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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat

  1. Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.

  2. I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.

  3. I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.

  4. The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.

  5. The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.

  6. Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.

  7. As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.

Worth noting that whether or not you think Europe has fallen behind largely depends if you accept nominal or PPP as the basis for your GDP accounting. By PPP, Europe and the US are largely neck-and-neck.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=EU-US

There are also other, non-economic metrics, that determine quality of life such as far lower crime/homelessness/drug epidemics and more vacation days. That's why we don't see a surge of European migrants to the US. QoL is largely similar between the two countries, but Americans prize money and work whereas Europeans prefer leisure.

The US is above most of Europe in median disposable income by PPP, which seems like a far better measure than GDP if you're talking PPP figures.

True, but that measurement still doesn't adjust for working hours. Americans work far longer hours than e.g. Germans, Danes, Dutch etc. Once you adjust for both PPP and working hours, the distance between Germanic Europe and America isn't nearly as radical as is often claimed. Also worth noting that Europeans are taxed at higher rates, hence lower disposable income but this means higher education is largely free from out of pocket expenses, healthcare far cheaper etc. It can be debated whether this is ultimately a better social choice, but certainly by some outcomes (e.g. life expectancy) it isn't clear that the US has the better system.

It's different for Southern Europe (stagnation for 20+ years) and EU Eastern Europe (spent half a century behind imposed communism).

So now we're onto "Americans are richer because they work harder"? But... it appears Germans work about 34.6 hours per week compared to Americans 38.7. According to the tables linked, Americans made $46,600 to Germans $32,100. If the Germans worked as much as Americans and were paid accordingly, they'd be up to $35,900. So it doesn't look like working hours are going to help much. For the household numbers in those tables, in-kind social benefits are accounted for.

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Our stereotype here in the states is basically that Europeans are wealthier and happier than Americans, with their social services protecting the poor and public services like transportation representing a genuine difference in wealth in which the US doesn't come out on top.

Yeah, that's kind of a standard narrative from the left (not just the far left) and has been for a long time. Balance of immigration says otherwise. Sometimes you'll hear the same sort of thing from (well-off) immigrants in the tech field, so far I haven't been quite rude enough to say "Well, then why are you here?" directly.

I think that really most of the culture wars and the dislike of those who disagree feels more like a social class thing than anything really about politics. And as such, it’s not economics and economics won’t fix it.

The upper class of this country essentially wants to remake America to be much more like continental Europe. An open fairly liberated culture, walkable cities with good public transport, strong regulatory state, strong safety net, no guns, and irreligious. To them, the more rural, religious, and traditional red staters are “deplorables”, people who are just so far behind culturally that it’s an embarrassment to them. They’ve long sneered at those fools in flyover countries.

Of course the people in flyover counties are not onboard with the upper classes and their attempts to remake American culture into something different. They like their do-it-yourself culture, they like Christianity, they like speaking their minds, and they like guns. They obviously aren’t too keen on being sneered at by people who consider themselves better than a deplorable.

Do you think that the upper class in America really wants a strong safety net? If they do, why do they not put more support behind people like Sanders and Warren rather than people like Clinton and Biden?

Yes, I think it's fairly obvious they do, but they don't want to do it with their money, they want to do it with the common pot. And they get pushback because there's people suffering close to the bottom who work hard, floating just above the line where a safety net would need to catch them, who really could use the money they're forced to put into the common pot, who wonder why they shouldn't keep their money instead especially when they see others not working as much as they do being entitled to equal or more of it.

And as a result, the elites feel annoyed because they believe (and I think they truly do) that if everyone just shut up and paid taxes and didn't try to resist their plans, everyone could have a strong safety net and if they have to enact policies that explicitely fuck over the red tribers they'll see the necessity of a strong safety net, and they'll stop resisting.

So in general, they believe they have to soften up people a bit to accept ideas like UBI.

I think it’s again about social class, not wealth, so a person socialized into the upper class would have those values. I do question the sincerity of them really being willing to hand their money over to those rednecks in the south, or other groups they find odious. But as a group, they see welfare states as good things to be in favor of alongside universal health care and free college.

I mean the governments welfare programs often do go to those rednecks in the south and there’s little protest from blue tribers.

often do go to those rednecks in the south

Doth protest too much, or just generally confused about the facts on the ground in the south? The south has lots of poverty, primarily, because it houses more black Americans per capita.

It’s true that very high black populations make several southern states look worse than they really are on everything except military recruitment and diversity, but southern states with more nationally typical racial mixes(such as Oklahoma and West Virginia) still have elevated poverty rates, albeit not Mississippi’s. There are lots of dysfunctional poor whites, you just don’t see them because they live in rural areas.

West Virginia and Oklahoma is a very expansive definition of "the south" IMO.

Poor whites certainly exist, but their dysfunctions are, yes, largely contained to rural areas, and often in those areas you can be well below the poverty line and not really be doing anything wrong. There is just no wealth anywhere around you, so you are subsistence living, because that is all that is available. A poor person in a city is simply squandering every possible advantage.

Yes, they are, but it’s the closest match to ‘the south without the large black populations’. And in any case blacks out of the south seem to do better than blacks in the south, so there’s a factor of ‘southern-mess’ distinct from just ‘lots of blacks’.

More comments

If we're talking about some upper class kid who dropped out of college, or the illegal immigrant they pay to do thier gardening then yes absolutely.

If it's some farmer facing a bad harvest in Minnesota, or some poor schitzo who's been in and out of psychiatric care, then no.

I think that @MaiqTheTrue is absolutely correct that it's a class thing, and largely motivated by Europhelia on the part of upper and middle-class blues.

If it's some farmer facing a bad harvest in Minnesota, or some poor schitzo who's been in and out of psychiatric care, then no.

