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The costs of economic illiteracy

Discussions around financial literacy abound – and slosh over into the role (and track record) of journalism schools NOT teaching reporters how to educate the public. Or that it’s part of their job, to research a story sufficiently to inform and educate. Which is why we get a vibes election about inflation and the price of eggs. See? Sloshy.

En tout cas,  the Financial Times takes a run at efforts in Finlandia to learn-up their young charges with super-positive reinforcement:

Fully 91 per cent of Finnish students take part in a 10-lesson programme, during which they learn how business, the economy and society work as well as how to apply for a job. Finally, they are let loose in the business village for a day to practice teamwork in their work uniforms, buy drinks and food with the money they earn, and even find out what happens if they spend too much and they need to make emergency cash.

…

“The goal in Finland regarding financial literacy is that people make sustainable and value-creating economic decisions,” said Simo Karvinen, a teacher at Lauttasaari High School for International Business in Helsinki. “These decisions are made in various roles, whether as individuals, in households, in businesses, or almost in all activities within society. Therefore, it’s not just about how to manage your own financial wellbeing and capital.”

Anu Raijas, a financial literacy adviser at the museum of the Finnish central bank who led the writing of the national strategy on financial education, said the Nordic country still had more to do, particularly with women and less-educated young people.

Meanwhile, we’re missing flights trapped in circling robo taxis.

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Fearing the wrong storm

Panicky news media and political opposition frets and pre-surrenders to the prospects of what the next US president will do to climate goals and renewable energy projects. If you’re not accustomed to pushing back, prepare to be pushed around.

A few facts:

The U.S. currently produces more crude oil than any country, ever. What more fracking and drill babying will do to the price oil is an unsolvable mystery.

A powerful bomb cyclone is ripping the Pacific Northwest with hurricane-strength winds as the season’s first atmospheric river comes ashore in Northern California, promising torrential rains, floods and mudslides across the region.

Advanced energy capacity is concentrated in renewables, just ask the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to take massive financial hits from the effects of destructive storms.

What to do with this information (yes, after you stop ignoring it)? Use it to make decisions, including voting, but not just that. But speaking of voting, leaders have to be led to the safe place to do the right thing. Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to create the safe place and lead them there?

It’s almost flattering to think global warming is complicated and difficult to solve.

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Are greenhouse gasses actually a delicious dessert topping AND a floor polish?

NYT runs an ad sponsored content article about AI and Hollywood without once mentioning water or energy usage.

Can’t honestly quote it because it’s so cheerlead-y all the way through, it doesn’t seem to have any other point – and yet it leaves out so many. And Tom Hanks’ concerns about his estate are simply adorable.

The energy usage requirements of super-computing aren’t just downsides. This weird thing no one seems to actually want isn’t possible without massive electricity consumption. See also, bits o’coin.

Image: Inadvertently apropos actual article at Bloomberg today.

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Dollar amounts to muddy waters on global warming

As massive storms cause catastrophic – and catastrophically expensive – damage to the built infrastructure, a weird and unnecessary thing happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen. People make it happen and then make it worse, kind of like global warming:

Although traditional statistical methods cannot quantify the influence of greenhouse gases on rising disaster costs, many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

“A lot of these extremes are really ramped up,” said Adam Smith, the NOAA climatologist who has led the billion-dollar disaster project for more than a decade. “If you want to act like nothing’s happening or it’s minimal, that’s just not the case in what we’ve seen in these extreme events in the United States.”

In September, Smith experienced a billion-dollar disaster firsthand when Hurricane Helene’s record rainfall overflowed the rivers that run through Asheville, N.C., where NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information is located. Smith and the other NCEI employees survived the floods, but the agency’s trove of meteorological data, including the billion-dollar disaster website, was knocked offline and remained inaccessible for weeks.

…

As the billion-dollar disaster tally climbs, the question grows more urgent: Is global warming to blame?

To answer that, it helps to first ask another question: What do scientists really mean when they say that global warming is causing a trend? For that matter, how does scientific knowledge get created in the first place? In the case of the billion-dollar disaster dataset, the answer begins with two self-described weather nerds at NOAA’s office in Asheville.

Come on people. There is no need to use one thing to confuse another. Unless you are trying to do that deliberately, in which case, not okay then.

The point becomes moot in the context of decades-earlier debates on whether it would be too expensive to do anything about global warming, and especially whether those amounts were alarmist. . As these get eclipsed by economic data adjustments and comparisons, the murky, cause-effect-correlation confusion sets in. It seems like a reasonable question to raise. But no more-perfect distraction has been designed than the billion-dollar disaster data set, other than the caveat farm itself where this story was harvested.

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Moving away from cars

As difficult, and complicated, as contemplating the move away from cars might be, it can be strangely contextualized by reckoning with the move away from Florida:

The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas‍—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.

Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

So, a series of counterintuitive developments – much like many of these communities themselves – where, rather than becoming cheaper and less habitable, Florida becomes more expensive and more appealing.

If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.

Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.

Oh, yes. People prefer less complication.

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Oil Sports

Like Soap Operas, only when you’re watching this week’s marquee match up® brought to you by our friends at BPExxonMobilShellConocoPhillipsChevron where “what’s a little feel good fossil fuel propaganda between friends?”

Well, the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change & the Environment conducted a survey:

Many major league sports teams in the U.S. have sponsorship deals with some of the companies most responsible for the polluting products fueling climate change. But how many exactly?

This survey of 2024 sponsorships across six major league sports leagues in the U.S. reveals more than 60 recent deals with high-polluting companies. This includes sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies—most of them Big Oil’s household names. It also includes deals with lesser-known utility companies that generate electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants and sell fossil gas directly to consumers. Not every team plays this way. This survey also highlights some that have chosen a different path.

LAT follows up with an easy-to-understand analogy:

If you’re wondering why this matters, I could tell you about research suggesting that fossil fuel companies, much like tobacco profiteers back in the day, pay off the owners of beloved institutions, including our favorite teams, to cleanse their dirty images — and lull us into forgetting that their noxious products are causing hotter heat waves,more intense wildfires and growing water scarcity (not to mention regular old deadly air pollution).

I could tell you about the research. Or I could ask you to imagine going to watch the Sacramento Kings — or the Giants, or the 49ers, or LAFC — and seeing a cigarette advertisement above the scoreboard. Or a gun ad.

Unimaginable, right? So why is Big Oil propaganda considered acceptable?

At some point, the shift in consciousness about banning fossil fuel ads will break through into legislation. It really has to. Though big statements are waiting to be redeemed for PR gold, public outcry won’t be enough. Because we may wince at the violence on the field/ice with the same grimace that we wince at these ads, allowing for both. As we consume that media – that’s what we’re doing – designed to make us think about some things rather than others, the next thing happens in our brains. Acceptance or rejection. Allowing the infringement of advertising does not allow for ambivalence. Marketers have thought of that, too. Ask me how I know.

Or better yet, start to notice the ads. In a different way.

Image via

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If it has sentience

it’s being used to protect us? Now that is thoughtful:

Imagine a medical-advice chatbot that lists fewer diseases that match your symptoms, because it was trained on a narrower spectrum of medical knowledge generated by previous chatbots. Or an A.I. history tutor that ingests A.I.-generated propaganda and can no longer separate fact from fiction.

Just as a copy of a copy can drift away from the original, when generative A.I. is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature, a group of researchers in Britain and Canada showed how this process results in a narrower range of A.I. output over time — an early stage of what they called “model collapse.”

Apparently, visual artists have been attempting to poison the models for a while now, to the point where they can’t tell the difference between a cat and a cow. Turns out even in Plato’s Cave you need people who know things.

But using itself to replicate itself is, shall we say, projecting deformity.

Hapsburg AI, indeed.

Image: Based on research by Ilia Shumailov and others.

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A target on your front

Georgia misses out on billions to cut climate pollution (sic?), the headline blared. Metro Atlanta failed to secure federal dollars to slash its emissions:

Last year, with the help of a $3 million federal grant, the state of Georgia began developing its first-ever plan to cut emissions of planet-warming gases. With funding from the same Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program, metro Atlanta drafted a climate road map of its own, too.

The plans were submitted to the federal agency this spring. The hope was to snag a slice of the $4.3 billion the EPA was offering, part of one of the federal government’s largest-ever grant opportunities for curbing heat-trapping pollution.

Let’s peek inside that first-ever plan, shall we? I wonder why the feds didn’t reward for these forward-thinker-lookers:

Peach State Voluntary Emission Reduction Plan

Oh.

Maybe that’s just the title and the plan is really much more aggressive inside, given the stakes not to mention the detestable traffic in that photo:

Strategy 1: Electrify Transportation Sector and Adapt to Mode Shift                                                                                                            Strategy 2: Improve Energy Efficiency and Promote Electrification
Strategy 3: Increase Availability and Use of Renewable Energy
Strategy 4: Improve Waste Diversion and Landfill Management
Strategy 5: Promote Use of Alternative Fuels
Strategy 6: Refrigerant Management
Strategy 7: Advance Conservation and Sustainable Land Use

The media report, and no doubt public officials, characterizes the rejection of federal funds to support this laughably obtuse plan as a ‘snub.’ I mean, where to start? This would have been decent plan had it been pursued in 1982, visionary perhaps. But now? Promote the use of alternative fuels? The absence of the words ‘mass transit’ is a damning indictment by the plan’s second chart, Figure 2, which indicates that the largest percentage of Georgia’s GHG emissions (38%) come from transportation.

Games played by non-serious people. Meanwhile, those voluntarily miserable drivers keep enjoying the scenery.

Les miz, indeed.

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My way, part two

The post below was kind of a set up, because there are so many things like that, and so many things like that are related climate change.

For example, why so many people continue [broken record alert] to buy expensive cars and live so far from work despite the misery eventually produced by both, not just at present, for a very long time now. And yes, these two things are prime exacerbating factors driving climate change and making it worse, inducing despair in those who cannot fathom giving up large vehicles or exurban living and rage against suggestions they consider it. See also, over-crowded ‘lakefront’ developments, especially in the American south, with accompanying overpopulation of large boats and jet skis. If the taste for these things is no longer based on pleasure or necessity, we must unpack. Bourdieu is very helpful here.

Another one – how climate patterns influence where people live and work:

Among the mass migrations in U.S. history: after the Second World War, people left cold Snow Belt states in the Northeast and Midwest for the warmth of the southern half of the country. Americans are still moving south in large numbers, but new research documents some growing appreciation of colder parts of the country due to climate change.

Marketplace’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell has been looking into this. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: All right, just remind us, 1950s and ’60s in particular — it was from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.

Chris Farrell: That’s right, there were a combination of factors. Millions of retirees, they were just fed up with the cold. They went for the warmth and recreational activities of the Sun Belt. Defense companies rose alongside military bases in the region. Established northern industries looking for cheap, nonunion labor shifted operations south. Agricultural businesses boomed, thanks to new farming techniques. So if you take a step back, David, newcomers were attracted by the region’s low cost of housing, the growth in job opportunities, low taxes and warm weather. And the widespread adoption of new technologies like air conditioning made the hot climate bearable.

So…. to bring it all together, that was broadcast on a radio program. What if you were listening to that report on your commute in your large automobile? Does it spark… anything? Bueller?

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Comme d’habitude

Pierre Bourdieu on taste, as luxury vs. necessity:

The true basis of the differences found in the area of consumption, and far beyond it, is the opposition between the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity. The former are the tastes of individuals who are the product of material conditions of existence defined by distance from necessity, by the freedoms or facilities stemming from possession of capital; the latter express, precisely in their adjustment, the necessities of which they are the product. Thus it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously most ‘filling’ and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labour power at the lowest cost which is forced on the proletariat as its very definition. The idea of taste, typically bourgeois, since it presupposes absolute freedom of choice, is so closely associated with the idea of freedom that many people find it hard to grasp the paradoxes of the taste of necessity. Some simply sweep it aside, making practice a direct product of economic necessity (workers eat beans because they cannot afford anything else), failing to realize that necessity can only be fulfilled, most of the time, because the agents are inclined to fulfill it, because they have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to. Others turn it into a taste of freedom, forgetting the conditionings of which it is the product, and so reduce it to pathological or morbid preference for (basic) essentials, a sort of congenital coarseness, the pretext for a class racism which associates the populace with everything heavy, thick and fat. Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.

Doesn’t quite explain why people eat chickfila who don’t have to – or does it?

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