A convenient truth - Steven Levitt - CDI 2011

[Music] thank you thank you very much right after my book super Freakonomics came out I had the pleasure of having dinner with a guy named Danny Kahneman so Danny Kahneman if you know him he's a Nobel Prize winner in economics but it's not even an economist he's a psychologist one of the greatest psychologists in the history of the world one of most eminent scholars in the world and as I sat down to dinner with him I was surprised to find out that he said to me I I've already read your book super Freakonomics it had only been out a few days I was surprised he would have taken the time to do it I said well what did you think of it and he said I believe it's gonna change the future of the world Wow I felt so wonderful he thought this was true but but he hadn't stopped talking he actually said I believe it's going to change the future of the world and not for the better but for the worse he was referring to the last chapter of her book a book the chapter on global warming and it turned out among the many criticisms we received on that chapter she's just one of the kinder versions of criticism basically everyone hated what we had to say about global warming of all the controversial things I've said I've said that legalized abortion is the reason that crime went down I've argued that drunk driving is actually good relative to drunk walking which turns out to be far more dangerous than driving drunk could say so not that you should drive drunk but if you have a choice between walking drunk and driving drunk driving drunk is definitely the right choice to make I've said that child car seats in work I've said all sort of things to offend people but nothing has ever had the effect of enraging people like what I said about global warming if you go back to nineteen 2009 the fall of 2009 when my book super Freakonomics came out it was an amazing magical time for the climate scientists if you know anything about science there's a hierarchy at the very top you've got the physicists and then you have the chemists then you have the biologists and then you have the evolutionary biologists and at the very bottom of the pecking order of scientists are the climate scientists okay now they're still well above economists we're down you know even further than that but the climate scientists at the bottom and they'd always had to accept that but things had changed the world had come to understand that the globe was getting warmer that mankind was almost certainly responsible for it there was scientific consensus there were documentaries like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth one of the most successful documentaries of all time and suddenly the world had come to believe that it was time to do it something to change and the climate scientists were at the heart of all of us at the Copenhagen meetings to discuss global you know climate change were going to be the moment at which the world changed course everything was gonna be better because the answer was the only way to save the planet was to stop producing so much carbon okay and the world leaders had pledged that they would come to an agreement and they would stop producing so much carbon and we would be on a path to a better world well it turned out that that meeting happened and nothing happened that nothing came out of it okay that no changes happened that since that time you can see almost no measurable impact of anything by government by people actually dealing with climate change and the thing that made everyone so angry when we published super freakonomics just a few months before the Copenhagen meetings was that's exactly what we said would happen okay but you didn't need to be a genius or a rocket scientist to know that nothing would happen indeed almost any economist could have told you the same thing because the basic premise of a fighting climate change was one that economists knew couldn't work it was based on the idea that people were good and people cared about other people and people would make big sacrifices for other people but if there's one thing that economists have learned over time it's that that's not really what people are about the people more or less their self interested and they more or less do what they were doing yesterday and it was very unlikely that governments or people would change their behavior radically but this isn't really I started one - your story really about climate change how what I really want to tell you story about is about conventional wisdom and about ways of thinking and about how even even you know big groups of scientists can become confused in a sense about what the question you really want to answer yes the reason the earth is getting so warm is almost certainly because we're producing so much in terms of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and so it stands to reason that the solution to the problem would be to produce fewer greenhouse gases okay here's the problem we love greenhouse gases we love the things that produce greenhouse gases we love the things that we drive and we love the things that we eat and it's an intrinsic part of our life so to change what we produced would cost a lot of money by the estimate of one economist the idea was it would cost about 1.2 trillion dollars a year to change our behavior in order to produce fewer greenhouse gases ok so about maybe 2% of the world's GDP is below would take that's expensive and not just one year but every single year essentially to the end of time ok the other problem would effect in greenhouse gases is that it's probably too little anyway even though the discussions that were talked about if this is a real problem we're gonna have a very big impact on the world around us ok the third thing is is probably too late ok if you really think we have a problem when you produce greenhouse gases carbon dioxide particular stays in the air for a hundred years ok when you put it up there the half-life is a hundred years so I should say ok so even if you start changing things now