David Friedman On "Sustainability"

As a general rule, I don't like overly lengthy quotations, but I do see or hear things worthy of an exception to this rule from time to time. What follows is one of these - it is an extended quote I transcribed from David Friedman's recent talk delivered at his own University in California, in which he argues against "sustainability" as either empty rhetoric or a bad idea:

"One of the things that people have somehow managed to not pay enough attention to is that over the last twenty years, what people used to regard as the one great problem of the world, and made great efforts with no success at all to solve, has been solving itself - and that problem is the poverty of the third world... If you look at the history of India and China ... roughly from the end of world war two on, the Indian government accepted the advice of western economists, economic development people, which was that if you want to make yourself into a modern country you need central planning, five year plans; in order to develop your industry you've got to put big tariffs against foreign autos and build autos in India at a cost of $15,000 instead of buying second-hand autos in America at a cost of $500... and India basically followed that policy, the people in government were pretty happy with it because it put lots of power in their hands and it meant that while they were explaining that they were doing all this for the good of India, they were doing it in luxury, air-conditioned hotels in Delhi. And nothing happend, India stayed poor... during the same period China got its advice from the other direction, "advice" insofar as it wasn't their own ideas, it was basically coming from Stalin's Russia and they followed a roughly similar policy and they stayed poor.... Then about twenty or thirty years ago, for various reasons, the views in those countries shifted, and both countries moved a considerable difference but not nearly as far as I think they should have towards something more like a market society with private means of production, private buying and selling and so forth, and since then they've started getting ... well "rich" would exaggerate it but getting less poor - that instead of worrying about China as "how will they feed themselves or India, we're worried about China as a competitor to America. Isn't that terrible? We might have somebody else as rich as we are, how can we stand that? And economic development takes power. If we were somehow able, and fortunately we're not, but if we were somehow able to get the people of India and China to do what our position on global warming says they have to do, that would mean ending the most successful war on poverty since free immigration to the U.S.... because it would mean slowing or reversing economic development because it would mean one of the major inputs to doing stuff would have suddenly become much more expensive and much less available... Getting two to three billion people out of poverty is a lot more important in my view than keeping the world's temperature from going up two or three degrees centigrade."

Good stuff. It puts me in mind of a letter I wrote to the Taipei Times back in November 2009 on the subject of global warming and the Climategate scandal in which I wrote this:

"...what is at stake here, politically, is whether an increasing apparatus of state control over society, globally networked, is the right way to deal with any problematic climate change, or whether, on the other hand, a rapid dismantling of state apparatus both internationally and domestically would spur the necessary economic development to make technological solutions affordable on a global scale."

They didn't publish it.