I find the SSC "Too much dark money in almonds" post interesting because it starts from the premise that there obviously isn't too much dark money in almonds, an argument from incredulity, and uses this (and similar) to argue that there isn't too much dark money in politics, but
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if you start looking at almonds, it seems like there's too much dark money in almonds? For example, here's a water policy expert who thinks a lot about CA water policy discussing the impact of almonds on CA https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/05/05/turning-the-tables-on-almonds/ … https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/04/17/more-almonds-make-them-prove-they-have-the-water-first/ …https://onthepublicrecord.org/2008/12/17/i-dont-even-like-wine/ …
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Those posts are targeted at an audience of water policy nerds, so they don't lay out the full case because it's expected that readers will generally know what's going on in CA water policy, but IMO, if you look into this in detail there's a decent case to be made that
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California water policy is a disaster on the same scale as California housing policy, caused in part by water policy that enriches some of the richest people in California, e.g., almond billionaires, at the expense of most others.
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Replying to @danluu
Whoa literally on the same scale? The first estimate on google for CA housing policy costs is $140b/yr in lost output,* do you think water is comparable or that’s too high for housing? *https://imanetwork.org/blog/2019/07/15/the-economic-consequences-of-californias-housing-crisis/ …
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Replying to @benskuhn
I don't think that estimate is implausible. They estimate that people reduce consumer spending by a bit less than $1k per person per year due to housing costs and then estimate other effects that are double that, that could be right.
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I think it's really difficult to do a direct comparison to water policy since most of the impact is expected to be in the future, I don't think it's implausible that current policies extrapolated into the future would have impact within an order of magnitude.
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But I think this isn't quite the right comparison -- housing costs, while problematic, have relatively diffuse impact, a water district self destructing has much higher local impact. You can assign a dollar value to that, but it's always going to be handwave-y.
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You could argue that desalinization costs (plus transport costs) should be an upper bound to the impact of bad water policy. I don't think that's literally true, but just to have a number, that gives you a number that's not too far off the McKinsey estimate when computed naively.
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Dan Luu Retweeted Dan Luu
But my top-line response is really that this isn't thoroughly fact checked, could be quite wrong!https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1254965172424175617 …
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