I finally finished reading the paper to which this article refers, and it is almost certainly bullshit.

The paper is extremely long and pointlessly over-mathematical, so it took me a while to read. It’s 40 pages long.

There are a number of obvious problems, but the main one seems to be that the authors include these factors as “returns,” which is very dubious as most people would define that word.

A major innovation in JKKST is the inclusion of housing returns. These new data on housing returns cover capital gains, and also the net rents paid renters and owners (i.e., imputed).

This, uh, “innovation” means basically that the “returns” here will be dominated by the rent paid from renter to owner and the notional rent an owner would pay to live in his or her own house. In other words, the first one is not the typical way to define housing returns and the second one is basically a fake number that if included in the calculation certainly juices the “return” but nowhere did any money change hands or any gain accrue to anyone, capital or otherwise.

Economics is so essentially terrible. The whole profession is full of things like this where you have to be extremely knowledgeable to see how and where you are being hoodwinked. I’ve spent an hour and a half reading this damn paper, trying to understand the math, and it’s a con, just like a lot of (appropriately named) econ.

To show why imputed rent is one of the problems here, and a huge one, imagine that you buy a house. Twenty years go by. The area does well. Your mortgage is still low or paid off. Yet, your imputed rent might be $2,000 a month — meaning that you’d pay $2,000 to live in your own house — if it were required. No money changes hands. Absolutely nothing has been exchanged. There is no return here. No one gains anything in the real world. If held apart from capital gains, this is a form of double counting — tallying the capital gains and the “return” from imputed rent. Nice try, attempting to slip that by. It’d work on most.

What a waste of my time. Along with the idea of including rent paid from renter to owner, which is not a typical way of tabulating returns to housing; remove those two items above and include taxes (also not included in the paper), and all those “returns” vanish.

Wonder what propaganda outfit caused this paper to appear. Economics doesn’t have a replication crisis. It has a “let’s just make stuff up” crisis.

I agree with his larger point. Ambitious technocratic projects require statecraft and must be tied to nation building and geopolitical ambitions. This is opposite of most environmental politics, which actually mistrusts statecraft and attempts to shortcircuit with science.

— Ted Nordhaus (@TedNordhaus) March 18, 2019

Yes. And the left is giving up a lot by demonizing nationalism, effectively making most environmental projects impossible.

Look, I too like the kumbaya vision of a global and borderless world, where we all hold multi-hued hands on a verdant hillside and shit. But that’s not the world we have today or that we’ll have anytime soon. In the real world where we currently live, battling against corporations and seizing control of capitalism and fighting climate change all must be done at the national level.

And guess what? It requires a national purpose and unity…which is also called nationalism. There is no other countervailing force at the moment that will come close or has a chance of developing anytime soon. I get it, the kumbaya on a hillside dream is much more appealing, but that’ll get us right where neoliberal fluid capital wants us: precisely nowhere. Because it is, as mentioned, a dream.

By equating nationalism with racism and with it being evil and bad in all cases, the left is doing a huge disservice to history and to the future, and pretty much killing any possibility of fighting climate change. Good job.

if we want to reduce the amount of garbage in the world, we must work to address the root cause. this is why i have introduced legislation to make everyone’s garbage cans smaller https://t.co/NDHwKh6KXU

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) March 20, 2019

It’s even worse than that. It’s like if we made the solution to pedestrians being struck and killed by cars that the pedestrians had to wear huge flashing lights and have loud sirens going off all the time, that required carrying gigantic backpacks full of batteries.

Sen. Gillibrand’s proposal is evil and harmful, and will hurt the most the people who most require the medication. But that’s America — we throw those under the bus who don’t have the energy, time or social status to object effectively. As long as it scores political points or the prudes are happy it’s all good (see FOSTA/SESTA for another example).