THE PROPAGANDA MODEL
Economics And The Environment

Introduction

Here I empirically test Chomsky's claim of an "acceptable framework of discussion" for environmental economics. I discuss Chomsky’s propaganda model, and his claim about the news media having a framework of discussion that creates narrow boundary conditions on what can be discussed, or maybe even thought of by those that work within the news media.

In this framework, if your claims go beyond the boundaries then they are deemed unacceptable, and you will be marginalised by institutions. I analyse the boundary conditions for elite universities when it comes to the economics profession’s discussions on climate change and argue that the propaganda model’s conception of a narrow and uncritical framework of discussion holds up there as well. My analysis does not cover the debate past 2016, or the limits to growth/degrowth vilification from the economics profession, in which quite a few mainstream economists have a tradition of not being able to read what critics of growthism say. This tradition of illiteracy is still largely present today, and goes all the way back to 1971.

The Propaganda Model

One of Noam Chomsky’s views on propaganda was that the liberal media set boundary conditions on how far the debate could go. The propaganda model was an institutional analysis of the media, where the framework of discussion was a reflection of the institutional values that journalists operated in. These institutions were a “guided market” system, where the media is owned by major corporations, dependent on ad revenue, and dependent on sources from the public relations industry and State officials.¹

“The spectrum of discussion reflects what a propaganda model would predict: condemnation of ‘liberal bias’ and defence against this charge, but no recognition of the possibility that ‘liberal bias’ might simply be an expression of one variant of the narrow State-corporate ideology as - demonstrably, it is- and a particularly useful variant, bearing the implicit message: thus far, and no further”. (Chomsky, 1995).

What the propaganda model predicted, among other things, was that the news media behaves hypocritically when it comes to mass murder. He demonstrated this by taking roughly comparable crimes, one committed by an enemy state, (say, Russia), and one committed by a client state or the US itself, and compared the media coverage.² The results were that the liberal media either ignore mass murder, or think of it as constructive when the US is responsible for it. But they think mass murder is a bad thing when an enemy state does it, or when corporate-State interests no longer support it.

At its most critical, mass murder can be opposed on tactical grounds, but not moral ones. It is assumed without evidence that intentions are noble when the US does it.³ Noam Chomsky was not just interested in the news media however, and he only studied the media because there was more data available to prove his point. He was also interested in “public intellectuals” (a phrase not used as much in New Zealand, I think), and academic scholarship.

“If you look at journalism, it is kind of an easy target and a little bit unfair because the journalist has to get something out tomorrow; they can’t think about it much. Much more interesting is scholarship. That’s why most of my own critical work is on scholarship, not on journalism, because in the case of scholarship, people have time, they have resources, they have security, they can think about what they’re doing. And what you find is, with very rare exceptions, pretty much the same thing” (YouTube, "The Chomsky Sessions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xf5H00ACws)

The way he explained it in elite academia was like this: “I mean, you want your department to be collegial. You want people to be nice to each other. You don’t want somebody in the department getting up and saying, ‘Look, you’re a war criminal,’ and showing it and demonstrating it. That’s not nice; it doesn’t feel good. So, you sort of keep these people away” (ibid.).

Well, it’s not just politeness that stands in the way of horrific crimes and world peace. The elite universities are pumped full of huge amounts of research grant money from corporate interests. The rest of the universities, including those in the Global South, have far less resources. I think their economic shortfall makes them more dependent on accepting the ideas that come from the elite universities. It takes a lot time and resources to develop criticism of the mainstream ideas. That’s my opinion anyway.

Adapting the propaganda model for academia is much harder. There are physical limits for reading through and understanding an entire sub-field. One way of doing it is to identify which scholars are perceived as the most critical. This perception ideally should come from people within the mainstream, and outside of it. Then we see what the scholars perceived as most critical, and take it as an approximation of the boundary condition that says “thus far, and no further”.

Boundary Conditions For Economists And The Environment

My interest is in how mainstream economists at elite universities have discussed climate change and the whole ecological crisis in general. I want to take a snapshot of what the mainstream of environmental economics was like on climate change from the start and up until around 2016, where the profession’s "framework of discussion" has drifted since then.

The main target of criticism from outsiders has been William Nordhaus, who won a Nobel Prize for a climate catastrophe, arguing that we should raise global temperatures by four degrees Celsius as a trade-off for the economy. This would be cataclysmic. There were people in free market think tanks who critiqued Nordhaus for wanting to do too much about climate change, and that we shouldn’t even have any carbon tax at all. However, it’s fair to say that Nordhaus was the “conservative” boundary on the debate in elite academia.

Perception Of Criticism

Benjamin Franta is a historian of science whose PhD thesis was on the fossil fuels industry strategic response to climate change. In a footnote he identifies the two most critical mainstream economists on climate change. “Additionally, some other economists, such as Nicholas Stern and Martin Weitzman, have warned of the high costs of global warming. Yet Charles River Associates’ work continued to be promoted and accepted in important parts of media, Government, and academia” (Franta, 2022).

Genevieve Guethner is another scholar who critiques the economics profession, and gives a fairly favourable view of Martin Weitzman’s critique of Nordhaus, saying that “Weitzman was a brilliant thinker… his greatest contribution was to the economics of climate change”. Steve Keen is an economist and a critic of mainstream economics as a discipline, but in particular their views on climate change. He names the exceptions within the mainstream field who critiqued Nordhaus.

“Nordhaus’s [models] can be characterised as ‘making up numbers to support a pre-existing belief’: specifically, that climate change could have only a trivial impact upon the economy. This practice was replicated, rather than challenged, by subsequent neoclassical economists with some honourable exceptions, notably Pindyck (2017), Weitzman (2011a, 2011b), DeCanio (2003), Cline (1996), Darwin (1999), Kaufmann (1997, 1998), and Quiggin and Horowitz (1999)”.

