Provocation 224   Life threatening Dorian and life threatening economy collapsing through climate change -how we think. 

Why are a number of the economists I know  so tuned in to Dorian but not tuned in to climate change? (I am going to leave this rough, like a conversation, not giving the false appearance of being well worked out. Imagine that we are just having a cup of coffee and  chatting. )

 There are some deep similarities between the way we look at the climate, economy and  change and the way we look at Dorian . For example, the focus on numbers such as GDP and category 4 or 5.  But Hurricane categories seem visceral while   GDP a is OK for approximate calculation. GDP (and other performance measures for the economy, such as “incomes are rising”) do not get us in the gut – because it is too far away from visceral experience, and, as in this case, badly misleading. We know for example that cutting trees can contribute positively to GDP while also a loss  of wealth from the earth. But we don’t feel it the way trees falling in Barbados tears at our imagination.  In the economy our  numerics and our intuition often move in opposite directions.  House work and child care don’t count.  For hurricanes it seems like a more coherent experience.

The main difference might be that hurricanes are delivered in narrative form as a sequence,   “this then this then this”, whereas economics are delivered in equations – only “if this then this”. The narrative form is open and easy to include emerging or missing steps. In economics such things are treated as external to the system and mere disrupters of our professional stance. 

What can we learn about this? It really is a call for a deeper understanding of human feeling and cognition if we want to increase our understanding of what happens.. Our narratives about the hurricane seem fairly accurate, taken together, while for  climate change they are just touching the surface. Death  by hurricane is spoken, death by climate change is not.

One way to think about this s to compare an approach through systems thinking with narrative thinking.  I was in a meeting yesterday where a silicon valley thinker said he was relabeling himself a story teller, no longer  a systems thinker. System thinking tends to form around a single heavy model, narratives are more like  a handful of butterflies.