Tim Worstall

Economic Illiteracy

We don’t normally expect the People’s Republic of Berkeley to understand the real world but this piece is simply amazing.
Talking about the jobs impact of moving to renewable energy sources :

They found that for all feasible scenarios, the renewables industry consistently generated more jobs per average megaWatt generated in construction, manufacturing and installation, in operations and maintenance and in fuel processing, than the fossil fuel industries.

And they think that this is a good thing.

Um, guys, if you have to use more people to do something then it is a bad thing. It means your process is less efficient than the alternative.

Don’t they have Econ 101 at UC Berkeley ?

In

2 responses

  1. Atanu Dey Avatar
    Atanu Dey

    I seem to recall that Brad DeLong is from the PRoB. And he seems to know a bit of Econ 101. Indeed they do have a few Nobel prize winner in econ too over there. So, no, that bit you quote is an outlier.

    Reply
  2. Tim Worstall Avatar
    Tim Worstall

    An outlier ? But it’s the whole point of the report. “Using renewables is good because it will create more jobs “. To which the response is ” Using more labour to provide our energy supplies is reduction in the productivity of labour, which makes us less wealthy “.
    That PRoB contains good economists may be true, but they don’t seem to be talking to the people who wrote this report.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Tim Worstall

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading