It’s been said before by many inside and outside of science that so-called “global warming” is a good thing. Usually it’s pointed out that warming associates with more food production, not to mention that cold weather kills more people than hot. Beyond that, what about the simple productivity implications of warming?
Assuming it’s man-made or a natural evolution (after all, the sun that warms planet earth is 1 million times the size of earth) is to miss the point. If warming is the trend, it’s logically a bullish one. This not-so-insightful viewpoint is vivified by the recent snowstorm that hit the east coast of the United States pretty hard.
It’s useful to think about the snowstorm through the prism of the past. Supposedly snowstorms were quite a bit more common when the earth wasn’t warming. Which is the point.
When it snows, the loss of productivity is enormous. Endless individual hours spent shoveling snow instead of working is just the beginning, but it’s substantial.
Economic growth is all about a reduction in the barriers to production, but snow is a literal barrier. And it’s not just the hours spent by people shoveling it out of the way where they live. There’s also the roads well beyond where people live, and that can take large amounts of time to be cleared. Roads are the personification of productivity, only for snow to render them unusable at times.
What it all means is that it’s more difficult for the would-be productive to not just get to work when it’s snowing, but also for those who would transact in various ways with the productive to get to them. No doubt the internet mitigates this somewhat, but work done online still signals the movement of people, products and services outside of the internet. Also, and as evidenced by weekday traffic in any major U.S. city, work remains a destination for most Americans, only for snow to deter arrival at work, along with customer arrival where workers are working.
The Americans who live where the recent snowstorm hit hardest saw all of the above pretty clearly. Businesses closed, flights connecting the productive cancelled, and workdays themselves substantially truncated. See above, but also please read on.
Consider schools and their snow days. Throughout the east coast the last two days, schools have been closed. About this, more than most will admit school doubles as daycare for working parents throughout the United States. Snow days logically leave many parents without the daycare.
One obvious response is that many parents have babysitters, but the same roads that working parents drive to get to work are what babysitters rely on. Which is a speculation about the last couple days that it wasn’t just snow shoveling that substantially limited worker productively in the parts of the U.S. inundated with snow. Kids needed to be tended to in addition to the snow, which means even fewer hours for individuals to work.
Which brings us back to the presumption of global warming. If true, what an advance assuming the days of heavy snow are increasingly a thing of the past. Think of the workdays gained as a substantial barrier to production becomes much less of one.
It’s basic stuff, but worth thinking about as the Thomas Friedmans of the world refer to “climate change” as an “epochal challenge.” Tell that to the tens of millions who just lost two workdays thanks to cold weather. Time is precious, and it’s elemental to economic progress.