Thus, Martin Weitzman was identified as the more critical end of the acceptable framework of discussion. This identification is done by three scholars that critiqued mainstream economics, and all three work in different areas. William Nordhaus wrote a book called “Climate Casino” in 2013, which argued for four degrees Celsius warming as the optimal approach to climate change, as in his Nobel Prize lecture. I looked at three reviews by prominent mainstream economists. All of them were positive reviews.⁴

All of them recognised that Nordhaus wanted to raise global temperatures by four degrees, and made some basic critiques. However, aside from Weitzman, the target of four degrees was only really criticised on the grounds of containing some unrealistic assumptions. Weitzman’s criticism focused on the impact it would have on the economy or the ecosystem. However, in his review, he states that “Bill Nordhaus, who more than anyone else founded the economics of climate change and has been a major contributor to the subject over many decades, is a balanced centrist pragmatic observer who avoids extremes of Right or Left” (Weitzman, 2015).

Trade-Off

Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman wrote a book called “Climate Shock” in 2016, which accepted that the economy and the environment are a “trade-off”, where you hurt the economy by increasing the size of a carbon tax. Trade-offs are particularly relevant on an average, national, or global level. And they are perhaps nowhere more apparent on the planetary scale than in the case of climate change. It’s the ultimate battle of growth versus the environment. Stronger climate policy now implies higher, immediate economic costs".

This is a common fossil fuel industry talking point, and it defies the reality that socially and ecologically useful jobs can be created. In terms of the policy solution discussion, the debate in this book is as follows. Both Nordhaus and Weitzman agreed that implementing a carbon tax was the solution. “The correct - the only correct - approach is to price each and every ton of carbon according to the damage it causes”. Weitzman did not actually say what the right price on carbon should be, though indicated it would be above $US40 per ton. However, what he made clear at the end of his book is that we are not ready to tax the rich, and that we need to stick to just taxing carbon.

“Some, like activist author Naomi Klein, call for ‘taxing the rich and filthy’. That’s a nice turn of phrase. One might agree that we probably should be taxing the rich more. But that’s a different problem entirely. First and foremost, we ought to be taxing the filthy. Instead of ‘sticking it to the man’, the point is to stick it to carbon. Far from posing a fundamental problem to capitalism, it’s capitalism with all its innovative and entrepreneurial powers that is our only hope of steering clear of the looming climate shock”.

Was Martin Weitzman the best approximation of the Left-bound? Almost but not quite. Recall the mention of Nicholas Stern above as one of the other critics, and I’d throw Joseph Stiglitz in there too as wanting to do more. In examination of these claims, a rough approximation of the acceptable framework of discussion and thought is formed which has the following properties:

1. The idea that the economy and the environment is not a trade-off was probably close to unthinkable for all but the most open minded.

2. The acceptable framework of discussion was largely confined to how big a carbon tax would be.

3. The mass negligent homicide of billions of people and mass species extinction is considered Centrist and pragmatic, and deviating too far to the Left from that view is extreme and ideological.

4. The idea that taxing the rich is somewhere close to the edges of the boundary, and the debate would be over whether it’s a utopian goal to strive for or not.

Conclusion

I find Chomsky’s conception of the cultural managers as working within a narrowly bounded framework of discussion (and thought) to be pretty accurate. Even among the more critical economists in the mainstream of elite environmental economists, there wasn’t even anything suggested that would be remotely close enough to avoid ecological catastrophe, and billions of people dying.

Sources

Chomsky, N (1995), “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control In Democratic Societies”, House of Anansi.

David Balcarras (15/3/22), “Noam Chomsky – The Chomsky Sessions”, YouTube. 29:00-32:00 is the timestamp.

Franta, BA (2022), “Big Carbon's Strategic Response To Global Warming, 1950-2020”, Stanford University.

Geide-Stevenson, D, & La Parra-Perez, A (2024). “Consensus Among Economists 2020 - A Sharpening Of The Picture”, The Journal Of Economic Education, 55(4), 461-478.

Guenther, G (2024), “The Language Of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda And How To Fight It”, Oxford University Press.

Keen, S (2022). “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics Of Climate Change”, in “Economics And Climate Emergency” (pp. 79-107), Routledge.

Nordhaus, WD, Stavins, RN & Weitzman, ML (1992). “Lethal Model 2: The Limits To Growth Revisited”, “Brookings Papers On Economic Activity, 1992(2)”, 1-59.

Suter, M, Strahm, N, Bundeli, T, Kaessner, K, Cologna, V, Oreskes, N, & Berger, S. (2025), “Green Growth Beliefs: Investigating Factors Associated With Expert Opinions On Green Growth”, PLOS Climate, 4(4), e0000597.

Wagner, G & Weitzman, ML (2016), “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences Of A Hotter Planet”.

Reviews

Jaffe, AB, & Kerr, S (2015), “The Science, Economics, And Politics Of Global Climate Change: A Review Of ‘The Climate Casino’ By William Nordhaus”, Journal Of Economic Literature, 53(1), 79-91.

Krugman, P (2013), “Gambling With Civilisation”, The New York Review Of Books, 7, 14-18.

Weitzman, ML (2015), Book Review - A Review of William Nordhaus' “The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, And Economics For A Warming World” Review Of Environmental Economics and Policy.

Endnotes

[5].⁵ A survey on the profession in 2020 notes that the consensus has shifted on views towards inequality. Notable shifts in consensus centre on the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not obvious in previous surveys and are largely supportive of Government policies that mitigate income inequality.

Watchdog 171 -- May 2026

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