Thomas Gale Moore RIP

I just learned from Condi Rice yesterday that my long-time Hoover Institution colleague and long-time friend Tom Moore has died. He died on August 23. He was 93.

Tom was an excellent economist. He wrote the article titled “Trucking Deregulation” in The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, 1993, which later, after the rights reverted to me, became The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Then, when I put together the second edition of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Tom wrote an update titled “Surface Transportation Deregulation.”

Tom was one of the early advocates of deregulation. At a forum on inflation held by President Ford in 1974, Tom circulated a statement calling for deregulation of transportation, airlines, energy, and a number of other sectors. (I’m going by memory here. The copy he gave me was destroyed in my 2007 office fire.) As I recall, he got the vast majority of economists, a group that included many Democrats as well as Republicans, to sign the statement.

Tom also wrote, for the second edition of the Concise Encyclopedia, the article “Global Warming: A Balance Sheet.” I reread his piece as background to this post. I find heartening how well some of his analysis holds up almost 20 years after he wrote.

Here’s an excerpt:

The media and many others have attributed to global warming every possible weather, from more to less climate variability, from more rainfall to more drought, and from more violent winter storms to fewer and weaker cold weather surges. But an examination of its likely effects suggests little basis for that gloomy view. According to the IPCC, global warming would warm winters more than summers, would produce more precipitation, and would lead to more of an increase in temperatures at higher latitudes—that is, in already cold regions—than at the equator.

How would climate affect economies? Climate affects principally agriculture, forestry, and fishing. For the United States, these three total less than 2 percent of the GDP. Manufacturing, most service industries, and nearly all extractive industries are immune to direct impacts from climate shifts. Factories can be built practically anywhere—in northern Sweden or in Canada, in Texas, Central America, or Mexico. Banking, insurance, medical services, retailing, education, and a wide variety of other services can prosper as well in warm climates (with air-conditioning) as in cold (with central heating). A warmer climate will lower transportation costs: less snow and ice will torment truckers and automobile drivers; fewer winter storms will disrupt air travel; bad weather in the summer has fewer disruptive effects and passes quickly; a lower incidence of storms and less fog will make shipping less risky. Higher temperatures will leave mining and the extractive industries largely unaffected; oil drilling in the northern seas and mining in the mountains might even benefit.

A few services, such as tourism, may be more susceptible to weather. A warmer climate would likely change the nature and location of pleasure trips. Many ski resorts, for example, might face less reliably cold weather and shorter seasons. Warmer conditions might also mean that fewer northerners would feel the need to vacation in Florida or the Caribbean. At the same time, new tourist opportunities might develop in Alaska, northern Canada, and other locales at higher latitudes or upper elevations. Shorter winters would benefit most outdoor recreation, such as golf, hiking, tennis, and picnicking.

In many parts of the world, warmer weather should mean longer growing seasons. If the world were to warm, the hotter climate would enhance evaporation from the seas and, in all probability, lead to more precipitation worldwide. Moreover, the enrichment of the atmosphere with CO₂would fertilize plants, making for more vigorous growth. The IPCC assessment of warming is that “a few degrees of projected warming will lead to general increases in temperate crop yields, with some regional variation” (IPCC 2001, p. 32). Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish environmentalist and statistician, reported that with moderate adaptation by farmers, warming would boost cereal production in richer countries by 4–14 percent, while cutting them in poorer countries by 6–7 percent (2001, p. 288). The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a cautious report, reviewed the likely influence of global warming and concluded that the overall effect on world food production would be slightly positive and that, therefore, agricultural prices would probably decrease (Kane et al. 1991).

Global warming could melt glaciers and thus cause rising sea levels, which would flood low-lying regions, including a number of islands and delta areas. The high-end estimate by the IPCC of the rise in the sea level by the year 2100 is three feet. Economists such as William Cline, William Nordhaus, and Richard Morgenstern, starting with this three-foot assumption, have estimated the costs of building dikes and levees and of the loss of land for the United States at $7–$10.6 billion annually, or about 0.1 percent of America’s GDP. For some small low-lying island nations, the problems would be much more severe; in some cases they might even be completely submerged.

The whole piece is well worth reading, as are his two pieces on transportation deregulation.

Today or tomorrow, depending on my time constraint, I’ll share, over at my Substack, my story about how I came across Tom’s work in 1972. I’ll post the link here.