Found my way here from your interesting comments on ACX. Great, I like your thinking here. I think perhaps wrestling with the age of limits is the next big intellectual challenge of our time. High modernism's solutions may be mostly hot air: what we actually have to do is learn to work inside the biosphere's very obvious limits. Maybe this challenge is exactly why it's still so counter-cultural to really look hard at tradeoffs and costs and value and hard evidence? It's been so common since the 1980s to do the La-la-la can't hear you thing, to pretend that there is as much energy as we want, whereas actually the limits of the planet's resources become more obvious all the time.
I'm not sure how I got subscribed to your newsletter (I think by accident), but I'm happy I did! So now I'm reading the posts backwards.
The part about the US perpetually exceeding its revenues, for decades, is a very difficult one to overcome, rhetorically speaking. Because of it, the "well for every public spending taxes go up" doesn't ring true, because they don't (for most people who might be amenable to your teachings, e.g. young people), at least not in the direct cause-and-effect way that the thought experiment suggests. And the effects of gigantic debt are attenuated and distributed - it might contribute to inflation, but again not in a direct way, and we are only really feeling it now with the ABSURDLY massive injection of cash into the economy and nothing to spend it on (so it all goes into vehicles and home improvement and the stock market).
That is usually something we end up talking about a bit later in class, government finance after personal finance. The idea that governments can in theory roll over debt forever is contrasted against private entities. Then the issue of "crowding out" comes up, as well as the money the government borrows comes from somewhere, and that money could be lent to someone else if the government wasn't borrowing. And of course the worrying situation when the debt can't be rolled over, and what happens when your government has to pull a Greece... At any rate, yes, it takes a lot of economics before government finance makes any sort of sense, and even then it isn't easy!
I took those economics courses and I remember that discussion. But it is hard to find straightforward examples of this - although it clearly happens. Actually, I promise this isn't a non-sequitur, one of the most compelling arguments *against* charter schools I've heard (and I'm not against them, though I am not as enthusiastic about them as I used to be) is that they crowd out private schools.
That's a good point. Charter schools are better than only one option, but a compromise at best. A hell of an improvement over the status quo most places, but that's a pretty low bar :D
Found my way here from your interesting comments on ACX. Great, I like your thinking here. I think perhaps wrestling with the age of limits is the next big intellectual challenge of our time. High modernism's solutions may be mostly hot air: what we actually have to do is learn to work inside the biosphere's very obvious limits. Maybe this challenge is exactly why it's still so counter-cultural to really look hard at tradeoffs and costs and value and hard evidence? It's been so common since the 1980s to do the La-la-la can't hear you thing, to pretend that there is as much energy as we want, whereas actually the limits of the planet's resources become more obvious all the time.
Thanks for introducing me to Sowell, that is a useful set of questions he developed (I found these summarised here https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/428193-in-flood-resilience-debate-there-are-no-solutions-only-tradeoffs).
Glad you made it over! Sowell is really a national treasure.
I'm not sure how I got subscribed to your newsletter (I think by accident), but I'm happy I did! So now I'm reading the posts backwards.
The part about the US perpetually exceeding its revenues, for decades, is a very difficult one to overcome, rhetorically speaking. Because of it, the "well for every public spending taxes go up" doesn't ring true, because they don't (for most people who might be amenable to your teachings, e.g. young people), at least not in the direct cause-and-effect way that the thought experiment suggests. And the effects of gigantic debt are attenuated and distributed - it might contribute to inflation, but again not in a direct way, and we are only really feeling it now with the ABSURDLY massive injection of cash into the economy and nothing to spend it on (so it all goes into vehicles and home improvement and the stock market).
Glad you made it over, even if by mistake :D
That is usually something we end up talking about a bit later in class, government finance after personal finance. The idea that governments can in theory roll over debt forever is contrasted against private entities. Then the issue of "crowding out" comes up, as well as the money the government borrows comes from somewhere, and that money could be lent to someone else if the government wasn't borrowing. And of course the worrying situation when the debt can't be rolled over, and what happens when your government has to pull a Greece... At any rate, yes, it takes a lot of economics before government finance makes any sort of sense, and even then it isn't easy!
I took those economics courses and I remember that discussion. But it is hard to find straightforward examples of this - although it clearly happens. Actually, I promise this isn't a non-sequitur, one of the most compelling arguments *against* charter schools I've heard (and I'm not against them, though I am not as enthusiastic about them as I used to be) is that they crowd out private schools.
That's a good point. Charter schools are better than only one option, but a compromise at best. A hell of an improvement over the status quo most places, but that's a pretty low bar :D