They absolutely want a strong safety net for the latter. Unfortunately they want that safety net to be provided by everyone without strings; that is, they keep them alive and roaming free-range, occasionally attacking ordinary citizens with legally enforced impunity.

Do you think that the upper class in America really wants a strong safety net? If they do, why do they not put more support behind people like Sanders and Warren rather than people like Clinton and Biden?

The upper class supports a strong safety net for the children of the upper class. Specifically, they think that the low paying jobs that rich kids take for status reasons should come with an income that allows that person to stay in the class of their birth. The daughter of a surgeon or a banker who becomes an adjunct or a journalist should be guaranteed an income to allow her to live in the manner to which she has become accustomed. A Clinton or a Biden ensures this.

A Sanders could take wealth from backwards patriarchal dad who still pays the bills.

As far as I know democrats have not generally been better for the fortunes of those entering academia than republicans.

Does a Clinton or Biden really ensure it? As far as I know, wannabe journalists do not have it easy during Democratic administrations. And why would a rich person not just give their kids money directly rather than indirectly through trying to manipulate the levers of government? It takes more out of their pockets but on the other hand, is more sure of success. Some parents have the attitude of "make the kid learn by working for their own money", but making it so that the government supports them would be almost as bad for such a policy as giving them money directly would be.

And why would a rich person not just give their kids money directly rather than indirectly through trying to manipulate the levers of government? It takes more out of their pockets but on the other hand, is more sure of success. Some parents have the attitude of "make the kid learn by working for their own money"

The driver here isn't the rich parents, it's the adult children of rich parents in the lumpen-PMC. They simultaneously want to inherit the status and comfort of their parent's class like you can in the old world, and still be seen as having "earned" that status independently, like Americans.

That's what colleges are selling to people with useless degrees - it's a way to launder their parent's money into the child's "accomplishment".

Does a Clinton or Biden really ensure it?

Biden has certainly pulled every lever he could reach to send as much money as he can to universities. His initial student loan bailout had a cost of hundreds of billions before SCOTUS spiked it...

And here's the bailout for news organizations, framed as allowing them to collectively bargain to collude against tech companies.

So that's university jobs and news media jobs...

I think the parent is a little off base. It's not ensuring the kids have sufficient income to support their lifestyle. Mommy and daddy could probably support them in upper middle class bobo comfort indefinitely. What is about is ensuring the outside and respect of those people and their positions. To ensure that being a "journalist" accords the level of prestige and unearned influence that being a "reporter" does not. To ensure that being and adjunct or NGO executive confers status and access that being a researcher or business executive does not. That's why Trump's open disrespect for these people and their unearned positions upset them so greatly.

It would probably help to clarify what is meant by "upper class", since it gets applied to anything from tech billionaires to regional business gentry to second string journalists at mid-tier outlets.

People I don’t like, of course.

I’ve no doubt that there exists a class of rent-seeking nouveau riche with a taste for Continental aesthetics. Many of them surely endorse high immigration, humanities educations, and the perennial pastime of scoffing at proles. By merit of their wealth, they no doubt wield outsize influence on the course of the Democratic Party.

But how many of them are there, really? How much of the Democrat platform hinges on these elites, rather than on the modern sensibilities of America’s middle class?

Those are some fair points. I won’t contest that stereotypical Democrat beliefs owe a lot to the opinions of an actual elite. What bothers me is the insinuation that believing such things implies upper-class status.

My intuition is that most of these thought-leaders, the journalists, creatives, and academics—most of them shouldn’t be rated as an “upper class.” They have their own elites, but most will never be household names. They won’t handle more money than a company accountant or direct more people than a blue-collar floor manager. Organized religion is a good comparison. Most local preachers don’t qualify as an elite, even though they hew closely to an elite-approved doctrine. But gosh, it sure is nice to dunk on the whole edifice whenever Joel Osteen does something distasteful.

I think such a bait-and-switch was pretty explicit in Maiq’s post. He’s using everyone’s favorite punching bag, Hillary, as a stand-in for the whole outgroup. Weak men are superweapons, I guess.

How much of the Democrat platform hinges on these elites, rather than on the modern sensibilities of America’s middle class?

That's sort of what I'm getting at. Anti-elitist rhetoric is fairly central to populism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the object of that rhetoric are actually elite or upper class in any meaningful sense, as opposed to merely being political adversaries. (It doesn't help that Americans are simultaneously obsessed with success and embarrassed by it, so we'll do tremendous backflips to explain how we're just a working Joe despite making six figures and living in a house that arguably qualifies as a palace). Urban professionals may have different values than suburban small business owners, but identifying them as upper class seems like a stretch.

If we take the sort of people who get jobs in the media or accademia as representative (a dangerous assumption I'll admit) I would say that the class "rent-seeking nouveau riche with a taste for Continental aesthetics" represent the bulk of the DNC or at the very least it's public face.

I wouldn't describe those as rent-seeking, neither in the traditional, landowning sense nor a more modern position atop the stock market. "Nouveau riche" doesn't seem right, either, for a class which is effectively trading off earning potential for a chance to be a Thought Leader. At least by the time they get that PhD, academics have given up hope on being the financial elite.

No, I'm talking about the Pelosi-type. Relatively new to wealth and power, perhaps immigrants or their children. Heavily invested in a neoliberal worldview. Played the American system to its full effect, especially including the stock or real estate markets. Little incentive to rock the boat with progressive zeal, and very little concern for the potential downsides of neoliberal policy.

When people talk about coastal elites, are they talking about Sanders, or are they thinking of Soros?

As someone who knows little about economics, I am curious about how much the various economic metrics actually correspond to quality of life. Certainly I feel that there is good reason to be a bit suspicious about such metrics in general. They inevitably simplify complex realities, they can be cherry-picked by biased "experts", and then there is Goodhart's law.

