On his blog, Greg Mankiw quotes Paul Samuelson:
I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treaties, if I can write its economics textbooks.
It’s fitting for Mankiw, whose “Principles of Economics” is in its tenth edition and one of the most famous economics textbooks in the United States.
Implied in the quote is my personal belief that, over time, politics, economics, and science will align. This notion has comforted me for some time as I struggle to get politicians to acknowledge and act in accordance with climate science and economics. My approach hasn’t been trying to force politicians to act, rather I’ve been trying to facilitate an inevitable alignment to occur sooner than it might otherwise.
I also studied the Soviet Union and understand that politicians can defy basic economics for a long time with terrible consequences—for seven decades in that case—so my efforts have always been cautiously optimistic.
However, as the president implements tariff policies that I, and Mankiw, think will reduce productivity and GDP, I wonder: Why are U.S. politicians so out of alignment with both economics and, in the case of climate change, science?
I suspect part of the answer may be that when politicians derided the shift of manufacturing jobs overseas, we didn’t disagree with them. We should’ve pointed out that when other countries have a comparative advantage and, therefore, produce goods at a lower cost, we should buy those cheaper goods and shift our production to things in which we have a comparative advantage. But we just knowingly accepted that politicians had to say those things.
And that tolerance allowed protectionism to grow. And today, a small group of influential protectionists enable the president to pursue trade policy in clear defiance of economics 101—Samuelson’s adage not-withstanding.
Unfortunately, the lesson for those of us who have worked to align climate science and policy is that alignment is not inevitable. Like trade, our knowing acceptance of politicians delaying action to address climate change due to specific economic interests has positioned us to never respond adequately to it.
But economics endure. The value of global markets lost about $10 trillion in the days following the implementation of the president’s tariff policies. And although climate change is a back-burner issue now, we must not forget that it will cost an estimated to $38 trillion per year by 2030.
Surely the economics alone will cause politicians to act. Let’s hope.