From Edward Fullbrook Steve Keen’s new paper “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change,” would benefit humankind if it were widely read by economists.¹ There are two ways you can obtain it: Go here at Taylor & Francis and pay £35 Go here and download it for free. Here is its conclusion: Conclusion: drastically underestimating economic damages from global warming Were climate change an effectively trivial area of public policy, then the appallingly bad work done by Neoclassical economists on climate change would not matter greatly. It could be treated, like the intentional Sokal hoax (Sokal, 2008), as merely a salutary tale about the foibles of the Academy. But the impact of climate change upon the economy, human society, and the viability of the Earth’s biosphere
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from Edward Fullbrook
Steve Keen’s new paper “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change,” would benefit humankind if it were widely read by economists.¹ There are two ways you can obtain it:
Here is its conclusion:
Conclusion: drastically underestimating economic damages from global warming
Were climate change an effectively trivial area of public policy, then the appallingly bad work done by Neoclassical economists on climate change would not matter greatly. It could be treated, like the intentional Sokal hoax (Sokal, 2008), as merely a salutary tale about the foibles of the Academy.
But the impact of climate change upon the economy, human society, and the viability of the Earth’s biosphere in general, are matters of the greatest importance. That work this bad has been done, and been taken seriously, is therefore not merely an intellectual travesty like the Sokal hoax. If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly contemplate (Kulp & Strauss, 2019; Lenton et al., 2019; Lynas, 2020; Moses, 2020; Raymond et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020; Yumashev et al., 2019), then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.
1. More than once Keen distances his usage of “climate change” from greenwash usage, as when he writes: “these Neoclassical economists are on a par with United States President, Donald Trump, in their appreciation of what climate change entails. . . . . They are equating the climate to the weather.”