I’m sure Taleb would have much to say about your ability to bend Reason, if, of course, he would deign to waste the time it would take to point it out.

here’s a clue: it’s why it was poetic that you picked: “A Poverty of Reason” as your ‘example’–which you proceed to mischaracterize.

and, if you would, substantiate ths: I’m not the one claiming to have all the answers, backhanded accusation..

I’ll just guess that, in your household, throwing ‘Honor’ out the window is seen as a +, saves on chairs, right?

So what? The author of the review obviously agrees with the author of the book.

“second, here’s the context around your simpering cherry-picking:”

Nicholas Taleb was right when he said that economists (amateur or professional, I suppose) are the easiest people in the world to rile. I thought I’d leave you the honour of posting the context, since I did not want the text to be associated with my screen name.

I suggest that your unquestioning attachment to a currently fashionable reductionist economic philosophy is a great example of what NNT calls the ludic fallacy. No doubt I’m also guilty of a similar fallacy, however I’m not the one claiming to have all the answers.

first, it’s A Book Review, second, here’s the context around your simpering cherry-picking:

“For proponents of sustainable development, the free market is not enough. People will indeed endeavor to conserve what they own; but they will do so guided by an economic principle. For actors on the market, maximizing expected utility is the be-all and end-all.

Is this not unfair to future generations? People will make provision for their children and grandchildren but will rarely seek to conserve their resources beyond what is needed to do this. So long as people can leave something to their heirs, the pursuit of profit will impel them to wasteful use of scarce resources. Must not the government protect the rights of future generations, in order to prevent this catastrophe?

Beckerman identifies a fundamental failing in this line of thought. Let us grant that the present generation ought not to squander all its resources and leave nothing for distant future generations. It does not follow that these future generations have an enforceable right that resources be conserved at a certain rate. To introduce here the language of rights, our author maintains, is to assume without basis that whatever moral claims future generations have on the present bind us absolutely, or close to it. Why not instead view obligations to the future as one item to be weighed against other things?

Our author goes further. He maintains that ascribing rights to those who do not yet exist makes no sense. “More generally it is difficult to see how future generations can be said to have any rights because properties, such as being green or wealthy or having rights, can be predicated only of some subject that exists. . . . If I were to say ‘X has a fantastic collection of CDs,’ and you were to ask me who is X, and I were to reply, ‘Well actually, there isn’t any X,’ you would think I had taken leave of my senses. And you would be right . . . unborn people cannot have anything. They cannot have two legs or long hair or a taste for Mozart” (pp. 67–68).2

One might object, “Is not Beckerman simply playing with words? Let us grant him his point: might we still not have a binding moral obligation to preserve a sustainable environment for future generations? Where has his semantic wordplay gotten him?”

We can, as the objection supposes, speak of binding moral obligations without reference to rights, but Beckerman’s point nevertheless helps us grasp an essential issue. The language of rights at once takes us into the realm of absolute claims; and if we grasp that we need not—or cannot, if Beckerman is right—ascribe rights to future generations, we can begin to think clearly about our obligations to them. Beckerman has freed us from the prison of a false assumption.

Beckerman’s point about rights can be used, in a way that he does not consider, to strengthen his case against sustainability advocates. Future persons may not have rights, but presently existing people do have them. If so, then efforts by even moderate environmentalists to restrict property rights may be illegitimate on their face. Beckerman very effectively demonstrates that environmentalist arguments fail on their own terms. But even if these arguments were cogent, this would not suffice to justify compelling property owners to restrict their consumption. The issue of rights would first have to be addressed.

Beckerman has exposed a hidden assumption that lies behind the environmentalist case, but this is not his greatest contribution. He challenges head-on a key premise of much contemporary moral philosophy. The sustainability advocates maintain that each future generation should be provided with an equally good environment to the one we now have. With great daring, Beckerman asks, what is so good about equality?

Arguments for equality often hide behind feelings of sympathy many people have for the impoverished. Environmentalists paint a bleak picture of a future in which essential fuels are exhausted and people confront catastrophically high temperatures. Is it not unfair, they inquire, to subject people to such conditions?”
~~
Edited and written by David Gordon, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and author of four books and thousands of essays.

A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth
Wilfred Beckerman
Fall 2003
Volume 9, Number 3

Vol. 9, No. 3; Fall 2003

Do Future Generations Have Rights?

A Poverty of Reason: Sustainable Development and Economic Growth.1, by Wilfred Beckerman. The Independent Institute, 2002. xiii + 94 pgs.
Wilfred Beckerman is an outstanding economist of a type probably more common in Britain than America. Like Anthony de Jasay, Amartya Sen, and I.M.D. Little, Beckerman is thoroughly at home in philosophy; and in A Poverty of Reason, he makes insightful remarks about the rights of future generations, equality, and the so-called “precautionary principle.”

Some environmentalists are outright enemies of humanity, who favor a drastic reduction in human population, if not the elimination altogether of our species. Once at a conference, I was seated at dinner next to that eminent Luddite, Kirkpatrick Sale. I mentioned that a critic had accused him of wishing to return to the Stone Age. To my surprise, he said that this was just what he wanted.
~~
poetic, though, that you picked that one..

