Does Reality Count For Nothing?

12/09/2015

Does Reality Count For Nothing?

Jeff is the only journalist on Earth who noticed that the global economy is in recession. I wrote about it yesterday.

For example, in the Vox report The world's CO2 emissions dipped in 2015. But don't celebrate just yet, the word "economy" occurs only one time.

It's true that something remarkable happened in 2015. Historically, worldwide CO2 emissions have gone up each and every year unless there's a major crisis that puts a dent in global economic growth. So emissions dipped temporarily in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they fell temporarily in 2008 with the financial crisis. But once growth returns, they usually go up, up, up.

This year appears to be the first time that didn't happen. The global economy grew at healthy 3.1 percent clip this year, but emissions fell nonetheless.

That 3.1 number comes from an IMF forecast made October 6, 2015. You won't be surprised to learn that this forecast uses China's official growth numbers. The guy who looked at the latest IMF data was trying to draw our attention to the fact that the October forecast was a tad off. The numbers show that nominal GPP shrank 4.9%.

Lest you think I'm picking on Vox, well, the New York Times story on declining emissions — you know, all the news that's fit to print — contains exactly the same oversight.

If your story crucially depends on a single proposition — "the world economy is growing" — then you might want to check that out to see if it's actually true.

For months now, Larry Summers and others have been warning us that the global economy is in deep doo-doo. Nobody listened. Global recessions have now been banished because humans simply won't acknowledge their existence.