Biopolitical

Time discounting and sustainability

2011-12-15T14:23:00.000+01:00

Ecological Economics has just published an interesting paper (Climate change economics and discounted utilitarianism) by Ulrich Hampicke. He explains the controversy over time discounting in the context of sustainability and climate change - what sacrifices should we make for the good of future generations? Different choices of time discounting parameters lead to wildly different policy prescriptions. These choices are actually moral choices (or perhaps ex-post rationalizations of policy preferences). Hampicke criticizes the moral and empirical soundness of these choices, but his alternative proposal does not yield a practical, quantitative criterion for making decisions. My take is even more disheartening.

Two parameters quantify time discounting, δ and η. δ is the pure time discount rate, which expresses the lower importance we assign to future events or individuals just because they happen to be in the future. The larger δ the less we save for the future.

η (the elasticity of marginal utility relative to consumption) expresses, in Hampicke's words, how quickly people get satisfied as consumption increases. It compares how much the rich and the poor enjoy a little more consumption, and thus measures our willingness to take from the rich to give to the poor, or vice versa. As we will probably earn and consume more in the future than we do now even if we don't save, a large η justifies saving little. Saving would be akin to taking from the poor, making them substantially worse off, to give to the already satisfied rich. η also measures our aversion to risk - why take risks to earn more if more consumption adds little to our satisfaction.

For climate policy, larger δ or η imply fewer sacrifices in the present, and thus a warmer future climate.

The Stern–Nordhaus controversy shows that the “adjustment screws” δ and η have such overwhelming influence on the result of the optimization (and for ensuing policy recommendations) that a new agreement on which numbers to plug in for them would at once invalidate previous results. [...] By tweaking the adjustment screws of the model, researchers can arbitrarily lend support to any climate policy recommendation.

One can take a descriptive view of δ and η, set to empirically find their actual values in the human population, and enter those values in the equations. Or one can take a normative view of δ and η, reckoning that they are moral choices ("we ought to give due importance to future generations; we ought to satisfy ourselves with a frugal life"), and enter the morally good values in the equations. Both finding the values of δ and η that currently guide actual human behavior, and finding the morally superior ones are difficult tasks.

Given the empirical and theoretical difficulties of finding δ and η Hampicke advocates giving up entirely on the undertaking. But the alternative he tentatively proposes (doing everything in order to avoid serious evil for future generations) does not specify a quantitative criterion for making choices:

Under intergenerational fairness, each generation strives for its own happiness while recognizing that its actions and omissions imply consequences for future generations, and takes these into account. And each generation accepts that fairness is reciprocal: We must not burden our successors with morally unjustifiable disadvantages, while, conversely, our successors cannot demand undue sacrifices from us.

There is probably no good solution to the problem of time discounting. This, of course, is no excuse for collective inaction on climate change. Nor is it for collective action.

Jeffrey Sachs and vergüenza ajena

2011-12-13T16:23:00.000+01:00

When a couple of months ago I read With 7 billion on earth, a huge task before us by Jeffrey Sachs I felt vergüenza ajena, which Wikipedia defines as:

Sense of shame on behalf of another person, even though that person may not experience shame themselves—for example, cringing when watching a very bad comic—generally more intense when the other is well known to you, though possible even when you dislike the other person—similar to the Dutch term plaatsvervangende schaamte and the German term Fremdschämen— 'external shame' or 'vicarious embarrassment', being vicariously embarrassed by someone else. The humor enacted by video clips of very bad auditions for televised talent shows leverage the vicarious pain of this emotion. It is also known as 'Spanish Shame'.

I have just found the following comment by Bradley Calder on another blog:

Sachs knows the more he agrees with people who advocate for environmentalism, the more money he is likely to make through speaking engagements and so forth. None of this surprises me.

I had the same thought when I read Sachs's article, but that didn't diminish my vergüenza ajena. Curiously, reading Calder's comment has diminished it. Perhaps seeing other people openly describe Sachs's article as a marketing device, and not as an intellectual product, somehow makes the whole act less ridiculous in my eyes.

Daly dose of fun

2011-12-01T11:14:00.001+01:00

Every day hundreds of newsletters circulate the world giving stock-picking advice - for free. From the point of view of rational investment they are nonsense. If someone has a real clue about sound stock-picking the last thing he or she will do is to freely share it with strangers. Those newsletters only make sense, and money, for brokers earning trading commissions. That's why brokers write and publish them - to persuade clients to trade.

Herman Daly, the Pope of Ecological Economics, offers investment advice in the journal Ecological Economics (Growth, debt, and the World Bank). Unlike common stock-picking advice, which consists of random, superficially plausible just-so stories, this one is based on a patently wrong, implausible just-so story. Either that or you follow Daly's advice and get rich.

Consider. What limits the annual fish catch—fishing boats (capital) or remaining fish in the sea (natural resources)? Clearly the latter. What limits barrels crude oil extracted—drilling rigs and pumps, or remaining accessible deposits of petroleum—or capacity of the atmosphere to absorb the CO2 from burning petroleum? What limits production of cut timber—number of chain saws and lumber mills, or standing forests and their rate of growth? What limits irrigated agriculture—pumps and sprinklers, or aquifer recharge rates and river flow volumes? That should be enough to at least suggest that we live in a natural resource-constrained world, not a capital-constrained world.

Economic logic says to invest in and economize on the limiting factor. Economic logic has not changed; what has changed is the limiting factor. It is now natural resources, not capital, that we must economize on and invest in.

I am not running to my broker to invest in natural resources because it seems to me that oil extraction is limited by extraction technology, the fish catch by aquaculture technology, irrigated agriculture by pumps, sprinklers and such, and fish catch, irrigated agriculture and cut timber by deficient private-property institutions. To increase the output of these industries we would have to invest in capital, including social capital. Not that I am suggesting you to do so - I don't know whether there will be enough demand for fish, oil, food or timber to justify more private investment.

Daly also says:

The claim [of economists] that capital is a near perfect substitute for natural resources is absurd. For one thing substitution is reversible. If capital is a near perfect substitute for resources, then resources are a near perfect substitute for capital—so why then did we ever bother to accumulate capital in the first place if nature already endowed us with a near perfect substitute?

Because what other capital "endows" us with is cheaper than what nature "endows" us with.

Daly says many more things - that atomic bombs will be thrown because of natural resource shortages, that the fact that we now live better than ever before should not count as evidence against his idea that economic growth "makes us collectively poorer, not richer" (an argument that is as good now as it was two hundred years ago and as it may be two thousand years from now), that countries "think" and but don't think very well because we can see that they don't act "in their own best interests," and on and on and on.

CO2 emissions, health and education

2011-11-22T17:20:00.001+01:00

"With Earth's human population reaching 7 billion in the past month" it is Time to stop celebrating the polluters (in Nature). Chuluun Togtokh wants the Human Development Index (HDI) of the UN to incorporate CO2 emissions because he thinks both that CO2 emissions are a proxy for unsustainability and that the HDI as currently constructed "encourages countries" to behave irresponsibly. CO2 emissions are not a good measure of unsustainability, "countries" don't behave, and I doubt anyone tries to earn more, educate himself or live longer just to increase the HDI of his country. But I want to focus on another bizarre statement:

Emissions are positively and strongly correlated with income; less so with the HDI; and not at all with health and education.

