Empowering the poor

In a blog post with the sarcastic title Participation of the poor in mainstreaming gender empowerment for civil society stakeholders to promote country ownership of good governance for community-driven sustainable development, William Easterly finds parallels between the empty rethorics of some current development literature, which is very similar to that of Resilience Science/Ecological Economics and the field of public health, and the language of British colonialism. In old and new literature alike, writers pay lip service to the idea of "empowering" the poor.

Easterly then writes:

One word that is extremely unpopular in aid documents but has great historical resonance on “power to the people” is “liberty.” Neither the 347 page World Bank 1998 “Participation Sourcebook” nor the 372-page World Bank 2006 “Empowerment in Practice” ever mentioned the word “liberty.” The poor cannot have liberty, but they can have lots of empowerment and participation and ownership and civil society.

Ecosystem services and counting costs as benefits

Let's get costs and benefits, and thus prices, right.

[I]f the market could somehow be made to price the [ecosystem] services appropriately, all those forests, streams, lakes, prairies and seashores would suddenly acquire real economic value, and people would have incentives to preserve them.

Or let's get them all wrong. This is what we would achieve if we were to follow Nature's logic. The above quote (which, by the way, confuses "real economic value" with commercial value) comes from one of today's editorials. And here is another one:

[S]cience policy-makers will need to make ecosystem monitoring, research, analysis and simulation a high priority in general — and on an ongoing basis. Granted, it will be difficult to find money for such activities in the current economic downturn. But they could provide a fair number of jobs. Monitoring tasks such as checking sediment traps and nitrogen levels in streams require many boots on the ground, for example, and streambed restoration requires many more.

"But?" Why "but?" Those activities cost money because they require jobs. Jobs are costs, not benefits. Monitoring is very bad (very costly), and streambed restoration is even worse. But for Nature large costs count as good reasons for undertaking projects.

Me on the radio (in Spanish)

I was yesterday on PDF, the great radio show. You can find the podcast here.

How much must we worry about future generations?

We place more weight on the present than on the future, and more weight on ourselves than on others. We may say that we worry about future generations, but our actions - how we invest our time and money, for example - indicate that we do not. Here is an argument for not worrying (from Jeffrey Krautkraemer):

If technological progress enables the future to be much better off than the present, then there [is] less need for greater weight being placed on the very long run.

Past generations did well in not worrying much about us.

Why a large human population is good

This was Paul Romer in 2001, applying his distinction between objects and ideas:

If everything were just objects, like trees, then more people means there's less wood per person. But if somebody discovers an idea, everybody gets to use it, so the more people you have who are potentially looking for ideas, the better off we're all going to be. And each time we made a little improvement in technology, we could support a slightly larger population, and that led to more people who could go out and discover some new technology.