because it’s good for the planet is economically and morally bankrupt. Poverty is a bitch. The principal of a high school near Chicago’s Robert Taylor housing projects once told me that when I was writing a story on urban education. He was talking about the challenges of teaching kids who had grown up poor and deprived. He might as well have been talking about the state of the world. Many parts of the world—places we rarely think about, let alone visit— are desperately poor. We ought to make them richer; economics tells us that trade is an important way to do it. Paul Krugman has nicely summarized the anxiety over globalization with an old French saying: Anyone who is not a socialist before he is thirty has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is thirty has no head. He writes: If you buy a product made in a third-world country, it was produced by workers who are paid incredibly little by Western standards and probably work under awful conditions. Anyone who is not bothered by those facts, at least some of the time, has no heart. But that doesn’t mean the demonstrators are right. On the contrary, anyone who thinks that the answer to world poverty is simple outrage against global trade has no head—or chooses not to use it. The antiglobalization movement already has a remarkable track record of hurting the very people and causes it claims to champion. 24 The trend toward more global trade is often described as an unstoppable force. It is not. We’ve been down this road before, only to have the world trading system torn apart by war and politics. One of the most rapid periods of globalization took place during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of A Future Perfect, have noted, “Look back 100 years and you discover a world that by many economic measures was more global than it is today: where you could travel without a passport, where the gold standard was an international currency, and where technology (cars, trains, ships, and telephones) was making the world enormously smaller.” Alas, they point out, “That grand illusion was shot to pieces on the playing fields of the Somme.” 25 Political boundaries still matter. Governments can slam the door on globalization, as they have before. That would be a shame for rich countries and poor countries alike. |
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