I see that much of the US heartland looks like a hollowed-out place with few jobs other than at the McDs, gas station, farm, army base, or prison and with massive drug abuse issues. I see how many of the good jobs are concentrated in a few cities. I see the housing crises in the desirable cities. I see the difficulties that people who are not in the upper tiers of birth fortune and/or intelligence have in getting decent jobs. I see how little vacation time working Americans usually get. But when I write all of this, I also know that there is a huge amount of economic success that such a picture misses. There is also a great deal of affluence, success, and dynamism in America.

Overall, I feel that it is hard for me to get a good picture of how well America really is doing economically.

Certainly I feel that there is good reason to be a bit suspicious about such metrics in general. They inevitably simplify complex realities, they can be cherry-picked by biased "experts", and then there is Goodhart's law.

This is an extremely good point that I think a lot of people fail to respect or notice.

That said, if you're looking for a statistical metric that's harder to game, I find that energy/electricity usage per capita is a really good indicator.

Out of curiosity, did proof-of-work crypto show up on such metrics?

I would hope that its electric waste would be dwarfed by industrial processes like aluminum smelting, but I don’t really have an intuition for it.

The chart I'm using is https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&facet=entity&country=~USA - it has Y-Combinator and Oxford at the bottom so I'm assuming this data hasn't just been pulled entirely out of someone's ass and is actually from the EIA.

But to answer your question - no. When you look at the chart the US economy suffered a big hit in 2007 and has not actually gotten back to that point. Something happened in 2020 that made energy usage per person go down a lot (gee, I wonder what that could be? cough cough) but the overall trend is that the US economy never actually recovered from the 2007 GFC in any real way - which is consistent with the hypothesis that the "recovery" was both unevenly distributed and in some part consisted of statistical chicanery.

Interesting--thanks!

I'm not sure what to think about the metric. It makes sense that more energy spent = more industrial output = more material prosperity. Some parts track pretty well: sustained growth through the 90s. Dips after the OPEC crisis, dot-com bubble, Recession, and COVID.

But...did the end of the 70s really collapse harder than all of those combined? By this chart, American quality of life peaked during either the OPEC crisis or the Carter years. I'm not sure I know anyone who voted in that election and feels the same way.

Conversely, where's the Nixon Shock? "Stagflation" dates back to 1970, which according to this plot, is barely a delay in skyrocketing prosperity.

This metric is much harder to game, but I don't find it very easy to interpret.

But...did the end of the 70s really collapse harder than all of those combined? By this chart, American quality of life peaked during either the OPEC crisis or the Carter years. I'm not sure I know anyone who voted in that election and feels the same way.

The 70s was when the US hit peak domestic conventional oil production. Petroleum is the lifeblood of modern industrial economies, and when you can no longer produce enough of it domestically you're forced to go elsewhere. Throw in the oil embargo of the 1970s and you've got a recipe for a truly brutal economic contraction. While the Petrodollar system implemented afterwards did actually provide a lot more cheap energy, the costs associated with it are substantially higher(the US enforces the petrodollar militarily, and last I checked the US military was very expensive), and as energy is the basis for effectively all economic activity, increases in the price of energy ripple through the entirety of society.

While you're totally right that it doesn't track quality of life perfectly, part of that is due to the distribution of the pain - and part of it is thanks to the massive outsourcing project that the US embarked on. The US used substantially less energy per person because a lot of consumer goods were being manufactured in a variety of developing world sweatshops with brutal labour practices and no pesky environmental protection regulations, as opposed to local manufacture. If you live in the privileged classes of the USA (to borrow someone else's classification, if you earn a salary rather than a wage), you would have seen your quality of life actually improve - products made in China are much cheaper than ones made in the USA after all. Of course, if you're someone who lives in small-town, flyover America you didn't see any recovery from the 1970s. Instead, you saw the factories which gave your town stable employment get shipped off to China and replaced with malign neglect of local infrastructure and fentanyl addictions - I'd argue that those parts of the country most definitely did not recover from the 1970s depression in any real way.

Depends on what you mean by "quality of life." If quality of life corresponds to revealed preferences, then people in the heartland are getting more of the things they want than ever and are therefore enjoying a better quality of life than ever. But it so happens that what they want is meth and McDonalds.

If by "quality of life" you mean "the things that people should want," then that's a harder question. We'd have to come up with an objective way of figuring out what people "should" want, and then measure whether they're getting more or less of that.

I don't think it is a hard question unless you want it to be.

Similar to how it is universally preferable to have friends and not constantly fear for ones life, I think it's universally preferable to have easy access to housing. And I think access to housing trumps nigh every other need outside of food and water.

It seems to me we can have a very simple baseline definition of 'quality of life' and come away with the fact that a 'good economy' doesn't matter in any meaningful sense to a lot of people.

Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky

How about neither?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pg

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pi

As far as major economic trends, nothing seems to have even changed when Trump was elected. These graphs show % change from 1 year prior, but they're easy to modify to show raw level or whatever else. I guess he was "lucky" in the sense of being elected after the recovery was well under way but even that seems like a stretch.

Data proves me point he got the economy just a tad hotter than it ran before. We are talking fraction of percents more.

I don't see that in these data; any change is likely noise. And even if there were such a change at approximately the correct time, you can't just read causality off of a timeseries graph.

edit: If anything, the decline in unemployment slows slightly after 2016, though this jut because it's approaching the lower bound at that point.

  1. As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.

The reasons for a "national divorce" aren't necessarily economic. Much more important are

  1. The ability to do smaller scale experiments in policy. We could see first hand what a Western country with low immigration looks like, or what the consequences of school choice writ large are.
  2. Having competition between states for highly productive people forces the states to treat them well. Right now the only real choice for many highly skilled people is to work under U.S. law and taxes.