Togtokh doesn't say how he got these results. But they look wrong. According to Gapminder World, CO2 emissions do correlate strongly with income:

And more or less equally so with the HDI:

And also with life expectancy (the measure of health in the HDI):

With child mortality (not included in the HDI):

And with years of schooling, the measure of education used in the HDI (the graph includes the data for women, but an even stronger pattern applies to men):

Thomas Dietz, Adam Smith, rationality and manipulation by unscrupulous agents

2011-11-16T13:22:00.001+01:00

In Nature (In retrospect: The art of influence), Thomas Dietz "reassesses" Robert Cialdini's 1984 book Influence, which argued (again) that decision-making is often irrational and subject to "manipulation by unscrupulous agents."

We make decisions based on narrow self-interest, calculated benefits, costs and risks. Or so claimed economist Adam Smith, whose 'rational actor model', from his 1776 opus The Wealth of Nations, has long dominated thinking in economics and social science. By the late twentieth century, Smith's view had been applied to every domain of human decision-making, from marriage to international negotiations. But a growing body of evidence began to indicate that the model was often misleading.

Adam Smith claimed that we sometimes make rational, self-interested decisions (as exemplified by an unscrupulous salesman trying to manipulate his customers' wishes) and that a model that we always decide that way would often be misleading (as exemplified by those customers who, against their own interests, fall victim to the salesman's tactics). He said it in 1776. In 2011, Dietz agrees with him. But he writes as if Adam Smith never said such things.

Cialdini saw that Smith's model of rational decision-makers, immune to any influence other than information, was simplistic.

Mythical Adam Smith is, to say it in improper English, one of the strawest men ever.

Mainstream policy analysis still relies heavily on the assumption of a rational decision-maker, but social psychology is starting to affect how policies are designed. In the 2008 book Nudge (very much a descendant of Influence), authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that insights from the social sciences — such as our strong tendency to choose the default option no matter what it is — can be used to encourage better decisions.

This paragraph doesn't make sense. Thaler and Sunstein's proposal would replace the current system of government coercive paternalism with one they call "libertarian paternalism" based on free, but subliminally directed, choice. In either case paternalism assumes that people are irrational and thus unable to make wise choices by themselves. In what sense does "mainstream policy analysis still rely heavily on the assumption of a rational decision-maker"?

Dietz later makes the good point that although "libertarian paternalism" may be better that outright coercion, "unscrupulous agents" in government may use the salesman tactics Cialdini documents in his book to "manipulate us against our own interests."

The politics of a Science editor

2011-11-03T12:39:00.000+01:00

Reviewing a new movie for Science, Sacha Vignieri, who is an associate editor of the journal, writes:

All people deserve an equal quality of life, but the unfortunate truth is that Earth cannot sustain a developed-country level of consumption for billions of people. As pointed out in the film, it would take all the resources of 10 Earths to support the current global human population at the consumption level of the United States.

There are three unsupported statements in this text:
1. All people deserve an equal quality of life.
2. Earth cannot sustain a developed-country level of consumption for billions of people.
3. It would take all the resources of 10 Earths to support the current global human population at the consumption level of the United States.

Migration as adaptation

2011-10-27T12:05:00.000+02:00

For all of human history, people have migrated in response to environmental changes. Institutional xenophobia, which may have roots in behaviors that could be useful in prehistoric times, currently obstructs migration. Sadly, in a time when standard travel is cheaper and safer than ever, hundreds of people perish each year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in makeshift boats.

Migration is an obvious response to poverty and climate deterioration. Thus, it is good news to see a commentary published in Nature calling for more open borders to ease adaptation to climate change. And it is not authored but some ideologically-driven liberal zealot - as some would probably label me - but by seriously politically-correct members of the UK government, including John R. Beddington. Perhaps times are changing for the good.

Dear taxpayer...

2011-10-24T18:35:00.000+02:00

As the U.S. congress grapples for solutions to the economic crisis, it is critical to recognize that rebuilding and modernizing infrastructure will be a key driver of economic growth. [...] Infrastructure investments provide an opportunity to improve the economy in the short term by creating jobs [MF: and more of them if workers use spoons instead of shovels and excavators], while also driving the long-term growth needed to compete in the global marketplace.

Who wrote this? Kathy Caldwell, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. It is published in Science, and not in the advertisements section.

Dyslexia, color blindness and the challenge of conceptualizing social-ecological systems

2011-10-05T11:09:00.000+02:00

Just as some textual and visual materials are unsuitable for the dyslexic or the color blind, Resilience Science art is unsuitable for those of us suffering from dysconceptualdiagramia and flowchartphobia. Even after wiping the tears from my eyes, calming down my trembling and stopping my room from spinning wildly, I fail to make sense of those charts.

Pro-choice in health care

2011-09-23T15:06:00.001+02:00

A pro-choice idea on health care has found its way to the latest issue of Science (Rethinking clinical trials, by Andrew Grove):

Another proposal would allow patients to choose between medicines whose efficacy has been determined in different manners.

Collectivists (pro-lifers?) would counter that patients are too stupid and medical providers too unscrupulous and short-sighted for such a proposal to work; that smart, honest and far-sighted bureaucrats must keep deciding for all of us; and that anyone else trying to make a choice for herself or to help others to choose must go to jail.

Social costs and benefits of palm oil plantations

2011-09-13T11:35:00.001+02:00

CJA Bradshaw angrily criticizes an awful piece by Phillip Lawrence that defends palm oil plantations in South-East Asia. But he actually agrees too much with Lawrence.

Bradshaw believes that "poverty alleviation" is "a key justification for their advocacy of oil palm expansion and forest exploitation in developing nations, and it is true that these sectors do offer significant local employment. Yet forest loss and degradation also have important societal costs." He sounds as if employment should be counted as a social benefit of oil palm expansion, to be weighed against social costs. But employment is not a social benefit but a social cost. The only social benefit of oil palm that I have heard of is palm oil consumption. Work is one of the costs that society has to pay in order to enjoy palm oil consumption. Wages (which are the good side of employment, the bad side being the hours worked) and business profits (which are the good side of investment, the bad side being risk and the postponement of consumption) are, from the social point of view, neutral - they benefit workers and owners as much as they hurt the consumers who pay them.

So, palm oil consumption is a benefit, work and capital risk involved in palm oil production are costs, and wages and profits are neutral. Thus, employment and business should count only as costs, not as benefits. To these costs we must add environmental and other social costs.

The important question that remains is how the social benefit of palm oil consumption compares to all the social costs (including employment) of its production. And that's a difficult one.

Immigration, Spanish revolution and the petty outrage of the well-to-do

2011-08-21T16:00:00.000+02:00

A loose movement of protesters asking for political reform in Spain suddenly and unexpectedly gave rise to spectacular street demonstrations around May 15, 2011. The movement was named 15-M and its participants and sympathizers are called "the outraged" (los indignados). They, like perhaps most Spaniards, blame politicians, bankers and capitalism for the economic crisis Spain is suffering since 2008. They think that politicians should provide for jobs, health care, education and housing, and are outraged about 20% unemployment, long waiting lists in the state health care system, low-quality of education and hundreds of thousands of empty homes - many of them owned by state banks - that are too expensive for anyone to buy. They complain that politicians don't fix these problems.

Politicians cannot and will not fix these problems. Instead, following the instructions of voters, they implement policies that create social problems. Most of the specific proposals los indignados are making consist of the same kind of populist policies that created or exacerbated the problems they complain about. Los indignados will remain indignados.

