November 22, 2010

“Jaw-Droppingly Rude”

Posted in Book Reviews, Economics, Environment, Other blogs at 7:30 am by Paul Sagar

Book Review: Chasing Rainbows – How the Green Agenda Defeats its Aims by Tim Worstall

Tim Worstall – scourge of leftist bloggers, and bane of all those he takes to be stupid (which in practice means: almost everyone he disagrees with) – has written a book. Or has he? For Chasing Rainbows: How The Green Agenda Defeats its Aims (Stacey International, £8.99) is above all the paper version of timworstall.com. And the effect, unfortunately, is frequently unsatisfying. Flippant sentences which might work as part of a 200-word blog entry often read as convoluted and clumsy in the midst of a chapter running to several thousand words. Paragraphs of assertion, or wink-wink allusion, are much less workable when there’s no hyperlink to enlarge the issue.

But attempting to put aside the big niggle – “is this actually a researched and long-pondered book I’m reading, or a collection of brief musings dashed to the printers”? – it’s helpful to consider Worstall’s core strategy. Namely, to apply a set of basic economic concepts (of the sort known to any competent A-Level student) – like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, specialisation, growth, cost-benefit analysis, etc – to a set of issues raised by the environmentalist movement. Or as the book’s title puts it, by the (far more sinister-sounding) “green agenda”. An “agenda” that Worstall does not deny is important, but simply claims to be misguided because of its lack of basic economic understanding.

At times the strategy works remarkably well, paying-off in conceptual clarity and useful illustration. Worstall’s chapter on recycling, for example, is very good. It is a clear exposition of how to think logically and sensibly about a given problem. And his solution is an eminently sensible one: that if the aim is to get more stuff recycled (and Worstall is quite right that the “if” in this situation is a live one, because recycling may not always be the most sensible thing to do), then paying professionals to sort out the stuff in question is likely to yield better results than expecting households to do it in their own leisure time. Hence, if the “green agenda” is serious about recycling, it should take a cost-benefit analysis seriously, and adhere to its outcomes.

Similarly, Worstall’s discussion of population growth is sharp. He (correctly) points out that not only is economic growth properly understood a good thing insofar as it drastically improves the lives of the worst off, he also explains clearly why (paradoxically) improving living standards and increasing life expectancy in developing countries leads to population control over time. (Quickly: because if you and your kids are more likely to survive, it’s less of a gamble raising sprogs, so you can have fewer of them, invest heavily in them, and not offset the chances they’ll die by having more to act as potential replacements). Unfortunately however – and this is a recurring problem in the book – Worstall fails to draw the explicit connection between why controlling population growth through raising living standards is something the “green agenda” misunderstands, thus “defeats” its own “aims”. Rather, the discussion of population growth becomes a self-contained unit, sharply addressing that particular issue but not linking-up to the book’s implied promise of skewering self-defeating greens.

I say implied, because this has to be pretty much imputed from the front cover alone. Worstall’s “introduction” is really just chapter 1, and there’s no serious attempt to lay-out what it is the “green agenda” thinks, and to explain systematically why it is “self defeating”. Rather, separate chapters treat separate topics, which (one either assumes, or knows from experience) have something to do with various claims made by environmentalists. Worstall then applies his basic economics to these topics, in order to show how he thinks about them and believes we should too. Sometimes (as with recycling) the pay-off is fairly clear. Other times, however, it’s hard to see why exactly Worstall thinks he’s exposed something “self-defeating”. The lack of a serious attempt to connect chapters together (and there’s no conclusion to the book at all, just the end of the final self-contained chapter on tax, and cap-and-trade) reinforces this problem – as well as the impression that one is reading a series of collected blog posts, not a book.

