It's about time. Good for Samuelson.
As per usual, I'm at a bit of a different place. For instance, there is more than a little of the tone that is the curse of the last several years, the great dichotomies of reasoning: good or evil or, in this case, all or nothing. It's not the overall logic of the piece, granted, but there is the "let's find the engineering solution (and solution is the key word here) before we do anything" about it.
And then there is this:
The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Which, in my experience is the economist and engineering logic at work. Just innocent of all political work, not a little totalistic (I'm tempted to type a worse word but it really doesn't fit). It's totalistic in the sense that the only solutions are one's which do it all and the only way to get that solution is to turn the engineers and/or economists loose to do it.
I am reminded, and this is not a cheap shot, of Plato's philosopher kings.
But the problem is that's another way to say nothing will be done.
The solutions have an inherent political dimension to them; there has to be a general alarm that problems need to be addressed before serious resources can be allocated. And before all those emergent and always collective solutions can emerge.
As I understand the Gore argument, that's what he is trying to do. |
