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Just when you thought that the Washington Post could not go any further in bringing its readers off the wall statements from self-imagined great thinkers, it rises to the occasion. Today we have Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, giving us “five myths about America’s decline.”
This short piece contains heaping doses of silliness. For example, Bremmer thinks China will be suffering because:
“the ratio of Chinese workers to retirees is around 6 to 1 today, but by 2040, that number is expected to shrink to 2 to 1.” Fans of arithmetic know that this is not likely to pose a problem. Even with a substantial slowdown in the rate of productivity growth in China, the average worker is likely to be close to 4 times as productive in 2040 as they are today. This means that China will easily be able to accommodate substantial increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. In fact, the slowing of China’s population growth will provide enormous environmental benefits to China and the world long into the future.
There are other quirky comments and confused assertions which I’ll skip, but here’s the money quote:
“Finally, imagine a world in which a poorer country such as China becomes the world’s largest economy. The Chinese government’s willingness to lead on issues such as climate change and nuclear non-proliferation would probably pale in comparison with the leadership America provides today — yet one more reason Beijing will not supplant Washington anytime soon.”
Yes, that is an accurate quote. Bremmer thinks the world needs the United States’ leadership in dealing with global warming.
Just in case you have not been able to get news for the last 15 years (stranded in Antarctica or on some Pacific island without Internet access), the United States has been the most important force blocking any action to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The most progress the world has ever made in this area was when George W. Bush explicitly said that the United States was not interested in taking part in the Kyoto Agreement. This allowed the other wealthy countries to move forward with a plan involving binding caps on emissions. The world would do much better without the sort of “leadership” that the United States has been showing in this area.
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Economist Dean Baker is co-founder of Center for Economic Policy and Research and writes regularly on CEPR’s Beat the Press blog, where this post first appeared.
14 Comments
The Washington Post is to Journalism as a truck stop on I10 is to Haute cuisine.
Cap and trade is a joke are we really going to pay people to plant enough trees to overcome the increase in pollution as the population grows? Are we really going to keep paying them not to cut down the trees as population growth makes farmland crops more valuable?
We need fuel cell, electric and hybrid cars produced on a mass scale now we need to replace coal, oil, natural gas power with wind and solar and use that power to create hydrogen from water like the Germans are doing.
China might fall it might not but we if we keep going on as we are are falling further behind cuts in education funding since the 60′s are having an effect. The pay for school movement seems to be making it worse.
Private health insurance and free market drug prices suck money from our pockets and deliver shorter lifespans and higher infant mortality rates.
Banks keep gambling with money that only exists on paper because we won’t regulate them.
The jobs Obama is creating are not enough and pay less than the jobs we had before.
Its hard to see us stopping our decline faster than China might decline even under the best scenario.
Sometimes I wonder if newspapers sock puppet their comment sections you rarely see anyone ever point out the facts when these self-imagined great thinkers get it wrong or make up stuff.
But you do see a bunch of comments always pushing toward the Right any rebuttal seems to be the least damaging to a writer’s post that can be made.
Bobo at the times for example gets ripped to shreds all the time here but the Times never prints anything we write.
i am sure other readers of the Times come up with similar ideas.
C’mon Dean, compradors have got to dream, eh?
This is why it was such a shock to see the WaPo’s leadership, they which hired Domenech and drove off Froomkin, allow something as sensible as Norm Ornstein’s kiss-off to the GOP to run in their paper last week.
Even under Obama the US has done Jack Shit about climate change.
Eeeekk!!! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Heh.
Cap and trade is a terrible approach. If we are able to pull off regulating CO2 as hazardous pollution through the EPA, it will provide a far better model than this neoliberal nonsense of creating ANOTHER captive speculative market to be gamed by the rich at the expense of everyone else on the planet.
Declaring the crap dangerous and simply requiring industry stop producing so much of it … done … is a whole hell of a lot more direct and efficient than hoping a new (and completely opaque) vehicle to facilitate ANOTHER class of toxic derivative asset while basically saying “Those who are rich enough can pollute forever as long as there’s somewhere with leaders who agree to not produce power for their citizens in exchange for
bribescarbon offsets.” and hoping all that somehow results in reduced CO2 emissions. Not sure why we’d expect any different outcome on that than we’re seeing the approach yield in banking, housing, oil, etc. … I guess hope springs eternal for some folks.Depending on how things shake out in the courts and with EPA policy, we might actually pull off innovative leadership on greenhouse emissions reduction after all. It really depends on what Obama does after the election (win or lose) in terms of solidifying current policy in such a way that rulemaking to undermine the approach will be difficult.
Perhaps you may not have noticed, but climate change has not been a particularly big topic in the Greek, Serbian, and French elections. When you have 25%-plus unemployment in places like Greece, Serbia, and Spain – - 10%-plus in France and Italy – - then the material does have a remarkable tendency to crowd out other issues. Green issues are critical, but when they supplant basic material needs (such as the doubling of the price of gasoline) esp. for the working poor – then they paint green-progressives into a political corner of irrelevancy.
The result is a permanent political minority status which may be morally satisfying, but politically unethical. In the meantime, (just look at Euro greens) far-right parties rush to fill the void. I would hesitate before dismissing so quickly a materialist framing.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this man is an idiot. The question remains, what kind of idiot is he?
The right has legions o hacks churning out such crap 24/7 366 days a yr. We can’t ever keep up with this level of nonsense. It’s the private version of Soviet agitprop.
And it’s delusional to think that a few economist heroes will do a damn thing about it.
Love and admire your work, Dean, but every single post plays off of something the MSM media–usually the WaPo–does or says. As with endless scrutiny of the Sunday talk shows here, I just don’t get it. OF COURSE these guys are idiots–let’s make our own world, huh? Let’s point the way OURSELVES.