The Wrongest Denial Ever

A fellow by the name of Topher Field, who prefers to go by "Topher", has created a very polished piece of propaganda, which claims to make the case that "avoiding climate change" costs fifty times what the avoided climate change would cost. He takes the position that he accepts IPCC numbers, and has come up with this "game changing" analysis.

Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0

You can also see it on his website

http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS

In a sense, this is good news. If the deniers drop their pseudo-science and retreat to economics, at least science can be left to go about its business; all the post-normal science will end up centered around economics, which to my way of thinking, they well deserve.

But that doesn't mean that Topher's argument should be left unchallenged. 

In fact, the usual sources of rebuttals of denialism come up empty here. So somebody needs to step up to the plate and go through it. 

It turns out that, despite its superficial credibility, it is about the worst thing that has ever been produced on the climate issue. There are several tricks along the way.  In the end, we will see that he is not just wrong, he is demonstrably wrong by a factor of over a thousand.

Please watch the whole thing and then come back here for the analysis, leaving it cued up for reference.

THE POINT ON ITS FACE IS ABSURD

Topher wants to convince us that avoiding climate change is fifty times as expensive as enduring it.

Clearly, in extremis this is nonsense. Suppose climate change became so severe as to lead to human extinction. (This is not likely in practice, but if we did nothing to suppress human alteration of the climate as Topher suggests, it's not totally off the table.) 

According to Topher's style of argument we should do nothing to avoid the end of humanity and the end of multicellular life, because doing something about it would be fifty times worse.

This reductio ad absurdum applies to the argument at a smaller scale. You simply can't just take a small sample of this system and extrapolate it to the system as a whole. 

But supposing you could. Topher is still woefully wrong.

THE MAIN SLEIGHT OF HAND

Topher works backwards from the common wisdom in the Australian right that the soon-to-be abandoned carbon tax there was pointless. That argument is based on three stipulated facts:

1. The tax would cause Australian net emissions over a decade to be reduced by 5 %.
2. The tax would amount to $160B over ten years
3. The impact on global temperature would be immeasurable at the end of the ten years

(An Australian dollar is close enough to a US dollar or a Canadian dollar nowadays that for the present purposes of rough approximation we can consider them interchangeable. We will be dealing with much bigger inaccuracies than that! For clarity, from here on, by dollars, we mean Australian dollars.)

Topher then tells a compelling tale of how wasteful this is. What did the $160B gain us? Nothing measurable! What a failure!

This argument seems solid, but is based on a couple of common misapprehensions.

First of all, there is confusion about the cost of the tax. Second, there is confusion about the way the benefits accrue. Third, there is confusion about the costs of inaction. These errors multiply together.

CONFUSION ABOUT THE COST OF THE TAX

To decide if a tax is worth doing, you have to evaluate the cost of the tax and compare it to its intended benefit. But the cost of the tax is not the total moneys collected! 

In fact, a revenue neutral tax arguably has no aggregate cost at all. Australia did not structure its revenues that way, but indeed much of the collected money was returned as a very large increase in the amount of federal tax-exempt income. From the first $6000 of income being tax-free the sheltered amount went to $18200.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia

In any case the increase in public funds that is not rebated is presumably is 100% wasted. So the total funds collected is not actually the cost. 

" The plan sets out to achieve to these targets by encouraging Australia's largest emitters to increase energy efficiency and invest in sustainable energy. The scheme is administered by the Clean Energy Regulator. Compensation to industry and households is being funded by the revenue derived from the charge."

All else equal, taxes are suboptimal in allocating resources in a perfect market, yes, but it is simply nonsense to presume that taxes have the same net effect as burning money. A tax is not the same as the government taking your money and burning it! If it were, the most successful societies would have no taxes at all!

Let us suppose that some of the money is rebated, some replaces other taxes, some is used to support useful energy-related infrastructure, and fully a quarter of it is utterly wasted. So we very generously ask Topher to give us back no more than a factor of four:

If the Australian government does better than that, well, the cost becomes that much smaller, and that much more of the 50:1 evaporates.

So we're not at 50 to 1. We're at 12.5 to 1 already.

CONFUSION ABOUT THE BENEFITS OF THE TAX

On the other side of the ledger, the benefit which Topher is eager to minimize, we have a more complicated calculation.

Let's follow his lead and divide this into the amount of carbon to be reduced per dollar, and the temperature decrease per unit of carbon avoided.

Topher asserts that under the tax, Australian cumulative emissions would be reduced by 5% over ten years. 

Thus, every dollar expended on the tax is presumed to reduce a specific amount of carbon. But that's not the point of the tax at all.

The main error on the impact side of the ledger is the casual presumption that if a $20 tax per ton on carbon reduces emissions by 5%, that it would require twenty times that much to cause the 100% reduction, i.e. a $400 tax. 

Back to Wikipedia:

"The pricing is part of a broad energy reform package called the Clean Energy Plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia by 5% below 2000 levels by 2020 and 80% below 2000 levels by 2050."

It is in fact the case that the 80% reduction in emissions in advanced countries is about the most we can get away with shy of driving the climate well past the 2 C "dangerous" target. So, Australia has been joining a few European countries in trying to play fair, even in the absence of a treaty.

But the purpose of the price increase is not to punish the carbon user. Rather it is to make non-carbon-emitting energy competitive and thus reduce the amount of carbon you use. This could well be in the vicinity of a sustained $20/ton to eliminate most emissions, but some propose as high as $160. 

Let's be generous to Topher. We'll use $160. Note that $160 is still less than $400 by a factor of 2.5 .

So let's ask Topher, generously, only to give back a factor of 2.5 here:

So it's not 12.5 to 1, but 5 to 1.

BUT WHAT IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS?

The whole point of this is to actually reduce the emissions! 

And we have a four-fold cut in total emissions by definition!  

The total cost is not proportional just to the tax rate, but also to the amount of carbon we are emitting. And the reason we raised the cost was to reduce the emissions.

Let's limit our goal to an 80% reduction, because if we get to 100% reduction, the net amount spent on the tax becomes zero! 

The ratio of 20% to 95% is 4/19; we'll only be paying the $160 tax 4/19 as often as today. That's the whole point. 

So, we're down to 20/19 to 1 or 1.05 to 1.

Now, even though we have been extremely generous with Topher's errors, we are already close to breaking even. But wait! There's more!

ASIDE - The 3.4 quadrillion dollar cheat

Before we actually move the calculation to the other side of the ledger, let's focus on the scale-up at 2:48 in the video. 

Topher is taking the benefit of the Australian tax as being not its reduction of emissions, but as the cumulative amount of emissions over an arbitrary period of a decade, which is not long enough for them to add up to much. Then he is scaling that up to reduce warming by a degree, over ten years, and getting a ridiculous number.

But the scenario is completely ridiculous. The background warming rate is a sixth of a degree C per decade; he is proposing the value of a carbon tax that would remove six times more carbon from the air than we produce, over the next decade! 

Now, whatever the prospects for carbon sequestration, we are not going to do it over a decade.

(You could suggest credits for sequestered carbon, but then, if a tax is counted as pure cost to the economy, shouldn't a sequestration rebate be a pure benefit?)

No, the scenario is silly and meaningless. He is scoffing at a fantasy of his own concoction. The column of coins going to Neptune and back is definitely silly. 

SLIPPING IN A BIT OF BAD SCIENCE

But wait, there's more. I promised you more, and we've already passed it? Remember the little bit of math at the one minute mark? Well, as promised it follows IPCC convention. But then at 1:42 we multiply by the "ten-year climate sensitivity parameter". But that's a switch! Are we interested in how much climate changes as a result of our actions? Or only in how much it changes instantaneously?

While some criticize climate economics for not discounting the future enough to match economic practice, this is the opposite. The factor of 0.33 is being used to convert from watts to temperature. But the usual factor converting watts per square meter to degrees C is close to 1, taking 3.7 W of top-of-atmosphere forcing to 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C.

So at the very least the right multiplier is 0.4, not 0.33, but on the consensus best estimate sensitivity (which he is using) it should in fact be 0.67.

That is, if we don't care what our behavior over a decade does at the end of a decade, but rather, what our behavior does in the long run, we get another factor of just over two.

So now the calculation is 2 to one in favor of mitigation!

But the biggest error of all is yet to come! And yet he makes it twice!

A DECADE IS MORE THAN A YEAR

At 4:40, he uses his multiply flawed calculation to get 80% of annual GDP to remove the 0.17 degree warming over the decade. Then he makes this equivalent to an 80% cut in GDP! But it is spread over ten years by his own construction! So it should only amount to 8% of present-day GDP. 