the benefits aren't even going to come for 50 60 70 years ok so even if the best intentions happen we wouldn't begin to cool the earth he optimistic appraisals would be fifty years before the earth started to cool so one of the things I came to understand about climate science is it's only really half science okay that the people who go on to be climate scientists say starters environmentalists okay and they bring with them almost a religious fervor to the idea about climate they believe that there there are things and I got to thinking well I'm an economist okay I don't know much about religious fervor okay I don't know anything about climate scientists is there something I might be able to say about global warming and as I thought about it it struck me that the Economist said at least three things to say about global warming the first is that if you think about progress think about how think about your cell phones think about your computing capabilities there is progress there's enormous amounts of progress in areas in which we invest okay if the real dangers of global warming are coming 100 years from now it's it's it's you know expensive to try to fight global warming now it might be cheap in the future one of the stories we tell in super Freakonomics is about the biggest problem that cities had in the late 1800s was horse manure cities were over run with horse manure with horse carcasses they were convened meetings like the Copenhagen meetings were convened where people say how can we rescue our cities from all of the horse manure well it turned out that the rescue came in the form of cars we didn't do no radically overhaul what we did with horses we didn't need to you know feed the horses last we need to have fewer horses we just needed to have cars there was a technological solution okay so economists in general say don't do anything today because we're always going to be better in the future at doing whatever we would do today to hold off okay on the flip side economists have a unique understanding I think of risk Morgan Spurlock talks about risk here's how we think about it people are risk averse and when you run through our little models it is shocking how much we will pay to avoid Cataclysm so think about an individual so if you if you take a typical individual and you actually work through the way people behave it turns out that to avoid a one in 1,000 chance of death this year you would be willing to pay about 2 to 4 percent of your income okay Susan one in a thousand chance so this is if I if I offered you a bet where we would take out a thousand sided die and I'd roll it and if it came up four hundred and seventy four I got to kill you okay if it didn't come up four hundred seventy four I would give you something like four percent of your income that's how much I'd have to give you to get you to roll that die okay and in that kind of world you have to be terrified of global warming because what global warming offers us is a small chance of Cataclysm okay and that is something that economists have come to learn is very very dangerous so what do you do about it well as I started to think about it and talk about there economists it was interesting because all economists thought about the problem the same way instead of saying how we're gonna reduce carbon we thought about any different lens because it isn't really the problem isn't really carbon what's the problem the problem is the planet is too hot okay who cares why is too hot it doesn't matter why it's too hot it could because of humans it could because of the Sun it could be you know cuz I you know cows who cares doesn't matter the question is how do you cool the planet quickly and cheaply okay note that I've completely reframed the problem this isn't about the moral weakness of humans and how progress has ruined the world it's just saying we have a problem the earth is too hot how do we get it cooler okay and some scientists have been thinking about that problem okay now if you remember I said that the the carbon solution is estimated to cost us two one trillion dollars a year to the end of time okay but Nature has actually give us a hint at another way to cool the earth other than reducing carbon so what's nature's approach well in 1999 Mount Pinatubo an enormous volcano erupted and the eruption lasted for days and it shot millions of tons of sulfuric ass into the atmosphere in fact it was so powerful it shot it all the way up into the Stratus okay and it turns out that if you can shoot sulfuric ash into the stratosphere it forms a kind of blanket around the earth and it blocks out some of the sunlight so that one volcano in 1991 managed to reverse for a year all of the global warming that had occurred for the previous 100 years okay and this is you know well known science there's nothing that no science fiction about it people understand this to be true and so you know even the strong environmentalist are willing to admit that if we were willing to foolishly rely on Mother Nature to produce huge volcanoes periodically we wouldn't have to worry about global warming okay so he's there a human version of these huge volcanoes I mean one option would be say to put nuclear bombs from time-to-time inside of volcanoes erupt them by hand and throw the ass up in the atmosphere now not probably a very intelligent approach but it turns out how much do you need to get of the of the the sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere so so some some of the world's best scientists guys had a led by Nathan Myhrvold the former chief technology officer at Microsoft went through some calculations and they figured out that essentially in order to cool the earth if you put sulfur dioxide high enough in the atmosphere so that it stays there it has a tremendous leverage in getting the job done Columbia Aerith and they realized that about how much you needed was if you had to garden hoses okay and you turn them on full and the amount of water that comes out of guard notes if you turn down let it run for a year that's how much sulfur dioxide you needed to put one at the North Pole want the South Pole and that's all the sulfur dioxide we need to cool the earth whatever temperature we want essentially okay so then the question became how do you get to garden hoses worth of sulfur dioxide 10 miles high at the North Pole in the South Pole and they thought what if we actually built a 10 mile long garden hose okay which doesn't necessarily sound like it would be the smartest solution to the problem but they figured out it actually wasn't that hard you have special garden hoses you have the kind of pumps that you might put into your your swimming pool and you have a bunch of helium balloons and they figured out that for about 200 million dollars they could build a prototype that would basically give the earth an insurance policy on global warming and that we could basically for two hundred million dollars build something which would keep the earth from getting hotter if we wanted to now a lot of not a lot of people are saying we should begin right today to change the earth but we would have an insurance policy on the future okay the cost let me emphasize again is two hundred million dollars okay I want to contrast that with one trillion dollars okay there's a lots and lots of zeros that get you from two hundred million to one trillion it's a big big difference I'm not sure I've ever heard of an idea that is more repugnant to regular people than the idea of building a garden hose to the sky and turning it on and starting to dial in the temperature of the earth like we're God okay the only idea that maybe I've ever heard the sensory penguin is that is the idea that we should have a market for kidneys or livers or organs okay which it turns out every economist is in favor of every economist thinks that for organ transplants we should have a market why not every non economist thinks it's the craziest idea they ever heard if you want to determine whether or not you are an economist all you have to do to ask yourself that question do I think there should be a market for people to buy and sell their organs to put inside of other people if you answer yes and you know you are indeed an economist at heart you're at least an honorary economist everybody hated that idea it just sets people on fire when you suggest that we're going to act like God and start to change the environment okay well it's especially repugnant I think because it involves polluting more to solve the problems of pollution right we're actually putting more pollutants up there to offset the other pollutants we did okay so these guys came up with a second idea one which was only slightly less repugnant then the idea of putting a garden hose to this guy well they said China has a number of enormous coal generating electric coal burning electricity generating plants and if we just found a way to take all of the sulfur dioxide and that they're producing in those plans and instead of having a come out of the the smokestacks 300 feet high it actually came out 10 miles high the world's global warming problem will be felt so how do you do it well it turned out they basically built a big balloon okay they have a patent for a big balloon that just makes the ash go up into the sky 10 miles high and so we're not putting any extra pollution in the air which is putting in a different spot and that doesn't seem to me to be quite as bad it's putting the extra pollution in the air well but I'm an economist non economists still find that incredibly repugnant so along came a third set of people guy named John Latham a scientist environmentalist who came up with another idea it's incredibly simple idea and it's brilliant and I think many ways what what scientists understand is that dark surfaces absorb a lot of heat make the earth warmer and brighten the light surfaces like clouds reflect a lot of the heat back into the sky they make the earth cooler if we could get more clouds over the oceans and in particular if we made the clouds in a special way that made them more reflective we would in a very simple way could moderate the temperature of the earth and it doesn't need to be a big share of the surface of the of the ocean just you know three or four or five percent so what John Latham figured out along with another guy Steve Salter is that you can create clouds over oceans just the same way that airplanes and the contrails and when airplanes fly they leave behind them clouds contrails from the condensation that the way you could leave these trails over the ocean was simply by having a bunch of solar-powered dinghies 10,000 to be precise and they would putter around energized by the Sun and they would throw up into the air salt water and the salt water the salt molecules end up being the nuclei around which the clouds form and their model suggests that if we had 10,000 of these little dinghies puttering around in the ocean spraying up salt water behind them guided by GPS then that would be enough to completely offset all of the global warming we've seen in the last hundred and something years okay and the beauty of this solution is that if you get tired of making the earth cooler you just called the dinghies back into port I tell him to stop spraying the Sun this is all into the air it's completely reversible getting these clouds I mean who doesn't like clouds I mean this is not like sulfur dioxide we're putting up there these are just clouds they're natural they don't hurt anyone we already have lots of clouds of the ocean why would we expect this to affect anything in terms of global patterns interestingly despite what I find to be an incredibly compelling argument these guys make they have had a total of about two million dollars in funding over the last decade no one will fund this project I myself have gone to a number of billionaires and I've tried to convince him that if they want to make a name for themselves a legacy of saving the world if they just had five or ten million dollars to put towards studies where we could actually learn whether the science behind it works when