Not only is all this outrage misdirected regarding blame - with politicians and bankers as favorite scapegoats for the failures of the whole of society. It is also misdirected regarding the severity of problems. Unemployment or inefficient health care in a wealthy country are petty troubles compared to those of the average person. Research indicates that eliminating political barriers to immigration would double world GDP. But only 1% of Spaniards think that Spanish laws against immigration, which are among the toughest and most inhumane in the world, are too tough. As Bryan Caplan puts it:

[I]f outrage were proportional to harm, virtually every protest on earth would be in favor of open borders.

Atheist and libertarian

2011-08-18T16:35:00.001+02:00

"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know." [...]

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe.

This is Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller in CNN.com.

Food security and stakeholder empowerment

2011-08-16T10:34:00.001+02:00

As the human population approaches 10 billion in a planet with finite resources, food security will remain a major social-ecological challenge. Decision-making regarding food security requires a dialog between different actors, stakeholders and communities at multiple spatial scales, and must be underpinned by the empowerment of local and indigenous peoples as well as displaced individuals and environmental refugees, the strengthening of participatory governance, and the development of cross-cultural ecologies and trans-disciplinary capacity building. Narratives, data, values and assessments must all be incorporated into a collaborative process of scenario-building. In the end the process must provide specific recommendations for policy-makers.

Following this blueprint, relevant stakeholders yesterday created a World-Wide lnterethnic Platform on Food Security and Ecosystem Cultural Services with the goal of establishing a short-term agenda for food security and birthday celebration. This mandate was completed after a lively deliberative process in which an indigenous individual contributed local expertise and traditional knowledge and a young environmental refugee built creative scenarios and provided nonlinear criticism. The final policy recommendation was to go to the Italian buffet, leaving the grill restaurant or Burger King for another occasion. After dinner we both felt very empowered.

---

I thank Mike Hulme and collaborators for stylistic inspiration (Science-policy interface: beyond assessments, also available here).

Human population: collectivism is alive and well

2011-08-07T00:32:00.000+02:00

I have finished browsing the Science special issue on human population. I have even read whole some of its twenty articles. It's been an appalling experience.

First, it seems that many women in poor countries have more children than they prefer. Some argue that it is due to a lack of access to, or ignorance about, contraception. There are obvious ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies that are universally available, so I suspect the real reason for truly unwanted pregnancies is coercion. Coercion comes in several ways. In its subtler forms, it may come as a seemingly friendly encouragement by relatives and neighbors. At its most brutal, it may come as aggression by men wanting to have more children or simply sex - a behavior that is often socially condoned. Women are not means to the wants of men, relatives or neighbors. The collectivization of women is appalling. In some cases, outsiders making contraception more socially appealing, or at least less socially visible, help these women's case. As long as these outsiders do not use coercion themselves, they are doing good.

Second, every article in this issue agrees that reproduction is a matter of public policy. Starting from the dubious assumptions that both population growth in poor countries and population decrease in richer countries are bad things, they advocate without further justification, or citing pamphlets by the United Nations, that governments must intervene to change course. Here we have again the collectivization of potential parents and children. People are considered means to a higher end - a supposedly optimal population trajectory for the country, humanity, "the planet" or "sustainability."

Third, articles are unanimous that government policies must consist of discouraging or encouraging reproduction, depending on the case. None of them considers the possibility of abandoning repressive policies. Namely, none of them denounces collectively-set restrictions on migration. None of them denounces xenophobia and racism, as in Spain's policy of forbidding nationals of certain countries from entering Spain unless they are descendants of Spaniards (i.e., white). All those authors that happily endorse population control and natalist policies without discussing migration restrictions are looking the other way on xenophobia.

I don't like community oppression of women, migration restrictions, and population control and natalist policies. I don't like Science endorsing, either directly or by default, the latter three policies. I can feel the stink of xenophobia, racism and eugenics. But I can end this post with an optimistic outlook. Crass collectivism is alive and well, but so are individual people looking for independence and freedom. Most women now live in cities, and the proportion is growing faster than ever. Moving from a traditional community to a city is the surest way of both escaping the social pressure to reproduce and accessing modern contraceptive methods. And cities are the best places to raise children.

Population shrinkage, sustainability and the mother of all parties

2011-08-04T19:03:00.000+02:00

This is from the Science news item The upside of downsizing:

“Humanity is already consuming resources at an unsustainable rate; population shrinkage is the cheapest and surest contribution to sustainability that we know of,” says Simon Ross, chief executive of Population Matters, a London-based group pushing to restrain population growth to reduce stresses on the environment.

Indeed. If we decided to have no more children, those alive could then set to enjoy consumption without worries about sustainability.

Individual people are not countries, and viceversa

2011-08-02T23:33:00.000+02:00

Yes, surprise. Humanity is not just a collection of countries. There are individual people too. And a person is not a miniature country. It's something completely different. You should become aware of this fact when you meet a person, you meet a country and compare one to the other. You can shake hands with a person but not with a country.

Dennis Normile, Japan correspondent for Science, seems surprised about the existence of individual people, as opposed to countries, and is not yet fully aware of the conceptual consequences of this little-known fact. He writes in The upside of downsizing:

He [Akihiko Matsutani, a demographer] believes that per capita income [in Japan] could rise even as GDP shrinks, providing a more comfortable lifestyle for individuals despite diminished national economic clout.

He writes as if the fact that someone's income can rise independently of his country's GDP were a worth-mentioning, perhaps even controversial, hypothesis. The income of a person depends on her productivity. The GDP of a country depends on productivity and population. First lesson: countries have population, individual people don't.

He seems surprised by, or at least interested in, the fact that individuals can prosper "despite diminished national economic clout." He was probably surprised when, as China overtook Japan as the second largest economy, Toyota engineers remained well-paid Toyota engineers and did not suddenly become Third World peasants, as most Chinese still are.

Japan is not alone. Populations are shrinking in much of Eastern Europe and Germany [...]

Good for Japan. Loneliness is a bad thing. Bad for the Japanese. Fewer people means more loneliness. Second lesson: countries and people sometimes have opposite interests. As a person, not a country, I side with the latter.

Japan is leading this trend because it deliberately cut short its post–World War II baby boom.

Normile has yet to learn that countries don't do things deliberately. Individual people do. In the case of having children, this includes making compromises, reaching consensus and having fun with a person of the other sex. Countries can have baby country booms too - witness the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia - but they do so asexually.

Finally, leaving aside the question of whether individual people are worth a damn, Normile and/or Matsutani offer the following thought, which has the flavor of, to paraphrase Megan Evans, a "naive circular flow model of the economy" or of "perpetual motion machines":

He [Matsutani] thinks economic forces could push Japanese corporations to focus on making higher-value-added products less subject to competition from manufacturers in low wage countries. To attract employees from a shrinking labor pool, such companies will have to pay more and be more flexible, by accommodating working mothers, for example. Higher wages would also prop up domestic consumption.

If, because of a shrinking labor pool, companies have to pay more and be more flexible, they will be outcompeted by companies that do not suffer from such labor shortages. These would include, for example, Japanese companies moving to countries that allow immigration. And if there were labor shortages everywhere, higher wages would not prop up consumption because they would also drive prices up (or, to be more rigorous, companies could not pay higher wages because they could not charge higher prices).

Normile's article also offers a (final) solution to the problem of sustainability. But I will leave that for another day.

There is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity

2011-08-01T23:44:00.005+02:00

Here I argue that there is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity (ungated here).