But since he makes the mistake twice, going in his own favor both times, it would be repeating his mistake in reverse to double count it.  This is just meant to point out that all the rhetoric about an 80% cut is bogus. It's an 8% cut, with all his exagerrations.

However, tempted though I am to throw in an extra factor of ten, I won't. Because it ties in with the last factor of twenty-five (see below) that would be double counting. Suffice it to say that Topher happily conflates annual costs and total costs to his convenience throughout the whole presentation.

GETTING BACK TO THE MAIN THREAD AGAIN

Without the exagerrations counted to this point, he is off by a factor of almost exactly 100. So the actual impact we are talking about is 0.08 %. (*)

CONFUSION ABOUT COSTS OF INACTION: (NOW LET'S MAKE STUFF UP)

At 6:01, he refers to the Stern report's conclusion that climate change would cost between 0 and 3% of GDP by the end of the century. In order not to compare to zero, Topher kindly splits the difference and takes 1.5 %.

But this seems pulled out of his rear; if it makes any sense at all this is about the wrong side of the ledger. 

· Unabated climate change could cost the world at least 5% of GDP each year; if more dramatic predictions come to pass, the cost could be more than 20% of GDP.

· The cost of reducing emissions could be limited to around 1% of global GDP; people could be charged more for carbon-intensive goods.

Splitting the difference between 5% and 20% we get 12.5 %, rather than 1.5 % So we immediately get a factor of 8.3 in our favor. Let's be kind and round it down to 8.

(By the way, Stern now thinks his number is an underestimate.)

So now we are to 16 to 1 in favor of mitigation.

FINALLY LETS CONFLATE ONGOING COSTS WITH TOTAL COSTS

Topher misses the point. Stern delivers not a one-time cost as a percentage GDP. It is a perpetual loss of GDP.

So given that this is over a century, we could arguably be multiplying this by something like 100. But the impacts are loaded toward the end of the century, so let's say it ramps up linearly after 2050. 

This gives us another factor of 25 going the other way!

The result is 400 to 1 in favor of mitigation!

COMPARING MONEY NOW VS MONEY LATER

Comparing costs over a century is a complicated problem, and much of the criticism of Stern revolves around it.  This is a favorite critique by right-wing economists, who think the discount rate is set by banks. That would slant the result against mitigation. It's also a point that I complain about, though in my estimation it goes the other way. What if growth stops or reverses? What's the discount rate then?

Fortunately, Topher's simplistic argument is based on a very simpleminded idea of what a dollar is anyway, so it ignores this issue altogether. So we don't have to take it up here.

THE BOTTOM LINE: SLIPPED UP A MERE TWENTY-THOUSAND-FOLD

On Topher's own terms, just fixing his numbers up, and being generous to him at every turn, he has gone from 50 to 1 in his favor to 400 to 1 against him, an error factor of 20,000.

He achieves this by combining six errors: 4 * 2.5 * 4 * 2 * 8 * 25

But what's a factor of 20 thousand among friends, eh? Hey, Topher, lend me a fiver, would you?

(*) WAIT, ARE WE REALLY RISKING THE FUTURE OF THE EARTH FOR 0.08% OF GDP? ARE YOU SERIOUS???

Not really, just following Topher's flawed argument and fixing the numbers up.

Stern comes up with 1 % of GDP, so we seem to have lost a factor of twelve. I think that is because the cost of a tax is not really related to the amount of money spent on the tax at all, but itself must be processed through the economy.

But still, the risk/benefit is nothing like 50 to one against.

If we trust Stern for a number, why not trust him for both numbers? Stern 2006 comes out at

12.5 to 1 in favor of mitigation.

As such, Topher's result is only off by a factor of 625. It's his flawed calculation that is off by a factor of 20,000. The difference is because his calculation is based on bad reasoning in the first place.


STILL, WTF?

The point of the denial movement is not that it's going to unnecessarily cost us all 1% and so they need to protect us from that. Clearly, we can put up 1% to avoid an existential threat.

You can see it in how systematically they exaggerate the costs of mitigation. (The 80% nonsense that Topher spins.)

Much more than 1% of the net worth of the incumbent fossil fuel industry is going to be transferred to a playing field where they have less of an advantage.

