Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The problem with green investment seems to me to be that is it is so polluted with political money that you can't use market as a signal for anything. I.e. everybody invests in, I don't know, solar panels (just random example) and then it turns out the model is not viable, and all the political money is burned, which nobody (among politicians) cares about, and your money is burned with them. Sure, if US were a dictatorship like China, you could follow the political money just relying on inertia, but in the US the agenda could change every 4 years, and some investments may be so stupid that they don't survive even if the government wants them to. There will be viable projects too, the question is how you separate viable from unviable ones in a distorted market?
There's a fundamental issue with industrial policy where it's justified by government mandates and subsidies allowing nascent industries to develop locally. But once the justification for the power is made, they forget all about it and just throw money at things. Like how the economic concept of a non-exclusive, non-rivalrous "public good" gets repurposed to mean "goods I want the public to pay for"
Giving people money to buy solar panels from China didn't produce a local industry, it just gave certain people a ton of money at the expense of other people. Solar might be a great investment, but nothing about the government's policy did anything to influence that except add more slack for malinvestment and the nightmare of scams residential solar loans turned into.
Ironically the Biden tariffs and manufacturer subsidies are an actual piece of industrial policy, but decades too late and at odds with literally every other government policy pushing manufacturing off shore. Ironically harming the natural process of solar adoption more than.ending all solar subsidies would have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link