I’m pleased that The New York Review of Books published this letter of mine, as well as author Bill McKibben’s response to my missive, in its Dec. 21 issue:
HOW CLOSE TO CATASTROPHE?
By Donald J. Boudreaux, Reply by Bill McKibben
In response to How Close to Catastrophe? (November 16, 2006)
To the Editors:
I’ve read few passages in your pages that are as mistaken as Bill McKibben’s assertion that “the technology we need most badly is the technology of community—the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done…. We Americans haven’t needed our neighbors for anything important…” [“How Close to Catastrophe?,” NYR, November 16].
Each of us cooperates daily with countless others—neighbors, fellow citizens, foreigners—to ensure not only our prosperity but our very existence. My mind boggles at the number of people who cooperated to make available to me, for example, the shirt on my back. Cotton growers in Egypt; fashion designers in Italy; textile workers in Malaysia; merchant marines from around the globe; investment bankers in Manhattan; insurers in Hartford; truck drivers along the East Coast; department store executives in Seattle; security guards and retail clerks in Virginia—these people and millions of others cooperated so that I might wear an ordinary shirt. Ditto for my house, my food, my subscription to The New York Review of Books.
For McKibben to say that “cheap fossil fuel has allowed us all to become extremely individualized, even hyperindividualized” is to be blind to the amazing and vast system of cooperation that today spans the globe. Clearly, we have, in spades, “knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.”
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
Bill McKibben replies:
Donald J. Boudreaux’s response proves precisely the point I was
trying to make—and it says something about the blinders that too many
economists have strapped on. We do cooperate, unconsciously, to promote
our individual self-interest; Chairman Boudreaux’s slightly less
elegant restatement of Adam Smith’s remarks about the butcher and the
baker are, as far as I can tell, not in serious dispute. What is in
dispute is whether this cooperation carries over into more crucial
matters—like keeping the planet from overheating in the next decade.
Since my article came out, the British government has released a report
estimating that the economic cost of global warming will exceed the
combined impact of both world wars and the Great Depression of the
1930s. So far, there is precious little sign of our communities coming
together to meet this challenge—politically, economically, culturally.
Which doesn’t prove Smith—or even Boudreaux—wrong. Just incomplete.
And I thank Tibor Machan for alerting me to my letter’s appearance in TNYRB — a fact that prompts me to share with you this wonderful recent op-ed by Tibor.
