Social harmony versus soulless individualism

Daniel Todes ascribes the initial rejection of Darwin's ideas by some Russian commentators to a cultural reaction to the metaphor of the struggle for existence.

Russia's economy, political structure and culture also contrasted sharply with those in the United Kingdom. Capitalism was only weakly developed and political supporters of the two most important classes, rich landlords and peasants, spoke the language of communalism — stressing not individual initiative and struggle, but the importance of cooperation within social groups and the virtues of social harmony. Russian political commentators of the left, right and centre reviled Malthus as an apologist for predatory capitalism and soulless individualism.

Those comfortable with tyrannical systems have long been fond of equating more freedom with less soul and less harmony.

A list of ecosystem services

I copy and paste the whole contents of a box from the latest issue of Nature:

Published online 18 November 2009 | Nature 462, 270-271 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462270a

Box: Ready to serve

From the article:
Biodiversity: Putting a price on nature [a profile of Gretchen Daily]

A selection of nature's 'services':

Provisioning: timber, fish, wild game, fruit and fungus, even moss and foliage for floral arrangements.
Regulating: water filtration and capture, flood protection, carbon sequestration.
Cultural: recreation, education, aesthetic and spiritual contemplation.

I don't know what spiritual contemplation is. Apart from this, it seems to me that we can get all of these services by artificial means, including intensely managed ecosystems. Will these means be more expensive than "nature"?

Elinor Ostrom and social capital

This year's Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom is well deserved and a good reminder that we can study all of human collective behavior through the lens of economics, i. e., of science. It also seems that the prize has almost everybody happy. Ostrom advocates neither government intervention nor individual property rights as the solution to problems of commons. This allows both pro-market and anti-market spin doctors to celebrate Ostrom as one of theirs.

I squirm at some of Ostrom's ideas. And I am somewhat relieved that I am not alone.

This is from an article by Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom and Paul C. Stern:

Effective commons governance is easier to achieve when (i) the resources and use of the resources by humans can be monitored, and the information can be verified and understood at relatively low cost (e.g., trees are easier to monitor than fish, and lakes are easier to monitor than rivers) (29); (ii) rates of change in resources, resource-user populations, technology, and economic and social conditions are moderate (30–32); (iii) communities maintain frequent face-to-face communication and dense social networks—sometimes called social capital— that increase the potential for trust, allow people to express and see emotional reactions to distrust, and lower the cost of monitoring behavior and inducing rule compliance (33–36); (iv) outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost from using the resource (new entrants add to the harvesting pressure and typically lack understanding of the rules); and (v) users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement (37–39). Few settings in the world are characterized by all of these conditions. The challenge is to devise institutional arrangements that help to establish such conditions or, as we discuss below, meet the main challenges of governance in the absence of ideal conditions (6, 40, 41).

This is an anonymous comment in Marginal Revolution:

Effective commons governance is easier to achieve when (i) ... (v)

Reading this list, it almost sounds like the "cure" is worse than the disease, if back-to-the-future means old-boys networks, guanxi, cartels, provincialism and mistrust of outsiders, resistance to disruptive and innovative technological change, a world where who you know or who your parents were is more important than your character or ability, rule of law and equal opportunity is trumped by hoary traditions, and so forth.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but some elements of this program sound like a sinister throwback to old ways that we spent centuries trying to overcome.

The challenge is to devise institutional arrangements that help to establish such conditions...

How about no?

In support of clearly bad things

Michael P. Nelson and John A. Vucetich advocate political advocacy by scientists in Conservation Biology. They also take the opportunity to engage in some political advocacy themselves.

Quite apart from whether neutrality is an appropriate position, refraining from advocacy is unlikely to represent a neutral position. Rather, such a refrain is typically implicit, but powerful, support for the policy backed by those with the most political power. [...] For example, biodiversity loss, climate change, human population growth, and pollution on the whole are so favored by the dominant culture, institutions, and policies that abstaining from advocacy against such processes is a de facto support for these processes. Just as being neutral toward child abuse guarantees children will be abused, neutrality about environmental abuse guarantees environmental abuse. Arguably, many current policy issues are like this. They are clearly bad, and scientists are responsible for knowing that they are clearly bad, but they delude themselves into believing that they can remain neutral about them.

I don't advocate against human population growth because I see nothing wrong with it. I don't advocate against climate change for the same reason I don't advocate against the weather. I don't advocate against pollution or biodiversity loss (or anthropogenic climate change) for the same reason I don't advocate against work, chemotherapy or paying off your mortgage.

GM crops, African farmers and just a little tyranny

A dogmatic and unscientific stance on basic human rights — whether for or against — helps no one, least of all African slaves. We support a 'wait-and-see' stance.

I have made up this quote, but I thank Ian Scoones and Dominic Glover for inspiration:

A dogmatic and unscientific stance on GM crops — whether for or against — helps no one, least of all African farmers.

Scoones and Glover sum up their point of view with this deceptively middle-of-the-road sentence. But their point of view is no middle of the road. They argue that African farmers, unlike their more prosperous counterparts in the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, must not be allowed to choose what crops to grow because GM crops are no panacea - as if non-GM crops were the solution to all human problems from genocidal war to erectile dysfunction.

An informed 'wait-and-see' stance thus makes sense.

Predicting financial crises with agent-based models

Nature complains in an editorial that standard economic models failed to predict the recent financial crisis and endorses the idea that agent-based models, which detail the behavior of individual consumers, producers, investors and other agents, may be more useful. J. Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley further explore the idea in the same issue (The economy needs agent-based modelling).

Such models do not rely on the assumption that the economy will move towards a predetermined equilibrium state, as other models do. Instead, at any given time, each agent acts according to its current situation, the state of the world around it and the rules governing its behaviour. An individual consumer, for example, might decide whether to save or spend based on the rate of inflation, his or her current optimism about the future, and behavioural rules deduced from psychology experiments. The computer keeps track of the many agent interactions, to see what happens over time.

I wonder how agent-based models would model the behavior of agents that use agent-based models to guide their decisions. Well, no need to wonder. Given that all agents can and do use at least as much information as models there is no way for models to outsmart the system. Financial crises are inherently unpredictable. And this is precisely what standard economic models say.

The collapse of Japan

If I was Japan’s worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years’ time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein.

While lunching on salmon, orzo, avocado, grapefruit, pomegranate lychee green tea and lots of pomegranate juice in his Bel Air home, Jared Diamond reflects that the Japanese will rather starve than eat anything other than tuna.