Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…The water issue is a pervasive global issue. Colleagues of mine published in PNAS a few weeks ago and then another article. One on the fact that with climate change, the models show that the American Southwest and Great Plains are likely to dry very, very significantly during the 21st century. The climate models basically show massive water problems in many places in the world and for two big reasons. Many dry places now, which are often on the descending zone of convective forces like in Hadley cell, become drier with climate change because these convective forces become more powerful. Second, in general, with higher temperatures, evapotranspiration is faster so the soils dry out. All of this means that water crises will intensify. Even without the climate change, water stress is pervasive because population increases and agricultural demands are huge. We have 60,000 major dams in the world diverting runoff already. That means famous places like the ROC, which dried out irrespective of the climate change in the past. I can tell you about recent research, and it absolutely comports what I see with my own eyes in many places. Syria had a huge drought, the biggest in its modern history, from 2006 to ’10. It led to many social ramifications that contributed to the explosion of violence starting in 2011. This fact of these ecological crises turning into social catastrophes, I think, is a very real phenomenon. We should not presume that somehow we’ll just be able to handle this stuff. I’m told constantly, “Crisis leads to innovation and solution.” The truth is that’s sometimes true, and sometimes crisis leads to catastrophe. What I’m going to do — I think we have time for two more questions. I’ll take the two sequentially, and then Jeff can address the two together as he sees fit. Don’t answer the first right away. A question here, a question there, and then back to Jeff. Given that a goal of economic development policy is to help low-income countries catch up, what do you believe the Ex-Im Bank’s role, and export subsidies more generally, have in economic development, especially with the knowledge that many of the beneficiaries of Ex-Im assistance are firms in countries with rich economies like Mexico, India, Hong Kong?…

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