That is, any ideology that does not (somehow) result in sustainability is not viable (in the biological sense) since if humans become extinct due to a flaw in the ideology then the ideology also becomes extinct.

On mises.org I found this article on sustainability within the austrian framework:

https://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=259

I think that tells me all I need to know about Austrian Economics, assuming that is, that this article correctly states the official Austrian position. I urge anyone wanting to understand the fundamental philosophy behind the austrian school to read this piece. To summarise it quickly, the article states that if humanity becomes extinct a few generations hence then this is philosophically OK, since because future generations don’t exist yet, they therefore have no ‘right to exist’.

I think that’s going to be a very hard sell…

simply, for one who claims to be ‘about sustainability’ and, yet, Ignorant of long-standing foudational premises thereof, you should be more considered in use of the accusation of ‘laziness’.

more simply, if you can’t be bothered to educate yourself on the underlying premises of the conclusions you regurgitate, I, surely, won’t be bothered to your work for you.

my friend, you should take a page from, the Fictional, Will Hunting:

towit, WILL
Look, don’t try to pass yourself off
as some kind of an intellect at the
expense of my friend just to impress
these girls.

Clark is lost now, searching for a graceful exit, any exit.

WILL
The sad thing is, in about 50 years
you might start doin’ some thinkin’
on your own and by then you’ll realize
there are only two certainties in
life.

CLARK
Yeah? What’re those?

WILL
One, don’t do that. Two — you
dropped a hundred and fifty grand on
an education you coulda’ picked up
for a dollar fifty in late charges
at the Public Library.

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Good-Will-Hunting.html

I hadn’t heard of this zero waste conference, but I’ll certainly take a look. Meanwhile, you might like to take a look at a possible alternative to FRB that seems to my mind more likely to happen than a gold standard.

http://www.jamesrobertson.com

This proposal advocates a 100% reserve banking system in which fiat money is created by the state (whether socialist, minarchist, capitalist or whatever – it doesn’t matter), and spent into existence rather than lent into existence. In fact if we end up having to fully nationalize most of the existing banks then this is effectively what we’d have, except that the interest earned on loans ends up as state revenue, and can therefore be used to cut taxes, and removes the need for perpetual growth.

Note that I’m not advocating this solution, and in particular I’m not saying the bad government and the usual vested interestes would not ruin it. Instead I’m highlighting it in the hope that it might lead to some intelligent and hopefully constructive (and civil) discussion, since idealogically I’m still a floating voter.

@DeDude: And the “go-look-at-this-site-and-you-shall-see-the-light” argument is usually one trotted out by people who have no real answers.

Or perhaps it is lazyness. I could be proved wrong if mark would simply and concisely state the libertarian position regarding sustainability and pricing of externals in a few simple statements without any outside references and a minimum of vitriol.

What I offered above were economic truths which no one (understandably) tried to argue against or refute. Instead, you preferred to label it as theorizing, and tilting at windmills, when your suggestions are so absurdly vague and empty as to justify a little humor.

“We need sustainability”? Well gee-f^%*ing-whiz! Why do you think Austrian economists like Schiff are so focused on the fundamentals? What do you offer? Pragmatism, common sense….a little of this and a little of that? Perhaps you should refrain from actual policy prescriptions or ideas of “let’s see what works and try it”.

All seems a little Paulson-esque if you ask me (the Hank kind of course).

Here’s the wonderfully pragmatic mainstream treated this theorist, when HE was tilting at windmills two years ago. All yours:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8r-nDBx5Jg

I’m no fan of the Fed either but I agree with Barry that you’re “tilting at windmills” in thinking they will ever be abolished

I would agree with you that expecting the crop of current stakeholders to slay their golden goose is folly. When I speak against the Fed myself I am not speaking to those who would destroy them but to those that would destroy their power. That is every person. The Fed and banking system’s dominance over the economy does not currently come from printing money so much as it comes from loaning it into existence. As long as people continue to borrow money they continue to ‘vote’ for the system as it is and give power to those who inflate at our peril. If you want to slay the beast the only way is to starve the beast by not feeding it interest payments and the fruit of your promised future production secured by your own collateral and credit rating.

It is much wiser to educate your fellow citizen on the destructive(via inflation) nature of a credit based society than to expect those who are benefiting from it to end their tyranny. At this point the power to change things are still in the people’s hands but they need to be willing to live in an honest money system. What has taken 100 years to build doesn’t end overnight and maybe not even in a generation but if people want to end the slavery that many of them are in then getting back to honest money and an honest economic system is the only way to go IMO.

It is time people were again consuming out of their wealth and surplus. That would be opposed to what they are doing now which is consuming out of the promise of future wealth and surplus. The latter creates two problems. It creates problems when people’s jobs go away thus exacerbating contractions and it forces them to buy and consume minus interest costs so they are actually consuming from 0% to 10% less than they could because of the cost of servicing debt. That ultimately is a drag on the entire economy. Not to mention the fact that people have to demand more in compensation just to service the cost of debt, which forces prices higher, which forces people to pay more and consume less etc. etc.