Don't forget that the pain of a national divorce would absolutely not be evenly distributed. If you're a member of a population that's disadvantaged by the current arrangement and could do much better without it, supporting a national divorce is absolutely in your best interest even if it would be bad for the "economy" as a whole. This is one of the reasons that making sure your internal proletariat get a voice at the table and a share of the goodies is so important.

The problem is it’s a huge drag on economies of scale. A big reason tech is US is because it’s easy to scale domestically. And it even matters for a lot of manufacturers to have a certain market size to make buying a million dollar machine for a niche product.

I mean, you could have a new confederacy and a progressive paradise and they’d both be huge.

Shale was a major mistake by the US. Shale oil is short lived compared to conventional oil with high decline rates and is expensive to extract. The shale boom will not be a long term solution. Shale caused a 10-20 year boom which will be followed by a decline. Meanwhile, the US is missing valuable years transitioning away from fossil fuels. The world is building public transit and high speed rail at record rates, the US is investing in short term shale oil as its long term energy solution. Cheap natural gas has allowed for construction of energy inefficient buildings and a lack of investment in efficient heating/cooling systems. The US is seriously lagging behind in walkable and bikeable cities due to cheap gas. Even when it comes to electric vehicles the US is somewhat behind

As for the energy grid, the US is lagging behind in nuclear with an older fleet of reactors than Europe and only 1 of 60 reactors planned for construction in the world are in the US. The US is lagging behind in renewables, and overall investments in the energy transition

The shale boom absolutely benefited the US. However, other parts of the world have ripped of a sizeable chunk of the bandaid regarding getting off fossil fuels.

The same entities that oppose shale also make nuclear expensive and hydro and everything. While there are some genuine green activists that would be happy with decarbonization, there are many more who use that as an excuse for the real goal of de-electrification.

As someone who considers themselves a green activist, de-electrification isn't really the goal per se.

The problem is that the cut-off date for a smooth, clean and orderly transition away from using fossil fuels is the far-off future of...1974. De-electrification isn't a goal anymore than having a car stop when it runs out of gas is a goal. There's no energy source that can take the place of petroleum and fossil fuels - nothing has the massive amounts of existing infrastructure, body of knowledge, energy density and EROEI to take their place, and the costs of retrofitting our society with the technology required to maintain current living standards with the far lower energy budget that renewables provide are so massive that it would not be possible from within the constraints of the current society.

Shale in particular is a really bad idea, because it has incredibly high depletion rates, lower EROEI than regular crude and causes substantial environmental damage. Those costs might not show up on a fracking company's balance sheet, but those consequences will show up elsewhere in society, in the form of less usable farmland, medical issues, water-pollution, etc. The main reason that shale looks good at the moment is the combination of unaccounted externalities, incredibly low interest rates/money-printing and a paucity of conventional light, sweet crude. This isn't a case of the environmentalists just wanting less electricity usage because civilisation is bad, but more along the lines of pointing out that eating the seed corn is actually a bad idea rather than a brand new strategy that older people were too dumb to see the benefits of, even if you have a new accounting system which claims that there's nothing wrong with eating said seed corn.

The main reason that shale looks good at the moment is the combination of unaccounted externalities, incredibly low interest rates/money-printing and a paucity of conventional light, sweet crude.

Is this a copypasta from a couple of years ago? The Fed has been raising rates for a while now.

The majority of the shale oil boom took place during that period - and even then there were a lot of problems.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/shales-bust-shows-basis-of-boom-debt-debt-and-debt/2020/07/22/0e6ed98c-cc41-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html

The production boom propelled the U.S. to become the world’s largest producer of both oil and gas. But in doing so, explorers burned through some $342 billion of cash since 2010, leaving little in the way of returns for investors. The biggest oilfield service and equipment companies invested roughly $85 billion in their businesses over the past decade, only to see their earnings fall by $4.7 billion and net debt climb by $19 billion in that same period, according to an Evercore study in February.

There's some good stuff in the article, but this chart alone was even worse than I thought it would be:

(chart should go here, not sure if it is being formatted correctly?)

This really does not look like a healthy, thriving and profitable energy sector to me. That said, I haven't found good data that reaches the current year - maybe the industry has managed to recover and start generating healthy profits, but I really don't think so.

/images/1689832993043623.webp

Your article is about how shale producers were in trouble when energy use (and thus oil prices) were way down due to COVID. Oil prices were rather significantly higher before, and now.

I think it was an accurate descriptor when a lot of shale infrastructure was getting built, but yeah, weird if he’s talking about current development.

Even if I took all of your post as sincere and true, I'd still be running into confusion as to why the environmental movement has caused nuclear to 10x in price, inflation adjusted. The confusion isn't, "why does this particular person dislike shale?" It is, "why does the general movement of people who dislike shale also dislike nuclear?"

You appear to have a specific view on shale that is far more specific and niche than 99.99% of people who oppose shale could ever express. I like shale because it is an avenue that circumvents the anti-energy caucus for now. I am in favor of all cheap energy, hydro, coal, oil, shale, etc. As long as it foils the anti-energy people, and keeps us advancing towards a day where energy is actually sustainable, I am good. The people who think they can force it via regulation are evil or naive. So called "green" energy is already overinvested, and mostly rubbish.

@Amadan

I was asked to volunteer mod/rate this post even though it was a reply to me from someone I was actively debating. I marked it as neutral, but this seems like unwanted behavior that could be ripe for abuse and I wanted to report it. (sorry for the ping anti dan)

Yeah, it's not ideal, and I want to fix it, we just haven't gotten around to it yet.

I am sort of entertained by it because it's a good way to tell if someone can separate a bad post from someone they're disagreeing with. Kind of tempted to make it more likely, not less likely.

