TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Left and Right keep looking for dichotomies of good/bad, where I see two sides of the same coin － the phenomena of predictably unaccountable, irresponsible, greedy, self-serving, stupid risk-shifting behavior by individuals within organizations where they are shielded by law/lack of transparency/custom/raw power/physical or social remoteness from other people who bear the bulk of the costs of actions that seem advantageous to those who act.

I also observe the ‘dysfunction’ in/of organizations that themselves are protected from the choices of citizens/customers, by virtue of law, monopoly or other coercion, and that such “BLOWBACK” often pays in spades for the group that makes or drives the bad decisions.

This is essentially a scientific undertaking in which many like #Ostrom was and others under the rubric of #NewInstitutionalEconomics are involved in researching and explicating.

Those who reflexively are incapable of looking at the fruit of massive state interventions in the economy (including the corporations that the state makes), who demand MORE and BETTER of what hasn’t been working, are displaying essentially religious and tribal mentalities. We have Sunni and Shia tribes in our #AmericanTaliban!

[Excerpted from a 2009 note to John Quiggin on “libertarians and delusionism“. My delusionism is smaller than yours!]

Would domestic cap-and-trade be an enclosure of the atmospheric commons, for the benefit of firms receiving grants of permits and costs flowing regressively to energy consumers, and internationally represents a vast expansion of state authority and bureaucracies, with attendant enclosure of local resources?

Many of the problems that concern libertarians also concern progressives, chief of these being the negative effects of state actions on communities, development and on open-access (and hitherto local, indigenous-managed) commons. This is the same concern that the Nobel Prize committee expressed when extending the prize in Economics to Elinor #Ostrom, signalling their desire for a change in international aid policy. [I have blogged on Ostrom’s views on the climate commons.]

Readers might find these remarks by Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann, Sarah Sexton and Simon Fairlie in “Reclaiming the Commons” (1995) to be pertinent:

The creation of empires and states, business conglomerates and
civic dictatorships — whether in pre-colonial times or in the modern
era — has only been possible through dismantling the commons and
harnessing the fragments, deprived of their old significance, to build
up new economic and social patterns that are responsive to the
interests of a dominant minority. The modern nation state has been
built only by stripping power and control from commons regimes and
creating structures of governance from which the great mass of humanity
(particularly women) are excluded. Likewise, the market economy has
expanded primarily by enabling state and commercial interests to gain
control of territory that has traditionally been used and cherished by
others, and by transforming that territory – together with the people
themselves – into expendable “resources” for exploitation. By enclosing
forests, the state and private enterprise have torn them out of fabrics
of peasant subsistence; by providing local leaders with an outside
power base, unaccountable to local people, they have undermined village
checks and balances; by stimulating demand for cash goods, they have
impelled villagers to seek an ever wider range of things to sell. Such
a policy was as determinedly pursued by the courts of Aztec Mexico, the
feudal lords of West Africa, and the factory owners of Lancashire and
the British Rail as it is today by the International Monetary Fund or
Coca-Cola Inc.

Only in this way has it been possible to convert peasants into
labour for a global economy, replace traditional with modern
agriculture, and free up the commons for the industrial economy.
Similarly, only by atomizing tasks and separating workers from the
moral authority, crafts and natural surroundings created by their
communities has it been possible to transform them into modern,
universal individuals susceptible to “management”. In short, only by
deliberately taking apart local cultures and reassembling them in new
forms has it been possible to open them up to global trade.[FN L.
Lohmann, ‘Resisting Green Globalism’ in W. Sachs (ed), Global Ecology:
Conflicts and Contradictions, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1993.]

To achieve that “condition of economic progress”, millions have
been marginalized as a calculated act of policy, their commons
dismantled and degraded, their cultures denigrated and devalued and
their own worth reduced to their value as labour. Seen from this
perspective, many of the processes that now go under the rubric of
“nation-building”, “economic growth”, and “progress” are first ad
foremost processes of expropriation, exclusion, denial and
dispossession. In a word, of “enclosure”.

Because history’s best-known examples of enclosure involved the
fencing in of common pasture, enclosure is often reduced to a synonym
for “expropriation”. But enclosure involves more than land and fences,
and implies more than simply privatization or takeover by the state. It
is a compound process which affects nature and culture, home and
market, production and consumption, germination and harvest, birth,
sickness and death. It is a process to which no aspect of life or
culture is immune. ..,

Enclosure tears people and their lands, forests, crafts,
technologies and cosmologies out of the cultural framework in which
they are embedded and tries to force them into a new framework which
reflects and reinforces the values and interests of newly-dominant
groups. Any pieces which will not fit into the new framework are
devalued and discarded. In the modern age, the architecture of this new
framework is determined by market forces, science, state and corporate
bureaucracies, patriarchal forms of social organization, and ideologies
of environmental and social management.

Land, for example, once it is integrated into a framework of
fences, roads and property laws, is “disembedded” from local fabrics of
self-reliance and redefined as “property” or “real estate”. Forests are
divided into rigidly defined precincts – mining concessions, logging
concessions, wildlife corridors and national parks – and transformed
from providers of water, game, wood and vegetables into scarce
exploitable economic resources. Today they are on the point of being
enclosed still further as the dominant industrial culture seeks to
convert them into yet another set of components of the industrial
system, redefining them as “sinks” to absorb industrial carbon dioxide
and as pools of “biodiversity”. Air is being enclosed as economists
seek to transform it into a marketable “waste sink”; and genetic
material by subjecting it to laws which convert it into the
“intellectual property” of private interests.

People too are enclosed as they are fitted into a new society where
they must sell their labour, learn clock-time and accustom themselves
to a life of production and consumption; groups of people are redefined
as “populations’, quantifiable entities whose size must be adjusted to
take pressure off resources required for the global economy. …

enclosure transforms the environment into a “resource” for national or
global production – into so many chips that can be cashed in as
commodities, handed out as political favours and otherwise used to
accrue power. …

Enclosure thus cordons off those aspects of the environment that are
deemed “useful” to the encloser — whether grass for sheep in 16th
century England or stands of timber for logging in modern-say Sarawak
– and defines them, and them alone, as valuable. A street becomes a
conduit for vehicles; a wetland, a field to be drained; flowing water,
a wasted asset to be harnessed for energy or agriculture. Instead of
being a source of multiple benefits, the environment becomes a
one-dimensional asset to be exploited for a single purpose – that
purpose reflecting the interests of the encloser, and the priorities of
the wider political economy in which the encloser operates….

Enclosure opens the way for the bureaucratization and enclosure of
knowledge itself. It accords power to those who master the language of
the new professionals and who are versed in its etiquette and its
social nuances, which are inaccessible to those who have not been to
school or to university, who do not have professional qualifications,
who cannot operate computers, who cannot fathom the apparent mysteries
of a cost-benefit analysis, or who refuse to adopt the forceful tones
of an increasingly “masculine” world.

In that respect, as Illich notes, “enclosure is as much in the
interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the
interests of capitalists.” For as local ways of knowing and doing are
devalued or appropriated, and as vernacular forms of governance are
eroded, so state and professional bodies are able to insert themselves
within the commons, taking over areas of life that were previously
under the control of individuals, households and the community.
Enclosure “allows the bureaucrat to define the local community as
impotent to provide for its own survival.”[FN I Illich, ‘Silence is a
Commons’, The Coevolution Quarterly, Winter 1983.] It invites the
professional to come to the “rescue” of those whose own knowledge is
deemed inferior to that of the encloser.

Enclosure is thus a change in the networks of power which enmesh
the environment, production, distribution, the political process,
knowledge, research and the law. It reduces the control of local people
over community affairs. Whether female or male, a person’s influence
and ability to make a living depends increasingly on becoming absorbed
into the new policy created by enclosure, on accepting — willingly or
unwillingly — a new role as a consumer, a worker, a client or an
administrator, on playing the game according to new rules. The way is
thus cleared for cajoling people into the mainstream, be it through
programmes to bring women “into development”, to entice smallholders
“into the market” or to foster paid employment.[FN P. Simmons, ‘Women
in Development’, The Ecologist, Vol. 22, No.1, 1992, pp.16-21.]

Those who remain on the margins of the new mainstream, either by
choice or because that is where society has pushed them, are not only
deemed to have little value: they are perceived as a threat. Thus it is
the landless, the poor, the dispossessed who are blamed for forest
destruction; their poverty which is held responsible for
“overpopulation”; their protests which are classed as subversive and a
threat to political stability. And because they are perceived as a
threat, they become objects to be controlled, the legitimate subjects
of yet further enclosure. …

People who would oppose dams, logging, the redevelopment of their
neighbourhoods or the pollution of their rivers are often left few
means of expressing or arguing their case unless they are prepared to
engage in a debate framed by the languages of cost-benefit analysis,
reductionist science, utilitarianism, male domination — and,
increasingly, English. Not only are these languages in which many local
objection — such as that which holds ancestral community rights to a
particular place to have precedence over the imperatives of “national
development” — appear disreputable. They are also languages whose use
allows enclosers to eavesdrop on, “correct” and dominate the
conversations of the enclosed. …

Because they hold themselves to be speaking a universal language,
the modern enclosers who work for development agencies and governments
feel no qualms in presuming to speak for the enclosed. They assume
reflexively that they understand their predicament as well as or better
than the enclosed do themselves. It is this tacit assumption that
legitimizes enclosure in the encloser’s mind – and it is an assumption
that cannot be countered simply by transferring what are
conventionbally assumed to be the trappings of power from one group to
another….

A space for the commons cannot be created by economists,
development planners, legislators, “empowerment” specialists or other
paternalistic outsiders. To place the future in the hands of such
individuals would be to maintain the webs of power that are currently
stifling commons regimes. One cannot legislate the commons into
existence; nor can the commons be reclaimed simply by adopting “green
techniques” such as organic agriculture, alternative energy strategies
or better public transport — necessary and desirable though such
techniques often are. Rather, commons regimes emerge through ordinary
people’s day-to-day resistance to enclosure, and through their efforts
to regain livelihoods and the mutual support, responsibility and trust
that sustain the commons.

That is not to say that one can ignore policy-makers or
policy-making. The depredations of transnational corporations,
international bureaucracies and national governments cannot be allowed
to go unchallenged. But movements for social change have a
responsibility to ensure that in seeking solutions, they do not remove
the initiative from those who are defending their commons or attempting
to regenerate common regimes — a responsibility they should take
seriously.

Might there be good reason NOT to rush into a vast expansion of government world-wide?

[cross-posted from #CCC, the Collaborative Center Community group on Facebook]

What are the “commons”? Are they un-ruly, without central formal management? (Is #CCC similarly unruly, and require top-down management?)

Below is a comment I posted in the #WBOS group, spurred by various comments by others (I’ve tagged those who are also members here):

CB: “To me, any such claim [to property rights] is only valid because of its direct dependency on [an individual’s] rights over their own life.”

“This is actually one of the key libertarian points that I am still struggling to fully grasp. I have asked a number of people about this and gotten (what feel to me, at least, like) a number of different answers. Specifically, could you go over the reasoning that connects a person’s right to life (and/or control over that life) to the ownership of property?”

TG: “The only problem I have with private ownership is that it can, and currently IS, conflicting with the issue of the commons. If we can somehow ramp down on the me me me and exclusivity issues of private ownership, it will be less of a challenge to the notion of the public trust or good.”

NB: “Most of the commons is held as public land, not private. The worst cases of abuse are occurring on public land (and sea).”

JH: “The problem with the commons is that, supposedly owned by all of us, not all of us can be there to make each decision, so we have to delegate to an agent – that agent of “The People”. The agent starts making decisions based on what he says is the general interest, but there’s an interesting correlation between what the agent represents as the public interest and what lines his own pockets.”

Allow me a few quick thoughts.

– There is much that “New Institutional Economics”, “Public Choice” economics and “Austrian” economics researchers and thinkers bring to the perception and understanding of our “commons.” See especially Nobel Prize-winning Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent and their enormously influential and collaborative research and thinking.

– Our commons are not “simply” the pervasive commons which are our physical environment and the ubiquitous, deep and extensive informal/formal institutions/practices/norms in which we all swim and that undergird all of our interactions. Our languages themselves are commons (which grammar Nazis provide a crucial and selfless function in protecting :P); so too are much of what I consider to be “social capital”. We are born wealthy, thanks to millions of years of evolution, and millennia upon millennia of social experimentation in myriads of changing environments.

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=commons
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2009/11/20/bruce-yandle-tragedy-commons-evolution-cooperation-property/
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2014/01/30/thoughts-morals-objectively-real-morals/
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2009/08/28/fun-deception-espouse-quot-objective-quot-moral-order-act-refuse-elucidate-act/

– I am a practical commoner; I see much (but certainly not all) of the “libertarian” effort to structure principled bases for human interaction to be shallow, self-deluded and convenient for a few people who actually run the show. In this, libertarians are very much like (yet not as bad imho as) the statists who scorn them.

– There is something to the “self-ownership” concept, but “property” flows not from “principles”, but from MUTUAL ACCOMMODATIONS in particular societies/environments. As I said elsewhere:

“My key point is that it is cooperating individuals in societies with shared values, mores and customs who come up with “property rights” in the form of agreed practices that they find mutually suitable, not thinkers who are coming up with “principles”, and using them to tell others how stupid they are.

“Societies of cooperating individuals are the sine qua non of ALL property. Those who focus on the “principles” but ignore the need to build community are trying to grow trees at the risk of damaging the forest.”

More: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=property

– Much of what passes for “property” isn’t principled at all, but rammed down our throats by the 1% via “our” governments.

For example, without government-made corporations, our dialogue on what claims by others we should recognize as legitimate/worthy of respect would be much clearer.

Further, most of us fail to see that allowing our governments to claim ownership of our commons — whether physical ones like our public lands, waters, air and the resources within them, or less tangible ones like our self-defense, welfare, communities and the right to use and allocate our personal or shared financial resources — is in many cases simply a scam and a device to privatize and destroy our commons, which, left to our own devices without large central governments and bureaucracies, real life shows IN FACT that we are quite capable of managing collectively (after all, we live in and need our commons!).

The history of our governments is in fact one deep in the gore of the theft of the commons from native peoples and other commoners; see the “enclosure” movements, see the acquisition of and gaming of the allocation of US/state “public lands” for the benefit of the wealthy, see the ongoing #Avatar situations at home and abroad where central governments claim ownership, accept corrupt extraction deals from faceless govt-made “corporation” fronts for more elites, and then use their army/police etc. to arrest/steamroll/kill/starve protesting locals.

– even “self-ownership” is a shorthand and not absolute; societies all differ, but in none are infants/toddlers/juveniles accorded full rights to make their own decisions, and curtailed rights for others of limited mental capacity are similarly ubiquitous.

As “ownership” is essentially shorthand for what individuals, either alone or in groups, will act to defend, the ownership of oneself and personal physical objects differs only in extent (not nature) from the “ownership” of children, of commons, or even of friends or other community members.

I hope the members here will dedicate themselves to a better understanding of, and greater love and defense of, our many shared and overlapping commons.

[cross-posted from Facebook]

– “Govt evolves like society has evolved, like we evolved.”

Formal “Governments” are human artifacts, and subject more or less (depending on size and many other factors) to conscious human manipulation. But as social, cooperative and competing animals, we also “govern” each other in myriads of informal mechanisms, which are also both part of of evolution and cultural heritage. These, too, can in part be shaped.

– “Govt does solve problems but what it does well we can’t see, what it doesn’t do well we notice.”
Well, we all have limited time, energy, cognitive ability and information, and also face competing priorities. We DO tend to notice more when things are broken, in ways that impose significant negative costs or inconvenience. But it is possible to notice what “Govt does well”, as well as to overlook countless things that it does not do well.

– “What you want is the next evolution of govt. You want it to be a society without govt.”
I’m not sure where you’ve derived these conclusions from (or entirely what you mean). Yes; I see many things about formal Govt now that are gravely broken and damaging to many people. But no, I do NOT want “society without [formal] govt”. In fact, my purpose in CREATING this group is to band together with others of many different persuasions to try to CHANGE formal government — not to end formal Govt altogether. But yes, humans did evolve without formal governments, and most of our interactions still take place informally, so I would hope to see formal Govts altered in ways that allow more of what Nobel Prizewinner Elinor #Ostrom called “polycentric” government, including much more self-government and participatory government.

– “Perhaps we as a society think we are ready for that, I am not sure we really are.”
I share your doubts that we are ready to live without formal Govt. In any case, it is not my objective. But we have before, can again, and imho definitely need to live again, with much more robust self-government that is more resistant to central corruption and looting by distant and unaccountable elites.

– “After all, you think there is no community.” 
I don’t think that there is NO community, but that growing crony capitalism and a growing Big Brother has steadily ERODED our communities and our mutual reliance and accountability, and set us up against each other in fighting over the crumbs that fall from the table, and for an illusion of who is really in charge.

Hence, my objective here is to BUILD community among others who are also waking up to the stinking mess that is America. Allies of all political stripes are welcome. We need to unite and build coalitions in order to push for changes that will rein in crony capitalism and restore more power for people to manage their own affairs and communities.

