Re: [FRIAM] The Brown Underside of Green Technologies WAS: RE: vol 93, issue 22
Speaking as a Troll , Eric is correct and careful with his words, and also paraphrasing Bertrand Russell , Humanity is notoriously bad at anticipating the consequences of its actions. But, and these are my words now , we are very expert at making up fairy tales to explain away our misdeeds. Peggy has indeed found something odd that has potential to involve many other nations. http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/rareearth.pdf As well Investors are marshalling funds globally to do something and exactly what is unclear. Simultaneously Canada is opening new iron ore deposits some of the largest on the planet in the High Arctic.( It was well known but was always assumed to be absurd because of Polar Ice which is now thinning) Greenland and the Danes are expecting to open their own REE mines next door in the south west of Greenland. The Chinese are investing in Arctic shipping and the Russians are already or shortly will be shipping LNG over the top of Siberia. It all converges in the Bering Strait. The link between Iron Ore bodies and REE is unclear. Australia has been of interest to the Chinese for metallurgical Coal, and Iron ore as well as REE. It seems the Chinese are already finding ways to curtail the Neodymium issue by exporting the externalities. Now that is going to force a re-examination of the Fairy Tales now that another Power is playing with the same game rules. BHP is trying to corner the global minerals industry and Potash was only a recent misadventure. Lithium, Scandium as well as Neodymium are all attractive investments. The commercial exploitation of unusual materials appears to be a global free for all, recall Coltan for cell phones in the Congo. War and human atrocities seem to follow these Gold Rush phenomena. I recall something from the past about Rubidium in the Antarctic. When BHP entered Saskatchewan their intention was to create and enormous stockpile close the smaller mines, lay off workers and wait till the price of Potash climbed. In some sense they expected to handle potash like a drug dealer dispenses heroin. Neodymium appears very much like a runaway Coltan http://www.cellular-news.com/coltan/ nightmare made much worse by Western demands for consumer products. Is This a classic case for dismantling the Market Place Wisdom Fables?. One could just as well conclude that the entire North African Revolt is linked to Cell phones . It is a fairy tale to expect costs to stay with the polluter, unless we account for all the innocent victims having absolutely nothing to do with the industry it is a Farce of Awesome proportions. That is so it seems exactly ,the purpose of economic theory, to hide the real costs. Thankfully in time all empires collapse under the weight of delusions and the problems resolve themselves. Not necessarily the way we expect, however. Peggy had a concern and unfortunately I now agree it is valid globally. But the tax concept seems dubious and I suspect something much bigger is required. In the pdf , which I added I was staggered to see the enormous physical territory included within China. One has to wonder when , exploiting REE as an opportunity, would threaten the food production when every dollar gained in one sector would simply reflect permanent losses in others. Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky PhD vbur...@shaw.ca 120-1053 Beaverhill Blvd. Winnipeg,Manitoba, R2J3R2 Canada (204) 2548321 Land (204) 8016064 Cell -Original Message- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith Sent: March-25-11 9:24 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Brown Underside of Green Technologies WAS: RE: vol 93, issue 22 Nick, hi, No boxing of ears. Your use of externalities is right on, and in the spirit of the economists' use of that term in relation to "competition". Both, in this construction, are terms of art. When ordinary people say "competition", perhaps we think of rugby, Go, or Odyssean deception in order to win. In economics, "competition" is codified as the assumption of complete markets. Meaning that, for every action any agent can make, all possible consequences, to everybody, in any states of the world, are known and rationally valued, and are parts of the negotiation of the prices for the contracts that permit that action, which include a complete set of forward contracts for all possible eventualitites to all participants in all states of the world into the indefinite future, whose probabilities are also all correctly known and consistently valued by all participants. Moreover, the action can only be taken when the contract is voluntarily accepted by all, and enforcement of this restraint is sure and also costless. This notion of compete contracts is defined to have "Arrow-Debreu" securities, which is this unimaginably huge and impossible portfolio described above. In that context,
Re: [FRIAM] The Brown Underside of Green Technologies WAS: RE: vol 93, issue 22
Eric, thanks for the passage below. It illuminates a lot for me. As for whether this formally absurd framing has actually captured something useful, we could probably have a long discussion--even economists were chastened by the outcomes of the last few years. After a lot of years of listening to the endless litany of objections that can be (correctly) raised against this notion of "competition", and also seeing that the economists know all this perfectly well and yet (even the honest ones, not just political lackeys or disingenuous ones) continue to speak as they speak, one comes to think that the standardly-heard objections are somehow not responding to the right point. One can read Arrow or Samuelson, who make clear that they understand all this wild unreality, but that they are after something else in it, which they think they correctly capture in spite of the formally absurd framing. It's almost like Bertrand Russell says: "[more or less] Why read philosophy, when all of it is wrong and most of it goes beyond wrongness to the point of being wild nonsense?" and then defends that the value is to capture something that one still can't see through other lenses, and which may yet have some use. "Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and corrupt." Christopher Hitchens FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The Brown Underside of Green Technologies WAS: RE: vol 93, issue 22
Nick, hi, No boxing of ears. Your use of externalities is right on, and in the spirit of the economists' use of that term in relation to "competition". Both, in this construction, are terms of art. When ordinary people say "competition", perhaps we think of rugby, Go, or Odyssean deception in order to win. In economics, "competition" is codified as the assumption of complete markets. Meaning that, for every action any agent can make, all possible consequences, to everybody, in any states of the world, are known and rationally valued, and are parts of the negotiation of the prices for the contracts that permit that action, which include a complete set of forward contracts for all possible eventualitites to all participants in all states of the world into the indefinite future, whose probabilities are also all correctly known and consistently valued by all participants. Moreover, the action can only be taken when the contract is voluntarily accepted by all, and enforcement of this restraint is sure and also costless. This notion of compete contracts is defined to have "Arrow-Debreu" securities, which is this unimaginably huge and impossible portfolio described above. In that context, then, "externality" is the term used to refer to any consequence of a possible action that is not covered, known, or negotiated within a system of complete contracts and self-consistent preferences and expectations. After a lot of years of listening to the endless litany of objections that can be (correctly) raised against this notion of "competition", and also seeing that the economists know all this perfectly well and yet (even the honest ones, not just political lackeys or disingenuous ones) continue to speak as they speak, one comes to think that the standardly-heard objections are somehow not responding to the right point. One can read Arrow or Samuelson, who make clear that they understand all this wild unreality, but that they are after something else in it, which they think they correctly capture in spite of the formally absurd framing. It's almost like Bertrand Russell says: "[more or less] Why read philosophy, when all of it is wrong and most of it goes beyond wrongness to the point of being wild nonsense?" and then defends that the value is to capture something that one still can't see through other lenses, and which may yet have some use. I can't try to suggest a better point of engagement here, because I don't think I could say anything that would be worth the space. Only to try to provide some grammatical fill-in so that the terms in the discussion need not be stumbling blocks in themselves. This entire FRIAM thread seems to have been very much in the practical spirit of trying to engage the question at its appropriate point, which involves power, knowledge, and the difficulties of coordinated action, so who could object to that? All best to all, Eric FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