Actually @ZorbaTHut would be the one to ping. I don't think this is a big deal, personally - yeah, someone might occasionally get asked to volunteer-mod a post that was arguing with him, but even if you always chose "Yes, definitely bad!" you aren't the only one looking at it, and mods have final say, so there's not that much opportunity to game the system.

(fwiw, I think @anti_dan is being more hostile than necessary, with the thinly-veiled implication that you are being insincere and disingenuous, but I don't think it rises to the level of requiring a mod warning. This time.)

To be clear. I was not implying that, I was instead conveying that his viewpoint appears to be so rare in the general meatspace that it is hard to engage with unless he lays out a 10000 word manifesto explaining all his theories causes and effects, etc.

Even if I took all of your post as sincere and true

For the record, I am being entirely sincere - and, to the best of my knowledge, true.

I'd still be running into confusion as to why the environmental movement has caused nuclear to 10x in price, inflation adjusted. The confusion isn't, "why does this particular person dislike shale?"

I don't believe the environmental movement has caused nuclear to inflate in price to such an absurd degree, but the position I take on nuclear is simple: show me the money. If it was possible to actually generate nuclear power sustainably and profitably, why hasn't anyone done it yet? How has the western environmentalist movement managed to trick every single government on the planet, including ones who are manifestly and directly opposed to them and the horse they rode in on? Too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power has been just a few years in the future for the entirety of my life, and it would be such a geopolitical game-changer that there's no way even the US government would ignore it. Can you honestly and earnestly say that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei are all so terrified of the US environmental movement that they are turning down technology that would immediately and dramatically change the geopolitical balance of power in their favour and crush the petrodollar? The environmental movement cannot even get western governments to agree to slow down the rate of increase of fossil fuel consumption, but they have a total veto over this kind of technology across the entire world? I can't see any way to square this circle, when the answer "It just isn't economical" explains it perfectly.

It is, "why does the general movement of people who dislike shale also dislike nuclear?"

Pollution and environmental damage is the unifying concern for the "general movement" as far as I can tell. If you believe that those sources of energy are only profitable because of unaccounted-for externalities, making them more expensive via regulation et al is an extremely sensible goal, and actually optimal in the long term.

I like shale because it is an avenue that circumvents the anti-energy caucus for now. I am in favor of all cheap energy, hydro, coal, oil, shale, etc. As long as it foils the anti-energy people, and keeps us advancing towards a day where energy is actually sustainable, I am good.

This is an incredibly dangerous and short-sighted belief! How confident are you that those energy sources are not bridges to nowhere or have ultimate costs which leave us further behind? I'm extremely confident that shale in particular falls into this category - an illusion that looks worthwhile simply because the actual costs have been converted into externalities that aren't accounted for, on top of being in a financial system which distorts economic realities and conditions. I believe the rationalist community term for this concept is "deceptive local maxima" but I may have just imagined this.

So called "green" energy is already overinvested, and mostly rubbish.

Green energy is far from overinvested - hydro and geothermal in particular seem like fertile ground for future investment, but you're right that it is mostly rubbish. Renewable energy sources simply cannot provide the same amount of energy fossil fuels do, and the lifestyles they can sustainably and comfortably support are most definitely not the incredibly extravagant ones that people in first world societies currently live. But that doesn't mean they're overinvested when you view them in the proper context. To use a metaphor I've stolen from someone else, a parachute is a terrible investment. You lower the resale value the moment you get it out of the box, you're gonna have trouble using it more than once, and ultimately you're going to be losing money on the purchase. But if you're aware that you're going to be pushed out of a plane at high altitude tomorrow morning, the parachute looks like a much smarter purchase than some FAANG shares.

I disagree with a lot of what you've said, but I appreciate you saying it here and explaining your stance clearly. I see you're kind of getting dogpiled by people who disagree, but I've learned a bit about green activist viewpoints from all your interactions here. Thank you.

For what it’s worth, nuclear does push the border of too-cheap-to-meter. The cost per megawatt is pretty low, and the high cost of shutdown and spinup makes operators want to keep it running. So they tend to bid it pretty low in energy markets, roughly comparable to renewable sources. Certainly much lower than combined-cycle natural gas.

I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this front. Can you show me the nuclear power system that can run sustainably and profitably without government subsidies? As far as I can tell this doesn't exist anywhere on Earth, and the French nuclear system is currently being nationalised by the government due to the massive amounts of debt they had to take on (for what it's worth, I think that if a power generating system is taking on copious amounts of unsustainable debt to the point it requires nationalisation, it probably isn't very profitable).

I'd actually go so far as to say that in 2023, there are no non-fossil fuel power systems that can be run sustainably without government subsidies. And even then, governments are playing a global game where the flow of fossil fuels are tied to geopolitics.

I was working in China during the Great Solar Adoption. Endless fields of them, blanketing dozens upon dozens of factories. What they don't tell you is that photovoltaics are incredibly toxic to handle, dispose of, and manufacture, they require regular cleaning before the efficiency generation drops precipitously, they don't last anywhere near what they're supposed to and produce incredible amounts of dangerous e-waste. They were only adopted because of incredibly generous government tax benefits and subsidies, as well as awards for reaching a significant % of total power generation from solar, and kickbacks to companies manufacturing solar panels.

Current state of renewables simply don't scale, not if we want to maintain the same quality of life. Maintain, not improve. There is no solution. You can shit up people's quality of life, but you'll get pushback, especially as the shit won't be evenly applied.

Honestly the only energy sources I have hope for are geothermal and nuclear. And nuclear has a long list of caveats in that even in the face of overwhelming security precautions, black swan events can have outsized disparate impact. I hope we crack fusion regardless.

There is definitely a way to make our world much more ecologically sustainable - bomb all non-agrarian Third World countries to glass. If "degrowth mindset" is in vogue, might as well go all the way and yank the ladder out from countries seeking to take advantage of readily accessible cheap fuel to industrialize.