Protected areas, biodiversity loss, jobs and human population growth

2011-07-30T21:07:00.001+02:00

After convincingly arguing that current conservation efforts, including protected areas, cannot stop biodiversity losses, Camilo Mora and Peter F. Sale call for "stabilizing the size of the world’s human population" (Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas: a review of the technical and practical shortcomings of protected areas on land and sea, Marine Ecology Progress Series).

One could safely argue that biodiversity threats are ultimately determined by the size of the world’s human population and its consumption of natural resources. The explosive growth in the world’s human population in the last century has led to an increasing demand on the Earth’s ecological resources and a rapid decline in biodiversity.

They add that conserving biodiversity is not their only reason for "targeting human population growth directly."

[H]uman population growth may also lead to economic (e.g. high competition for and/or shortages of jobs; Becker et al. 1999) and societal (e.g. shortages of food and water, lack of universal primary education, increase in communicable disease, etc.; Campbell et al. 2007) problems [...]

I have checked the papers by Becker et al. and Campbell et al. In their op-ed, Campbell et al. 2007 do not relate the lack of universal primary education to population growth but to family size and do not relate communicable disease to population growth but mention that "preventing unintended pregnancies is the most cost-effective way of reducing mother-to-child transmission of AIDS." Campbell et al. do not mention water but do imply that hunger is related to population growth - ignoring the fact that hunger has been decreasing as population has increased.

Becker et al. 1999 do not mention job shortages or job competition. And, contrary to what Mora and Sale's citation implies, they are quite optimistic about productivity and human capital improvements in a growing population. This is Becker et al.'s conclusion:

Population may reduce productivity because of traditional diminishing returns from more intensive use of land and other natural resources. However, larger populations encourage greater specialization and increased investments in knowledge, mediated in part through bigger and more important cities. Therefore, the net relation between greater population and per capita incomes depends on whether the inducements to human capital and expansion of knowledge are stronger than diminishing returns to natural resources.

The potential importance of increasing returns to population in a world with rapidly growing population justifies a reconsideration of the relation between population and per capita incomes.

Fortunately, this is what we are witnessing - a growing human population that is getting more productive and wealthy.

People create biodiversity

2011-07-21T20:15:00.000+02:00

Here is an example:

[T]he Collaborative Cross, an ambitious project to create hundreds more mouse varieties representing a wider range of genetic diversity, is beginning to deliver its first animals. The new mouse strains have some very visible differences from one another — from variations in fur colour to tail length — and are already yielding clues to genes that help fend off fungal infection, which might not have been easily uncovered with standard lab strains.

Crowded Rwanda under siege?

2011-07-04T19:57:00.000+02:00

There are few places in the world where the full pressure of population growth is felt as strongly as in tiny, landlocked Rwanda.

Thus starts an article in Nature by Josh Ruxin and Antoinette Habinshuti (Crowd control in Rwanda). While Rwanda currently "boasts economic growth, security and rising prosperity," Ruxin and Habinshuti believe that more population growth will lead to resource depletion, declining tourism due to poaching and encroachment in Rwanda's only major national park, and chronic poverty and malnutrition.

The authors advocate controlling population growth by promoting economic growth and girl education and offering "free" (by which they actually mean "paid by taxes") "contraceptives in every health centre and through every community health worker."

Until wealthier nations and large donors step up to fund family planning, poor nations themselves will have to take the lead. For those that choose this path — as Rwanda is doing — the rewards will be healthier, wealthier and smaller populations.

I do not object to voluntary donations to fund family planning, although I would rather give people the cash and let them decide how to spend it. But I do object to a couple of serious omissions by Ruxin and Habinshuti. They do not mention that people born in Rwanda could manage to prosper without those apparently dwindling resources by trading or migrating, as those born in crowded, tiny and landlocked Beijing, Frankfurt or Atlanta do.

Who believes that we are bumping up against Nature's limits?

2011-06-25T23:09:00.000+02:00

I am one of those who believe that it is impossible to find a ten-euro bill on the floor, because someone would have already picked it up. I believe it is impossible even though I found one myself not long ago. Likewise, I believe that there is no opportunity for profit because someone would have already picked it up.

Actually, I do not believe exactly these things. But I do believe that lost bills and opportunities for profit do not lay around for long. There is always someone passing by close to them that picks them up. So, I don't let my skepticism stop me from bending down to grab a lost bill, but I think that there are better ways to spend my time than searching for lost bills and opportunities for profit in random places.

Reflecting on Malthus, human population growth and agricultural productivity, Jeremy Cherfas says that he believes that "we are bumping up against" Nature's limits. I believe that if we were bumping against Nature's limits there would be people picking the opportunity this brings to make a profit, and the steps taken by these people would result in higher long-term prices of land or fertilizers or whatever might limit agricultural productivity. And we are not seeing those increasing prices.

I believe there are better ways to spend my time than searching for future scarcities. And I would be worried about future scarcities of natural resources if I saw people betting real money on them - and I mean much more money than this.

Behavioral economics of economists

2011-05-21T18:22:00.001+02:00

Hundreds of studies document that under many circumstances people do not behave in a perfectly rational, self-interested way. These systematic deviations from the ideal Homo economicus are the subject matter of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics has implications for policy. Some economists argue that the pervasiveness and potential harmfulness of people's psychological biases and quirks justify government command of individual behavior, or at least some "nudging". But policy-makers, including voters, politicians, bureaucrats and scientific advisors, are people and thus have their own cognitive biases, including the bias blind spot, that result in commanding or nudging others in the wrong direction - not to mention that may seek their own good instead of that of society.

Elisabeth Gsottbauer and Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh review the behavioral economics literature and draw some implications for environmental policy in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics (Environmental policy theory given bounded rationality and other-regarding preferences). It is a very good review. And it may illustrate the paradox of irrational people guiding other irrational people. At some point they write:

Pichert and Katsikopoulos (2008) offer an experimental analysis of consumer decision-making relating to green electricity use. They examine peoples’ motivation for choosing green electricity in laboratory experiments and find that default options have a strong influence on consumer choice. A policy lesson drawn is that, in order to promote pro-environmental behavior, green electricity should be presented as the default option for consumers.

Gsottbauer and van den Bergh don't explain what they mean by "green electricity," so I went to the original Pichert and Katsikopoulos 2008's paper (Green defaults: Information presentation and pro-environmental behaviour, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology). For the purpose of their study, Pichert and Katsikopoulos classify "renewable energy sources such as water, wind, biomass, and the sun" as "green" and "environmentally friendly," and "electricity generated from detrimental or at least controversial energy sources such as coal or atomic power" as "grey."

I am aware that all this may be just an exercise in the study of how people make decisions, and that which kind of electricity is better for the environment - or, more precisely, has smaller environmental negative externalities - is a technical problem outside the scope of behavioral economics. Or maybe Gsottbauer and van den Bergh actually believe that water, wind, biomass, and solar power are environmentally better - have smaller environmental externalities - than coal and nuclear. They really do sound like wanting to nudge people into using what they call "green" electricity. And this is not an isolated instance in their article. They also seem to want to nudge people into sorting domestic waste to facilitate recycling. Does all this reveal their bounded rationality? Are they perhaps unconsciously engaging in wishful thinking, neglect of probability, anchoring, overconfidence, bandwagon effects, attentional bias or false consensus effects?

Unsustainability

2011-04-22T11:20:00.001+02:00

I made the Google Ngram Viewer count the relative frequency of the words revolutionary, socialist, ecological and sustainable in books published between 1945 and 2008 (the latest year available), and got the following graph.

