Would you rather be poor or face the collapse of global civilization?

Now that's a good fear mongering propaganda :) Destroy the bourgeois or face the eternal hunger and enslavement! Get rid of {insert your preferred ethnicity} or face the downfall of the nation!

When in reality it's "be poor now (and likely to face the collapse of global civilisation and ecological crisis is still in roadmap) or maybe your grandkids will face the ecological crisis".

So, because collapse isn't certain, you'd rather stuff cotton in your ears, cover your eyes and yell "lalalala can't hear you?"

BTW, your suggestion that my post in any way represents or resembles a call for ethnic cleansing is in extremely poor taste and bad faith. Stop putting words in my mouth.

Not ethnic cleansing. Just a regular regime that pushes through using emotional calls.

The problem is not that collapse isn't certain. The problem is that solution is iffy to say the least. So it's one possibly bad outcome vs another possibly bad outcome. On top of that, one out come may come much faster than the other.

There's plenty of good research out there showing that global civilization will collapse before the end of the century given the amount of warming we're on track for. You should read it.

However, assuming it is coming, what is the solution? Besides "stop pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere," I just don't see one. And, doing that is going to lower a lot of peoples' standards of living, i.e. make them poor.

I did read it and IMO it's emotionalised bullshit. Few cities may be vacated, few major seaside cities will solve it with expensive technological installations. But it certainly won't be {insert your favourite dystopian movie} style collapse.

Solution is "stop pumping greenhouse misions and consuming so much crap shipped all around the world". But developed countries paying off developing countries won't bring us to that solution.

The world as a whole has to consume much much less, yesterday. Developed countries can start by bringing manufacturing and agriculture back home. This will increase costs and lower consumption.

For most people it's:

A) be poor now

versus

B) maybe face the collapse of global civilization in 40 years.

They'll chose B) everytime.

Do you have any historical examples of this? As I believe in opposite.

Tragedy of the commons is a thing for a reason.

Why do you think that a lot of people want "small government"? The state/government is by definition in those "commons".

Regarding examples, they're countless. Think of petty tyrants fighting over the remains of the Byzantine Empire just as about the Ottomans were about to conquer it. Almost every falling empire had this behavior going on, selfish people "getting theirs" just before the fall.

It's human nature, unfortunately.

The government isn't really part of "the commons" at all:

> "The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all [on what becomes law]."

https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem/

It is of the commons. That's the problem. If the government were pmiller2's property, nobody could take it over, you'd defend it.

But because the government/state is ill-defined and shared, it can be abused and it's much harder to do anything about it.

Private property is selfish but efficient and clearly separated from the rest (in general) while public property is altruistic, not that efficient and generally not that well delineated from the rest.

Our government has more characteristics of private property than the commons, then.

And new regime is usually coming to get rich fast, not fight for a noble goal achievable in 100 years. Even if leaders are naive idealists, usually the masses get behind them for a quick buck.

I love evolution of USSR for this reason. First the masses took down Tsarist regime to take property of the rich. Then masses took down Soviet regime to privatise the property. Both events happened because life was shit and people were looking for a quick way to live better.

Take a look at any (r)evolution. Pretty much every time people took "get rich soon" over hippy paradise. French revolution, Soviet revolution, Dissolution of USSR, Hitler coming to power...

Do you have any arguments to believe in the other option?

It doesn't work this way from a macroeconomic perspective.

If a foreign nation runs a trade surplus and the US runs a trade deficit as a result, that means that spending by foreigners is smaller than their income, in other words, foreigners are saving money which they can invest in the USA. If they invest then the money flowing outside the US will also flow back to the US.

The Chinese buy US treasury bonds, that is where most of the USD China receives eventually end up. The government can issue debt to tap into the savings and invest them on behalf of the people buying treasury bonds. The investment will create new jobs and hopefully a return over the long term that beats inflation.

Of course the assumption was that the money is being invested. From what I have seen Donald Trump merely used the low yields on the treasury bonds to cut taxes for the rich. This will increase the corporate savings rate at the expense of the household savings rate. It's entirely possible that the additional savings end up in treasury bonds again and we are stuck in a loop.

If they invest in the US :) But why would they invest in US if developed world is focusing on propping up the developing nations?