Social Governance Securities Exchange

My friend and I wrote up a submission to the Industrial Efficiency contest on the Climate CoLab.

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/16/planId/1300012/tab/DESCRIPTION

We recommended creating a new securities exchange for companies who want to be leaders in corporate social responsibility and investors who are interested in such companies.

Check it out and support our proposal!

I even made a little logo.

New CoLab Contest

2011 CoLab contest is on its way. This time people have more time to work on the proposals, which should be nice. Hopefully I'll have time to participate.

UN Climate Talks in China

There are UN talks in Tianjin, China right now, a meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Bloomberg

Among the sticking points are a demand by countries for Chinese commitments to more aggressive emissions cuts as well as for China to accept more stringent verification of its climate change mitigation, said Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the National Reform Development Commission of China, the country’s top economic planner.

Some countries tried to tie those conditions to financial assistance to the least developed countries, he told reporters through a translator today.

Developed nations have pledged $30 billion in short-term financing from 2010 to 2012, $2 billion of which still needs to be sourced, Figueres said. The outline of a longer-term climate fund could also be agreed upon in Cancun, she said.

The negotiations around targets for rapidly developing nations like China and for financial transfers are relevant to my research for the Climate Collaboratorium. I have been working on making it possible to see simulations of economic impacts of climate mitigations for different regions.

Developing content

I've been doing a lot of discussions on the Climate Collaboratorium.

Today I did a bunch of posts on the debate on behavioral economics. I'd encourage people to join the discussions.

I'm also interested in how the economic/political system affects our ethics and behaviors. It is widely accepted that the communist system in the USSR and in post-revolutionary China fostered inefficiencies because people did not have enough incentive to work hard. There is also anecdotal evidence that people take advantage of entitlement programs and benefits from being unionized.

On the other hand, it seems to me that capitalism also causes people to value only doing things that are economically rational. The belief in the invisible hand of the market has been used to rationalize selfishness and why it's best for everyone to be as selfish as possible. Within this context, there is no reason why anyone should curb their consumption or even care about their own grandchildren much less other people. Plus, the possession of things is used to express ourselves and gifts communicate to others how much we appreciate them, etc. This idea that things serve a large social function is discussed in the UK Sustainable Development Commission put out a report "Prosperity without Growth".

I think these are very controversial issues, but it would be great if we could try to study them more systematically.