Making t-shirts great again. How OPEC reduced emissions. The US stock market in 1812. Making saxophones.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
Nicolas Sage, Le Vercors, nuit, 2023. Source: Galerie Documents 15
On Manhattan’s 7th Avenue, near the corner of 39th St., there’s a larger-than-life statue of a garment worker — a man wearing a skullcap, hunched over a sewing machine. The statue is a tribute to the locale’s history: It stands in the middle of what’s still called the Garment District. After all, in 1950 New York’s apparel industry employed 340,000 workers. That industry is gone now, not just from midtown Manhattan but from the United States as a whole, having moved to low-wage countries like China and, increasingly, Bangladesh:
No serious person mourns the offshoring of apparel employment. Clothing production is a low-tech industry that even in its heyday mostly employed immigrants who, despite being represented by a powerful union, were paid low wages and often faced harsh working conditions. For a poor nation like Bangladesh, apparel jobs are a big step up from the alternatives. But American workers have better, and better-paying, things to do. As I said, no serious person wants the apparel industry to come back. But Donald Trump’s economic team aren’t serious people.
How OPEC’s market power reduced global CO2 emissions. “The monopolist is the environmentalist’s best friend” —often attributed to Milton Friedman
The global oil sector accounted for more than 40 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in 2021. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) cartel power restricts oil supply, which in turn reduces the environmental externalities of fossil fuel use. In Two Wrongs Can Sometimes Make a Right: The Environmental Benefits of Market Power in Oil (NBER Working Paper 33115), researchers John Asker, Allan Collard-Wexler, Charlotte De Cannière, Jan De Loecker, and Christopher R. Knittel use data from Rystad Energy and engineering estimates of the carbon intensities of oil production in different locations to examine how OPEC’s market power has affected carbon emissions since 1970. … The researchers compare the actual history of oil, which reflects OPEC’s market power, to a counterfactual scenario with a competitive oil market. They estimate that OPEC’s market power reduced CO2 emissions by 67.7 billion tons between 1970 and 2021. That is the equivalent of four years of current oil consumption or 1.7 years of total global CO2 emissions. Using a social cost of carbon of about $60 per ton of CO2, this translates to about $4 trillion in avoided environmental damages. Using the DICE climate model, the authors calculate the OPEC-related reduction in emissions helped to avoid a 0.028°C temperature increase in 2021. The reduction also represents about 18 percent of the remaining carbon budget needed to have a 50 percent chance of meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target.
Source: NBER
Two hundred years ago, the American stock market was every bit as concentrated as today.
Source: Jason Zweig in WSJ
Nicolas Sage, Santa Maria dello Spassimo, 2017.
Elon Musk on one of his most devoted followers and de facto boss of DOGE
“Steve (Davis) is like chemo,” Mr. Musk said at a transition meeting before President Trump took office. “A little chemo can save your life; a lot of chemo could kill you.”
Source: New York Times
HEY READERS,
THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day.
I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button.
If you are a regular reader of long-form Chartbook and Chartbook Top Links, or just enthusiastic about the project, why not think about joining that group? Chip in the equivalent of one cup of coffee per month and help to keep this flow of excellent content coming.
If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to.
And when you sign up, there are no more irritating “paywalls”
The fight to rescue the IRA
For contributing subscribers only.
Making Saxophones
What working-class English people ate in 1912.
Nicolas Sage, Santa Maria della Salute (Venise), 2016.
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: