Last week’s Economist featured an interesting article on migrations caused by climate change. I am, for one, rather agnostic on climate change. While keeping our minds open to rational demonstrations, we should recall that environmentalists have forecasted other imminent catastrophes before, notably in the 1960s and 1970s. Many ideologues are happy to jump on any excuse for oppressing their fellow humans, oblivious to the high likelihood that they will themselves be oppressed by their fellow revolutionaries. Let’s admit for now, as The Economist believes, that the climate is changing due to human activity and has started pushing many people to move—especially, in poor countries, from the countryside to the cities. (See “The Surprising Upside of Climate Migration,” The Economist, July 1, 2023.)
The first interesting reality is that, as any economist should tell you, individuals are not plants. They will move to mitigate the effects of any detrimental event, just as they move to pursue new opportunities. Nobody has to force them to do so. Following imperative incentives, they will also discover new information they were not aware of. By trying to stop their conditions from deteriorating, they will generally improve their welfare. This is already happening when more frequent droughts and floods incite poor people in poor countries to move to cities. About poor farmers and herders who have moved to the capital of Niger, The Economist writes:
“It’s better here. There’s work,” says Ali Soumana, an ex-herder who now makes bricks. Back in the village he did not have enough to eat; now he does.
When flames approach and you don’t have a fire extinguisher, you move. By the same token, as parts of the Earth grow less habitable, people will migrate. …
Climate-induced migration will often be traumatic. Yet it will also be an essential tool for adapting to a warming planet. And it may have some positive side-effects. If it causes more subsistence farmers to move to cities, they will probably find better work, health care and schools. They may also start having smaller families.
Niger, where climate change is already spurring large-scale migration, gives a sense of how things might unfold. …
When rural migrants move to urban areas, their lives tend to improve. Throughout the developing world, poverty is less common in cities. Urban wages are higher and depend less on the weather.
Climate change may jolt some into making a decision (to migrate) that would long have been in their interest anyway. …
Villages can be stifling places, where old men enforce rigid traditions that, among other things, treat women abominably. In the hurly-burly of a city, those rules weaken. Old men may lament the shift to immodest dress and individualism. “In a village, when we make a decision, everyone follows it. Here [in the city], it’s everyone for himself,” sighs Mr Hassone, who is 66. Yet he admits that his children prefer urban life, because there is more to do (and, whisper it, more freedom).
In government, old black men are not better than old white men. Governments—as they are in reality, not those of legends—are not always helpful:
Amazingly, many governments discourage domestic mobility. Roughly half have policies to reduce rural-urban migration, according to the UN.
A second reflection concerns the unmistakable parallel with what happened in the Industrial Revolution. In 18th- and 19th-century Western countries, about to become rich partly for this very reason, people who were starving in the countryside moved to cities and factories. There, conditions were better than starvation, and soon to improve as never before in history. In the United Kingdom during the 80 years following 1820, life expectancy at birth increased from 40 to 50 years. In 1900, it was still only 24 years in China and 32 in Russia, pretty much what it had been during all of mankind’s history (statistics from Angus Maddison, The World Economy, OECD, 2006).
Third lesson: Assuming that climate change has serious detrimental consequences, mitigating them is likely to be less costly (to most people) than the short-term and long-term consequences of unleashing leviathans with still more power to conscript their subjects in another collective war that will be “the health of the state” (as Randolph Bourne said of conventional wars).
In the same issue of The Economist, another article was, in my opinion, less economically literate (see “The choice between a poorer today and a hotter tomorrow”). It did emphasize the importance of economic development for poor countries—so that their inhabitants become rich, just as our recent ancestors in the West did, although the venerable magazine did not put it that way. The importance of growth and prosperity transpires in the simple fact it is the taxpayers of wealthy countries that are called upon to help the governments of poor countries in climate matters, not the other way around. It is often forgotten, even by The Economist, that the best way to help people in poor countries would be to stop harming them with the protectionist measures that limit our imports from them. That is the most efficient and ethical way to share our prosperity. Let me add that, of course, “share” can be a misleading word because an inhabitant of a rich country who chooses to trade with a producer from a poor country also benefits from the exchange; free exchange is never a zero-sum game.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Jul 10 2023 at 10:32am
Taking this with the first article, it seems the best way would be to allow free international migration, it’s hard to have internal migration help if your entire country is underwater.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 10 2023 at 11:18am
Dylan: That’s a good point, whose implications are complicated. For one thing, it would probably require lots of subsidies. The Economist also briefly mentions the issue:
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 10 2023 at 10:34pm
I agree, but I’d set immigration policy much more toward improving the status of residents than the no doubt greater per capita benefit to t he immigrants and I can see some downsides from too many, too quickly even of high skilled people at levels of immigration far grater than the US is currently experiencing.
Freer trade is much less problematic, if only because the exchange rate is an equilibrating mechanism.