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or have ultimate costs which leave us further behind

What sort of costs do you have in mind?

If you are thinking of abandoned wells, this is certainly something that oil companies would rather skip -- but the tech is well understood, and in no way does the cost overwhelm the value of the well's lifetime production. It's a hole in the ground -- you fill it with cement and walk away. This procedure is performed multiple times during the development of the well, it's nothing crazy.

Groundwater corruption is the one that immediately jumps out at me. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-contaminate-drinking-water/ Who the fuck knows what the long-term consequences of shoving all these toxic chemicals into groundwater are going to be? We're already seeing it fuck up drinking water and wells in the region, and I think that sacrificing a bunch of perfectly usable farmland forever (or spending immense amounts of money and resources on cleanup/mitigation efforts) in exchange for some low EROEI fossil fuels is one of the worst trade deals in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.

I was going to go with my usual "this complaint is bullshit and proves that you have no idea how oil wells work" response -- but of course this being the Motte I am morally compelled to RTFA!

And I'm so glad I did -- they've constructed a marvelous motte:

He published a comprehensive, peer-reviewed study last week in Environmental Science and Technology that suggests that people’s water wells in Pavillion were contaminated with fracking wastes that are typically stored in unlined pits dug into the ground.

So the bailey on this complaint is usually something like "fracking formations several thousands of meters underground which are capped by impermeable layers (a big part of the reason they contain hydrocarbons!) somehow bleeds up into groundwater aquifers that are more like hundreds of feet -- I'll grant that there probably sometime in history exists a case where a casing/cement failure resulted in direct groundwater contamination from a fracking operation, but it's very much in the best interests of the drilling crew to avoid this so it's certainly very rare; by no means a "cost of doing business" for the process.

There never was much of a motte, but now (!) a researcher finds some badly built settling ponds leaching into the groundwater! The bad (?) news is that this is by no means inherent to the process either, and probably a major EPA violation -- modern operations line their pits with EPDM, on pain of prosecution.

So yeah -- contaminating groundwater is bad! The thing is, lots of industries have instances where people occasionally get sloppy and contaminate soil/groundwater! Oil & Gas is pretty good on the whole -- they make so much money they can afford to do stuff like lay down plastic over the entire drilling lease before moving any equipment on there! And test the soil once they are done, trucking any that's been contaminated away for treatment! This is completely routine in the industry! They still make shitloads of money, even on relatively expensive shale gas projects!

So the point is, that "seeing it fuck up drinking water and wells in the region, and ... sacrificing a bunch of perfectly usable farmland forever (or spending immense amounts of money and resources on cleanup/mitigation efforts) in exchange for some low EROEI fossil fuels" is totally not true -- if you think that, it's because you have been exposed to a toxic information environment.

The crucial question vis a vis the discussion at hand is this: would knowing what I've just told you (hypothetically; assume that I am someone who has worked on the ground in this industry and that you trust, instead of an anonymous rando on a forum full of weirdos) change your mind about shale gas being a bad idea -- or does your true objection lie elsewhere?

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This is an incredibly dangerous and short-sighted belief! How confident are you that those energy sources are not bridges to nowhere or have ultimate costs which leave us further behind?

If they're bridges to nowhere, they've at least kept us warm now. Ultimate costs which leave us further behind? Has never happened on more than a regional level, very rarely on more than a local one. The world would not be better off without coal power, hydro power, or nuclear power despite the various problems associated with all of them. On the other hand, anti-energy is not just a bridge to nowhere, it's just stopping. You're not going to advance anything once you're shivering in the dark, with no shipping, no air travel, on a calorie-restricted diet and the way out of this is well-known (burn fuel) but the environmentalist elite won't let you use it.

If they're bridges to nowhere, they've at least kept us warm now.

"Sure this bridge stops halfway across the canyon, but at least it has kept me moving forward for now!" is not actually a compelling argument against my point.

The world would not be better off without coal power, hydro power, or nuclear power despite the various problems associated with all of them.

This has never been my contention, even to the point that I explicitly supported hydro power! But the problem with fossil fuels specifically is that they aren't renewable on any scale or timeline that matters to people, and as they decline our total energy budget will go down as well. I'm not suggesting that we stop using them at all, and anyone who did stop would be immediately outcompeted by people who did. I think a better way to get across my view here would be a financial metaphor.

Say you won the lottery one day - you got a massive lump sum with tons of money. You quit your job and stop making money the way you used to, and just live off this giant pile of savings, a giant pile which is not going to be renewed. My contention is that you should save a bunch of this money for the future - maybe there's a really great investment opportunity coming in the future that requires a substantial amount of capital. My position is that you absolutely should not waste this sudden windfall in a spree of profligate spending under the assumption that you can just win the lottery again. When the "economic elite" tells you that you should save a bunch of money for the future and retool your lifestyle so that you're not spending so much money that you'll run out well before you die of old age, are they just unaware that your second lottery win is right around the corner?

To abandon the metaphor, how confident are you that the hypothetical energy-generating technologies of the future aren't going to require a significant investment of energy to get them fully integrated into society in a usable way? Think about the immense costs associated with completely ripping out the petroleum-based infrastructure in the US and replacing it with something more sustainable. That's a massive economic undertaking and right now the US government cannot even maintain basic infrastructure in broad swathes of the country, let alone go on massive civic improvement projects. Hell, even the late Romans were capable of building border walls!

"Sure this bridge stops halfway across the canyon, but at least it has kept me moving forward for now!" is not actually a compelling argument against my point.

The analogy has been pushed past its useful point. If various energy technologies do not in fact lead to a glorious carbon-free renewable future, they are still useful in they keep us warm and -- assuming arguendo we do need to reach this glorious carbon-free renewable future -- able to look for other ways to get there.

To abandon the metaphor, how confident are you that the hypothetical energy-generating technologies of the future aren't going to require a significant investment of energy to get them fully integrated into society in a usable way?

I'm sure they will requires an investment of energy. But if they're a good investment and industrial society is still functioning, it will be available. And that's a lot more likely if we don't impose austerity plans to "save" the shale in the ground.

That's a massive economic undertaking and right now the US government cannot even maintain basic infrastructure in broad swathes of the country, let alone go on massive civic improvement projects. Hell, even the late Romans were capable of building border walls!

Spare me the rhetorical talking points. The US not only can but does maintain basic infrastructure (and more than basic) in the vast majority of the country. There are exceptions for various political and economic reasons, but none would somehow prevent the introduction of a new method of power generation, nor would any amount of "saving" make those exceptions better.

If nukes and fossil fuels aren't bridge tech we are doomed to revert to pre industrial life anyways.

Hydro is nice, but most the good spots are already taken, and environmentalists oppose it as well.

Geothermal is proving hard. Again, we need bridge tech, which is nukes and fossil fuels. This isn't like a parachute. The environmental movement is like stabbing yourself in the leg in the middle of the desert and pouring out your canteen. Maybe it's impossible to make it to fusion or cheap, reliable, high capacity batteries. But you should try. And trying means growth.

Plus, climate change concerns are silly if greens are correct about green energy. If the tech actually worked we could set CO2 levels to whatever we wanted on a yearly basis.

Geothermal is proving hard. Again, we need bridge tech, which is nukes and fossil fuels. This isn't like a parachute. The environmental movement is like stabbing yourself in the leg in the middle of the desert and pouring out your canteen. Maybe it's impossible to make it to fusion or cheap, reliable, high capacity batteries. But you should try. And trying means growth.

To use a metaphor from elsewhere in the rationalist space, picture yourself at the bottom of a mountain range, the high peaks covered with clouds and impossible to clearly see from the ground. You have enough supplies to climb up one or two of the mountains - how confident are you that you're going to climb up a mountain which has a rest-area that allows you to recover and resupply before journeying further upwards? If it turns out that fusion is indeed a boondoggle which cannot support society, then spending energy and resources trying to reach it is a terrible idea when those resources could be saved for another, more promising project.

How confident are you that nuclear is the technology of the future, as opposed to something like finding a way to use zero point energy? How certain are you that nuclear power isn't something that can only be economically exploited by a society with access to far more energy and technology than we have now? From where I'm standing you have an awful lot of work ahead of you if you want to actually make the claim that it is nuclear or bust, and that claim seems to me like it is at the heart of your position here. If we live in the kind of world that I'm positing (and there's a decent chance we are!) then just "trying" like you're suggesting is actually the path to primitive existence that you've been trying to avoid.

Plus, climate change concerns are silly if greens are correct about green energy. If the tech actually worked we could set CO2 levels to whatever we wanted on a yearly basis.

If we reach that level then there is no point discussing energy because we have effectively become a post scarcity society and can just do whatever we want. That hypothetical future is effectively post singularity and impossible to talk about in any real way.

In your mountain range analogy, you have to add the caveat that you also starve to death if you just stay in the valley. Which is what you are proposing.

there are many more who use that as an excuse for the real goal of de-electrification.

Like some sort of primitivists? I go with mistake theory, I think it's more that leftism is virtually ignorant of the concept of trade offs. Any negatives are because of a lack of will; just get the right people in power and spend money and we can have zero carbon energy for our dense, walkable, clean, safe, cities.

As far as I can tell the environmental movement wants us to repent for our sins of overindulgence by dramatically scaling back our consumption. Whether or not a proposed regulation actually helps the environment is of little relevance. For an example, see plastic bag bans.

It doesn't matter that the "reusable" bags mandated for sale are far more carbon intensive and contain far more plastics than the flimsy plastic bags they've been mandated to replace. It doesn't matter if you know that none of the trash in your region is transported by barge. The true aim of the ban is to curb the sin of consuming disposable plastics. If an environmentalist were looking at a spreadsheet of plastic bag consumption before and after a ban, and they saw a 5% drop, they'd count it as a win, regardless of the fact that post-ban bags are about 30 grams and pre-ban are 5 grams. On a materials basis you'd break even when you reduced consumption to 16% of what it once was.

Google for plastic bag ban effectiveness and all you'll see supporters pointing to are bag counts: www.google.com/search?q=plastic+bag+ban+effectiveness

None are claiming a drop in consumption large enough to offset the extra materials.

They seem completely uninterested in fixes that enable current levels of consumption to continue while mitigating or eliminating environmental impacts.

Have a look at what certain people in the UK see as a viable and desirable vision for the future:

https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/75916920-51f6-4f9c-ade5-52cbf55d5e73/content

Page 6 has a quick chart that explains their vision. No meat, no shipping, no airports, much less heating, much less road use, massive austerity in construction. They're big on electricity production though. And all of this (a 20-30 year Greater Depression) comes with an enormous price tag and mobilization of national resources! An apocalyptic vision if ever there was one.

Perhaps. But a lot of the green activists talk about the need to reduce the number of humans we have.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49601678

I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think this is the best fallacy for your argument.

Texas is both a leader in shale and wind energy. Also has a Tesla battery factor. Even if you are right for when shale oil production will fall the energy people have pursued both paths at the same time.

I agree, I think the us should be deploying reactors asap, although I think the above poster vastly overstates the problems with shale oil. Shales are outrageously abundant in the US and break even costs remain far below current oil prices. https://www.statista.com/statistics/748207/breakeven-prices-for-us-oil-producers-by-oilfield/

(This is during a time period characterized by lots of inflation in the materials needed to frac)

Not to mention shale = a stepping stone to tech and regulations for geothermal

Which there was just had an announcement on: https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-technology-breakthrough-in-next-generation-geothermal/

How much of this is just higher euro interest rates to cope with PIGS debt and the euro not being the worlds reserve currency?

