Matt Yglesias embraces dovishness
Another way of looking at this is that we don’t really know what the world will look like in 25 years. But it’s predictable that whatever military challenges we face, they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a better-educated crop of twenty-somethings rather than a worse-educated one. That they’ll be easier to deal with if we have a productive economy with a modern infrastructure than if we don’t. . . . Obviously the long run does you no good if your country can’t defend itself in the short-term, but a strategy based on perpetually higher commitments to defense spending is self-defeating over time.
Worrying obsessively about particular problems you might encounter in the future will undercut your ability to deal with the generalized problems that will definately occur in the future. In general the best way to deal with the future is to work on problems that actually exist today, so that you have more capacity to deal with the unexpected problems of tomorrow. Now to convince the world that this argument applies equally well to the deficit and climate change.
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Tuesday ~ January 11th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
annelidgustator
I love how this post is immediately prior to a post about pricing risk.
Friday ~ January 14th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
walt
The continuing rise in energy prices will affect global warming. Let’s work on the energy problem, but try to avoid solutions which aggravate global warming, including coal and tar sands.