On New Years Eve, two people were arrested for stealing soap from the Walgreens in my neighborhood. If you think that’s a pretty minor crime, consider this — one of the perpetrators was the exact same height as the Unabomber!

Now wait a minute, you might say. Height is not a measure of criminal impact. If that strikes you as obvious, you are smarter than the readership of the fellow who calls him “Digiconomist” and tweets stuff like this.

Now, if you chortled at the notion of measuring the serious of a crime in units of feet and inches, I trust you are chortling doubly at the notion of measuring economic impact in units of terawatt-hours. Bitcoin miners tend to gravitate (either physically or via the cloud) to where power is cheapest. Argentinians tend to use whatever power is available in Argentina. There’s no reason to think that the cost of a Terawatt-hour generated by a hydroelectric dam in Turkey is comparable to the cost of a Terawatt-hour generated by burning fossil fuels in Buenos Aires.

So why does Digiconomist report this kind of claptrap? Maybe he’s a smart guy who doesn’t always think before he posts. Maybe he’s an idiot. Or — and this is where I’d put my money if I had to — he figures his readers are idiots who are easily dazzled by shiny nonsense.

134 Terawatt Hours is a lot of power. But with not even a guess as to the (internal and external) costs of generating that power, we are left with absolutely no basis for even beginning to think about whether those costs are acceptable. And the comparison to Argentina, where costs are likely to be very different, does not help even a whit. Digiconomist appears to hope his readers won’t notice that.

I’m going on a bit about this because I happen to have just come from a conversation with a pack of idiots of just the sort who I’m sure the digiconomist finds useful. The tweet above happened to come across our desks; I pointed out that it was pretty stupid, and the general reaction was that this just goes to show that economists are living in some crazy fantasyland, where they deny obvious truths like “Everything anybody cares about can be measured in Terawatt Hours”.

Suddenly we were back in first grade where I was explaining that the reason we care about energy use is because it consumes resources and therefore denies us other things, like haircuts and tractors and fresh produce and clean air — and that if you want to think about whether the tradeoffs are worth it, you have to measure everything in a common unit, of which the most readily available is the dollar. That was taken as more evidence of how out of touch economists are. Nobody even suggested an alternative way to think about tradeoffs, having decided, apparently, that thought serves no purpose.

Usually I’m pretty good at ignoring this kind of stuff, but this one really pissed me off. Possibly that was because I was in kind of a bad mood to begin with. But I think it was also this: The idiots in this pack are not full-time idiots. They’re professional people who do their jobs well. I’m sure that if I had to take over any of their jobs, I’d be laughably incompetent. Surely they know how to process information. Surely they’re capable of spotting an obvious fallacy, or an attempt to pull the wool over their eyes. But given an opportunity to hoot and jeer at a simple and obvious point that they happened not to think of themselves, they shut down all of their critical thinking skills in order to grab that opportunity. That’s partly a reflection of how human beings are wired, and partly, I think, a reflection of the times we’re living in, where tribalism and mockery seem to perpetually trump reason and thought. And what it means is that in these times, even many of the best of us have chosen, at least intermittently, to join the pack of idiots. It’s pretty scary. In fact, I’d say it’s even scarier than the number of animals in the National Zoo.

In a New Yorker essay, Elizabeth Kolbert takes at face value the widely reported statistic that “the average level of self-reported happiness, or subjective well-being, appears to have been flat going all the way back to the nineteen-fifties, when real per-capita income was less than half what it is today”. Proceeding from the assumption that these self-reports tell us something about actual happiness, Kolbert, proceeds to muse on the policy implications, quoting ex-Harvard president Derek Bok with approval:

If rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier over the last fifty years, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?

Wait a minute, now. Self-reported happiness has been flat for fifty years despite rising incomes. Self-reported happiness has also been flat for fifty years despite dramatic increases in leisure and environmental quality. (Since 1965, the average American has gained about six hours a week of leisure—the equivalent of seven vacation weeks a year.) So why aren’t Bok and Kolbert asking why we bother to come home from the office, take vacations, and clean our air and water?

Continue reading ‘Unhappy Reasoning’