Democracy and insurance
Here are a few things that caught my eye this week.
Time is up for neoliberals
I recently had an email exchange with a colleague about how to speed up climate policy. At one point, he said, “Capitalism is the most efficient way to solve climate change.” I responded that there is no single version of “Capitalism”, but rather a continuum of how much government intervention there is in society.
Over the last 40 years, the United States has shifted towards a neoliberal version of capitalism, characterized by policies that emphasize deregulation, privatization, and free-market capitalism. The result has been environmental damage, including climate change, unaffordable health care, inequity in our society, legalized corruption, etc.
At this point, as Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in a Washington Post oped, the verdict is in: this neoliberal version of capitalism has been terrible:
We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society.
Read the entire thing — it’s well argued and convincing. Here is a gift link.
More about homeowners insurance
As readers of The Climate Brink know, I've been thinking a lot about homeowner’s insurance recently. I think this is one of the first places where the general public suddenly realizes, “Holy crap, climate change is terrible.”
I ran across the How Things Work substack and this fantastic article that highlights the difficult choices we face, making the point that there are no easy solutions.
In a nutshell: climate change and its increasing disaster risk causes insurance rates to skyrocket for homeowners in areas exposed to fires and storms. Those skyrocketing rates become unaffordable, sparking an outcry from homeowners. State and local politicians step in to try to artificially limit the rise of rates, which does not fix the underlying problem, which guarantees that the size of the eventual national reckoning will only get bigger. We have already reached the “financial publications writing ‘Teetering on the Edge of a Crisis’” stories phase of this process. And it’s still early.
Unfortunately, the longer we wait, the more painful our choices become. Read it all here:
Update: Several readers have flagged this story in today’s New York Times about homeowner’s insurance. Important and worth a read.
NYT had an article about homeowners insurance this morning. It let you check to see how home insurers are doing in your state. I was surprised to see that insurers in my state of Michigan went deeply into the red last year, after being in the green in previous years. And that seems to be due to one set of storms with tornadoes that hit mid-Michigan (around Lansing) last summer. And I thought we were pretty insulated from disasters here! I'm wondering what my new rate will be when my policy renews in a couple months.
Thank you Andrew - inc. for flagging Hamilton's piece, realy useful!
I enjoyed the Stiglitz oped, but couldn't help think he was a bit naïve when saying that neoliberals "believe firms should maximize shareholder value, doing whatever they can get away with, *because bigger profits serve the common good*".
I would contend these people have proven time and time again that they don't give a damn about the common good or about "growing the pie" for everyone. They care about their getting ahead of others, ie, increasing their share of the pie, and NOTHING ELSE.
They will even wilfully make the pie shrink if it means their share gets bigger (in absolute terms) - and indeed that's precisely what they're doing when they keep investing in fossil fuels and other high-emission industries: they're stocking up climate impacts on the poor and vulnerable (and increasingly on the middle class) and betting they can shield themselves from climate impacts thanks to their wealth...