Re: The 2005 hurricane season

In article <slrne3n4m6.t6m.randolph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Randolph Fritz <randolph@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The 1990's wasn't chosen by you at random--it's a period when the
computer industry was growing much faster than most industries at most
times. I was simply taking the growth rate of Bangladesh averaged over
recent years. Do you have some explanation of why that is a worse
estimate for the growth rate than zero, the rate you are apparently
using?

Because it's exponential, and no exponential trend lasts. Nor is
growth inevitable. Enough bad luck and bad planning and Bangladesh's
growth could be wildly negative.

Could be. Or it could be steeper--the current rate is respectable but
not outstanding. Exponential growth of per capita GNP has in fact
lasted, in lots of places, for longer than a century.

Again--why do you think a zero growth rate is a better estimate?

When entertaining yourself with fantasies of world catastrophe, it's
worth once and a while actually running some of the numbers to see
plausible they are.

....

In a letter to a friend on what we might do in response to these
issues, a bit back, I commented "I have tried in these recommendations
to hew to market and vote". We are perhaps more on the same side than
you think; I want humanity to thrive and be free and I think you do,
too.

I wouldn't be surprised. But I'm very sceptical of these sorts of
scenarios, in part because they are likely to be used as an excuse for
current reductions in freedom, based not on actual catastrophes but on
arguments about future catastrophes.

Think of it as an improved version of Stalin's approach. He couldn't
deliver actual prosperity, so he kept telling the Russian people that
their current sufferings would bring future prosperity. It worked for a
while, but as the years passed and the Soviet standard of living
remained far below that in the west it became less and less believable.

If instead you explain that current sufferings are to prevent future
catastrophe, you are safe. If the catastrophe never happens you can tell
people that it worked, and if it does happen it just proves they should
have put up with more sufferings than they did. We see that on a small
scale today with TSA nonsense, and I can easily see a permanent version
based on exaggerated claims about environmental catastrophe.

And I am also more sceptical because I am old enough--as you may also
be--to have gone through a previous round of warning about imminent
world catastrophe. That one was due to overpopulation, it too claimed to
be supported by scientific evidence, and it too was in the same tone of
"only idiots can disagree" as yours. Some of the "science" was in my
field, economics, and was obviously bogus to people in the field--I'm
thinking specifically of the book _Limits to Growth_. Predictions were
made and they turned out to be wildly wrong--instead of world famine in
the 1970's we have had a reasonably steady increase in calories per
capita in the poorer parts of the world.

I could, of course, be wrong this time. But when I observe you
handwaving economic growth out of existence on no evidence beyond "no
exponential trend lasts," I become less willing to trust your judgement
on the parts of the question I know less about.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

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