Selling Futures
Greta Thunberg has spent the week in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Knowing her, she probably rode her bike there from Stockholm and is probably camped out on a ski slope (Swedes are a hearty bunch and Swedish climate activists are especially hearty). My calculations suggest it would take her a week to cycle there, so I bet Greta would do it in five days. She would probably give speeches along the way and get $5 million in sponsorships to donate to clean energy alternatives. Everyone in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland would come to understand that “our house is on fire”. Greta is an amazing young woman and I am thrilled that she was made Time’s Person of the Year.
What did I like most about her designation (besides the obvious fact that it pissed the hell out of Trump)? The older I get, the more I believe we need to hand over this world to young people because we, my generation, have made a mess of it. My mother was a member of The Greatest Generation, born in 1916 and living through the Great Depression and WWII in their prime. Why were they so great? I think its because they not only met two of the biggest challenges head-on, but they came out of them enlightened enough to know that peace and humble prosperity were enough to make human existence pleasant. We the children of that generation, the Baby Boomers, grew up with a few shadows looming over us (most notably the Cold War and Vietnam), but we mostly felt entitled to the good life. Unfortunately, that was never bounded by anyone for us. It probably didn’t occur to our parents to think that a little indulgence would be such a bad thing. The psychology was probably that they had suffered and they were happy to have their children not suffer. We grew up feeling that was the normal state of affairs. We deserved happiness.
I had a discussion once with someone who was raised in a strict Catholic household. Catechism was followed by parochial school and by then the lessons of the cloth had sunk in, There was no indulgence involved, even among the Baby Boomers of that cadre. Having gone to a prep school that required church and vespers every Sunday (Protestant) and a high school run by Brothers of the Holy Cross (very Catholic), I was reasonably familiar with both the Bible and the ethos of deprivation (not that it was really imposed on me). Nevertheless, I was shocked by the response from this Catholic progeny in response to a casual comment by me that everyone had a right to be happy. She said, “Where did you get the idea that you have a right to be happy?” That caught me flat-footed and I had no good response because it was so anathema to my very theory of existence.
I can’t be certain, but I suspect that, unfortunately, Greta is not a happy person. I’ll bet her world-view does not allow her to feel too good about anything. That can’t be the right way to be. I believe that without happiness or the prospect of happiness, there is little reason to get up in the morning. We can all live with disappointment, grief and unhappiness for a time, but damning ourselves to eternal unhappiness simply doesn’t work no matter how strong you are. That means that even Greta must have her pleasures, as hidden from view as they seem to be. Scandinavians are supposed to be the happiest people in the world. I read the book that did a good job of debunking that, The Almost Nearly Perfect People. When someone is as serious as Greta seems to be, it is hard to imagine them having fun, but that’s not very fair to her. But I think I may have found something in which she took pleasure.
During the Davos conference, the Trump crowd, obviously still annoyed that a Swedish seventeen-year-old that looks like a fourteen-year-old is getting so much attention and is directly contradicting their anti-environmental policies (they continue to dismantle every environmental protection put in place over the last decade by the EPA), that they decided to attack her. We all know that Donald Trump is a bully and he will attack anyone anywhere if it suits his purpose, and he will do it with abandon and vileness. The man knows no shame and has no guardrails of propriety. Greta Thunberg has been the object of his attacks before (most of which she shrugs off like a pro), so his team knows she is fair game. In fact, given Trump’s inclinations, anyone who goes after her probably scores points with the big guy.
Perhaps one of my least favorite guys on the Trump team (that is actually a hotly contested heading) is Steve Mnuchin, the 57-year-old Secretary of the Treasury, and indeed a late-cohort member of my Baby Boomer Club. Mnuchin’s career started at Goldman Sachs (where else?) and then included stints with his Yale roommate Eddie Lambert, the guy who rode Sears and K-Mart into the dirt, and a stint running his own fund called Dune Capital. The most impressive thing that Dune Capital did was invest in Donald Trump projects and manage to get sued by him (imagine that). He then bought IndyMac, a failed mortgage lender and tarted it up after foreclosing on a bunch of embattled families, for a sale to GS alumnus, John Thane at CIT. If success is measured in money, then he was successful. But I can’t say I feel that track record makes him an economic genius in the least.
So, Steve Mnuchin decided for no particular reason other than to curry favor with the boss, to take on Greta Thunberg by saying she had no right to talk about climate change policy. Specifically, he said, “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
Greta’s response was an elegant, “We are facing extremely disruptive warming consequences absent a dramatic change in policy trajectory, and one really doesn’t need to know much about economics to understand that.” I bet Mnuchin had to study that for a moment to even understand it. So much for a classical education at Yale on Daddy’s dime.
Mnuchin must have been asleep during his economics classes at Yale, because his professor there, Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus and his partner Paul Romer vehemently disagree and feel that climate change has a tremendous and quantifiable cost to the economy. Life hates a bully, so like the cavalry riding in on an old western, economists with training that far exceed the five or six courses Mnuchin probably slept through at Yale, have come to Greta’s aide and stated unequivocally that climate change needs to be addressed or the impact on our economy will be devastating.
Donald Trump and his lackeys like Steve Mnuchin are mortgaging the future of our children. Wikipedia tells me he has three children, so you would think he would consider that. But Mnuchin showed us who he was when he did his IndyMac deal. He got the nickname of The Foreclosure King, so he’s no stranger to defaulting on mortgages. I personally like the nickname Esquire has chosen to call him based on his attack of Greta Thunberg this week. They keep it simple and just say he’s an “asshole”.