Avi Blizovsky
When I worked as a reporter for environmental issues in the local newspaper "Kelvo" in Haifa in the XNUMXs, the demands of the people of the electricity company and the refineries were not to bother them with the nonsense of the greens, because what they fear are theoretical things, while the damage to them will be real if they are forced to add, for example, dozens of receptors Millions of dollars in the case of an electricity company or reduce production activity whenever the inversion phenomenon occurs that makes it difficult for the pollution from the refineries to disperse.
That's when I was first exposed to the term "environmental price." Today, when global warming is a fact known to everyone, it is easier to prove that the environmental price is just as real as the price that the polluters are supposed to pay to alleviate the pollution. We are not in the era of the industrial revolution where smoke in the chimney meant food at home.
As an economics and management graduate, I am convinced of this, but it turns out that many are not convinced of this, and here comes Charles Whelan's book, revealing the environmental price in all its intricacies. But this is only one of the topics that came up in Willen's book and which jumped out at first. An equally interesting question is how the disappearing hand works. For example, how do we get to the supermarket next to our homes every day exactly the products we consume from a variety found in many countries around the world.
As a self-employed person who sometimes has to navigate between jobs, it is clear to me that the cost of a product (for example, a vacation abroad) is much more than its nominal cost - but also how many jobs I lost during this time. This is also discussed in the book.
And what makes countries rich? Among other things, Whelan specifies that a rich country is not so only because of the genes of its residents or its location on the globe, but because of the existence of efficient government institutions, property rights, prevention of excessive legislation, human capital, openness to trade, responsible fiscal and monetary policy. Natural resources are not an essential factor in development, on the contrary, they are actually an inhibiting factor (one of the examples that Whelan gave of a country poor in natural resources but with a flourishing economy is Israel.
In the HA book, reference is made to what happens when a government distorts the economy to artificially help the poor, what in our language is called social policy both on an intrastate scale and in aid from the World Bank to poor countries, this aid must be conditioned on improvements in economic policy, because otherwise, poor countries like poor people have habits very bad Providing support may encourage the continuation of the behavior that needs to be changed.
There are claims according to which there is a socialist system and a capitalist economy and the spectrum between them and you have to choose. Economy, as it appears from the book, there is only one and those who behave according to it profit. Whoever tries to control (a person, and even a country) loses in the end. It is likely that Absalom Whelan will not like the words of Charles Whelan, the economist, who criticizes the communist attempt to plan everything. Of course, like the environmental price, there is also an external price for poverty, and therefore it must be addressed, but most of the time the remedies that the governments take are wrong.
Book cover:
The economy is in every corner: in the grocery store, in the mailbox, at the savings bank, at the gas station. From the popsicle you bought at the age of five to the mortgage you took out at the age of 35, the "poor science" - as the Scottish critic Thomas Carlyle called economics - surrounds us from all sides.
Wretched, they call him. But as Charles Whelan shows us in Naked Economics, this essential science can also be a real pleasure. With humor and clear and fluid language, Whelan strips down the economy, that is, removes the graphs, the equations and the professional jargon - and breathes life into it. His book is full of witty anecdotes and simple examples from everyday life (and not only of people whose financial routine is similar to his and his readers'). It dispels the fog that surrounds so many concepts in economics, and answers all the questions you've always been ashamed to ask, for example: how to enter - if at all - investments in the capital market? Why does anyone reading this book probably not work in garbage disposal? If Nike pays wages - hunger to the girls working in production, is it wrong to boycott its products?
Willan managed to do what was considered impossible - to write an enjoyable and understandable book about economics.
” My wife's and my decision to buy an SUV affects all the other passengers on the road, but none of them are involved in it. I don't have to compensate all Honda Civic and other small car owners for the fact that I slightly increase the risk to their lives. I also don't have to compensate asthmatic children whose condition will worsen due to the gases I emit when I drive in the city at a consumption rate of four kilometers per liter. And I never sent a check to the people in New Orleans who might one day find their homes flooded because the carbon dioxide emissions from my car melted the polar ice caps. But all of these are real costs resulting from driving a vehicle that is less efficient in terms of fuel consumption. My decision to buy a Ford Explorer creates what economists call an externality, which means that the private cost of my behavior is different from the social cost."
The bookworm
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