  1. The US is the only major developed country (excl. Eastern Bloc) where living standards have significantly improved since 2008. This is pretty undeniable and economists have argued and will continue to argue about why this is (there are wider reasons like tech acting as a lightning rod to create huge foreign investor inflows into US markets after the comparatively worse 2000-2008 period when EM and to a lesser extent Eurozone growth was all the rage). My suspicion has always been that Poland, Romania and other EE countries entering the common market, plus the depth of the debt crisis and resulting youth unemployment in the PIGS countries, flooded labor markets in Northern/Western Europe with enough cheap labor that wages remained extremely depressed in a kind of doom cycle even in the richer parts of Europe throughout the 2009-2020 period. You only need a relatively small relative increase in immigration to depress pay significantly (see Canada vs the US, for example).

  2. The outperformance of the US versus the EU doesn't have anything to do with the EU's governing structure, Brussels, or anything related to it. Even its relation to the ECB is limited, the ECB was not in any major sense more irresponsible than the Fed since 2011 (there are some big regulatory problems, but not 'the economy is stagnant because of this'). The deep problems with European entrepreneurial culture, extremely hard-to-access capital, low social mobility between the middle class and genuinely rich and a population largely willing to coast on its current wealth can't be fixed by central banks or supranational organizations - or at least not reasonably, and not solely.

    They can't even (and this is something fewer people say) be fixed merely by pressing the 'more capital' button, because a big problem is that quality new businesses simply aren't being started in great enough numbers. If you speak to Spaniards and Italians about their golden age of cheap debt in like 2004-2007 they'll tell you that it was stuff like a couple, aged 35, who wanted to start a bed-and-breakfast or a restaurant in their dead little town being lent €800,000 euros by BMPS or whoever. It wasn't going to things that were ever going to generate real economic growth.

For whatever reason, Americans want to be rich more than Europeans do. You notice this even in casual conversation. In America, money is everything, and the acquisition of more money is a driving force in the personal motivation of the vast, vast majority of the population. In Europe, perhaps because status is more multifaceted, perhaps because the baseline social safety net is nicer, perhaps because economic growth has been slower for longer, perhaps for many other reasons, this isn't the case. Sure, people still 'want to be rich', the same way the average fat American 'wants to be skinny', but they don't do anything about it. This is underestimated as a cause of the divergence between the EU/Europe and US.

The outperformance of the US versus the EU doesn't have anything to do with the EU's governing structure

I disagree. Europe's problem is too much fragmentation. That makes everything from fundraising to intra-European trade (especially in services!) harder. But the solution - full fiscal and political federalism - is simply unacceptable to Northern countries as the South is seen as overindebted and lazy. Yes, these are stereotypes, but they are very much live.

To some extent it's fragmentation, but that fragmentation isn't the result of policy, it's the result of thousands upon thousands of years of history for vastly different peoples. The most salient difference is language and that's not something the EU can legislate its way out of.

The US is the only major developed country (excl. Eastern Bloc) where living standards have significantly improved since 2008.

I'm gonna need you to substantiate this claim.

Can you name a counter-example? Australia is the largest I can think of, but even there, growth has been slower since 2014 while the US has pulled ahead, so I think I'm still right.

Australia's GDP per capita is significantly higher than in 2008

South Korea's GDP per capita is significantly higher than in 2008

Germany's GDP per capita is significantly higher than in 2008.

Probably there are other examples, but 3 should do.

Germany is 10% since 2008. That isn’t “significantly higher”. Australia looks like it went from 54 to 61 in that time period. Also NOT significantly higher. This is 14 years and sub 1% yearly increase.

Are you genuinely claiming that living standards have substantially improved in Germany since 2008? I'm unsure whether you understand my question, it's not a pure GDP/capita play.

As for Germany:

As of 2021, the average annual wage of Germany was 43,722 euros per year, a growth of over 6,000 Euros when compared with 2000.

So a growth of 6,000 euros since 2000. In the US, which started the century at a similar level, per capita increases in average income sum to approximately 300% of that figure.

Well, I invited you to explain what exactly you were claiming and you didn't really clarify. If gdp per capita isn't what you're talking about, what is? And what do you mean by "substantial"?

If not GDP, what kind of metric do you have in mind?

I’m not sure I’m following the Germany example. Regardless of how it stacks up to our apparent €18,000 growth, it’s still a 16% improvement. Is that not significant?

True, and a good example. I was thinking about whether to add 'Western' but didn't.

I still think it's true that the US economy is visibly doing better than developed European economies, both in statistics and anecdotes.

But 'access to good and services' still is improving in europe - they can buy the latest iphones, the latest cheap TVs, use all of our nice internet services, etc! Most quality of life improvements in america are at least partially exported to Europe because there's profit to be made there too!

I still think it's true that the US economy is visibly doing better than developed European economies, both in statistics and anecdotes.

I don't think anyone is arguing against that more modest claim.

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I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus most building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant are trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue.

I think a bigger factor is that this success goes directly against the carbon-reduction platform that is important to much of the Democratic party base. Democrats are not too keen to paint any fossil energy extraction as anything but an economic negative and ate a lot of criticism over things like blocking Keystone XL, even if from time to time they quietly throw their environmentalist base under the bus when it comes to opening federal lands for drilling. But politically, fossil fuels are "bad", and good things can't be caused by bad things, therefore shale oil and gas can not be responsible for positive economic developments. Lucky for them, the press is generally fine with not talking about the double-think taking place because stoking environmental panic is good for their bottom line (and some, I assume, are true believers).

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