The denial movement is not, despite its pretensions or delusions, defending anything but a narrow private interest. And even that interest is deluded. The Koch brothers' kids themselves will have to live on whatever world their parents built for them. They may be better off having only a couple of billion dollars (instead of tens of billions) on a healthy world that doesn't blame them for its troubles.

Paranoia

Most paranoia is misplaced.

Well, all of it, really, by definition.

There's paranoia cutting every which way these days.

It's my impression that excessive demonization cuts every which way here. We are all human, fallible, vulnerable and defensive about ourselves, and suspicious of others who may not deserve it or only partially deserve it.

Not to say there aren't real bad actors out there. Obviously there are. But there are costs to false positives and false negatives alike.

mt

(No place for this on P3, but I need it on the web somewhere.)

Last Post

This blog is moving to http://init.planet3.org Please reset your bookmarks and feeds (http://init.planet3.org/feed/). That site and feed are now live. Updates about the shutdown of this site will appear on this article.

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Comments are welcome on the new site.

UPDATE MARCH 11 2013 :

The Wordpress move never really worked. Lots of live links from the internet go here. So I have revived it as a historical record.

 Most of my recent writing is at Planet3.0

-mt

Dennis Ritchie has Died

A less publicly renowned figure in the history of computing than Steve Jobs, but at least equally central in its development, Dennis Ritchie also passed away recently.

Dennis was coauthor of the original UNIX operating system and author of the first implementation of the C language. This is to say, the majority of modern computing builds directly on his work, and most of the rest was directly influenced by it.

One of his collaborators, Rob Pike, shared this message on Google Plus:

Dear Rob--

As Dennis's siblings, Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie--on behalf of the entire Ritchie family--we wanted to convey to all of you how deeply moved, astonished, and appreciative we are of the loving tributes to Dennis that we have been reading. We can confirm what we keep hearing again and again: Dennis was an unfailingly kind, sweet, unassuming, and generous brother--and of course a complete geek. He had a hilariously dry sense of humor, and a keen appreciation for life's absurdities--though his world view was entirely devoid of cynicism or mean-spiritedness.

We are terribly sad to have lost him, but touched beyond words to realize what a mark he made on the world, and how well his gentle personality--beyond his accomplishments--seems to be understood.

Thank you.

A better Way

This blog will be moving soon, to be a sub-blog under Planet3.0 .

Recall that the original purpose here was to examine how scientific communication had failed and what to do about it. Planet3.0 is the result of that thinking. It's my attempt not only to do something about it, but to encourage others to do something about it as well.

Trying to be both editor and reporter at a site with at least the intent of reaching a broader audience than this one has already been revealing. The nature of a site is, to some extent, as much about what it excludes as about what it includes. The blogger just writes whatever he pleases. The editor has to consider what will build the community and what will splinter it.

What's more, for the first time ever, I have information on "background"; that is, a source really wanted to tell me something, on condition that I not explicitly tell the audience. It's hard to explain why they would do that. I find it sort of weird, really. And now there is the question of whether to betray the source and my reputation, or to tell only half the story, or to let the story drop. This changes journalism from an exercise in nonfiction writing to an exercise in politics.

The editor's temptation not to rile people is pretty palpable. I find myself suddenly inclined to "safe" stories. The key to making Planet3.0 work is to improve the quality of disagreement. So being a chickenshit won't work.

On the other hand, I see plenty to criticize on both "sides". This is also a problem! Criticizing mainstream science makes you a tool of the denial industry, and ultimately an instrument of the decline of civilization and the biosphere. Avoiding that is the whole point. Refusing to criticize it makes you a voice in a tame chorus, incapable of saying anything that isn't explicitly in the interest

The point of view of the scientist is to advance the truth. It's really hard under the circumstances when politics and science get tangled up. My guiding light will continue to be to get the maximum amount of truth visible to my intended audience. I think it may be the case that doing this will lose me more friends among my allies than it gains me respect among my enemies. This is a sign, I think, of how low we have sunk. I will have to brace myself for it.

Much as I do not want to give attention to the ridiculous obsessions of the bunkosphere, I also don't think that making Planet3.0 into another also-ran pop science site is enough.

