Ends, Means and Policy

Current Events As Art Values Rise, So Do Concerns About Market’s Oversight An Oil Boom Takes a Toll on Health Care Is Divestment an Effective Means of Protest? – Divestment won’t do this by directly affecting share prices, at least in the short run — these companies are the richest enterprises in history. Instead, as the country’s colleges, cities and denominations begin to cut their ties, we’ll start to revoke the social license of these firms. Many of the nation’s elites sit on college boards, forcing them to grapple with the fact that the fossil fuel industry is now an outlaw against the laws of physics.

Business Subsidies

The Stern Review on the economics of climate change concludes that society should spend about 1% of global GNP to reduce the risk of climate catastrophe. Economist William Nordhaus uses a higher discount rate in a similar study, and concludes that 1% of GNP annually greatly exceed the benefits of avoiding catastrophe. In 2007, per capita global GNP grew at about 3%. In other words, Nordhaus argues that accepting our living standards from four months ago is too high a price to pay to avert catastrophe. Do you think Nordhaus appropriately discounts future impacts? Do you think those impacts should be discounted at all?

Big Ideas Practical dualism versus monisms Presuppositions of policy Ultimate means Ultimate end Information and knowledge Determinism and materialism Ends-means spectrum

Preferences vs. Ethics

Big Ideas Economic imperialism Ecological reductionism Steady-state subsystem