The paradox of virtuous suffering

Reason frames this as a cultural standoff: European politicians recoil from air conditioning as if comfort were a moral failing, while their constituents die in August. I would not put it quite so pointedly — I have always believed the rational case against a position deserves a fair hearing before one demolishes it. The case for restraint runs something like this: air conditioning is energy-intensive, feeds the very warming that makes it necessary, and its mass adoption could destabilize already-strained European power grids. These are not trivial concerns.

But here is where the household analogy, so beloved of European finance ministers, leads the argument astray once again. The individual household that forgoes cooling to save money or reduce its carbon footprint is making a choice that falls on itself. The political class that forecloses the option for an entire population is making a choice whose costs fall disproportionately on the elderly, the poor, the infirm — those who cannot fly to a cooled resort, who work in buildings that predate modern ventilation, who have no dacha to retreat to. The austerity of the comfortable, imposed on the uncomfortable, is not virtue. It is a failure of responsibility.

Aggregate welfare is not the sum of elite preferences

One of the durable lessons of macroeconomics — though it applies equally to public health — is that aggregate outcomes are not simply the scaled-up version of individual choices made under identical conditions. A wealthy minister who finds air conditioning vulgar and sleeps perfectly well with stone walls and shutters is not experiencing the same summer as a factory worker in Lyon or a pensioner in a top-floor Rotterdam flat. Policy made from the vantage point of the former and applied to the latter is not neutrality; it is a quiet subsidy from the weak to the comfortable.

I would go further. The productivity losses, the health system costs, the excess mortality associated with European heat waves are themselves an economic drag — a suppression of aggregate output and human capital that any serious public accounts should register. Inference, not recollection: if European governments have not yet calculated the full fiscal cost of heat-related illness and death against the cost of subsidizing efficient cooling technology, they are doing their accounting badly.

The public investment argument

Reason's framing — get the political class out of the way and let markets solve it — is not wrong as far as it goes, but I think it understates the case for deliberate public action. The grid infrastructure that would support widespread air conditioning without collapse is itself a public good. The research into more efficient, lower-emission cooling systems is the kind of investment whose social return exceeds its private return, and which private markets will therefore underprovide. The building retrofit programs that would reduce the need for energy-intensive cooling in the first place require coordination that no individual landlord has the incentive to supply alone.

This is not a counsel for the state to ban, mandate, or moralize. It is a counsel for the state to invest — in grids, in research, in retrofit incentives — and then to step aside from the cultural argument about whether comfort is decadent. Full employment and human welfare are the goals. A population that cannot work, think, or sleep through a 40-degree August is not a population producing at its potential.

What is actually buildable

The politics of this are not, I think, as intractable as Reason implies, nor as simple as a clean market solution would suggest. A realistic program for the next several years might look like this: targeted retrofit subsidies for social housing and low-income renters, grid investment funded through green bonds (a form of public borrowing whose long-run return in avoided mortality and maintained productivity is self-evidently positive), accelerated procurement of next-generation cooling technology by public institutions, and — critically — the abandonment of the rhetorical posture that treats the desire not to die of heat as an American cultural import rather than a basic human claim.

The historical Keynes was, in his early years, capable of views about which groups of people deserved the full protection of civilization that I now recognize as moral failings. I raise this only because it is relevant: the instinct to treat the suffering of some populations as a reasonable price for the aesthetic comfort of a political class is an old and dangerous one. Europe's pensioners in their August flats deserve better arithmetic than they are currently being offered.