Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The Kyoto Protocol is the quixotic attempt by some countries around the world to reduce each participating country’s CO2 emissions to their emission levels in 1990. Since CO2 emissions are a measure of the energy used, that seemed foolish to me, but hey, I was born yesterday. I figured nobody would be that dumb, and although the leaders might agree to such a goofy plan, people would find ways around the restrictions.
There are two very different groups of countries who have signed up to Kyoto to reduce emissions. One group is called the “Economies In Transition” (EIT) group. These are the Eastern European countries who were going from communism to capitalism. They are composed of Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. They’ve done well at reducing to 1990 levels, since their 1990 emissions were all high, and have declined since after the fall of the Soviet Empire. They’ve reduced their emissions, but no thanks to Kyoto. Indeed, some signed on just so they could sell their carbon credits, because their countries were already below the 1990 levels by the time they ratified … and they did very well at the scam, too. Russia made big bucks from selling credits to the rest of the fools …
The other group, called the “non-EIT” group, is composed of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. This is the group of interest, as they are the group which is like the US—established democracies with generally mature industrialized economies.
I took this issue up because of the recent release of the newest CO2 emission figures for 2009-2010. These gave me the opportunity to investigate the question in the title—what difference has Kyoto made? How much has Kyoto affected the emissions of the countries involved? Carbon saved is carbon earned … Figure 1 shows the emissions of the US, and the emissions of the Kyoto non-EIT nations, from 1990 to 2010.
Figure 1. Annual Emissions of Carbon. Units are billions of metric tonnes of carbon (C, not CO2). “Kyoto Countries” is the total of all of the non-EIT countries, as listed above. Data Source Up to 2008 and 2008-2010 Photo Source
Hmmmm.
Other than the post-2007 drop due to the 2008 global financial crisis and ensuing world-wide depression, what can we see in this data?
Well, the most obvious thing I see is what’s not there. Looking at the pre- and post-ratification behavior of the Kyoto countries, I don’t see any change in the emissions due to ratification. The trend 1990-1999 is no different from the trend 1999-2007.
Curiously, it looks like the US on the other hand slowed down the growth in emissions over the period. Before ratification the US emissions were rising faster than the EU emissions. After 1998, they have changed pretty much in lock-step. This can be tested by fitting a 2nd order polynomial to the 1990-2007 data for both the US and Kyoto countries, as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2. Same as Figure 1, with 2nd order polynomial trend lines fitted to the data up to 2007.
So to at least a first approximation, I’d have to say that the total amount of CO2 saved by the Kyoto Protocol to date is … well … not to put too fine a point on it, the CO2 saved by Kyoto seems to be approximately zero. There’s been no change in the rate of rise of the emissions by the Kyoto countries. No difference. Zip. Nicht. Zilch. The US reduced its rate of emission growth over the period more than the Kyoto countries did.
In any case, not to worry, the deus ex machina was waiting in the wings all along . What the Kyoto Protocol was incapable of achieving, the 2008 global economic meltdown had no problem doing. Figure 1 shows the total emissions of the Kyoto countries are now well below the 1990 benchmark … so I suppose the unfortunate citizens in the those countries are celebrating their great success, and hoping that the economic depression continues, no?
No?
w.
PS—It is obvious from this data that economic depression causes a reduction in CO2 emissions.
What has not been so obvious to the Kyoto folks is that the converse is true—forcibly reducing CO2 emissions comes at a cost to the economy.
barry,
You are the one blowing second hand smoke.
Let’s back up for a moment, and consider this:
CO2 [“carbon”] is harmless and beneficial. More is better.
Based on those facts, any proposal to ‘price carbon’ is economic illiteracy and anti-scientific nonsense. Why do you persist in emitting alarmist propaganda? Are you that incapable of understanding the science and the economics of those lunatic proposals? They only benefit self-serving rent seekers at the expense of the rest of us.
Willis says;
“Other than the post-2007 drop due to the 2008 global financial crisis and ensuing world-wide depression, what can we see in this data?”
That reducing CO2 will make us all depressed?
Albert says:
November 10, 2011 at 7:25 am
“One small question… How do we measure the amount of CO2 that is produced in each country?”
I know how this is done in Norway;
The Prime Minister, Mr. Stoltenberg has a meter in his office. He has also a knob where he can increase/decrease the Norwegian temperature.
He hand the other Prime Ministers in europe is quarreling all the time on how many degrees they will reduce the temperatures. It has been in the newspapers many times.
