TWO NOBEL PRIZES FOR THE GREEN ECONOMY – A “weird mystery”

– Ettore Gotti Tedeschi

The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics to two Americans for their science-economy-environment studies. The two “scientists” are William Nordhaus of Yale University for his studies on the effects of climate change on the economy and Paul Romer of Stanford University and former chief analyst of the World Bank, for the impact of technological innovation on these issues.

Our magazine proposes to reflect on this event for several reasons. The most obvious reason is related to the period to which these studies refer, the years 1970-1990, just the years of the start of the new world order which (among other things) above all sets the rules for population decrease and sustainable growth, that is, the principles of the economic crisis we are experiencing and even those of the failure of an entire civilization. I would like to point out to the reader that another authoritative member of Stanford University is Paul Ehrlich, famous for writing the book that initiates the process of population decreasing: The Population Bomb (1968), also famous for having made public sterilization at the university and famous for being invited to lecture at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (led by Mgr Sanchez Sorondo) at the Vatican in February 2017. But one of the two Nobel laureates has another interesting reference in his past as chief economist at the World Bank. This institution, established after the Second World War to support the reconstruction, then moved on to stabilize the global financial markets until it began to fight poverty in 2000, pursuing the famous “Millennium Goals” related to sustainable development, under the guidance of then UN secretary Ban Ki-moon, the same project that has contributed to exacerbating the conditions of failure of the world economy.

Also noteworthy is a curiously intriguing fact. Those who established the Nobel Prize for Economics (as economics was not a science, it could not be the academy of the sciences) was the Swedish Central Bank that began funding this award in memory of Alfred Nobel. And this began precisely (note the temporal coincidences) in 1969 when the first Nobel Prize for the economy was conferred. This fuels the suspicion that this award may be “political,” or better “political economic” at a precise moment in history, precisely the seventies, and serves to justify the goodness of criteria of economic conduct, “sanctifying” theories and theorists in view of practical use of their thesis. The reading of this event comes from the Nobel awarded to Dario Fo, in 1987, the desecrating and sometimes even blasphemous author of Mistero Buffo (on the story of Christ), also written in (attention!) 1969. The main motivation for Dario Fo was the fact that “according to the tradition of medieval jesters he mocked power” (which, that of the Church?).

The motivations of the Nobel Prize for the economy given to the two Americans are linked to the fact that human activity (production and consumption) have contributed to the rapid increase in average temperatures and the two winners have shown how the economy interacts with the science on the damages caused from climate change. Come to think about it: another award winning “mystery.” The thought of those who contributed to producing the error is used to manage the consequences, perhaps thanks to a Nobel Prize, a lecture at the Pontifical Academy of the Vatican, a quote in an Encyclical on the environment. Those who caused economic and environmental problems, in fact, were the neo-Malthusian environmental culture that exploded at the end of the 1960s and grew for the whole of the following period, and today fears being identified as responsible for the instability and protects itself in the way it can. The collapse of births in the Western world caused the collapse conditions of economic growth that were compensated with a strategic solution: the delocalization of volume production in countries with very low production costs (Asia) to re-import them at low prices, in order to increase the purchasing power in the West, necessary to increase individual consumption. This solution caused phenomena (in addition to socio-economic ones) of an “environmental” nature, thanks to the transfer of production to countries that did not care about energy consumption and CO2, and thanks to the hyperconsumism (with environmental impact) that characterized the western world.

The crazy promise to improve the economy and the environment by reducing births has produced exactly the opposite. This has happened, is happening and will happen, for a couple of reasons that are difficult to change. First because it was decided to ignore natural laws (of creation) that regulate the world. Secondly because one refuses to know and evaluate the moral causes of a problem, but only the moral consequences. (This is due to relativism that rejects a single moral value of reference). Even the Moral Authority deals with the moral consequences of poverty, inequality, the environment, immigration, ignoring its causes. How is it possible to make an adequate prognosis for solving a problem if it is wrong to make the diagnosis? The motivations of the prize seem interpretable in the sense that the economy is a political instrument of power, which wants to have moral autonomy and without regard for human goals and natural laws. It is probable that the two winners will soon be invited to hold lectio magistralis on economic decrease compensated by artificial intelligence, at the Pontifical Academy in the Vatican. And I was the one, my goodness!, who had proposed the Nobel Prize for Economics to Benedict XVI for the Encyclical Caritas in Veritate!