“I am concerned much of BIG BROTHER actually arises out of what community may still exist, the desire to control women, the desire to suppress atheism in the US…”

My own view on the growth of Big Brother is that it has fairly steadily centralized power, reducing the ability of people to live their own lives and manage their own communities, turning Govt into a one-stop shop for corporate welfare, contracts to provide military/defense and other services and for regulations that limit competition, and turned we the people into eternal supplicants for welfare and for more regulations to make the Frankensteins play nice.

Big Brother doesn’t so much “arise from community” as from a dynamic whereby it arrogates the right to solve the problems that it creates (by serving elites who fight to coopt it and to use its power).

[cross-posted from comments at WBOS FB]

A colloquitor believes business successes are driven by “betrayal, and ruthless sociopathy. That is how it works, and that surprisingly is what seems to lead to dominance and success in markets – or is believed to lead to dominance and success in markets.”

I think the sociopathy you speak of is a very real problem, but it is one we see mainly where, thanks to the Govt interventions that have made shareholders powerless, there is no effective external check on management. Did you see my post on “drone corporations” (half of the Fortune 500)?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/webuildoursociety/permalink/510602852376936/?stream_ref=2

The progressive approach differs from mine/the real libertarian one largely in that progressives still naively believe that more centralization (more power to a few) is the best way to fight problems produced by centralization. Rather, we must fight the DYNAMIC of centralization — roll back Govt-enabled risk socialization (limited liability of shareholders, deposit insurance and “protection” of public shareholders) and make use creative destruction to bring down the dinosaurs/Frankensteins.

Yes, the NAME of “libertarianism” has been used to magnify and justify corporate power, and attack and disempower ordinary working people, but not real libertarianism itself, which fights against the dynamic of the growth and capture of a central state that both parties have fed.

“Arn’t you being a bit monotonic in your explanations here? Everything wrong with biz is an external factor that depends on the government and only on the government? Isn’t it possible there could be other sources of malfunction as well? If the government has done stuff surely it is in response to the encouragement of the sociopaths and the delinquence of the supposedly controlling shareholders? And you must be aware that appointing sociopathic upper executives has often increased the shareprice, suggesting that shareholders approve in general, or even demand sociopathy? just as they approve sacking ordinary workers or cutting their wages? Sociopathy could be a feature encouraged by capitalism and free markets – competition, wiping out the opposition, exploiting the workers, and profit are the key values – which could be easily embraced by sociopaths.”

I may seem monotonic because I am looking at core dynamics of#MoralHazard, risk socialization, govt “capture”, corruption and theft.

On share prices and sociopathy, can I get you to look at these posts on drone corporations’ negative behavior invited by unaccountability and government? [Did you know that cronyism in general means LOWER economic performance?]

https://www.facebook.com/tokyotomsr/posts/510602852376936
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=sociopath
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=frankenstein
http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=hayek+moral+market

See Roderick Long here: http://c4ss.org/content/11146, and my earlier post on Robert Nisbet: http://reason.com/…/1984/10/01/cloaking-the-states-dagger.

Libertarianism/anarchism/mutualism/true conservatism would actually bring government and business both down to levels that could be managed by people in the communities that commons-guru #Ostrom spoke of:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/art…/hometown-hero/
http://www.newrepublic.com/…/remembering-alienation…
http://www.kirkcenter.org/…/robert-nisbet-and-the-idea…/

[Borrowed and edited from a Facebook comment]

Let me put in my two bits worth (anybody else use that ancient slang anymore?) on where morals come from and “objectively real morals”.

Simply, think evolution and #Ostrom.

Mankind is hardwired as a species to cooperate with close groups, and to be suspicious of outsiders. We are a “rule-perceiving and -acquiring” species, and we soak up the rules of the groups we are socialized in. Further, throughout our evolution, all groups have moral concepts about right and wrong behavior, which evolved both (1) to enhance cooperation and dampen collectively damaging behavior and (2) to adapt the group to the environment in which it dwelt. (Of course there has always been and always will be a tension between individual wants/goals/strategies and the “collective good” — and there always has been and always will be gamesmanship over this.)

Because we internalize ethics, we have a tough time perceiving and discussing exactly what the rules are. Yet as we speak, we are constantly trying to abide by largely subconscious moral codes, to act within such codes in ways that are personally advantageous, and to restrain the “bad” behavior of others, thereby continuously contributing to the ongoing evolution and adaptation of moral codes.

Bottom line? Our moral codes are group-based and situational, because that is who we are as critters on God’s green earth. 😉

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=evolution+moral

[Apologies for the weird font sizes – guess I’m too old to figure out the html stuff that creeps in when I cut and paste!]

I wanted to post a few additional and somewhat scattered thoughts I have had relating to the 1986 essay of Hayek that I recently stumbled across, “The Moral Imperative of the Market”.

What morals do we end up with as “market morals” are eroded?  In larger communities, the morals of a cynical or self-deluded selfishness and self-justification, accompanied by growing tribalism, insularity, suspicion, hostility, avarice, prejudice, jingoism and intolerance.

As the market breaks down, so also do market dynamics of broad exchange and sophisticated institutions, and things become each man for himself, finding friend and families to hunker down with, a hardening towards and less concern for others – who indeed may be viewed as either a threat or as fair game.

IOW, it’s the same load of aggressive, selfish and narrowly tribal stuff that once was ESSENTIAL to bands of humans when when we lived in a state of Nature and life was brutish and short, and that I’ve been giving other members of this and other communities grief over ever since I was marooned on these fertile but once hostile shores:

Cooperation comes naturally to man – among those we feel we can trust – but within limits, as so too does suspicion come naturally as to “others” who look like they might pose a threat. In building extended markets, we are always struggling with our predilection to form “Bands of Brothers”. In doing this work, we are always making use of our sophisticated yet at times quite reflexive native endowment.

As I noted a couple years back (you know, in ancient times when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize) in a comment to libertarian science correspondent Ron Bailey at Reason Online:

you forget what evolutionary psychology, Ostrom and Yandle have explained to us so well about how our innate moral sense drives and underpins mankind’s success as a species by enhancing our ability to cooperate and to overcome commons issues.
Ostrom: http://conservationcommons.org/media/document/docu-wyycyz.pdf
Yandle: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4064

Our long history of developed rules and institutions (informal and formal now overlapping) are based on our moral sense and the effectiveness of these rules depends critically on our moral investment in accepting their legitimacy – witness our views on murder, theft, lying and “not playing by the rules” – and in voluntarily complying with them.

Our moral sense reinforces our judgments about when rules/institutions are not working and the need to develop new ones in response to changing circumstances and new problems.  When we see a problem that we think requires change, it is unavoidable that we respond to the status quo, the behavior of people within it and the need for change with a moral sense. 

This is simply a part of our evolutionary endowment.  (Of course, other parts of our endowment accentuate our suspicions of smooth talkers and help us catch free riders and looters and to guard against threats from outsiders.)

Let all of us here at LvMI (and any strangers!) please be aware of our predilections, while we continue with the hard work of building strong, vibrant and open free societies.

I know, comrades, that you’re all dying for links to some of my relevant posts, which I certainly won’t begrudge to you :

Snicker-snack! We hold these truths to be self-evident: That WE’re right, and THEY are stoopid, deluded, evil AND cunning, out to destroy all that is good and holy

Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, Avatar & the Climate (of distrust); or, Can we move from a tribal questioning of motives to win-win policies?

I Can’t Stand Cant, Or, LeBron James and our Collectivist Scorn of “Collectivists”

Nick Kristof on politics: why we conclude that I’m right, and you’re evil (with a handy-dandy listing of a number of earlier fun posts!)

And a clip of a comment I made to Stephan Kinsella a little while back:

Austrians seem to act as if the love of reason requires a surrender of it in favor of the comforting distraction of a self-satisfied echo chamber of a type that would warm the cockles of any like-minded religious “alarmist” cult.

Mind Games: Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal panders to “skeptics” by abjuring science and declaring himself an expert on “mass neurosis”

I alerted readers in January to a blog post on libertarianism and the environment by Dr. Judith Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.

Scientific American  noted last October, in “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues; Why can’t we have a civil conversation about climate?“, that:

over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”

While I recommend that interested readers review the whole thread, I copy below my comments and some related:

TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 2:52 am | Reply

Judith, a climate scientist friend kindly gave me gave me a head’s up to your post.

I have been blogging and commenting for quite some time on environmental and climate issues from a libertarian perspective, and have also spent considerable time on trying both to help libertarians engage productively on environmental issues and to help leftist-environmentalists understand where libertarians are coming from.

Sadly, it’s largely a messy tale, reflecting how fights over government policy tend toward zero-sum games that blunt cooperation, the success that fossil fuel and other corporate interests have had in gaming the system, and how our tribal human nature leads many to abandon critical thinking in favor of choosing and reflexively defending sides and positions.

I have been highly critical of many libertarians in perpetuating unproductive discord, and have been the resident environmentalist pain-in-the-neck at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (for libertarian economics), which kindly hosts my blog. In particular, even while try to build bridges I have been critical of the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and MasterResource, which I view as being skewed by donations toward corporate agendas. There are of course some highly productive libertarians working on environmental and conservation matters; Terry Anderson and others at PERC (Properrty and Environment Research Center) have led the way on fisheries, water and other issues. (And then there are quasi-libertarians like Elinor Ostrom.)

Since you’ve expressed interest, allow me to load you up with a few links, to my exchanges with others such as John Quiggin, to my cajoling and castigating of libertarians, and to some of my views on climate/environment issues :

“Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

“John Quiggin plays Pin-the-tail-on-the-Donkey with “Libertarians and delusionism” ” http://bit.ly/8Zv5Y6

“A few more comments to John Quiggin on climate, libertarian principles and the enclosure of the commons ” http://bit.ly/eXaTKI

“A few more “delusional” thoughts to John Quiggin on partisan perceptions & libertarian opposition to collective action”http://bit.ly/f0FQ6K

“To John Quiggin: Reassuring climate “delusions” help us all to avoid engaging with “enemies” in exploring common ground ”http://bit.ly/eIFr4e

“The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government ” http://bit.ly/9oBkC7

The Road Not Taken II: Austrians strive for a self-comforting irrelevancy on climate change, the greatest commons problem / rent-seeking game of our age http://bit.ly/14n6G0

For climate fever, take two open-air atom bombs & call me in the morning; “serious” libertarian suggestions from Kinsella & Reisman!?http://bit.ly/f2bRUr

Thanks, Dr. Reisman; or, How I Learned to Hate Enviros and Love Tantrums http://bit.ly/h4BI0B

“Escape from Reason: are Austrians conservatives, or neocons, on the environment? ” http://bit.ly/cJhov2

“The Road Not Taken V: Libertarian hatred of misanthropic “watermelons” and the productive love of aloof ad-homs”http://bit.ly/cqFlzh

OMG – those ecofascists hate statist corps, too, and even want to – GASP – end that oh-so-libertarian state grant of limited liability!http://bit.ly/gjJFnv

“Who are the misanthropes – “Malthusians” or those who hate them? Rob Bradley and others resist good faith engagement despite obvious institutional failures/absence of property rights ”http://bit.ly/hbONhd

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ostrom

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bradley
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=manzi
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=michaels
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=lewis
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=horner
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=penn
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

On non-climate issues:

“Too Many or Too Few People? Does the market provide an answer? ” http://bit.ly/8zlecI
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=BP+oil
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=Avatar

Sincerely,

Tom

• curryja | January 7, 2011 at 7:32 am | Reply

  Tokyo Tom, thanks much for your input. your post originally went to moderation owing to the large number of links.

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:15 am | Reply

    Dr. Curry, thanks for your indulgence on this; given the time differences (bedtime now!) and my schedule tomorrow, I thought throwing out a few links might be useful (though I may be mistaken!!).

    Tom

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:24 am | Reply

    If I can add one further thought before I head off to bed, it would be that a key prerequisite (as Ostrom points out) for tackling commons issues like climate change that involves many players and countries is the need for TRUST, an element that is sadly lacking (a resource that libertarian analysis indicates is destroyed by squabbles over government) .

    Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, Avatar & the Climate (of distrust); or, Can we move from a tribal questioning of motives to win-win policies? http://bit.ly/912Xkj

    On climate, myopic progressives console themselves by pointing out fossil $ behind science “skeptics”; but miss the same from left and ignore middle ground http://bit.ly/arSX5G

    ‘Night.

    Tom

• Vaughan Pratt | January 8, 2011 at 6:04 am | Reply

  TokyoTom, take care that your fellow libertarians don’t label you a LINO: “Libertarian In Name Only.”

  Libertarians have a reputation for objecting to anyone messing with their access to fossil fuel . If you’re messing with it, the label “libertarian” may be working against you.

  Anyone undertaking to change the spots of the libertarian leopard may be biting off more than they can chew.

• gryposaurus | January 8, 2011 at 12:42 pm | Reply

  Tom, thanks for the links to your blog. It’s interesting to see Libertarians that are publicized outside of the corporate funded Beltway groups that have hijacked the movement. I’d love to point to you and think that there is still something useful with Libertarian thought, but you seem to have been relegated to a minority within a minority. Good luck and here’s hoping your message gets through to your fellows.

  • TokyoTom | January 8, 2011 at 8:27 pm | Reply

    Grypo and Vaughan:

    Let me note that though I don’t include myself among them, there are ‘left-libertarians’ and ‘anarcho-libertarians’ who are consistently quite critical of corporate statism and pro-environment (though they haven’t been too outspoken on climate.

    See, for example:

    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/16/a-bp-reader-statist-corporations-quot-the-environment-quot-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-managed-commons.aspx

    http://aaeblog.com/2010/06/08/roundup-on-bp/comment-page-1/#comment-356997

    http://c4ss.org/content/2446

    On climate, I have linked to various sympathetic libertarian comments at “”Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

    Ron Bailey, science writer at Reason Online, is also worthy of mention:http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

    TT

In the not-unsympathetic hour-long presentation that BBC broadcast on January 31 (after surviving a legal challenge), climate ‘skeptic’ Christopher Monckton (the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) says something about climate science that I can agree with and that is important:

The central question is this: it’s not whether CO2 or other greenhouse gases can cause warming, because we’ve known for 200 years that they can.

It’s not whether we are causing the CO2 in the atmosphere to rise, because we are.

The only question that really matters is, given the rate that we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, is how much warming that will cause, if it continues.

In other words, Monckton is correct that the core climate science issue is about what is known as “climate sensitivity”; that is, how much warming is going to be triggered by the rapid ramping up in atmospheric CO2 as we use fossil fuels.

Climate science skeptics like MIT’s Richard Lindzen and company adviser Pat Michaels agree and suggest that climate sensivity will be low (though in this film Lindzen rather jaw-droppingly suggests that “I can live with 5 degrees; you can live with a degrees” Fahrenheit increase in avergage global temperatures!).

The producer, Rupert Murray, suggests that the skeptics wrongly overstate their case and underplay the risks. Murray leaves unstated his premise (and that of the climate scientists he includes) that, if one accepts more conventional views of climate science, then one must also agree that government-imposed restrictions on personal freedom are necessary in order to moderate the threats posed by our use of fossil fuels.

Interestingly and sadly, rather than examining whether there may be common ground in policies that reduce climate risks, Monckton and other prominent skeptics like Lindzen and Michaels (and British commentator James Delingpole), all also appear to make the same assumption that the only possible policy responses are those that reduce personal freedom. Thus, rather than a focus on the content and merits of policy alternatives, we have a rather frantic search to find reasons to dismiss climate risks, and to question the motives and sanity of those who are concerned about them – all, of course, while ignoring the question of what economic interests benefit from the status quo. This behavior is, of course, also mirrored by many of the “warmers”; both sides have their own “Bootleggers and Baptists” coalitions lined up.

Not surprising when so much is at stake, and all are fighting over the use of government. Thoughtful people among the skeptics will acknowledge that the climate is a shared commons that can only be managed via collective action; thoughtful people among the “warmers” likewise should recognize that government itself is a commons that continues to be mismanaged for the benefit of elites and the expense of most citizens (witness our financial crisis and the BP disaster).

As Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom coninues to point out, trust is a sine qua non for effective management of common resources. Unfortunately, however, that trust is precisely what we are missing the most – and for good reason, as our politicians, bureaucrats and leading corporations have proven themselves unworthy of it.

It should not go unnoticed, however, that a policy to destroy public trust and foster our love of partisan acrimony is one that would be very effective in protecting the interests of those who benefit from the status quo. Creaming the commons while socializing risks is an inherent aspect of corporate business models (starting with the state grant of limited liability to shareholders).

Here’s a link to the video; my apologies that I couldn’t figure out how to embed it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y5j3v

[Update: It seems that he BBC has forced the removal of all non-BBC postings of the program, and only viewable via servers located in the UK. As skeptic Anthony Watts puts it: “the BBC does not allow people outside of Britain to watch the video; some sort of cranial-rectal problem I’m told, a proxy server in the UK is needed to view it if you live elsewhere”. Here is James Delingpole’s take on the the program – prior to actually seeing it: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100074116/meet-the-sceptics-another-bbc-stitch-up/. And here is one take by a relatively perceptive viewer: http://frank-davis.livejournal.com/140337.html.]

I refer to Tom Wood’s post on Mises’s Vision of the Free Society, regarding Ludwig von Mises‘s book, Liberalism.

I left the following comment (emphasis added):