Atheistic morality

[BigBallinStalin]

Pretty much.

[Metsfanmax]

Pretty much.

Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.

[BigBallinStalin]

Pretty much.

Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.

Uhh..? I'm not implying. The comic pretty much describes much of mainstream economics.

[Metsfanmax]

Pretty much.

Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.

Uhh..? I'm not implying. The comic pretty much describes much of mainstream economics.

I know. I'm making fun of saxi.

[BigBallinStalin]

Pretty much.

Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.

Uhh..? I'm not implying. The comic pretty much describes much of mainstream economics.

I know. I'm making fun of saxi.

(lol, good one. I'll respond to you soon. I'm beginning to think that I need to summarize your responses into some general contention, see if it's correct, and then work our ways backward).

[BigBallinStalin]

RE: the first and second paragraphs, it's not that it's difficult; it's rather the case that government has hardly any idea. Individuals know to some degree, after trial-and-error, their specific marginal benefit and marginal cost curves for various activities (e.g. grocery shopping). The problem with PWE is that it postulates a representative individual, whose utility curve + constraint represents the MB and MC curves of all society. (This is impossible to know; it's simply assumed, so the knowledge problem is assumed away by the economist).

It doesn't seem impossible to know in principle. It's true that the government can't know the utility curves of every individual, but it seems more straightforward to ask the question of what the representative individual's utility curve is. This seems doable because when you have a large enough number of people, you can average over all of the quirks that any individual represents. If you can estimate the monetary damage suffered to the society, then you can attribute the cost of that damage equally to everyone who contributes, in proportion to the amount that they contribute, since a molecule of CO2 doesn't care where it came from. So I don't believe that this is a problem with the framework but rather a problem of subjective assessment of total costs. If you think of examples like noise pollution, it's true that it's hard to objectively state what even the average cost to society is. But that's not an indictment of the framework of attempting to internalize externalities, so much as saying that we should only apply the framework when we're confident that we can provide some meaningful estimate of the representative individual's utility curve.

So, the basic problem revolves around the means for gathering such information, which then bumps into the issues of incentives. How many bureaucrats at national regulatory agents actually conduct cost-benefit analysis that also incorporate the utility functions of individuals who will be affected? (Then, re: the knowledge problem, there's no such thing as well-defined utility functions per individual. Shit changes, and people's preferences change. It's not like you or I can actually scale our preferences over all goods at this moment and then foresee future changes in this scale. I don't see how bureaucrats can adjust as quickly to accommodate such changes).

Then, there's the question of comparing various means for attaining the goal you mention: you have markets, monocentric government (federal regulation, one-size-fits-all planning), and polycentric (multiple layers of national, State, and municipal bureaucratic agencies interacting with their various superiors and various citizen-consumers at the national, State, and municipal level). This is a bit off-topic, but it's what Vincent Ostrom (Intellectual Crisis in American Public Adminstration) and Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) are all about.

The Pigouvian economist can simply imagine huge negative and huge positive externalities which do not exist in reality (e.g. education). Furthermore, individuals don't know the long-term costs of pollution, so there's no way to graph that social MB and MC curves in order to determine the magnitude of the negative externality.

Individuals may not know, but policymakers do have a better idea in this case. Again, the most compelling criticism here is that the policymaker may be way off due to unintended consequences, but that doesn't mean that policymakers can't be more knowledgeable than individuals. They absolutely can be in cases like this. The same is true for education. Individuals won't know for decades after they receive the education whether it was useful to them, so expecting them to be able to assess the value of education to themselves seems to be an absurd approach.

How do you know that the policymakers have a better idea? For climate change, yes, there's the current projections which have yet to resolve basic issues like which interest they should use (in order to discount future values). This given information will change over time--not the basic projections, but also which areas will be affected to whatever degree (and so on), so how do you know that the policymakers will update their rules and do so appropriately?

RE: edu, how many policymakers have actually estimated the net return, both private and social, of education? (You'd be surprised how much bureaucrats and the 'scientists' of public administration simply assume). And why do you place such little trust in parents and their children about their estimating the future benefits of education?

[I'll address the other parts later].

[BoganGod]

So from discussing morality. We are now looking at mortality. Seeking immortality in our progeny........ yawn.

[degaston]

I thought the point was:

• God is everything.
• Economics is something.
• Economics is evil.
• Therefore, God is evil.
• Conversely, atheists are moral.
  Q.E.D.

[PLAYER57832]

So every single thing we do know points toward a large warming coming in the following decades. The only bastion for "skeptics" to hold on to is that maybe the entire scientific community missed something big and the whole thing will just end up being no big deal. This is not particularly appealing to me.

This has nothing to do with science and everything to do with greed. People's self interest keeps them from objectively seeing the reality.

Its interesting that this discussion has come out in the "atheistic morality" thread, because the instrument most used recently has been the conservative Christian Church. That said, I firmly believe it is not Christians who have made the basic moves to push the churches toward Creationism. (I say this because of where the ultimate power base lies, though tracking that down is a very tricky thing to do and even more difficult to reasonably document)

[warmonger1981]

I thought it was the Rockefeller's and their influence on the World Council of Churches. Foundation's have deep influence on the public and religion.