you start to scale it it couldn't possibly hurt anyone but it would give us a quick idea about whether or not if we want to have that insurance policy it would be there and I have been unable to convince any billionaire to be willing to take out this five million dollar insurance policy on the globe there's something about about the idea that if you mess with the earth people will not like you and billionaires when they give away their money they want people to like them not to hate them even if by by doing it they save the world if you look at Google Trends or any kind of measure of the media there was a moment in time when everybody was talking about climate change okay and the crazy thing is it's just marching along the climate is changing there's no question about it and yet no one anymore has any kind of willingness to do anyone okay but we're at a point where I think ultimately as repugnant as the ideas I've thrown out today and I probably most of you are disgusted by the fact that when I could have talked about you know something pleasant like how real estate agents rip off their clients instead I came and told you how we should be messing with mother nature I think the time will come where this be our solution and will be an incredibly easy solution and the people who do it eventually I think like like with life insurance it turns out life insurance I used to be repugnant to people that when people first had the idea that well what you'll do is you'll give me money and then when someone you love dies I'll pay you a whole bunch of money back I mean that's pretty repugnant to not we accept it we accept it now but there was a time in the 19th century where people hated that idea so here's the irony everybody talks about global global warming and climate change and the environmentalists and the climate scientist devote their life to it but you actually had to go back and give a prize to the group of people who have had the biggest positive effect in slowing down global warming climate change over the last two or three years do you know who would be it wouldn't be government it wouldn't be the environmentalists to tell you the truth I think it would probably be economists and bankers well how can that be well almost everybody blames the financial crisis and the ensuing global recession on economists and on bankers the terrible greedy actually did that led to financial implosion well it turns out the only thing that we figured out that reduces the amount of greenhouse gases that go into the sky is slowing down the economy so in the end if you think about it The Economist's are the one to blame for the fact the economy is in a complete freefall and therefore we have done more for the environment than any other group of people on the planet in the last three years and for that you'll have to thank us thank you very much take care thank you very much Steve just one question okay about about another of your books una pregunta sorry to premier leave it about the first book you mentioned that will do have a theory about what are the consequences that you have a name and not other name yes I would like if you could elaborate little sure silly so you know in the United States there's an enormous difference in the naming patterns for african-americans and for white children okay almost no overlap and in fact Morgan DISA Morgan Spurlock does work on that in the Freakonomics film and there's a general view among Americans that if you give your child the wrong name you will like make their life terrible okay so we thought how could you study that how could you begin to do that and it is amazing so in this age of privacy it turns out the state of California gave us data from every birth certificate every person ever born in California with their name and the hospital and the date and what we were able to do was to take each child each girl who was born and then when she grew up when she had a baby we would take the information from her baby's birth certificate and we'd linked them together and so we had a way to understand whether or not your name you got at birth what your life looked like 20 25 30 years later when you had a baby okay and so what we did was we said well let's take all the african-american girls who got you know white names like you know Molly and Heather okay and compare them to the girls who got names like shamiqua or or Jordan okay and it turns out much too many people surprised it matters not the slightest bit okay so in the end what we realized was there's zero evidence that your name can affect your life at all I mean look at Oprah right look at kind of a price right people think well what if you didn't know Oprah you'd say what a crazy name but as soon as you know someone for about 15 minutes their name becomes unimportant and and and so I think it's it's uh it's been an interesting study because actually what we came to believe is that the only thing that a name matters for it doesn't matter for your life it matters for the parents standing with their friends okay that all of naming children ends up being what kind of name can I choose for my child that will make my friends think that I'm really hip I'm really smart I'm really cool whatever it is you're trying to be and so as a parent that's what you need to do and in particular let me just direct you now I know they're gonna be different in Mexico in the US but we have a list of Freakonomics approved names in our first book okay and we have a bet that those names are gonna become quite popular so you will help me up quite a bit if you can name your own children off of that list of 20 names please do that for me thank you Steve [Music] [Applause]

Channel: LaCiudaddelasIdeas

Views: 33,148

Rating: 4.5089288 out of 5

Keywords: andres roemer, roemer, ciudad de las ideas, grupo salinas, poder cívico, congreso, mentes brillantes, ideas, pláticas, conferencia, ciencia, pensar, puebla, conocimiento, pensamiento, idea, cdi, cdipuebla, talks, speakers, ted

Id: -30CdS8xiyM

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017