“Stimulus measures of the magnitude contemplated are steps into the unknown and need to be accompanied by clear statements that the consequences will be monitored closely, and there will be the capacity and will to adjust policy quickly…”
One thing that hardly anyone has publicly engaged with is that the accounting is not _in error_, in the sense of being done wrong, but that the accounting rests on ideas which we can today falsify. These ideas nonetheless retain status as axioms, mostly because the political cost of saying "you're not rich" is high.
Still, the whole foundation of open-loop extractive capitalism is false; we can't do that and accurately call the results wealth. Moving the costs accounting around so things seem free only lasts so long. Outdoor lighting and pesticides are doing an effective job of making insects extinct. There's absolutely no clever fix for that one; the pesticides have to stop and so does the outdoor lighting. We absolutely have to stop extracting fossil carbon (if we want to retain industrial civilization and increase our overall odds of species survival as agriculture collapses).
"Steps into the unknown" are exactly, urgently, vitally, what we need. The idea that there's a known we shouldn't get too far from because the cost could be high is exactly backwards. The cost of the known is already incalculable and vast; the quicker we get away from it the better. Even a very high risk of civilizational collapse would be better than the grim certain extinctions of of the known.
“Stimulus measures of the magnitude contemplated are steps into the unknown and need to be accompanied by clear statements that the consequences will be monitored closely, and there will be the capacity and will to adjust policy quickly…”
One thing that hardly anyone has publicly engaged with is that the accounting is not _in error_, in the sense of being done wrong, but that the accounting rests on ideas which we can today falsify. These ideas nonetheless retain status as axioms, mostly because the political cost of saying "you're not rich" is high.
Still, the whole foundation of open-loop extractive capitalism is false; we can't do that and accurately call the results wealth. Moving the costs accounting around so things seem free only lasts so long. Outdoor lighting and pesticides are doing an effective job of making insects extinct. There's absolutely no clever fix for that one; the pesticides have to stop and so does the outdoor lighting. We absolutely have to stop extracting fossil carbon (if we want to retain industrial civilization and increase our overall odds of species survival as agriculture collapses).
"Steps into the unknown" are exactly, urgently, vitally, what we need. The idea that there's a known we shouldn't get too far from because the cost could be high is exactly backwards. The cost of the known is already incalculable and vast; the quicker we get away from it the better. Even a very high risk of civilizational collapse would be better than the grim certain extinctions of of the known.