Green Keynesianism and Climate Free Trade Areas by mwomersley

Dear dmossetto, I will, as you recommend, attempt to 2) complete the climate model. However, don’t the organizers recognize that by requiring this exercise in this particular case they are in fact committing a logical category error? Or do normal rules of logic not apply to Climate CoLab? As I said, I’m prepared to make the attempt. I just want to make sure that you’re fully aware that this is a kind of intellectual make-work that you’re enshrining as a contest rule here. I can explain the category error for you if you’d like. As for your item 1), I thought I had linked together several other contests. I explain how my proposal logically facilitates several categories of proposal, and then list example proposals in each category that meet the requirement. If there is something wrong with the way I linked the contests, I am going to need a little help understanding why it’s not acceptable before I revise. Best, Mick Womersley (mwomersley)

Some (gratuitous) notes on the Climate CoLab process so far. 1) There sure are a lot of nutters out there (AKA "nut-jobs" in American English). Most of the proposals are from nutters and the tinfoil hat brigade. 2) The administration and judges are absent, or seem to be entirely absent from the debate so far. This is probably because of the nutters. I hope they appear after the deadline, when proposals are whittled down. 3) The only comments on my proposal so far were confusing and from a "fellow" presumably with some administrative authority administrator (D. Rossetto), who could not then be tracked down for any clarification. I eventually received a helpful email from another fellow. But the initial lack of communication was most unhelpful, and other proposal authors have also complained. 4) The process of writing down my strategic thoughts about solving the combined climate democracy problem, and then revising them over many weeks, has been helpful. Having a word limit and a format has at times felt constraining, but in general I think it has honed my English and forced me to become more concise and understandable. But the original idea of Climate CoLab, that "crowd sourcing" or "collective intelligence" produces better thinking has not so far been borne out. Having had no comments thus far, except the abortive administrative one, all the ideas in this proposal are my own. There's no collective intelligence, because no collective. This is disappointing. 5) The fact that I have a critical audience in mind, however, potential or future commentators, has been helpful.

Finally, a useful comment. I did not know that there ever had been a League of Democracies proposed, and will go research its history and incorporate this into my thinking. But only one truly useful comment in the three months I've been working with MIT Climate CoLab? So much for the value of crowd-sourcing. The comment about systematic structures is also somewhat useful. I'm sorely aware of this deficiency. But I'm trying to produce solutions for a political/economic reality that seems as yet poorly described by anyone, let alone me. Has anyone else applied realism and Keynesianism to the global climate polity? I have more to say that might be helpful, but it isn't well worked out. And there isn't space in the format. I cut a lot of what I had to say out before the judging. I would have loved to have more characters available to me to elaborate my as-yet clumsy understanding of the systematic structural assumptions. But the CoLab format doesn't allow enough space for such things unless you have them worked out very well ahead of time. As to whichever judge gave this pathetic comment: "Hard to see clearly what actions are being proposed...", to be frank, I don't think you even read the piece. I think you have cut-and-pasted this comment from your other responses. There are four actions steps clearly described in the proposal, in four temporal stages, under "What actions do you propose." I have nothing but intellectual scorn for a person that signs up to participate in what is intended to be an effort in collaborative thinking, for whatever reason, only to fail to collaborate at all by not even reading the proposal properly. Did you put "Climate CoLab Judge" on your CV yet? The comment on Keynesian multipliers isn't lazy or ignorant, and clearly is intended to be helpful, but I'm not sure waht to do with it. I understand that mainstream neo-Keynesianism uses general equilibrium models with flexible coefficients. But I'm not sure that this kind of precise modeling is at all influential politically. Does it matter what mainstream modellers do if the politicians are still fighting over austerity versus a weak Keynesianism? Surely if the models were influential we'd have abandoned austerity years ago? If we can begin to make left and centrist politicians aware that there are multipliers to renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, and that the adoption of such measures will begin to starve Putin, the Koch brothers and other fossil elites of resources, that may be as much as we can expect politically. Somewhat likewise, if ecological economics gains popularity, it's likely that we will one day throw out current economic modeling completely, since it has an inappropriate goal -- growth in consumption -- when what we actually want is much more complex -- happiness and other deeper values. I think this is mostly a conceptual mis-match, two different intellectuals that come from different understandings of how the economic/political system works, trying to share an idea for the first time only to find they don't have a common language or assumptions. I think if you and I were to have a conversation about this, it would take us many, many hours to even establish common core understandings of economics and political economy.