2024 Reads: Great Stories for Difficult Times
What can we say about 2024 and the times we live in? We live through so little that can qualify as reassuring or hopeful.
Resilience?
The word 'resiliency' is one of the more overused words in the wake of the pandemic. Things that were disrupted because of lack of proper investment include our supply chains that move goods around the world. It is not just global pandemics that cause major crises along these supply chains.
Supply chains and prices
Supply chains are still a bit of a mess since the pandemic. The ongoing geopolitical crises, climate change effects, and poor private sector management of large projects are putting intense strain on the transport industry and the costs cannot be understated.
Taxes and production
An issue arises when we look at taxes inevitably raised to pay the debt or for the increased spending. There is some strange thing that happens where people expect not to have to pay for things that the government does. Many think every tax dollar they pay is extra spending, even if they suddenly do not have to pay the directly out of pocket higher price in the private market any more. Math is hard and net savings are not obvious to people. The left should start talking about state revenue generation as an alternative.
Unions and natural gas
Carbon neutrality in the energy system is not the end of the use of natural gas, but it will result in the shift of focus on the use of natural gas from energy to production. If done correctly, this will not mean a /reduction/ in the work available. But, it will mean a shift in the focus of where that work happens. However, a redirection in the focus of work and investment is very problematic for current revenue programs of industry leading companies in Canada.
Transportation, new energy solutions, and investment
Efficiency of transport and storage is what is going to drive the cost of energy. This is because of our continued limited capacity to generate non-emitting electricity and that we do not use electricity only where it is produced.
Economic impacts of climate change
There is some new research about the drag on the economy of climate change. The new research questions the validity of previous studies which seemed to not attempt to model the direct effect of increased temperatures. This one looks at those in conjunction with temperature, extreme heat, extreme precipitation, and extreme wind effects on the economy.
Climate, subsidies, and investment
The push for commodification of carbon and the establishment of carbon markets has warped our understanding of investment and workable solutions to climate change. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Carbon Capture and Storage discussion.
Per-Capita Economic Growth
Population growth has been a focus of economic policy folks and right-wing pundits in major industrialized countries since the pandemic. The focus in the USA has been on so called 'illegal immigration' and endemic birth rate. In Canada, the focus has been on immigration and the temporary foreign worker program. Population growth is compared to economic growth (GDP), but the lack of short-term correlation between these two metrics has many questioning the popular rhetoric from liberal governments who promised economic growth. The left's answer is not so obvious. Liberal immigration policy was not driven by the desire for growing GDP, but was part of a suite of policies designed to increase unemployment and drive down wage growth to control short-term inflation. To no one's surprise, these policies drove support for far-right, anti-immigration parties.
Investment in industrial research
Productivity is dependent on not just the investment in research, but the implementation of new technologies that increase profitability. A new report from the Dallas Fed points out that there is a way a state can foster increases in productivity from new technological investment, which is funding federal industrial research programs. In Canada, we have not done this in a way to foster actual productivity gains.