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Biggest economic howler of them all Biggest economic howler of them all
(5 months later)
I'm surprised none of your correspondents on George Osborne's difficulty with the Reinhart-Rogoff data (Letters: Economic howlers of our time, 23 April) made mention of the carbon bubble you reported a few days earlier (Report, 19 April).I'm surprised none of your correspondents on George Osborne's difficulty with the Reinhart-Rogoff data (Letters: Economic howlers of our time, 23 April) made mention of the carbon bubble you reported a few days earlier (Report, 19 April).
Surely there can be no greater economic howler of our time than to persist with the assumption that Earth's resources and services are so abundant they can be treated as infinite and excluded from the price function.Surely there can be no greater economic howler of our time than to persist with the assumption that Earth's resources and services are so abundant they can be treated as infinite and excluded from the price function.
Price plays a critical role in markets, but the free market is distorted by treating the primary resource as the thing that is "free". The basis of this thinking was the 18th-century Enlightenment, when human population was much lower: the assumptions on how we could use natural resources were workable then. A world population of 500 million using a resource at a rate that would appear to have it last 500 years could be forgiven for thinking 10 generations was sufficiently far away to be ignored. Unfortunately the same resource would be consumed by a 7 billion population in just over 35 years.Price plays a critical role in markets, but the free market is distorted by treating the primary resource as the thing that is "free". The basis of this thinking was the 18th-century Enlightenment, when human population was much lower: the assumptions on how we could use natural resources were workable then. A world population of 500 million using a resource at a rate that would appear to have it last 500 years could be forgiven for thinking 10 generations was sufficiently far away to be ignored. Unfortunately the same resource would be consumed by a 7 billion population in just over 35 years.
The market system has delivered unprecedented human development, but the ecological debt it has built should make discussion on sovereign debt redundant. George Monbiot illustrates some of the difficulties and suspicions that face efforts to make human economy and Earth's ecology symbiotic (Comment, 23 April) but that is what we need to achieve. Few would disagree with the common sense that the Earth is finite. Can we now agree a common morality that our money system should stop pretending that it isn't?
Harold Forbes
Author, How to be a Humankind Superhero: A Manifesto for Individuals to Reclaim A Safe Climate 		The market system has delivered unprecedented human development, but the ecological debt it has built should make discussion on sovereign debt redundant. George Monbiot illustrates some of the difficulties and suspicions that face efforts to make human economy and Earth's ecology symbiotic (Comment, 23 April) but that is what we need to achieve. Few would disagree with the common sense that the Earth is finite. Can we now agree a common morality that our money system should stop pretending that it isn't?
Harold Forbes
Author, How to be a Humankind Superhero: A Manifesto for Individuals to Reclaim A Safe Climate
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