Worstall’s effort is, however, downright frustrating at times. Take, for example, his discussion of economic growth. The basic strategy here is to explain – again, correctly – that economic growth need not be predicated upon a necessity of resource consumption. Accordingly, environmentalists are making a mistake if they construe growth and resource-consumption as a necessary relationship, and in turn are mistaken if they think growth is necessarily the antithesis of environmental sustainability. We can in many instances achieve economic growth without chewing up the planet, so growth can be good from an environmental point of view – especially if it leads to (say) improved standards of living, lower child mortality, and thereby population control (which environmentalists allegedly want to see). This from Worstall is all fine (although I’ve drawn the argument more explicitly than he does in his chapter, and that’s not to his credit, as the point of his growth-can-be-compatible-with-environmentalism claim is largely lost accordingly). What’s not fine is acting as though the action stops there. Because clearly it doesn’t.

We can all agree that growth and environmental protection need not necessarily be in opposition. But the point environmentalists make is that at present they are, and that it seems like they will be for the foreseeable future, and hence this could have disastrous consequences. That is where the action is – and Worstall even acknowledges this to be the case at the outset of a later chapter – but the action is basically left un-addressed. Which is a problem, because Worstall has sketched the beginning of an argument, not the conclusion of one.

A similar problem occurs at the outset of the book, and I’ll dwell on it to illustrate the wider problem at play. Worstall deploys the concept of opportunity cost – i.e. whatever option was foregone so that what was actually chosen could be had – to ridicule environmentalists who tout the higher-levels of job creation associated with renewable energy production as a benefit. Worstall argues that this is wrong-headed; that having to employ more people is a cost not a benefit of a scheme, because if we have to employ 20 people to get X amount of energy, that’s 20 people not producing anything else. If only 2 people are needed, then the other 18 can go off and produce other things, making everyone better-off as we get more out of limited resources (in this case, labour). More people employed on one thing is thus a bad outcome, not a good one.

Now this is all fine as things stand; in a basic situation like the one Worstall illustrates his criticisms with job-creation is a cost not a benefit. But things get much trickier when we translate up to the national political level where the “green jobs” argument is typically being made in actuality. For there, we may not have the full employment background assumption that allows Worstall to run his ridiculing line. For imagine that there are, as at present, 2.5million people sitting on the dole. In this case, an energy-production method that employed a million people more than other alternatives might look like it provided a very real benefit – not just jobs, but jobs for a million people who would otherwise be doing nothing else with their labour at all (thus there is no opportunity cost problem of the sort Worstall’s simplistic model brings out). Indeed, things get more interesting if one brings in macroeconomic thoughts derived from Keynes. Let’s say we have 2.5million unemployed because the national economy is in the midst of a recession. Keynes-friendly economists will greet the job-creation scheme as very welcome if it has the effect of stimulating demand and thus kick-starting the economy. In turn, politicians – and the environmentalists that Worstall attacks over job-creation claims typically are politicians – are in a specific situation whereby there are all sorts of political advantages to touting job-creation as a benefit of renewable energy schemes. Suddenly, things look a lot more complicated than Worstall’s “yah-boo aren’t they all so thick because they don’t understand opportunity cost” shtick. Not least because by touting job-creation as a political move (rather than a narrow economic one of the sort Worstall myopically focuses on) then the “green agenda” does not “defeat” its aims but may well in a political context advance them quite considerably. That this is against the economic truth as seen by Worstall really is quite besides the point, if the aim of the book is supposed to be about how environmentalism is self-defeating.

My point here – and I should stress this clearly – is not that Worstall cannot reply to the above arguments. I’m absolutely sure that he can and would. As somebody who rejects Keynesian economics (for example), Worstall will have all sorts of reasons for dismissing much of the above as fatuous and false. My point here is to draw attention to the fact that he doesn’t bother to make any of the difficult arguments in his book, or to treat his opponents as anything other than simpletons who haven’t grasped economics 101. This occurs again and again, with the partial exception of the final chapter where a more sophisticated argument regarding Pigou taxes is considered – though as usual serious intellectual replies are basically absent from any discussion.

Now this tendency to resort to basic economic concepts and exposition might not be terribly objectionable in and of itself. If Worstall’s sole aim was to delineate some basic economic concepts for the good of the masses, then there could be little cause for complaint that he doesn’t engage with the more complicated side of economic reply, mixed-up with the complexities of real-world-distorting politics, next to which all real economic decisions end up being made. Similarly, if he reserved his ire for genuine economic maniacs and imbeciles like the new economics foundation alone, his lashing tongue could be fairly easily forgiven. What rapidly becomes tiring is Worstall’s scorn and caprice being directed at very clever people who cannot reasonably be lambasted for failing to grasp economics 101.

Whatever Worstall thinks of Alistair Darling (and the answer is clearly “not much”), it is fatuous and facile to treat the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as a simpleton who does not understand the basic concept of opportunity cost, and as though he was not making his economic decisions and pronouncements in the middle of extremely difficult and sensitive political contexts. I have no particular love for (say) Caroline Lucas or even George Monbiot, both of whom receive Worstall ire a-plenty, but it’s quite a different thing to casually dismiss Karl Marx’s ideas as “barking mad”. Whatever one thinks of the Labour Theory of Value – and it is true that few now hold it to be tenable – it is tedious to find Worstall lambasting one of the greatest and most innovative minds of the past several hundred years as though he were a garden-variety nincompoop. Marx may have got his labour theory wrong (derived as it was from a complex reading of Adam Smith and Ricardo, as well as drawing upon long-standing themes regarding exploitation and justice stretching way back into the pre-Smithean natural law tradition), but there’s something particularly unpleasant about Worstall’s sneering in a book that is itself so utterly superficial in much of its analysis.

Indeed, just to reinforce that point, Worstall deploys the snark against politicians of all stripes ad nauseam by reiterating how stupid and destructive he thinks they all are. Whilst this may be true of some particular cases (John Prescott isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and Nicholas Soames is clearly a pratt), Worstall shows no sensitivity to the difficulties of institutional decision-making in constrained representative democracies against the background of interest-managing, wherein politics can never be the straightforward application of basic economic logic (least of all, economic logic solely as Worstall conceives it). The result is a tired, boring and uninsightful mantra of how awful and thick politicians are – as presumably contrasted with the wise author, who sees things so much more clearly than the stupids he is constantly insulting in his long-established play to the gallery.

You may think that the above is all, therefore, a very long-winded way of complaining that Worstall has written a book that isn’t for me, or for people like me. After all, the book is pursuing what has proven to be a very successful strategy elsewhere. Timworstall.com makes, by all accounts, a decent sum for its author, and has led to many opportunities (not least this book). Clearly there is a demand for what Worstall does, and Worstall admittedly does it very well. If the book is therefore a success amidst its target audience, can I reasonably be complaining about anything other than that I didn’t get a book for me?

I think I can, because I see this book as a frustrating missed opportunity. Part of the reason Worstall is hated by so much of the left is precisely because he is sharp. He sees how arguments fit together, he spots other people’s fallacies, and he points them out in devastating ways (and whilst the rudeness is a source of considerable friction, it is made infuriating precisely by the fact there’s often an actual intellectual point being made too). What I was hoping for from this book, however, was the next level: Worstall taking himself seriously as a thinker and constructing something that goes beyond the “yah boo sucks you’re all stoopid” formula of his website. I wanted to see what Worstall really had to show. Instead, we’ve been given a book that clearly isn’t about serious engagement. If it was, it wouldn’t be published by a group that is clearly in the business of climate “scepticism”*, and written in an obnoxious self-congratulatory tone that is guaranteed to irritate most environmentalists beyond the point where meaningful interaction will be possible.

Tim Worstall has written a book that will please his target audience – the people who read timworstall.com already. Worstall has thus elected to stay in his comfort zone, and stick to what he knows. His book thus has very little to say to those of us who sincerely want to push things further.Or who want to see if Worstall is as clever as he keeps telling us he is; as clever as he ultimately needs to be if he’s to get away with being (as one reviewer on the dust-jacket puts it) so “jaw-droppingly rude”.

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*Other titles from other authors include The Hockey Stick Illusion, The Wind Farm Scam and Climate: the Great Delusion all published under the indicative banner “Independent Minds”

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