Comment on Argument Screens Off Authority

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 17:51:26 GMT

"scariness" means willingness to spend resources

Just to be clear: The issue here AIUI is whether the Stern Report's predictions, if correct, are scary. If we're on the same page here, you're saying that the prospect of a permanent loss of 5% or more of world GDP, of millions of extra deaths, and of tens to hundreds of people displaced from their homes, does not seem to you enough to justify the cost of the sort of mitigation the Stern Report proposes. Is that right?

If so: OK, fair enough; I'm not going to try to adjust your values. But I suggest that it's probably quite unusual to regard those prospective harms as "quite non-scary", as not "probably quite bad".

pure handwaving

I think it's actually somewhat impure handwaving because in the body of the Report there is a little explanation. But that explanation is itself fairly handwavy and in particular it's not at all clear where the figure of 20% comes from.

pricing of future risks with an overlay of generational transfer issues

That seems to me like just one way of expressing "caring about the future". In particular, using "caring" that way seems almost exactly as reasonable as using "scary" in the closely-related way you say you're using it.

Discuss