The environmentalist's paradox and perpetual motion machines

2011-04-07T01:11:00.001+02:00

A while ago I commented on Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?, the article by Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne and others. The paradox is, how come is human well-being improving if "ecosystem services" are being "degraded?" And my answer was "because, to use the article's jargon, the Earth's capacity to provide services has increased." I quoted what Raudsepp-Hearne and coauthors wrote about increasing food production, clean water provision and disease regulation, and concluded:

In the end, if we keep applying the same reasoning to all the components of objectively measurable human well-being, the Raudsepp-Hearne's paradox vanishes. The HDI [Human Development Index] depends on "nature." The HDI has improved almost everywhere. Therefore, "nature" is providing us with evermore and ever better goods and services.

I also pointed out that humans and their actions are the key reason "nature" is providing us with evermore and ever better goods and services. And in a comment answering a question by a reader I used these words: "human well-being is increasing because human capital is increasing. (Human capital includes things like knowledge, individual skills and efficient institutions.)"

Now Megan Evans, writing in ConservationBytes, attributes to me much more than I said:

[T]here have also been some comments (here and here) directed from an alternative perspective – that humans simply don’t rely on natural resources to the extent that environmentalists purport, and the continued positive trend in HDI in the face of environmental degradation is confirmation of this assertion. The environmentalist’s paradox is not a paradox because global growth in human capital (such as knowledge and individual skills) is substituting for our reliance on natural capital – ultimately meaning that human well-being will continually improve without restriction.

Did I say that human capital (such as knowledge and individual skills) is substituting for our reliance on natural capital? No (although I did indeed say that knowledge and individual skills are human capital, word for word). Did I say that "humans simply don’t rely on natural resources to the extent that environmentalists purport"? No. This is what I wrote in my original post:

Actually all the things we enjoy in life ultimately depend on "nature," a rich "environment," or "the Earth’s capacity to provide services". Everything we enjoy depends on the physical, chemical and biological processes that define the natural world around us. We have good reasons to take care of "nature."

Did I say or do I think that human well-being will continually improve without restriction? No. Is the idea that human well-being will continually improve without restriction a natural conclusion of what I did say? No. "Human well-being is increasing because human capital is increasing" does not lead to "human well-being will continually improve without restriction." Furthermore, several months ago, shortly before my post on the environmentalist's paradox, I wrote in a comment in ConservationBytes that humans might "be unable to prevent the destruction of the earth by the sun, or the infinite contraction (or expansion) of the universe, any of which would effectively end economic growth." Curiously, there is a comment by Megan Evans herself almost right below mine.

After inventing my opinions Evans explains them in more detail to her readers. According to her, I believe in a naive circular flow model of the economy and I don't care about or don't understand the laws of thermodynamics, which leads me to believe in perpetual motion machines. She then puts forward some arguments for the idea that there are biophysical limits to economic growth and human well-being, and declares my views refuted. She also identifies my views with economists and her preferred views with ecologists - which further adds to the irony because I am an ecologist, not an economist - and asks for "much bigger and louder conversation between ecologists and economists," by which she probably means forcing the idea that we should be very worried about entropy down the throats of poor economists.

Evidence-based policy

2011-03-30T13:35:00.001+02:00

A recent Nature editorial (Over the limit: Evidence should be considered when setting policy, but not to the exclusion of other factors) argues against evidence-based policy:

The evidence is clear. Statistics from the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa all point in the same direction: male drivers are more likely to crash their cars than females. Aggressive behaviour, rule-breaking tendencies and a greater willingness to take risks are all thought to contribute. Taken together, male drivers are a riskier bet, and face higher premiums for car insurance as a result.

Last week, the Court of Justice of the European Communities took a wrecking ball to this seemingly evidence-based policy. From December next year, insurance companies will no longer be able to discriminate on the basis of sex: men should see their premiums fall and women will pay more. [...]

The court's decision affects more than car insurance — life assurance premiums paid by men could rise to match those paid by women, where previously they were discounted because men on average die earlier.

And Nature agrees with the court because Nature thinks that policy should not be based only on evidence but "must also take into account social, economic and political factors."

I disagree. We would be better-off if policy were based exclusively on evidence, including social, economic, political and ethical evidence. Evidence tells us that if we impose homogeneous insurance pricing then we will get less insurance and it will be more expensive, contrary to the wishes of potential insurance buyers and society as a whole. Some men may cheer at this particular ruling, but both men and women stand to lose in the long run as the same "anti-discriminatory" criterion "to ensure equality between men and women in access to and provision of goods and services" gets applied in instances other than car and life insurance. And this need not stop at insurance. If men and women are to pay the same prices for the clothes they wear, the books they read or the courses they attend, we will all end up paying higher prices for and getting fewer quantities of clothes, books and education.

I think that Nature's attitude towards "evidence" is due to its ideological stance against the science of economics. For Nature, statistical data on car accidents count as "evidence", while the vast amount of information on how people respond to prices does not.

A sensible approach to economic growth policy

2011-03-06T22:29:00.000+01:00

Collectivists are divided about economic growth. On one side, conventional socialists and conservatives believe that government should promote it. On the other, Ecological Economists and other greens want government to stop it. The idea that government can effectively facilitate economic growth applies mostly to fantasyland, while the opposite one of government hampering economic growth is put into practice everyday in every country with spectacular results.

Regarding the desirability or not of economic growth policies, an article in the latest issue of Ecological Economics (Environment versus growth — A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-growth”, by Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh) came as a pleasant surprise:

If one accepts that GDP (growth) is not a robust, reliable indicator of social welfare (progress) then the only solution is to ignore it and as a result be completely indifferent about GDP growth. GDP growth is good in some periods or for some countries, but unconditional growth is not a wise aim. GDP growth is not generally necessary or sufficient for progress. Neither is GDP degrowth necessary or sufficient for sustainability. Correlations between GDP and welfare or between GDP and environmental impact are not constant and fixed over time. One can therefore not exclude the possibility of “dirty GDP degrowth” or a degrowth which hardly reduces environmental impact.

Instead of a policy of shrinking the economy van der Bergh advocates changing the composition of production and consumption by taxing activities with negative environmental externalities. He also wants government to allow "a flexible labor market that allows for part-time work contracts", to limit advertising of luxury goods and to sponsor technological research. I doubt the usefulness of the latter two proposals, but overall van der Bergh's position is very sensible.

In defence of degrowth is Giorgos Kallis's response to van der Bergh. It hurts to read it.

The world vs. corporate profit

2011-03-04T22:10:00.000+01:00

Some people want to mine the Bismarck Sea's sediments for copper, zinc, gold and silver. In a letter to Nature, George M. Woodwell cautions that mining will both affect the interesting organisms inhabiting hydrothermal vents and release minerals that are toxic to other marine life.

By what right do we destroy [hydrothermal vents] for corporate profit? [...]

The world is too small for this further destructive intrusion — it should be stopped now before it becomes another corporate atrocity, too big and too valuable to stop.

First, if we suspect this "intrusion" is to become too valuable to stop then we should probably go ahead with it. Second, "we" do not mine for corporate profit. "We" do it for the copper, zinc, gold and silver.

A sustainable alternative to capitalism

2011-02-07T12:51:00.000+01:00

In Pursuing self-interest or self-actualization? From capitalism to a steady-state, wisdom economy , published in Ecological Economics, Niaz Murtaza makes the standard complaints about capitalism and proposes Sapienism as an alternative. Aware that "several alternatives to capitalism have emerged over time" and failed "by not basing their structures on the foundations of clear and appealing values" he proposes one based on "the highest reaches of human nature."

Self-actualization, in particular, results in peak experiences encompassing serenity, intense well-being, and an awareness of transcendental unity.

According to Murtaza, capitalism was designed by neo-classical economists, who "operated under assumptions such as markets with high resource-allocation efficiency, value-maximizing individuals, self-regulating invisible hand and perfect information and competition" and who decided that pursuing self-interest was the best way to organize society. People listened to "neo-classical economists" and diligently set to pursue their self-interest. Crime, environmental destruction, economic growth and instability, inequality, stress, obesity, drug-addiction, single-parenthood and information overload followed. To remedy these and other problems Murtaza wants people to listen to him and focus less on self-interest and more on self-actualization.

The pursuit of self-actualization leads to a steady-state economy, higher personal welfare and long-term sustainability.

Bioethics, Marxism and markets in kidneys

2010-12-22T20:15:00.000+01:00

I believe that bioethics is dominated by an intellectual marriage of Marxism and Christianism (see here, here and here). But now Bryan Caplan reveals the following surprising fact:

I've even talked to Marxist economists who favor a free market in human kidneys!

The true cost of saving polar bears

2010-12-21T09:40:00.001+01:00

In Nature Andrew E. Derocher comments on a paper by Amstrup et al. (also in Nature) that concludes that sufficient mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions would leave enough sea-ice habitat for polar bears. He writes:

This paper provides reason to hope that the previous predictions of declines in polar bear populations can be avoided if concerted efforts are made to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The threat posed by climate change to biological diversity has been clear for years, however, and calls for carbon sequestration and reduction of emissions to conserve species have largely gone unheeded.

There is cause for optimism, but that requires optimism about our ability to change.

Although Derocher does not mention that "carbon sequestration and reduction of emissions" could have some costs for people, he is clearly sympathetic to human suffering:

Amstrup et al. also note that the best possible outcomes for polar bears include controlling hunting and other factors in an effort to make populations with the expected lower numbers sustainable. But a ban on hunting would be a serious cultural loss for the Arctic's aboriginal people.

Economic growth and heresy

2010-12-20T12:40:00.000+01:00

Peter Victor writes in Nature (Questioning economic growth):

The idea that governments of developed countries should no longer pursue economic growth as a primary policy objective is widely regarded as heresy. Yet a growing number of scholars, policy-makers and citizens are coming round to the idea that the planet cannot sustain continued global economic growth.

But economic growth is not a primary policy objective of the governments of developed countries, this is not widely regarded as heresy, and the number of citizens who say that the environment should be given priority is not growing.

How to make people happy via Ecological Economics

2010-12-15T13:15:00.004+01:00

Monica Guillen-Royo arranged group discussions with a heterogeneous sample of people from a city in Spain and has just published a paper saying that these workshops illustrate how "a given society can unravel its own pathway towards sustainability and wellbeing" (Realising the ‘wellbeing dividend’: An exploratory study using the Human Scale Development approach, in the journal Ecological Economics).

[P]articipants felt they were ‘locked-in' to unsustainable consumption patterns and consumerism. As a 48 year-old retailer said:
Carme (48): We are in the consumer society and we have been told that spending is good and since it is good we have to spend. Many times you find yourself in the shop and you do not know why.
[...] The longing for simplicity and subsistence is reflected in the following conversation between young participants.
Laura (20): a subsistence society would allow us to understand better. Nowadays, many of the things we do are not related to subsistence, we do them because we go with the flow.

Marcel (22): In a subsistence society you kill the hen because you are hungry...

Laura (20): Exactly. It is for sure that people in the African tribes have fewer worries than us.
[...] The present study has revealed that through in-depth discussions about human need satisfiers, ordinary people associate wellbeing with simplicity and ecological balance. As participants in this exploratory work clearly remarked, lower consumption, non-materialist values and basic income schemes would constitute the core features of their desired society together with time sovereignty and relocalisation.

But, according to Guillen-Royo, people - and "particularly the rich" - instead choose complexity, ecological imbalance, high consumption, materialist values, extra income and globalization, apparently because they are told to do so. Guillen-Royo does not clearly identify who tells people - particularly the rich - how to behave, but she hints at employers, marketers, corporate and media decision-makers, and economic and political authorities.

So, according to Guillen-Royo, people think that a more modest lifestyle would improve their well-being, keep telling each other - particularly the rich - not to pursue such lifestyle, and keep doing what other people tell them to do instead of what they think they should do.

I have an alternative interpretation. Saying certain things is great and cheap entertainment - just another harmless act of consumption. Good places to engage in cheap talk are bars, religious gatherings and sustainability workshops.

What every conservation biologist should know about economic theory

2010-11-15T12:52:00.000+01:00

Conservation Biology publishes the following reflection on advertising by John Gowdy, Charles Hall, Kent Klitgaard and Lisi Krall (What every conservation biologist should know about economic theory):

The myth that consumers are sovereign in a market economy is promulgated despite the fact that consumer tastes are manipulated by advertising and individuals often have very little control over much of how they live their lives in the face of market forces.

As far as I know, advertising is driven by consumer tastes both on market goods and on advertising content. No matter whether they have "little" or great control over how they live their lives, individuals in a market economy act on their own preferences when they consume, and cater to the preferences of consumers when they produce.

Elsewhere in their essay Gowdy et al. contend that competitive markets will never work because people are altruistic and irrational, that biodiversity and natural ecosystems have infinite value and that discount rates should be zero. As good peak-oilers, they also share their opinion on future commodity supplies. If they are right there is much money to be made going long in commodities markets. However, they also caution that money will probably make you unhappy. On the other hand, your happiness should not matter. With no time discounting, only the happiness of future generations matters.

Biopiracy and the Convention on Biological Diversity

2010-11-05T12:08:00.001+01:00

Biopiracy was one of the main questions at the recent Nagoya meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Science reports:

Advocates say there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of biopiracy: drugs, dietary supplements, and cosmetics based on traditional knowledge of the medicinal properties of plant and animal products that have been commercialized without authorization or any benefits being returned to local communities.

The Convention has now decided that "those seeking to use genetic resources or traditional knowledge for research or commercialization must obtain prior informed consent from both the country and indigenous communities involved and to agree on terms to share monetary and nonmonetary benefits, including intellectual property rights."

The same logic might apply to all knowledge and resources. Should Korean electronic businesses ask for consent from and "return" benefits to the peoples of Edinburgh, Cambridge, London and Great Britain for using knowledge produced by James Clerk Maxwell and others there? Should pharmaceutical companies selling penicillin "return" benefits to the dwellers of Paddington or London because its properties were discovered thanks to the Penicillium populations growing there?

I am very skeptical of the usefulness and morality of protecting intellectual property, although I admit that it may reward effort and risk-taking that are individually costly but socially desirable. I am even more skeptical of collective intellectual property rights because they will probably reward undeserving individuals at the expense of others and may encourage racism and other conflicts related to group membership. But, in any case, whether collective intellectual property rights are fair and welfare-enhancing is an empirical question. So, do current Londoners deserve a share of the benefits of Samsung and Shijiazhuang Shengqi Chemical Co? Would requiring consent from the London city council or the UK government to use knowledge of electromagnetics or byproducts of mould fungi benefit humanity?

Sharing benefits with local communities and national governments by law could perhaps encourage them to do more to preserve potentially useful traditional knowledge and biological resources. Perhaps the city of London would leave more food rotting on the streets to enhance potentially useful fungus biodiversity. On the other hand, by decreasing the returns to entrepreneurship, biostinginess laws would discourage people from developing useful products from traditional knowledge and biological resources, thus rendering them less valuable. It seems to me that this second effect is larger than the first because entrepreneurship is likely a more limiting factor in the development of new products than the availability of untapped traditional knowledge and biological resources, which is still huge. But I would like to know what actual quantitative estimates of these and other effects the Convention on Biological Diversity used to make its decisions.

Science scorned - in Nature magazine

2010-10-16T12:08:00.001+02:00

In its editorial Science scorned, Nature magazine accuses the political right wing in the United States of being anti-science - against evolution, climate change, and fruit-fly, stem-cell and embryo research - and anti-"science-based" government regulation. I agree that the US political right is anti-scientific. But Nature's stance is just political posturing.

Nature criticizes certain kinds of anti-science streaks, but it happily indulges in others. Economics is a science. There exists a mainstream body of knowledge about human collective behavior. And there exists a populist anti-science streak that holds that economists should have anticipated and averted the current financial crisis, that jobs are benefits and not costs and that governments can create millions of them with tax money, that government regulators are at a higher level of insight and altruism than us mere mortals, or that the US is involved in, and must win at all costs, some kind of economic competition with China. And there stands Nature, proudly defying economic science in countless editorials, news items and invited articles, and telling and retelling the old fairy tale of the good guys (the Democratic Party, government regulators, bioethicists) fighting the bad guys (the Republican Party, businessmen, Wall Street, China) to help the hapless, if not outright retarded, victims (consumers, patients, women, "indigenous peoples"). It is anti-scientific, but it helps to sell "science" magazines.

Conservation - science, politics and frustration

2010-09-12T13:42:00.000+02:00

Guillaume Chapron and colleagues complain that scientific results on "ecosystem degradation" and species extinction have little impact on political action.

If an endangered plant or animal population has become extremely small in size, then individuals should be reintroduced to achieve minimum viable population size. If a chemical threatens a species, then this chemical should be banned.

They "observe that political, social and above all, economic considerations prevail instead." They also suggest that politicians like to talk about being committed to saving biodiversity, but are not willing to act decisively.

But Chapron and coauthors don't give up. They intend to keep proposing specific actions for politicians to implement and "expect a clear signal from politicians that they are committed to resolving biodiversity issues and do something concrete to counter the problem." Instead I expect more frustration for Chapron and company.

Their attitude towards political action is misguided on two counts. First, economic considerations must prevail if we want socially optimal policies. Every decision has moral consequences and economics tries to make those consequences explicit in advance. Banning a chemical has other consequences besides helping a species. We should consider those other consequences. Economics helps us identify and weigh them.

Second, political systems do not choose socially optimal policies. Understanding why they don't do so is a scientific challenge. Scientists don't get frustrated by the fact that objects often fall to the ground. Scientists try hard to understand gravity.

The environmentalist's paradox

2010-09-09T14:28:00.000+02:00

Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne and others write in their article Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?, published in Bioscience:

Although many people expect ecosystem degradation to have a negative impact on human well-being, this measure appears to be increasing even as provision of ecosystem services declines. From George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature in 1864 to today (Daily 1997), scientists have described how the deterioration of the many services provided by nature, such as food, climate regulation, and recreational areas, is endangering human well-being. However, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a comprehensive study of the world’s resources, found that declines in the majority of ecosystem services assessed have been accompanied by steady gains in human well-being at the global scale (MA 2005).

They say that the "Earth’s capacity to provide these services is decreasing." Actually all the things we enjoy in life ultimately depend on "nature," a rich "environment," or "the Earth’s capacity to provide services". Everything we enjoy depends on the physical, chemical and biological processes that define the natural world around us. We have good reasons to take care of "nature."

How much do we get from "nature?" Raudsepp-Hearne and coauthors rightly use gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a measure of material human well-being. They are right not because GDP is a perfect measure, but because it is the best we have. Actually, they use a slightly modified metric of GDP, the Human Development Index (HDI), which aggregates information on GDP, life expectancy, literacy and schooling. With food, health and education being almost universally demanded by humans and together accounting for more than 30% of GDP, it is not surprising that the four components of the HDI are strongly correlated.

Raudsepp-Hearne and coauthors restate the well-known fact that these and other objective measures of human well-being are improving all over the world. And then comes the paradox. How come is human well-being improving if "ecosystem services" are being "degraded?" What is going on?

My answer is that HDI has increased because, to use the article's jargon, the Earth's capacity to provide services has increased. Raudsepp-Hearne and coauthors explicitly admit this for the case of food, which is one of the "ecosystem services" they discuss.

In conclusion, available evidence suggests that the benefits of food production currently outweigh the costs of declines in other ecosystem services at the global scale, and that this is a strong contributing factor to the environmentalist’s paradox.

They also hint at the positive impacts of improved clean water provision and disease regulation, also counted as "ecosystem services," on people's health.

Global epidemiological studies have argued that a significant portion of the global burden of ill health is attributable to degraded land, water, and air; for example, 8% to 10% of malnutrition cases may be attributable to land degradation (Smith et al. 1999). Other studies state that as much as 40% of world deaths are due to environmental degradation, although the term “environmental” is used in the broadest sense to include all forms of pollution and some lifestyle choices (Pimentel et al. 2007).

My conclusion is, to paraphrase Raudsepp-Hearne and coauthors, that available evidence suggests that the benefits of clean water provision and disease regulation outweigh the costs of declines in other ecosystem services, and that this is another strong contributing factor to the environmentalist’s paradox.

In the end, if we keep applying the same reasoning to all the components of objectively measurable human well-being, the Raudsepp-Hearne's paradox vanishes. The HDI depends on "nature." The HDI has improved almost everywhere. Therefore, "nature" is providing us with evermore and ever better goods and services.

Raudsepp-Hearn and coauthors don't think this is the whole solution to the paradox and they go on to discuss the possible role of technology in explaining it. They examine the hypothesis that "technology and social innovation have decoupled human well-being from ecosystem degradation."

We examine evidence that greater efficiency of use and substitution of ecosystem services has significantly lowered human reliance on their provisions.

Does this mean that technology has made us less reliant on, say, food? This doesn't make sense and, not surprisingly, trying to find whether technology has freed us from "nature" and "degradation" turns out to be fruitless. The authors don't reach any clear conclusion. It could not be otherwise.

Raudsepp-Hearn and coauthors also examine the possibility that well-being at any time is the result of past, not current, performance. If so, our current well-being would depend on what "the Earth's capacity to provide services" was at some point in the past. And it is possible that we are currently undermining this capacity and compromising our future well-being. If this is true, the paradox becomes irrelevant and standard environmentalists may be right in their denunciation of "ecosystem degradation." Raudsepp-Hearn and coauthors agree with them and list their worries about the future consequences of climate change, pollution, depletion of oil, fertile soil and wild fish, and other problems.

Their list contains a couple of errors. They say that "estimates of human appropriation of net primary productivity (NPP) suggest that it cannot expand much more, as humans already consume a large proportion of Earth’s NPP." But "the Earth's" NPP is not fixed. It can grow and so the fact that we "consume a large proportion" of it is irrelevant. They say that global trade decreases human well-being by making "people more susceptible to rises in global food prices." The opposite is true. Global trade makes people better off by increasing food availability and thus decreasing food prices. It also makes food availability and prices less volatile by spreading risk.