There are basically a bunch of approaches around today:

• tell everything that makes the future look scary, and nothing else
  
• tell everything that makes the people looking scared ridiculous, and nothing else
• tell all the above without choosing any of them
  
• science and engineering fandom, repeating press releases
  
• get into the thick of the policy, trivializing or ignoring science and engineering

If we're going to get anywhere, we need to close the loop. The venue we need is not afraid to draw the big picture.

In It will continue as my base for half-baked speculations about economics and for introspection about how to make public communication work. News about the move will appear shortly.

Good News from Texas

It's still unseasonably warm in Austin, but at least the season has changed. While it remains very dry here, major storms have been quite visible to our north and south of late. So, it seems that October is bringing us a normal summer pattern, and it's raining a more or less normal amount in Texas. Far from enough to bust the drought, but not threatening us with turning into Arizona.

We'll see if the double-dip La Nina makes for another severe outlier of a summer next year.

Also, it looks like Rick Perry is no more serious about becoming US President than Sarah Palin.

Also, occupy Austin is happening. I am nervous about actively supporting the Occupy thing. Since I still hold Canadian citizenship, it seems far safer for me to go up to Toronto and occupy it. But I've been very impressed with the way these guys are managing things; it seems the only people advocating foolishness at these groups are pro-corporate agents provocateurs.

As manifestos go, this one is marvelous. Majorities are for amateurs. (h/t PHA.)

This was really why I had no enthusiasm for cap-and-trade. Without near-unanimity in the public, globally and in each nation, the prospects for climate stability are grim.

We need to have traditional government chasing a social media consensus. And so that social media consensus has to be competent.

The Forces of Occupation

Obviously I've been wrapped up in Planet3.0 these last couple of weeks. But amazing developments have been afoot.

I am ALMOST as far as this:



But it is tempered by something clever somebody said at SXSWEco last week. Something like:

We don't need a movement chasing down the White House to make them do the right thing.

We need a movement that is strong enough that the White House needs to chase it.

Planet 3.0

Please check out our new Planet3.0 sustainability news site.

I hope the quality of conversation that has emerged on this site, of which I am very proud, can be transferred and scaled up on Planet3.0. We have in mind a number of experiments to facilitate intelligent and informed conversation, but they need a nucleus of participants.

So especially if you have been a contributor at this site, I'd like to ask you for a modest if kind favor. Please sign in at the Planet3.0 site and participate in the conversation there. Let's show the world how it's done.

Why They Are Called Numbers

Those of us who have learned the ability of numbers, properly deployed, to explain and illuminate have always had difficulty understanding where the name "numbers" came from.

All you need to do is attend a typical talk by a concerned, active, engaged but not especially informed person on almost any subject of collective importance.

Then you will see numbers being used to numb. So many million pieces of plastic in the Pacific. So many gallons of oil in the Gulf. So many trees saved. So many billion dollars saved. So many thousand jobs lost. Always without context, without weight, without comparison. Not meant to explain. Meant to numb.

Numb numbers are the sign you are wasting your time. If after hearing the numbers you say, not "yes I already knew that" or "wow, that really opens my eyes to how things work", if your response to the numbers is "yayyy" or "ewww", you are being victimized by numbing numbers.

Is Debt Conserved?

Arthur Smith makes an interesting argument.

I don't understand what a global overall "borrowing from the future" could mean in any physical sense. Maybe you have something specific in mind?

With monetary debt every loan has two sides: the borrower and the lender. There is a promise that the borrower will pay back the loan - with interest, so that's a promise of future exchange, a commitment by the borrower to redirect some of his future income to the lender. But there is no physical constraint involved: it is merely a contractual obligation between borrower and lender, and can be broken under various conditions without any fundamental damage to the world.

Clearly every time a dollar is borrowed, a dollar is owed. The transaction of borrowing money does not create or destroy total wealth in itself; one party owes a dollar, another is owed a dollar, so in the aggregate nothing happens.

After acknowledging that this is absolutely algorithmically true, I note that it is not what my conventional Keynesian macroeconomic prof taught me in Econ A01 at Northwestern in 1973 or so. (Wish I could remember his name, Robert something I think, he was an adviser to McGovern's campaign shortly thereafter.) He did not teach Keynesianism as a theory. He taught it as established fact. We would never ever have another depression because Keynes.

According to professor Bob, "public debt is OK, because we are borrowing from our future selves".

