According to a review of a book by Kings College Professor Daniel Susskind, President Trump is the harbinger of a new age of superstition and prejudice, which threatens to derail science driven economic growth.

Long-term growth is more vulnerable than it looks

A new book argues the belief that economies should always expand is relatively new, and threats to the future of growth are as large now as any time in the post-Industrial Revolution era.

Guy Debelle Former Central Banker
May 23, 2024 – 5.00am

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We have taken economic growth for granted for much of the past century. When the economy isn’t growing it dominates the news cycle, because those periods of decline have very much been the exception, not the rule. Even the slightest prospect of a recession can generate reams of tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers.

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Daniel Susskind provides a timely and thought-provoking book on the history of economic growth in Growth: A Reckoning. Timely, because a number of the critical factors that Susskind argues underpin growth are currently under threat. This is most apparent in the US in the form of Donald Trump, where science is being supplanted by superstition, reason by assertion, experience by prejudice.

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This bears on the Future Made in Australia debate. The government can provide the policy framework to support the market in taking advantage of Australia’s comparative advantage. The market will not always provide the right price signals. The market will not embody all the things that society cares about, though it can be shaped that way.

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Read more: https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/long-term-growth-is-more-vulnerable-than-it-looks-20240506-p5fp5a

The “Future Made in Australia debate” is a reference to the pushback against an absurd far left attempt to kickstart Aussie manufacturing, without addressing any of the fundamental factors which led to the original decline, such as Australia’s expensive and increasingly unreliable energy.

My question – what if the climate crisis is pseudoscience, like the many great pseudoscience movements which came before it, and the rise of Donald Trump is a desperate attempt to restore an age of evidence based decision making, before the rise of climate superstition plunges us into a new dark age?

Obviously this is pretty much the opposite position to that expressed by Guy Debelle, who wrote the article above, and I assume Daniel Susskind have taken. SO how do we tell who is right?

Weight of numbers is no defence against the suggestion the climate crisis is superstition – pseudoscience movements don’t rise to prominence because they lack support. When Einstein was told about the book “100 authors against Einstein”, Einstein is reported to have replied “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”.

The real tell of a pseudoscience is the inability of the pseudoscience to make worthwhile predictions, and the desperation of advocates to excuse away its failures.

Any examination of climate predictions reveals a dismal track record of failure. WUWT has accumulated 12 pages of failed or failing climate predictions, such as a prediction made before the US senate in 1986 by the Grandaddy of the global warming scare, James Hansen, that by now we would have experienced 3-4C of global warming.

As for the desperation to excuse away failures, we see that every day, as politicians pour billions into failed green energy policies which are designed to address a non problem, or the way climate modellers urge we accept their predictions as a source of truth, despite the decades long failure of climate models to accurately predict future climate trends.

This failure is easy to demonstrate – the diagram at the top of this page, which shows the divergence between reported confidence levels and climate model predictive failure, was created by former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer.

But I doubt professor Daniel Susskind or former merchant banker Guy Debelle will be moved by any of the arguments I just presented. If I am right, they are deep in the grip of pseudoscientific superstition, a superstition which ironically convinces them that they are actually the champions of reason, and are therefore all but impervious to arguments based on logic and reason which contradict their prejudices.

Of course, in our world it doesn’t matter what the Daniel Susskind and Guy Debelles of the world believe.

What matters is what voters believe. One of the great strengths of the US Republic and other nations where people get to vote for their leaders is protection from elitist groupthink. We don’t have to accept the prejudices of people who call themselves experts, we can make up our own minds who we believe.