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.