**Fiscal Discipline da 2
Econ Decline--Environment
Download 0.63 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Growth Solves War
- Growth Solves Poverty
Econ Decline--EnvironmentEconomic collapse turns the global environment – countries utilize methods to bounce back that are detrimental to the environmentBiello , Editor for the Scientific American , 08 (David, Editor for the Scientific American. “Is a Global Recession Good for the Environment?” http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=is-a-global-recession-good-for-the-08-11-132) Times are tough when a millionaire oil man can't get a wind farm built. T. Boone Pickens backed off of his much ballyhooed mega-wind project in Texas this week, citing the declining cost of natural gas. Fossil fuel burning power plants are still too good of a deal to bother investing $2 billion into wind turbines. A bear market might seem like a boon for the environment: less overall economic activity, like manufacturing and driving, means less overall pollution. Right? Actually, as the Pickens example proves, global economic downturns take a toll on the environment by restrain economic activity that could improve the situation. But that's not all. Over-farming and drought led to 400,000 square kilometers of prime top soil blowing away in the wind in the 1930s, exacerbating, and exacerbated by, the Great Depression. And the economic crises that crippled the economies of southeast Asia in the 1990s also set in motion a rapid uptick in environmentally damaging pursuits such as illegal logging and cyanide fishing, according to the World Bank. Even as I speak, economic worries have prompted some European countries to begin backpedaling on their commitments to cut back on global warming pollution. So an economic downturn is no friend of the environment. Brother, can you spare a turbine? Growth Solves WarGrowth good – democracy, values, and modern society, prevents conflict.Mandel 5 (Michael Mandel, Bloomberg Business, “Whats So Good About Growth?,” http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_45/b3958122.htm) The real benefit of growth, Friedman argues, is that it encourages a wide range of social virtues, including dedication to democracy, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, and commitment to fairness. By contrast, he writes, "when living standards stagnate or decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress." The book, at almost 600 pages, is too long and quite repetitive in spots. And it doesn't pack the punch of Friedman's influential 1988 book, Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, which warned that massive budget deficits were going to badly damage the U.S. economy. But in this book Friedman has scored a dead-center hit on the critical question: Why do we value economic growth? The usual argument is that a bigger GDP -- more goods and services -- leads to happier, more satisfied citizens. But that apparently simple proposition turns out to be far more complicated. As Friedman notes, there is plenty of evidence that people judge their well-being by comparing themselves to others. As the average income in a country goes up, so do expectations. As a result, the level of GDP per person in a country, taken alone, doesn't necessarily say much about the level of happiness. The lack of a direct link between personal satisfaction and the level of GDP per person seems to undercut the purely economic arguments in favor of growth. After all, why should we undergo all the turmoil of technological change and economic restructuring if more gadgets and bigger homes aren't going to make us happier in the end? Friedman argues that economic growth has a key additional benefit: As long as people see their own income rises, they worry less about competing. And that in turn creates a more favorable environment for political and social advances. To demonstrate this point, he draws on economic studies and historical examples, both American and global. In the 1700s, he points out, it became accepted that the rise of commercial and trading activity was a force for positive legal and institutional change. Adam Smith, for one, believed that moral progress went hand in hand with economic progress, as voluntary exchange replaced the use of force. Friedman points to the the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. and the Nazis in Germany as examples of what can happen when growth vanishes. And he worries that "rising intolerance and incivility and the eroding generosity and openness...have been, in significant part, a consequence of the stagnation of American middle class living standards during much of the last quarter of the twentieth century." Growth Solves PovertyEconomic growth solves povertyAcemoglu, Professor of Economics at MIT, 1/7/2012 [Daron, "Introduction to Economic Growth", Journal of Economic Theory, January 7, 2012, Accessed: 6/28/2012, pg 545] Economic growth continues to be one of the most relevant and exciting sub-areas of economics. Its relevance stems from the questions it focuses on. The problem of economic development remains a major one for humanity at large and for economics as a science. At the time Adam Smith laid many of the foundations of modern economics, there were likely small differences between the richest and the poorest nations in the world (e.g., Maddison [18], Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson [3]). Since then, the gaps between the rich and poor have increased to a level that would have been incomprehensible to most 18th and 19th century economists. At the root of this great disparity is the differential growth experience around the world. Some, like many in western Europe and western European offshoots around the world, have grown rapidly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, while many others have stagnated. This differential growth led to a huge gap in income per capita and living standards that continues to this day. Naturally, economic growth also has the power to rapidly close such gaps as illustrated by the experiences of countries of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and more recently China. Thus, the consequences of a few percent change in the growth rate of a nation can have huge consequences for the well-being and living standards of its citizens in one or two generations. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.63 Mb. Share with your friends:
|