The model pays attention to whatever you put in it. If you want to include the carbon cycle in the model you can. You are limited by your knowledge of the carbon cycle, just like you're limited by your knowledge of specific sectors of the economy.
Is it actually possible to improve our understanding of the carbon cycle and of the climate system to reduce the size of the "problem" that "disagreing on the outputs of CO2" causes, or not? If this kind of stuff is unknowable I would like to know why.
Do you actually think understanding our economic (and ecological) system is impossible?
Even if you don't have information on the environmental impacts of pollution you could include "cleanup" as a sector of the model and ask yourself what would happen if you demanded that all pollution be cleaned up. For instance, what does a carbon-neutral economy look like? If there are econometrists working for governments that have relatively faithful Leontieff models of their countries' economies, they're actually rather close to answering the question of what a carbon-neutral economy looks like for their country. I doubt anyone is asking them that question. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
Well, yes. Quite.
So you have a model which isn't actually an - er - model?
What's your definition of a model, exactly? I know that if I use standard models (not to be confused with The Standard Model) in circuit design or bridge building, I'll get an answer that approximates reality in a useful way, subject to some minor and predictable constraints.
When I look at ideas in economics, after I get over the 'You cannot be serious?!' stage, that kind of precision seems somewhat lacking, except for a very tiny subset of very simple problems.
I think it's a much harder problem than it looks, because unlike engineering or chemistry, economics is mostly psychology and politics.
And as for ecology - ecology is hard. It's much harder than most people seem to even begin to realise. Ironically I think the Leontieff approach is a lot more applicable to ecology than to economics, because the networks and energy flows in an ecosystem don't depend on anyone's opinion. (At least, not until fairly recently.)
What bothers me is that this modelling seems like an appeal to authority, and is only superficially related to the modelling done in real science.
I haven't looked through acres of papers, but I would be mightily surprised if I couldn't find at least one paper that used this model to 'prove' that raising the minimum wage would create unemployment, and another that 'proved' that it wouldn't.
industrial agriculture: (capital) + (labour) + (soil) + (fertilizer) + (fuel) + (sunlight) + (water) -> food
If we want to understand the likely impacts of peak oil, we can either pull things out of thin air or try to undestand on a more concrete level what the flow of oil through the economy actually works. And though that has a psychological and political basis, it is not a psychological or political question. How the flows can be modified is a partly technical, party political, and partly psychological, question, I'll give you that. However, once again, I am interested in the physical constraints that "sustainability" imposes on economics. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