Why?
DirkH says:
November 10, 2011 at 7:16 am
http://pragcap.com/the-mythical-collapse-in-american-living-standards
Suggest you read the comments to that article. Cullen has no reference point for the 1960’s. He’s too young to have lived then. He can’t imagine life without a cell phone or broadband internet as anything but miserable and primitive. Those of us who lived most of our lives without these things don’t remember it that way. Living standards, judging by our happiness with the present and our optimism about the future is, at least for a majority in the US IMO, way down. My kids aren’t as happy go-lucky as we were at that age. And as parents my wife and I have had to work a lot harder than our parents did. Without actually being able to compare then and now people like Cullen simply have no reference point on which to base an opinion so they basically try to imagine living life without a cell phone or the internet and come away with “it must have been awful”. Well, it wasn’t awful. It was better. Far better. Cell phones and internet are addictions. Of course it’s difficult to imagine life without these things. That’s a hallmark of an addiction – the inability to get along without something!
@Dave Springer
“The gap between US emissions and “Kyoto country” emissions has been widening since the treaty was signed and it’s been widening in the direction of them emitting less and us emitting more.”
Yes, when I looked at the slide the simple take away was that the gap between our emissions levels had grown. If one wanted to look at this the simple approach is to diffrence the two emissions and look at the trend of that, not to fit “trends” to both and do what willis did.
Here’s a link to the IEA report mentioned by Dr Chaos:
http://www.iea.org/press/pressdetail.asp?PRESS_REL_ID=426
It was trotted out, parrot fashion, in the local papers in Norwich. Well they would do, seeing as how the UEA is just down the road…
Its interesting you say this: “CO2 emissions are a measure of the energy used”. I don’t necessarily agree – that would only be true if countries all used the same methods and technologies for power generation. Anyway, the whole point of Kyoto is to reduce the CO2 emissions per unit of energy used. Take France and Germany for example – France uses more energy per capita than Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption), but has roughly half of the CO2 output per-capita (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC/countries/DE–XS-US-FR-GB-CA?display=graph), likely due to France’s large amount of nuclear power stations.
barry says:
November 10, 2011 at 12:08 am
“As pretty much all economic studies on mitigation/adaption, cost/benefit conclude that mitigation will be less costly, less of a financial shock than adaptation, and that the hit to GDP is a small percentage GDP, I consider the financial bogeyman as articulated by the skeptics to be even more alarmist than the other.”
I consider mitigation to be counter productive even if it cost nothing. There is an abundance of both science and agricultural practice showing that increased level of CO2 increases the rate of plant growth and at the same reduces the amount of fresh water required per unit of plant growth. This is common knowledge. Many greenhouses artificially raise CO2 level to increase production. If it could be economically raised even more in outdoor agriculture growers would do it there too. In fact is has been done economically as we burn fossil fuels to the tune of 280ppm to 390ppm which is one of the reasons why world population has grown while world hunger has not both because plants grow better and faster with less water due to more CO2 and because of the agricultural tools and related industries such as fertilizer mining, manufacture, and distribution which was made possible in large scale by fossil-fuel energy.
Adding insult to injury the reality of CO2 “global” warming is that it isn’t global at all. It’s regional. It’s confined predominantly to continental interiors in higher latitudes at night and in the winter. So what little warming is actually happening, be it anthropologic or natural in origin, or not, is beneficial as it translates into longer growing seasons where longer growing seasons are most needed and doesn’t translate into higher summertime maximum temperatures. These are all good things.
The things we would be “mitigating” against are fantasies which have no empirical support of coming to pass. In fact the world hasn’t warmed at all in the past decade despite CO2 emissions relentlessly increasing during that time. In fact sea level rise has not accelerated and is not anywhere near an alarming rate but rather the same rate it’s been for many centuries. There is no statistical increase in the number of severe weather events yet due to the industrial, agricultural, and technological advances that cheap fossil energy entails every individual human being’s probability of being harmed by severe weather has dramatically decreased.
This are the facts and they speak for themselves. Global warming alamists have no facts. They have agendas and specious fantasies invented to further those agendas.
You are missing the most significant point.
The World Trade Organization Treaty was ratified in December of 1995 and China’s entry was in 2001.
Your can see the US trade balance starts taking a real nose dive in 1997. This is the US manufacturing jobs (and CO2 emissions) heading off shore. (about $700 billion dollars worth)
GRAPH: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/US_Trade_Balance_1980_2010.svg
[SNIP – take your ugly personal attacks elsewhere, Dave, they make you look like a pre-schooler. -w.]