So did we borrow from our future selves (thus committing to growth) or did we borrow from the Chinese (thus giving them an asset to balance our deficit).

Well, the crucial thing to understand is that the bank and the government can lend money that they don't actually have. This has always been the secret of banking, and why, ordinarily, having a bank is the best possible business, with the possible exception of evangelism. In fact, when you put money on deposit at the bank, the bank gets permission to lend out some multiple, larger than 1, of that money as loans. This quantity is controlled by government fiat in some way.

I believe something very much like this is true in every non-Islamic country, by the way, except maybe the very weirdest pseudosocialist autocracies like Myanmar and North Korea. It includes contemporary Russia and China, though perhaps not their communist predecessors a generation ago.

So the point is, something did happen in the aggregate. The total of assets and liabilities remains zero, of course, by the fundamental theorem of accounting ledgers. But the absolute quantities of liabilities increased.

Now, why is the bank lending you money? After all, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, right? Well, because you agree to pay back the loan, plus inflation, plus coverage for the bank's risk, plus a profit for the bank. As we all experience with mortgages, in the end this is a significant penalty. It does not show as part of your or the bank's credits or debits (if you win the lottery tomorrow, you can settle your mortgage account with the bank next week, after all) but is something you implicitly owe the bank in addition to the amount you borrowed.

This is the engine of capitalism and it runs on optimism. The bank has some confidence that you (or your insurance company) will repay, or find someone else who can repay to buy the house from you, or in the worst case, that it can resell the house after repossessing it. In any case, the likelihood of losing most of the value of the house (or business) is small enough that it can be placed in a statistical category on which a profit can be made.

When you take out a mortgage, you are borrowing from the bank. But you are also committing your household to a specific level of economic function, such that you expect to be able to pay off the house and all the financial overhead associated with the loan. So although you are borrowing from the bank, you are also borrowing from yourself. You are saying, in order to have the pleasure of living in a house before I have paid for it, I promise to work hard enough to have enough surplus to pay for the house and the financial overhead.

You are borrowing from your own future earnings. If you expected to lose your income, you would not take out such a loan. If the bank expected that, they would not give it to you. At least, that was the idea until recently, but let's leave aside how the pattern failed.

The point is that when China buys US bonds, China is assuming that the US will pay them off.

If Tea Partiers come in and break the US economic system because they are too stupid to learn how the system works before taking hold of it...



Well, it could break in a number of ways that my Keynesian prof would have found absurdly unlikely, let's just leave it at that.

But in the aggregate, every loan that isn't disguised charity is an optimistic bet on the future of the debtor. And pretty much all the money comes into its strange ghostlike existence through such loans. So every dollar in circulation represents most of a dollar bet on the future. It's a "promissory note" that no longer promises gold or silver. It simply represents somebody's promises to gladly pay the bank on Tuesday for a hamburger today.

And as for Treasury bills, they are a special debt that is explicitly incurred by the nation as a whole, so its implicit problem is for the future prosperity of the nation. Without growth, the debt payments gradually become insurmountable. Without growth, that is, borrowing from your future self is destructive.

And that is why I think Krugman is not entirely right. We can't necessarily take up as much public debt as is needed to go back to "full employment", never mind expect the private sector to pick up the slack when "demand" goes back to baseline.

At this point future growth is not a sure thing. At some point, it becomes a sure not-thing. And whatever that point is, it's not clear we should be carrying debt at that time.

Fortunately there is an immense amount of wealth in the US and the wealthy are hugely undertaxed, so if anybody were making any sense there would be no reason to take on any debt.

But eventually, debt does matter.

What happens when the optimism is misplaced? Well, we are seeing exactly that now. The sudden disappearance of "wealth" and widespread increases in various stresses and demands, even though little or no physical damage was incurred!

This is bad for the debtor and bad for the creditor. It is no zero-sum move for the creditor to write off the loan and the debtor to lose access to credit. And this bad thing happens when growth is less than foreseen. And a worse thing happens when zero growth is foreseen.

Nothing.

Nothing happens. Zero growth, basically zero credit. And since we have arranged things so that we can only feed ourselves when something happens economically, well, everything goes to hell in a hurry.

So we'll have to change that. But the holders of debt will not like any prospect of growth stopping. Not one bit.

---

Zorg: I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would've immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun.