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So what's the difference between Conventional Wisdom and Zombie Ideas?
I would say it is that the Conventional Wisdom encompasses so much more.
That is actually a good point Galbraith makes. Keynes ideas won on areas where the Conventional Wisdom crumbled in the 30ies, but where the Conventional Wisdom did not crumble the old ideas remained. So the new Conventional Wisdom - real existing Keynesianism we can call it - came to include a good deal that Keynes was actually opposed to. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
Reminds me of an anthropological study of nuclear weapons researchers which noted that in the nuclear weapons talk there was no word for peace. If you started to talk about peace you had removed yourself from the group of serious people and placed yourself among hippies that also believed in unicorns. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
finance does have an uncanny resemblance to nuclear energy:
it's ROI is illusory, the capacity to poison huge swathes of society through no fault of their own, and the clean up after disasters is lengthy, painful and expensive, both industries' too big to fail, and un-insurable, what could possibly... (cont. p.92) 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
..Hmm. How to demonstrate. Ah. Right. Answer me this: What would you consider sufficient empirical evidence to change your view on nuclear?
I can tell you exactly what would cause me to dismiss it as unnecessary: Germany getting its carbon emissions per capita below France.
What would you consider sufficient empirical evidence to change your view on nuclear?
as opposed to unempirical evidence, you mean?
Thomas:
You do this because doing so marks you out as.. Serious.
serious? moi? unsurely you jest.
nuclear power is seriously screwed up, in my distinctly unserious opinion.
Germany getting its carbon emissions per capita below France.
me too, it's so encouraging to see the progress, isn't it?
saving the planet is serious. the nuclear era is come and is going away, like the blunderbuss it is. it had decades to get it right, and still fails the test for security that wind/solar have in spades, as well as the epic, entirely predictable-as-a-swiss-clock cost over-runs.
yes we will learn to do with less watt wastage, and we'll be happy we did. present utility companies are the main polluters, along with the infernal combustion engine, we have the science to do much better, what's throttling renewables is lobbying from dinosaurs capturing the political process, allowing at best one country in the whole of europe to do more than just a symbolic move into a wiser, cleaner future for our families.
the yoyo-ing of incentives and tariffs is a deliberate ploy to undermine, sabotage and brake this transition. coal is bad enough, but it doesn't leave fuel rods that need to be babysat for centuries, needing lots of fresh water we hope we'll still have on a drying planet.
either one is a deal with the devil. gas too for that matter, but even with fracking that's orders of magnitude less malign, and seems to have become the fuel of choice till we finish pulling our heads out of our collective fundament.
at least we could produce some of that at home for pennies, at a pinch, compared to presently enriching the putinocracy and raving about LPG terminals.
wind and sun? got any? how many wars are those energy sources going to get us into? how many dictators will we have to prop up for them?
look, if nukes were good for us, we'd have got that message by now, on their merit. they had their moment pretending to be the sun-in-a-box, now the real one has come out, no more need for superannuated hack-jobbing energy from the environment, when elegant solutions exist, and could abound with enough support.
instead we have the industry with the worst track record on truth and lies of any, and they can't find insurance from the precious free market can they? the government/taxpayers have to clean up after a whoops, right?
no need for that with renewables... it's common sense not to go backwards technologically if we can help it, deriving energy from near-infinite sources without political fallout or antipodean resource rape. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Thomas:What would you consider sufficient empirical evidence to change your view on nuclear?as opposed to unempirical evidence, you mean?
self-evident ever? 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
It is an urgency thing, more than anything. The potential kill count from global warming is in the billions, and people have been preaching the gospel that renewables will do the job and thus we do not need to resort to fission for over 40 years. 40 years of failure.
... Question. If 2054 comes around and Germany still burns coal, will that make you reconsider your standpoint?
Either you didn't finish your reading list or you didn't take my point of the danger of nuclear plus its cost. Sixty years and they still need subsidies!
You are downplaying the danger from nuclear. Well, unsurprisingly. Additionally you make the mistake of claiming coal was the competitor of nukes. Rubbish. Nuclear is the direct antagonist of renewables. You can't switch to wind and solar and have nukes at the same time. You've got to decide now if you want nuclear or renewables. Killing coal is the next step.
How about: a commercial entity building a plant on time, on budget, without subsidy, and without the State providing unlimited liability insurance? And then operating it safely, and disposing of all the waste successfully, and no weapons proliferation.
What, no takers, anywhere in the world? Hmmm.
Doesn't that make the economist in you just a little bit suspicious - that there is no such thing as a market price for nuclear? That nuclear is a loser that only governments can pick?
What makes me suspicious of nuclear power is the fact that we keep getting leaks revealing an appalling lack of safety culture and safety inspection agencies who are in bed with the plant operators.
Usually, those leaks take the form of documents, but every so often one of them takes the form of fallout.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
The private sector never built a modern rail infrastructure either, and it never will.
What makes me suspicious of nuclear power is the fact that we keep getting leaks revealing an appalling lack of safety culture
From Penn Energy, two days after JakeS posted the above comment:
South Korea's nuclear power watchdog has extended an investigation into forged safety certificates for thousands of reactor components in use at several nuclear facilities.
The controversy over the withdrawal by the Congressional Research Service of a report showing no connection between tax cuts for the rich and economic growth is a reminder that in U.S. politics, at least, the tax cuts/growth notion is the ultimate zombie idea. I mean, when the CRS report first came out I didn't write about it because it was basically old news (which is not to criticize the report, which did a fine job of putting the evidence together). Nobody has ever been able to find clear evidence of a link between high-end tax cuts and growth. The raw fact, after all, is that the US economy did better in the first half of the post World War II era, with high top marginal rates, than it did in the second half: growth was both somewhat slower and much more unequal in the years after Reagan's 1981 cut than before. ... There is, of course, no mystery here: just ask who benefits from the dogma that ever-lower taxes on the wealthy are just what we need, and you understand why there is always plenty of money for both economists and politicians who promote the dogma.
I mean, when the CRS report first came out I didn't write about it because it was basically old news (which is not to criticize the report, which did a fine job of putting the evidence together). Nobody has ever been able to find clear evidence of a link between high-end tax cuts and growth. The raw fact, after all, is that the US economy did better in the first half of the post World War II era, with high top marginal rates, than it did in the second half: growth was both somewhat slower and much more unequal in the years after Reagan's 1981 cut than before.
...
There is, of course, no mystery here: just ask who benefits from the dogma that ever-lower taxes on the wealthy are just what we need, and you understand why there is always plenty of money for both economists and politicians who promote the dogma.
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