Gail Combs says:
November 10, 2011 at 9:13 am
In all fairness the deal with outsourcing manufacturing overseas to China is it’s one of the mutually assured destruction deals. We can end the trade imbalance and they can stop taking IOU’s for it. We can welch on the IOUs too or simply inflate the principle into worthlessness. It’s a bargain made in hell if you ask me and all parties involved are getting nervous about it. I’m not sure what the best way to extricate ourselves from it might be. I hold out the hope that breakthrough technology in synthetic biology that I’ve been anticipating for almost 30 years will make it all moot before the international economic house of cards comes tumbling down.
“If the mainstream view is ‘alarmist’, then the ‘skeptics’ have economic Armageddon as their scare tactic. As pretty much all economic studies on mitigation/adaption, cost/benefit conclude that mitigation will be less costly, less of a financial shock than adaptation, and that the hit to GDP is a small percentage GDP, I consider the financial bogeyman as articulated by the skeptics to be even more alarmist than the other. At least the warmista have science to refer to. Economic Armageddon is based on pretty much no serious review whatsoever.”
Let me add two more cents to Willis’ response:
Mitigation and adaptation are two very different beasts. Mitigation is an action taken against a known-certain future outcome, even if probabilistic, like putting seat belts in cars. However, in the climate sense, with or without mitigation, I would submit that no one can accurately predict the future direction of the climate – certainly not with an accuracy that would allow wise policy decisions. Mitigation might produce positive, negative or no benefits. In the 1970s, the very same climate scientists were proposing dumping carbon dust on the ice caps to prevent the certainly-coming ice age. Had that come about, they would have been guilty of producing an unintended consequence that promoted global warming today. If, as the sun seems to be indicating, we are headed for a colder climate in the future, all that mitigation effort and money would be down the drain or in fact deleterious. Scientists today may claim to be smarter than in 1975 (bigger computers after all), but I would submit that on a scale of one to ten, they have gone from a two to a three. Every day we see new research pointing to the radical deficiencies of current climate theory. That is why we who believe in science and pursue scientific knowledge as an existential imperative are skeptics – as opposed to those who pursue scientific grants as a means of gaining fame and putting dinner on the table by going along with the party line.
When you combine climate scientists (and their friends, climate industrialists) with economists, you create uncertainty squared. These are the same economists who convinced the politicians that securitizing mortgages would be a benefit to the economy. Where was it, New York state, where the nuclear industry lobbyists got together with the politicians and decided it would be better if the rate payers pre-paid for yet-to-be-built nuclear plants so the economic shock would mitigated when the actual costs were incurred. And so it was. In the meantime, the cost of the plants went from $4 billion to $20 billion, a cost being paid despite the almost certain fact that they will never be built, despite the certainty of the economists and industrialists at the time.
So, mitigation based on scientific/industrial/economic prognosticators? No thanks.
And as for the “mitigation as insurance” argument: Mitigation is not insurance – otherwise you would cancel your car insurance seeing that you have seat belts. Since we don’t even know the sign of medium-term climate change, I would submit that we already have a thriving free-market insurance industry that will both adapt to climate change and drive adaptation. From an article yesterday, the cost of the “unprecedented” climate “disasters” of the last year – $34 billion for the entire world. Whopee do! Less than the cost of air conditioning the military quarters in Afghanistan. And these costs will track accurately with ACTUAL climate change in whichever direction it takes all the while actually insuring people and businesses against short-medium term risks at minimum cost to society.
Willis Eschenbach says:
November 10, 2011 at 2:06 am
Dev Bahadur Dongol says:
November 10, 2011 at 12:44 am
Fruitloop::ignore
This guy’s idea is to add turbines in series at the base of dams because he’s under the mistaken impression that there’s no energy lost as the water passes through the turbine so you can just hang another turbine on to the end of the first one and do this infinitely. I guess he has no clue that the inlet pressure and outlet pressure of turbines are substantially different and the pressure differential is an unavoidable consequence of removing energy from the water. It also doesn’t seem to occur to him that inside the turbines there are already individual stages arranged in series to extract as much energy from the water as it practical until there isn’t enough pressure left in it to drive a pissant’s motorcycle halfway around the inside of a cheerio.
[SNIP – man, you just can’t stop your nasty mouth from running, can you? -w.]
(This guy’s idea is to add turbines in series at the base of dams because he’s under the mistaken impression that there’s no energy lost as the water passes through the turbine so you can just hang another turbine on to the end of the first one and do this infinitely.)
1# Energy is never lost nor created – law of conservation of energy. After running a turbine running water is not even slowed down. Running water has kinetic energy. To keep turbine running consistently water must keep on running. The force involved here is the force of gravity which can’t be reduced nor blocked nor shifted; at a given point it is always there uninterrupted. If you slow down the running water the turbine on the way also runs slowly. The turbine stops when water stops running; then no energy is available.
(I guess he has no clue that the inlet pressure and outlet pressure of turbines are substantially different and the pressure differential is an unavoidable consequence of removing energy from the water.)
2# The pressure difference makes water to run. You can’t remove energy from water but transfer to another form (law of conservation). Kinetic energy that you can get from running water is by virtue of the force of gravity which is always available all the time.
The pressure effect throughout the running water column is uniform (Bernoulli Theory). So we can install turbine at any point of the running water column; between the inlet and outlet points of the running water column. Velocity of water at each point of the running water column is same.
( It also doesn’t seem to occur to him that inside the turbines there are already individual stages arranged in series to extract as much energy from the water as it practical until there isn’t enough pressure left in it to drive a pissant’s motorcycle halfway around the inside of a cheerio.)
3# From the comments above it is clear that you can’t but transfer energy. So far water is available for running you have the ‘force’ to drive water all the time indefinitely and unlimited. If there is no pressure difference water can’t run and by installing turbines we don’t stop but let water continue running. Do we? At least I don’t know hydropower station where water is stopped by running turbines. CHEERIO!!!
If you wish more details please visit my blog devbahadurdongol.blogspot.com and if you want to ask me any question please email me. (email address dev.dangol AT yahoo.co.uk) Physics teacher who knows Bernoulli Theory is very helpful.
US population increased by 25% in 1990-2011, EU/Japan population did not change.Taking this into account, US increase is WELL BELOW non-EIT.
Yo Dave,
” I hold out the hope that breakthrough technology in synthetic biology that I’ve been anticipating for almost 30 years will make it all moot before the international economic house of cards comes tumbling down.”
Have you checked out the book Robopocalypse? It’s all there spelled out in “soon to be a Speilberg movie” black and white. The thing is, when it happens, it might be a kind of biological hyper-inflation, in which the “old” biology is no longer worth a farthing and can not/will not interbreed with the new. Sort of like the way the Neanderthals were wiped out by the Cro Magnans. Don’t use Twitter? Can’t mate with me chap…
Or from the Firesign Theater in the 60s: “I’m sorry, you have violated Robots Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.”
And where is Apple going if not synthetic biology? Imagine if Siri was run by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Maybe later next year. Now imagine 1 million Wantons talking to us and to each other. In ten years it will be true. Fasten your safety belt and hang on dude, it’s going to be a wild ride. If you can adapt…
steven mosher says:
November 10, 2011 at 8:27 am
Well, guys, if I’d been interested in the difference between the Kyoto countries and the US, that’s what I would have done.
But I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in whether Kyoto had caused the participating countries to reduce their emissions. So I looked at their emissions, pre- and post-ratification, to determine if they had changed. I also did the same for the US emissions.
If you want to do a different analysis, more power to the both of you. But to claim that I should have done your analysis? That just proves you didn’t understand what I was doing. Perhaps my fault, my writing is not always clear … but you two seem to be the among the very few who misunderstood what I was up to.
w.
Manfred says:
November 10, 2011 at 9:55 am
That’s exactly why I didn’t do it on a per-capita basis. I figured people would scream that I was cheating if I used per-capita figures …
w.
DirkH says:
November 10, 2011 at 7:16 am
http://pragcap.com/the-mythical-collapse-in-american-living-standards
Suggest you read the comments to that article.
response cont’d;
In the comments Cullen asks a doubter that living standards are better now than 1960’s if he’d rather deal with a heart attack or cancer now or in the 1960’s.
I have an uncommon opinion on that. I’ve seen friends and loved ones die many ways and cancer is pretty much the worst, or at least the worst of the common causes. You get plenty of advance notice (sometimes years) and unless you get lucky by a tumor popping a blood vessel and you bleed out quickly by internal hemorrhage the end is going to drawn out and painful for both yourself and possibly worse for your loved ones who have to helplessly watch you suffer and die by the inch.
Because of the uneven progress in preventing and treating cancer vs. heart disease, cancer recently became the #1 cause of death in the United States. Modern medicine has made dying a quick death from a heart attack much less likely and dying a prolonged death over weeks or months from cancer a much more likely way of leaving the stage. Just as bad the protracted death by cancer is hideously expensive and is bankrupting our healthcare system.
Personally, I’m trying to carefully cultivate a heart attack by assessing the risk factors in my life and weighting them in favor of heart disease. My dad dropped dead from a heart attack. He hardly had time to grab his chest and say “Oh shit” before he lost consciousness and died. He was happily playing badmitten with some bouncy young women on a fine summer day when it happened. That’s how I want to go. Modern medicine and modern lifestyle recommendations make that very unlikely. More likely is dying in a hospice after months of suffering by myself and family, at huge expense, after slipping into a coma because my organs are failing with the exception of one organ – a strong heart that just refuses to stop pumping enough blood to my brain so I remain conscious.
Screw that. I’ll take the 1960’s way of dying thank you very much. It’s better for me, better for my family, and better for society.
Dave Springer says:
November 10, 2011 at 9:28 am
Gail Combs says:
November 10, 2011 at 9:13 am
In all fairness the deal with outsourcing manufacturing overseas to China is it’s one of the mutually assured destruction deals. We can end the trade imbalance and they can stop taking IOU’s for it. We can welch on the IOUs too or simply inflate the principle into worthlessness. It’s a bargain made in hell if you ask me and all parties involved are getting nervous about it. I’m not sure what the best way to extricate ourselves from it might be. I hold out the hope that breakthrough technology in synthetic biology that I’ve been anticipating for almost 30 years will make it all moot before the international economic house of cards comes tumbling down.
______________________________
On that we most certainly agree. WTO is a deal made for the benefit of the international multi-billionaires ONLY at the expense of the “little people”
Interconnecting the entire world’s economy and putting it under the control of just a few people is utter madness. Especially when those people are power hungry and greedy. Unfortunately they get labeled “Capitalists” and what they are doing is labeled “Free Market” when both terms are completely misused.
@willis
You say you didn’t want to show that the emissions gap widened with Kyoto countries growing emissions more slowly than US emissions since ratification. You wanted to show that Kyoto did nothing to reduce emissions from signatories.
Fair enough.
Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that your graph does not support the latter purpose either.
Kyoto country emissions are below where they were when treaty was ratified at 1.45gta then and 1.3gta now for a total decrease of 12%. US emissions are lower too at 1.53gta then and 1.5gta now for a total decrease of 2%.
Moreover the emissions of Kyoto countries is now below their 1990 level which was 1.4gta then and 1.3gta now. US emissions on the other hand are substantially higher at 1.36gta then and 1.5gta now.
You wave your hands and pass this off as a result of a recession and speculate that without the recession the goal would not have been acheived by the Kyoto countries.
What exactly makes you think the recession would have happened whether Kyoto was signed or not? I’m certainly not convinced of that and any conviction would be pointless as you can’t set the clock backward and see what would have happened if the treaty had not been ratified. But my gut feel is that the global warming brouhaha both inspired Kyoto and inspired crude oil to rise from $20/bbl when it was signed to as much as $150/bbl when the recession began. I strongly feel, but cannot prove it, that Kyoto, the unprecedentedly rapid increase in the price of crude oil that began with its signing, and the recession that began when oil price peaked are all causally related thus it is reasonable to say that Kyoto caused the bloody recession which caused the sharp downward spike in CO2 emission by both Kyoto countries and the U.S. whose economic well-being is tied to some extent to that of the Kyoto countries (global economy).
FAIL.
There seems a to be an assumption that these figures mean something or that they are remotely accurate, when they are not any such thing.
They are merely an indication of what Mankind in those countries has reported as their CO2 emissions.
But that is hardly the correct view of anything. Some countries cheat! If i told you that I had all the deposits made to my checking account in the last year, and it added up to say $4000 dollars, would you believe the calculated checking account balance is $4000?
Certainly NOT. You’d say but what about the the withdrawals that you made? And what was the starting balance? The answer you would get is that nobody kept track of them, so they don’t count. But we did find one mistake that was reported that it was underestimating fees by and corrected by removing $75,000 dollars from the account. Mr. Kevin Trendbert and the Warmunsit Team agrees that a miscalculation of this magnitude happened, and he concurs that the transaction fees were underestimated by that amount.
Just such a situation exists in all this CO2 pseudo-accounting. The natural CO2 flux caused by plants absorbing CO2 to incorporate into their bodies, the ocean dissolving or emitting CO2 due to thermal changes, the absorption or desorption by minerals on the Earth’s surface is not done by Mankind. The bureaucrats are frustrated. They can’t force the Oak or Pine to divulge an report their CO2 actions.
So they simply ignore those transactions. It is just like ignoring the withdrawals in our hypothetical checking account example. Except for the mistake that they now correct for 25 times the deposits.
So what IS the checking account balance? Despite spending $75 Billion dollars a year on “climate research”, there actually was a group that undertook to find out, once. A Team of Scientists working at Princeton University, actually measured the concentration of CO2 arriving on the shores of America, and measured it as the prevailing winds carries it across the continent. They measured it when t blew out to sea into the Atlantic. Guess what? There was less CO2 in the Air going into the Atlantic then there was in the Air blowing in from the prevailing winds from the Pacific,despite industrilaized mankinds adding or maybe even substacting some CO2 by his lumbering, papermaking and farming.
Mankind in America, despite its industrialization, was unable to add to the CO2 on NET. Mankind in America wasn’t even able to keep it at the same level. The North American continent WAS and IS a NET CARBON DIOXIDE SINK, absorbing more CO2 than it emits into the atmosphere. Surprise ! SURPRISE !!!!
Now the Warmunists would say, “NO we estimate how much the forests and farms absorb.” They even claim that they are accurate to a gnat’s eyelash. Until they had to admit just this year, that the mere error in their estimates was 25 times the total amount reported on those charts above that the United States supposedly emits. But in reality are nothing but what was reported on forms to bureaucrats plus some Wild aSS Guesses with estmation errors 25 times the total reported numbers. Mankind it is ESTIMATED emits only 4% of the annual CO2 Flux, but no one knows what the total flux IS, or what Mankind really emits. Is it 3.5% or 3.8% or a nice round number like 4%.
Research by these Princeton Scientists reveal that North and South America and Australia are NET CARBON DIOXIDE SINKs. Only Eurasia and Africa emit CO2 on NET. So if there is any CO2 reductions needed as chanted by the Warmunists, only Eurasia needs to do it. So why pray tell are we being harangued to reduce our Man-made CO2?
GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT !!!!!!!!!
Does anyone have a good conservative number for the average natural carbon emission level? I have seen everything from termites to volcanoes cited as major natural sources.
Gail Combs says:
November 10, 2011 at 10:18 am
“On that we most certainly agree. WTO is a deal made for the benefit of the international multi-billionaires ONLY at the expense of the “little people” ”
We’ll have to part ways there. WTO is for the benefit of the international multi-billion dollar corporations. The little people can have as much or as little part of the success of global enterprises as they desire both through employment with them and purchase of their publically traded stock. I did both. It’s not my fault if others chose to spend their free time taking vacations they could hardly afford or putting money into down payments on real estate at the wrong time. I spent my leisure time making myself more valuable to the international corporation that employed me and I continued renting and put the money I could have used for a down payment on a home into the purchase of stock in the company I worked for which was an even better deal because employees got substantial discounts from market price on voluntary stock purchases – the company encouraged employees to become owners in the company for the benefit of both.
I suppose it’s the Protestant work ethic that I can really thank and the crumbling of traditional religious values in the U.S. can be blamed, at least in part, for the current malaise. But I don’t want to preach about the economic value of being a good Protestant so I won’t go into it further except to say that the highest living standards in the world today are invariably attached to the countries which embraced the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. I’m agnostic about the divine, afterlife, salvation and immortality aspects of religions but I’m not at all agnostic about the things which can be measured like freedom and prosperity enjoyed (or not) by various religious groups and the cultures associated with them where they are in the majority.
Dave Springer says:
November 10, 2011 at 10:14 am
“Suggest you read the comments to that article.”
I have. Of course there are different opinions – and people who thrived and people who went under during the time period in question, and everything in between – , we don’t have to rehash the back and forth here.
Stas Peterson says:
November 10, 2011 at 10:47 am
“There seems a to be an assumption that these figures mean something or that they are remotely accurate, when they are not any such thing.”
For my part I will tell you that the accuracy of the data represented in the OP graphs I accept “for the sake of argument”. Just because I don’t contest the data doesn’t mean I endorse its precision, accuracy, or general reliability. Just sayin…