Populism and the Economics of Globalization [pdf]

Coming to the Bay Area, I was extremely surprised by how much water the appliances use, how much garbage my neighbors produce, people cook a lot less in the Bay Area, leading to much much more takeout boxes, plastic forks, etc. There could be tons of high income earners that live on a block and yet their neighborhood is littered with trash.

The whole politics of environmentalism consumes much more than rich vs poor or who cares the most, all of our behaviors contribute to environment decline. The biggest issue is that we have a whole economy which defaults every transaction to with environmental decay, going to the mall, buying clothes, electronics. Our lifestyle is incredibly unsustainable and pushing Western way of life on other peoples around the world is not feasible.

But yeah, I doubt Hillary would have helped labor to generate the kind of pricing power they need to keep the society from caving in.

Look, it's a chicken and egg thing. Poverty and lack of opportunity is often the consequence of racism and indifference to environmental factors. Build a factory, make money, contaminate the hell out of the area around the factory, move onto some other opportunity, let the factory close, and guess what's left behind? Unemployment, kids growing up in polluted in environments who then perform less well in education and employment and are either a) blamed for some lack of moral fiber or b) told they need to accept inferior conditions as a precursor to economic growth.

Look, some problems in our world are natural and hard to overcome - volcanoes, earthquakes, diseases wwe don't understand, rocks that fall from the sky, bizarre and unpredictable weather events etc. etc.. But in the developed world we have got pretty good at measuring and mitigating such problems, overcoming basic existential insecurities, and turning our productive abilities to fun and exciting things like exploring space, creating immersive art, and so on - we know many ways to have Nice Things.

A great many of the problems int he world are not the result of natural constraints or insults, but arise out of the prior economic and strategic choices we've made.

The fault of globalism is not its aspirations to make the world a better place, which after all would directly improve living conditions for poor people by reducing the environmental and social stressors which make life difficult. The faults are twofold: a small number of parasitic capitalists who manipulate economic and political markets to enrich themselves to an extreme and obscene* degree at the known expense of those the least well-off, and the lack of a clear philosophical project beyond 'go shopping, buy more stuff, um, that's it.'

* 'obscene' in the sense of a producer surplus that is so large it exceeds the capacity of the actor efficiently allocate it

The conditions for perfect competition do not obtain in many markets, but pretending that they do allows for the inefficient concentration of wealth and it is collectively irrational to ignore this. Instead of a dogmatic market fundamentalism we should pursue equitable efficiency, seeking to maximize return on investment consistently across a distributed network (rather than merely considering the aggregate) while remaining cognizant of the limits of our observational capability. Instead of an empty consumerism which spends significant resources on the manufacture of desire in order to sustain demand we should instead be focusing on the reduction of barriers to supply.

People in grinding poverty are not there because they were distracted by champagne-sipping elites into worrying more about the global carbon budget than their own economic agenda, they're in grinding poverty because capitalism (qua the individual accumulation of capital as an end in itself, and I include here social, political, and strategic military capital as well as mere cash) doesn't place a high value on their lives or life experiences and so does not allocate sufficient material resources to transform their situation.

That is a problem - for a lot of people, that will mean little to no leeway when things go wrong - but that's not the point that most people are making when they use that statistic.