zen_brassica
4mo ago
That's how they're used, but that means they're not Pigouvian.
Yes, you're correct, I mean in the sense that we should try to match them to the cost of the externality - which a ban doesn't do. I was just trying to draw a contrast with banning things, which involves far more deadweight loss, in the case where the thing being banned is useful. In the case of extremely addictive drugs, they're almost never good even for the person using them, so a ban makes sense, while for fossil fuels, they have a big benefit but also this externality, so a Pigouvian tax is a good fit. I just worded it clumsily and confusingly and didn't make the point I was trying to.
No, if you know the sign but don't know the magnitude, you can overshoot and end up with much worse.
My point is that even if we think that the damage caused by carbon emissions is somewhere between $5/ton and $2000/ton, a $50/ton carbon tax is much more likely to be beneficial than no tax.
That's just the Precautionary Principle, and it's a recipe for nothing but death.
Isn't the Precautionary Principle more about only allowing things once we're sure they're safe? That would have been like not allowing fossil fuels to be burned at all back when they were discovered. We have piles of evidence that what we're doing to our atmosphere is already fucking us over.
I'm not some sort of neo-luddite or de-growth advocate. Yeah, there are some things we could have avoided like leaded gas and CFCs (even for CFCs I don't think we probably should have prevented their use until we had a non-ozone-destroying alternative, given the benefits of refrigeration), but we've really screwed up by not allowing nuclear power to flourish, and on the whole, technology and building new things is good. I just think that for carbon taxes, at this point the debate should be at what level they should be, not whether we need them at all.
zen_brassica
4mo ago
Pigouvian taxes are just a more granular way of discouraging something instead of outright banning it. Sure, you do need to know the sign, but even if you're wrong on the magnitude, a wrong Pigouvian tax is usually going to be better than doing nothing. There's a wide range of estimates? Pick something in the middle and be done with it.
As for the sign of the impact of climate change, arguing that it might be beneficial at this point, given the evidence we're seeing, seems a bit like arguing "maybe smoking is good for you, actually".
But I think one of the strongest arguments is that, if you don't know what's going to happen when you fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition, then be conservative and don't fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition. We know what the climate is like now -- it's not perfect but it's alright. So it makes sense to take some effort to NOT fuck with it, even if there's some economic cost.
zen_brassica
5mo ago
I'd rather they be playing outside and getting exercise, playing with friends, reading, doing creative stuff. The latter two are lower-friction than they've ever been, though the first two (especially playing with friends) are higher than they used to be, partly because of cultural changes, partly because of modern car-centric suburban development patterns, though I won't get on my soapbox about that right now.
I do think that reducing the friction on the alternatives is good. But I disagree that we should do this first, because the problem of easily accessible and endless over-stimulating video is a really big problem and not that hard of a problem to at least put a serious dent in with a bit of effort, in my opinion. And reducing friction can only get you so far, when the friction for the thing you're competing with is non-existent.
And of course, different people can work on solving different problems.
Though of course, the demand for dopamine rush can quickly shift to something like video games. For that, I'd love to see an age rating for games and TV shows that includes a score for their addictiveness, so parents can make informed choices.
zen_brassica
5mo ago
I think you can get 99% of the way there by making this law apply to software available to the public, produced by for-profit companies over a certain size in terms of market cap, or view numbers, or some other hard-enough-to-game metric. It's fine if Big Vinny's Open Source Video Sharing Site with 153 users doesn't follow these rules, that's not what kids are watching on their iPads.
zen_brassica
5mo ago
My ideal policy would be one that sidesteps this problem by being a uniform policy for everyone. I don't know if it's possible, but what I'd aim for is putting a bit of friction on the slot machine lever.
For example -- banning endless scrolling feeds. Banning autoplay, except in certain cases like music playlists or playlists created by the user themselves. Having a delay (5 or 10 seconds?) before showing recommendations of other videos to watch. Or even a gradually increasing delay the longer you've been watching. Anything to making watching the next video a bit less appealing than doing something else.
Would people start just making compilation videos to work around this limitation? Probably. It's a hard problem to solve.
What I'd really like is a lot stricter rules around what is appropriate for a "kids" section of a website, like Youtube Kids. Some sort of maximum measurement of how hyper-attention-grabbing a video is, and while this could be done with objective rules, it's pretty hard to measure for every video. But we do manage to have rules around content, so I don't think it's undoable. Then at least parents could let their kids use just that app and not worry about their brains turning to mush at such a rapid rate.
zen_brassica
5mo ago
I rate the the harm of screen time roughly by how hard the content on the screen tries to claim your attention. At one end of the scale would be a screen that displays a static image of a still life painting - this is clearly no more harmful than an actual physical painting, except that it might hurt more if it fell on you. At the other end is rapidly cutting and highly animated brain-rot videos with over-the-top sound effects, in an endless stream that a child can flip through continuously. (Or the equivalent for adults).
Mr. Rogers is the show I always go to for what I would consider to be a beneficial use of screens. Aside from the positive lessons, it's slow and very minimally attention grabbing:
- Most of the time, there's not a lot of action on the screen.
- Mr. Rogers, the other actors, and the puppets speak slowly. Mr. Rogers often pauses to give the viewer time to think about what he's said or asked.
- There are very few cuts or camera movements.
- The sound effects are all piano, not different instruments that change all the time.
- And of course, ideally, it's a show you put on and don't let your kid play with the remote to change the channel.
The show is more attention grabbing to a child than staring at a blank wall, and roughly on the order of playing with some toys or having a conversation with an adult. All of the aspects I mentioned are in very stark contrast to what's on youtube shorts or tiktok today. If Mr. Rogers is an oatmeal raisin cookie in terms of appeal, the stuff many kids watch today is heroin.
Of course, this is all aside from violent, emotionally disturbing or mature content, which, while there are probably disagreements about what is harmful at the boundary, most of us would agree is not appropriate for children -- though adults know how to process it healthily. I do think though that hyper-attention-grabbing content is bad for adults too, even if we're better at restraining ourselves from indulging in it too much.
zen_brassica
7mo ago
@Closedshop Seconding this as good general-purpose advice for anyone having trouble distinguishing sounds when learning a new language. Ideally you can record your teacher reading each word in the minimal pair 3 times and pick two from each set that sound very similar to you to create the flashcards. This controls for any changes in intonation that occur when reading a sequence of words, which commonly provides an unintentional extra source of information in many languages.
zen_brassica
8mo ago
Focusing on just the cars & suburbs bit:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is.
This doesn't necessarily mean that suburbs & cars are the best way to do things. First, there may be selection bias -- people who don't want suburbs and cars probably have a higher tendency to stay in the urban environments in their home countries, and not migrate to the US at all. Secondly, we do have somewhat of a subsidy on this kind of lifestyle, with a lot of tax money going to roads rather than public transit, and cars have substantial unpriced externalities, compared to other kinds of transit. So it's not surprising that with the incentives in place, a lot of people will choose this lifestyle. A supermarket with a loss-leader of roast chicken is going to sell a lot of roast chickens.
Cowen says:
Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities.
Not every European city used to be the way that it is now. Some of them bought part-way into car culture, then changed plans after realizing the enormous cost (Amsterdam, for example). And there are American cities that have made some great changes in this direction too. It doesn't have to happen overnight.
And as for "just get [almost] everyone a car"... There are adolescents, elderly, visually impaired or otherwise disabled people who can't drive, and are often mostly locked out of participation in society if they don't have someone who can drive them around. To be fair, telecommuting has partially alleviated this for some people.
For everyone who can drive, cars are really not cheap to own or run, even discounting all the aforementioned externalities. While Americans tend to have higher income, I think a big part of why life is decent in many European countries for the average person is that you don't have this essentially mandated cost of car ownership.
I don't disagree, though maybe once most people don't smoke, being a smoker is actually negative socially. So nobody smoking is better than everyone smoking a little bit, probably. If you're in a society where everyone already smokes, smoking socially might be the right thing for you though, assuming you don't hate the experience.
The greening of the planet isn't actually good for agriculture. Most plants are what we consider weeds, so faster growing weeds means more pesticide use. And the big issue is really instability more than heat, as you get crazy weather, where the growing season starts early but then there's a frost, or severe droughts and heat waves, or floods, all sorts of stuff like that. Predictability is really good when in comes to farming, and the weather unpredictability caused by a warmer planet more than makes up for any benefit you might get from a longer growing season and more CO2 for plants to consume, in most places.
No disagreement on that point. I think a carbon tax of somewhere between $30 and $100 / ton CO2 is anything but taking things too far, though. A $100/ton tax would add about $1/gallon on the price of gas.
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