Capitalism is not inherently bad. Many people just seem confused about income redistribution. I would love twitter to tell me why that is because I simply don't understand.

Quick🧵about how money could make use happier by redirecting it where it does the most good.
First of all, being super rich doesn't make you happy. That is not just the observation of this consultant to the super rich.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Extra money is super important when you are poor, but the added value per $ quickly decreases once you get richer and in US it tops at around $75k per year.
cnbc.com/2015/12/14/mon…

Study quoted by CNBC: academia.edu/download/38933…
All studies agree that the contribution of one dollar to your income quickly decreases and essentially becomes zero after a certain point.

The only discussion is on whether there is a point after which it decreases. Recent discussion here: psyarxiv.com/4jvh5/download…
A reason for confusion is also that people who are richer THINK they are better off when they earn more money, even though they don't actually become happier.
So simple logic dictates that redistributing money from people who are rich towards people who are poor will make the rich hardly less happy (if at all) and the poor a lot happier.

That's why I'm strongly in favour of high taxes for the rich and low taxes for the poor.
And I'm not alone. If you survey people they want the world to be much more equal than it is.
I fully understand this is a hard truth to swallow between countries and will not work in practice.
Rich countries should give to poor countries if you follow this logic but every country has plenty of poor people and these countries have separate voting/ruling systems.
But why is higher income tax for the rich such a big debate inside one country, especially in the US?

Why don't the relatively poor simply vote "Yes" when a politician asks them if they want more money and cheaper education and healthcare and the like?

I'm honestly curious!
@RBReich with a good example of what you can do with more income tax.

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More from @AukeHoekstra

24 Nov
Among all the doomism surrounding climate change it's good to realize we have the capacity to reduce the damage done, as the way we are dealing with natural disasters shows.
Of course severity and frequency of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves could still be increasing (models certainly predict they will in the future) but how much of that can we already see in the data?

And then a little magic can happen on twitter...
World renowned expert @RichardTol asks @OurWorldInData to take a look at a dataset about precisely that, that lacks a user friendly interface due to funding that dried up.
Read 4 tweets
9 Nov
Unfortunate news: battery prices will probably not go down for a few years as the price of metals (especially Lithium) soars. We really need new mines!
🧵
lithiumstoragebattery.com/news-lithium-b…
Several manufactures have indicated that they will increase prices.
greencarcongress.com/2021/10/202110…
mineralprices.com/electric-car-b…
This was predicted already of course (e.g. by @JamesTFrith of @BloombergNEF), since improvements in manufacturing mean that the biggest costs are now to be found in the cathode material that now accounts for more than half of the battery cost.
Read 10 tweets
6 Nov
Coal has a target on it's back and is becoming uneconomical. Oil will decline as electric transportation rises.

Gas - which used to be touted as a transition fuel - will soon become our main problem.
One extra reason to phase out gas quickly is that production is so "leaky" that emissions are much higher than previously thought.

Abandoned fracking wells and countries like Russia are especially big culprits.
See the academic work of @howarth_cornell who put this on the map.
Stopping leaks and reducing venting during maintenance helps but as long as the worst polluters go scot-free it's like pushing water uphill.
Remember that e.g. Russia didn't sign the methane reduction pledge on #COP26.
Read 8 tweets
4 Nov
I see this as an another example of hurting young people by increasing climate anxiety based on exaggerated doom and gloom.

For a more fact based and constructive discussion that leads to actually solving the problem see the next tweet.
I LOVED this piece by @_HannahRitchie that explains how the doomism almost made her choose another career but how she (now a data ninja at @OurWorldInData) sees reason for hope in facts and numbers.
And that really matters because young people are our greatest asset in the fight against climate change.

Instead of making them depressed, we should support them as they choose careers in climate change and work to solve the problem.
Read 4 tweets
4 Nov
British media and @VolvoCarUK are resuscitating an erroneous study I corrected before in #Astongate.

But it's become WORSE!

Claim: it takes 70k miles for EVs to pay back battery production.

Reality: 16k miles.

Let me explain once again (sigh).
thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/art…
I research this at the @TUeindhoven and try to correct errors in the media. And this is not my first rodeo with @volvocars and @PolestarCars.

I already flagged this study in september 2020.
I also had a nice 3 hour chat with Polestars LCA lead.
Then the study was reused in an "independent" study that turned out to be published by the wife of a PR head at Aston Martin.

It became the saga of #AstonGate.

Here's a link to my (long) thread that takes you directly to the nice blog by @MLiebreich.
Read 15 tweets
3 Nov
The @FT with a very nice video on what the #COP26 is about and a scary visualization of where the earth will become "too hot to handle" for comfortable human living.
This picture shows Africa in the mean (SSP2-4.5) scenario: many people forced to migrate.
ft.com/content/072b5c…
The SSP5-8.5 they use as worst case is highly unlikely (not so much because of policy but because of technical development imho) but do we want to take even a 5% or so chance on billions of people having to migrate?
Anyway, one of the things we will have to face that climate change will hit the global south hardest with tens or hundreds of millions migrating and many millions dying because of heatwaves and famine after failed crops and we (the biggest emitters) are the cause.
Read 4 tweets

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