John hare
Jul 10 2023 at 10:58am
True believers in global warming should be buying property in northern Canada and Siberia.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 10 2023 at 11:37am
John: It would be interesting to know if some do. Or perhaps they only believe in collective action and are pure altruists?* But then, if they went and lived there first, they could prepare the (frozen) ground for future climate refugees. They would eventually become the world’s plutocrats and could demonstrate to the face of the (hot) earth what an ideal government in nirvana looks like.
*This reminds me of a (dad’s) joke, which works a bit better in the French language. A young child is at church with his father. He asks, “Dad, why are we here?” “It’s for the others” (“C’est pour les autres“), the father replies. “But,” the child continues, “why are the others here?”
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 10 2023 at 10:40pm
Depends on the marginal effects and your time preference, too. The effects of warming will not stop even is we reach zero net emissions in 2050.
suddyan
Jul 11 2023 at 10:13am
Yes. The sun will keep on doing what it does.
We humans have insignificant effect.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jul 11 2023 at 11:51am
We affect how much of the sun’s energy gest re-radiated back to space.
Jose Pablo
Jul 11 2023 at 8:45pm
Yes, the same way that “we”, by imposing on everybody a significant reduction in CO2 emission, affect, for the worse, our living standards.
Afterall, externalities, do come in pairs.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 12 2023 at 1:59pm
Jose Pablo:
The “imposition” on the standard of living (the dead weight loss of a tax on net emissions of CO2 and methane) is not an “externality,” it is just the least cost way of avoiding a larger imposition in the form of the costs of climate change.
David Seltzer
Jul 10 2023 at 5:48pm
Pierre: I grew up in Gary Indiana and worked in the open hearths at US Steel during the summers while in college. In the early 1950’s, many of the steel workers were from the South, Texas, Mexico and Europe. It wasn’t climate change the initiated the Great Migration North, it was the wages of $40 dollars per day as opposed to $40 per week. The interesting consequence; new businesses offering goods and services as well as employment to these new arrivals came into existence. Similar in Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Craig
Jul 10 2023 at 11:09pm
I do live in FL and as I write this I am in FL, but I also live in TN. My colleague’s family is from Pickett County and his father did something similar except Winchester, IN and not Gary. Initially my colleague considered himself as from IN, but the family moved back to TN. Of course many cities could draw and apparently more than a few would travel for part of the year and send money back. Still happens though now more likely to be Nashville, Columbus, Indianapolis or Atlanta.
steve
Jul 10 2023 at 5:49pm
We have had, to the best of my knowledge, only one Industrial Revolution so based on an n of 1 not sure we can make accurate predictions. It’s probably good to look at the optimistic predictions you present and not just other, more negative ones. I will say that like. almost every economist who has ever lived you seem to ignore the time factor. In the long run the Industrial Revolution was awesome. In the short run not everyone was able to adapt well or quickly and for those people it did not go well.
Steve
David Seltzer
Jul 10 2023 at 6:17pm
Steve, I see your point. An n of 1 is misleading. It’s estimated that the the IR lasted from 1760 through 1820. 60 years. 240 quarters. 720 months. While we can’t implement a controlled experiment, the advances in econometrics allows us some inferences. Omitted-variable bias, heteroscedasticity or reverse causality notwithstanding.
Jon Murphy
Jul 11 2023 at 6:52am
Depending on how one wants to count them, there have been 3 or 4:
-1700s-1800s
-about 1920-1980
-1990-2008
-Present (excl covid)
The current industrial revolution is sometimes grouped together with the one starting in the 90s.
My point is we’re not basing it on an N of 1. It’s actually much higher (I’m the hundreds given changes in policies in countries over the last 3 centuries or so).
Craig
Jul 11 2023 at 12:04pm
I suppose its just an issue of defining something. If one wants to define the dawn of the Industrial Revolution as successfully using steam power, I’m ok with that, but honestly I think once water starts turning mills, that process deserves at minimum some kind of footnote.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 10 2023 at 8:11pm
An interesting if rambling post so I’ll ramble in return.
I am pretty astounded that you do not accept that the increase in CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere does not have net costs This s very much NOT the same as the (I think) rather silly claim that the increase even not checked is an existential threat to our species or even would mean a poorer future than the present. I think it is very clear that there are costs. The question is are there any (costly) measures that we could take today that would reduce the future CO2 concentration and its associated costs such that those measures are “worth it?”
If a future environmental “deterioration” led some one to make a welfare improving move, I’m OK with chalking that particular transaction up as a benefit of climate change rather than a cost. It’s probably a thirteenth order effect and not worth trying include in the model used to evaluate alternative measures to reduce future climate change costs, but I agree that it theoretically exists.
Sometimes costs to mitigate the effects of climate change are confused with costs or preventing it. The avoiding the former are part of the benefits of the latter.
I think there is a pretty good moral case for people in countries that have benefitted from emitting CO2 into the atmosphere in the past to compensate to some degree people who will will suffer costs of those emissions. There is not reason for that compensation to take the specific form of subsidizing their taking measures to reduce future CO2 concentrations (or not to expect them join in taking those measures. To be hypothetically specific, I agree to help finance a seawall in Karachi, but expect Pakistan to charge the same tax on net CO2 emissions as the United States.
Hoc dixi.
suddyan
Jul 11 2023 at 10:14am
There is no climate change crisis caused by CO2.
Manfred
Jul 11 2023 at 11:46am
suddyan:
Why do you say this? Do you have any backup citation?
Thomas Hutcheson
Jul 11 2023 at 12:07pm
Are you disputing “crisis?” or “effect.”
I personally think that presenting the effect of CO2 accumulation as a “crisis” is both mistaken (in that we agree) and counterproductive. It implies that the costs of avoiding the “crisis” are larger than the costs of optimally reducing and mitigating the effects actually would be.
Jose Pablo
Jul 11 2023 at 9:04pm
the costs of optimally reducing and mitigating the effects
… following the design of an all-knowing Central Planner, I supposse you mean.
Yeah, sure thing, what can go wrong? central planners have a long tradition of “optimal designs” to “reduce and mitigate” the effects of almost every imaginable problem, from the lack of food production in China in the late 50s, to the actual homelessness crisis in California.
Rest assured Thomas, if history is a guide, the cost of any “optimal solution” led and implemented by central planners is going to exceed the cost caused by global warming by orders of magnitude
Not doing anything on this topic, is a way better solution, cost-wise, than any plan to “reduce and mitigate the effects” led by governments.
I believe that human CO2 emissions are a contributing factor to global warming. I am sure that government intervention will make things worse. Afterall, as it is well proven, if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 12 2023 at 10:56am
José: Don’t you forget that mainstream economists also know to optimally correct the detrimental effects of previous optimal policies?
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jul 12 2023 at 2:09pm
Pigou taxation is not “central planning.”
Even if you are maximally skeptical of central planning, I’d urge you to support taxation of net emissions of CO2 and methane as the least “centrally planned” way of avoiding the costs of climate change. I urge you to examine the IRA as a foretaste of what alternative climate change policies will look like.
Jose Pablo
Jul 13 2023 at 12:27pm
“Pigou taxation” is not central planners’ preference. It is not environmentalist’s choice, either. They cannot “oppress their fellow humans” enough for their taste with this solution.
You will see bans on diesel, stoves, washing machines, coal … and, of course, lots of subsidies to their preferred”rent seekers”.
The whole idea that “governments” will care about “optimal solutions” is very naive. You don’t really believe that governments implementing an “optimal” solution is a real option (except if you mean “optimal” from a “public choice” perspective)
And, in any case, Pigou taxation is far from an optimal solution. Markets are always better than taxes
Jose Pablo
Jul 11 2023 at 9:19pm
Old men may lament the shift to immodest dress and individualism. (…) Yet he [Mr Hassone,66] admits that his children prefer urban life, because there is more to do (and, whisper it, more freedom).
This is the transition between primitive societies “cage of norms” to Great Society “individualism” (relatively speaking) in a nutshell.
Amazingly, many governments discourage domestic mobility. Roughly half have policies to reduce rural-urban migration, according to the UN.
This is, actually, positive. I have a lot of faith in the effects of governments trying to discourage rural-urban migration. It will, for sure, accelerate the abovementioned transition. As a matter of fact, the “discouragement” is already working pretty well:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview#:~:text=Today%2C%20some%2056%25%20of%20the,people%20will%20live%20in%20cities.
nobody.really
Jul 12 2023 at 12:23pm
Are you willing to testify before Congress to that effect?
I find the Economist article about constructive internal migration encouraging; I’d never thought of that outcome. It prompts a few thoughts.
First, no, people do NOT know their own self-interest. The article suggests that people were happier moving to cities, and had the opportunity to do so, but never took that opportunity until climate problems prompted the move. Arguably this dynamic militates in favor of nudges, if not even more forthright social engineering (e.g., mandatory primary education).
Second, I can’t help but reflect on the fact that the Pilgrims made precisely the opposite migration–moving from hyper-cosmopolitan Holland to hyper-wilderness New World. And I surmise that they were motivated by the same things that the elders complain about regarding moving to rural to urban Nigeria: Urban living is corrupting, and undercuts the authority of the elders.
On a libertarian blog, should we celebrate the “freedom” experienced by the young? Or bemoan how externalities have forced a loss of household autonomy upon the old?
Jose Pablo
Jul 14 2023 at 7:02am
Interesting thought.
The problem with “nudges” is that you can easily “nudge” somebody into the wrong situation for him
Between the mistake of “nudging somebody into a worst option” or “not nudging somebody into a better option”, the latter should always be preferred. It is a matter of accountability.
It is morally inferior to push somebody onto the rail tracks than refraining from pushing him out of the very same tracks.
“First refrain from causing harm” also applies to nudges.
[Pilgrims move to the New World looking for freedom of religion, which, as everybody know, consist of feeling free to pursue every other religion]
Richard Fulmer
Jul 14 2023 at 3:55pm
If that were true, then humanity would not have survived much less achieved its current level of wealth and longevity.
The claim that most people don’t know what is in their self interest is often made by those who want to substitute their own self interest for everyone else’s.
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