Economists’ conflicted interests drive their advocacy of carbon markets

Evidence

Furthermore, professional economists are brought in to shill for this strategy, largely because they enjoy conflicts of interest in this area of a magnitude commensurate with those they have nurtured with the financial sector in general. The neoliberal genealogy of this approach is conventionally traced back to the MPS member Ronald Coase, who first proposed that pollution could be optimized by submitting it to a market calculus. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 928

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing the specifics of the conflicts of interest — which economists, funded by whom, in the carbon trading space?
• XREF: Coase as MPS member grounds carbon markets in the same Mont Pelerin Society lineage as Hayek, Friedman — connects to the reader’s thought-collective through-line. — connects to: Market advocacy can rest on despair about alternatives rather than genuine conviction — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 97; Economists serve the financial sector by muddying public debate to block political action. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 623; Science denialism, carbon trading, and geoengineering together form a coordinated neoliberal climate strategy. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 926 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Public-choice logic applied to economists themselves reveals built-in incentives toward rent-seeking theories. #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 597
• The market advocacy developed into a closed self-referential tradition in economics #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 154
• Economists’ appeals to science deflected attention from their own failure #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 483