Buried near the end of the article there is a little jewel of wisdom - the key to unravel all the paradoxes and confusion about "ecosystem services." Raudsepp-Hearn and coauthors want to "improve human capacity to produce ecosystem services that enhance human well-being." That's right. Once we understand that what we are really talking about is services produced by humans, everything - GDP, HDI, the "Earth's capacity to provide services", "the world's resources", "ecosystem degradation", the role of technology - falls gracefully into place.

A sensible attitude towards language extinction

2010-09-06T11:56:00.001+02:00

Kurt F. J. Heinrich writes in a letter to Science about the extinction of languages:

We may, as outsiders, deplore such an evolution, but language is a practical tool. We do not advocate returning to the steam engine, the slide rule, or the logarithmic table. The drastic reduction of the number of languages is natural, unavoidable, and—from the viewpoint of communication and integration into a world community—desirable.

Jeffrey Sachs, happy governance and dressing codes

2010-09-05T09:55:00.002+02:00

According to Jeffrey D. Sachs, all the world's economies should embark on a serious journey of inner reflection, a national deliberation, an enduring quest for social well-being, cultural robustness and resiliency, psychological well-being, stability and resiliency, environmental sustainability, and sustainable happiness. As finite and fragile physical beings, we must reject American-style hyper-consumerism, which can destabilize social relations and lead to aggressiveness, loneliness, greed, and over-work to the point of exhaustion. We must resist the onslaught of global communication, advertising and public relations. All of us should enjoy the benefits of economic growth regardless of our income level. We should strive to fill the government coffers and listen to inspiring speeches given by prime ministers.

I congratulate the members of the Bhutanese government for this piece of global advertising and public relations. May I also ask them to stop telling their people how to dress?

Georgescu-Roegen and open borders

2010-09-02T13:32:00.000+02:00

Practical proposals by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen mainly consisted of making the current generation worse off in order to leave more "natural resources" to future generations. A rare exception is to be found in a footnote in his classic Energy and economic myths. The footnote addressed how to allow the people from "underdeveloped nations [...] to arrive as quickly as possible at a good (not luxurious) life,"

At the Dai Dong Conference (Stockholm, 1972), I suggested the adoption of a measure which seems to me to be applicable with much less difficulty than dealing with installations of all sorts. My suggestion, instead, was to allow people to move freely from any country to any other country whatsoever. Its reception was less than lukewarm.

This reasonable idea is still widely rejected even among Georgescu-Roegen's philosophical descendants - ecological economists (with at least one notable exception ).

Georgescu-Roegen and ecological economics

2010-08-31T18:25:00.000+02:00

Clément Levallois writes in Can de-growth be considered a policy option? A historical note on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Club of Rome, published in Ecological Economics by:

If [according to Georgescu-Roegen] the economic process is an entropic one, economic growth should be curbed or even reversed, in order to stop the "waste" of energy in "non-necessary" uses, so as to preserve it for the sake of future generations.

This conclusion raises at least two questions, to which Georgescu-Roegen provided answers which many found unconvincing. What is the rate of this entropic decay? And if we accept that it is necessary to economize on natural resources, to which level of economic activity should we be ready to scale down our current societies? The answer to the first question is unknowable, since the non-mechanical character of entropy makes an "entropymeter" inconceivable. This implies that it is impossible to predict whether it is our current generation or generations in the distant future who will be confronted with the direst consequences of the exhaustion of natural resources.

To the second question, Georgescu-Roegen provided a logical answer: "… not only growth, but also a zero-growth state, nay, even a declining state which does not converge toward annihilation, cannot exist forever in a finite environment." [Energy and economic myths, Southern Economic Journal 41 (3) (1975), pp. 347–381]

I am unconvinced by Georgescu-Roegen assumptions but he looks more coherent than the ecological economists and their followers who believe that a sustainable, as well as equitable and happy, future is possible.

When costs are good and benefits don't matter: science projects and government stimulus

2010-08-12T10:22:00.000+02:00

An editorial in Nature says that "critics of US President Barack Obama have delighted in picking out projects funded by last year's $787-billion economic-stimulus package that they believe are examples of waste."

Yet the science projects, at least, have survived peer review, which tends to be a far more sceptical and rigorous vetting process than anything McCain and Coburn [apparently two such critics of Obama] are likely to provide.

However, the editorial does not provide the slightest clue that such projects are cost-effective. In fact, the editorialist seems completely unconcerned about costs. I thought this was bad enough, but then I read the following comment to the editorial:

I was myself awarded a research grant funded by the stimulus and administered through the NIH. The grant award allowed me to create 3.5 full-time research jobs and has to date resulted in the spending of nearly $100,000 US on equipment and consumable reagents. [...] I did not apply for the grant for the purpose of stimulating the economy, but the grant award both created immediate new staff jobs and resulted quickly in money being spent, and those were certainly the legislative intention of the stimulus.

From that perspective, it actually doesn't matter what science I was doing.

Brian Lazzaro
Associate Professor, Cornell University

Lazzaro, like many US politicians and voters, actually thinks that costs are good in and by themselves - although probably only as long as they are paid by taxpayers. I doubt he applies the same philosophy at home.

Twins versus biodiversity

2010-07-08T11:37:00.000+02:00

By being genetically identical or almost so, twins contribute less to biodiversity than regular siblings do. The European Parliament may find this a good reason to ban them.

Elephant conservation and ivory markets

2010-06-25T12:36:00.000+02:00

In order to protect elephant populations, CITES forbids ivory trade. However, several African governments are unable to enforce the ban and poachers are decimating some local populations. CITES is now considering whether to allow legal, controlled trade, so that ivory supply comes from certain targeted populations, and the reduced demand for illegal ivory leads to less poaching of more vulnerable ones. Wasser and coathors argued against this possibility in Science and, in a rejoinder to Walker and Stiles, they write:

Walker and Stiles next argue that legal trade does not increase illegal trade, and CITES should focus on enforcement instead of targeting legal trade. We disagree. The appeal of the market mechanism for managing wildlife stocks presumes well-functioning institutions with unambiguous ownership of the stocks.

They go on to provide evidence that the countries involved lack well-functioning institutions, but do not further consider the question of ownership. Perhaps we should aim at making ownership of elephant populations less ambiguous.

Up to 90% of all species may go extinct in the next thirty years

2010-06-02T10:50:00.000+02:00

The statement in the title is not true. Actually, more than 90% of all species may go extinct in the next thirty years. In fact, any fraction of all species may go extinct at any time.

Any fraction of all species may go extinct at any time.

That would be a true statement. Up to 100% of all species will go extinct in the next thirty years (or in the next five minutes, for that matter) is also a true statement. However, the false statement Up to 90% of all species may go extinct in the next thirty years conveys a more "effective" message. Whoever makes this sort of nonsensical statement is more interested in being "effective" than in being truthful.

Global biodiversity: (biased) indicators of recent declines

2010-05-31T10:46:00.000+02:00

Stuart H. M. Butchart and coauthors write in Science (Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines):

Only three indicators address trends in the benefits humans derive from biodiversity (Fig. 1 and Table 1): (i) population trends of utilized vertebrates have declined by 15% since 1970, and aggregate species’ extinction risk has increased at an accelerating rate (as shown by the Red List Index) for (ii) mammals, birds, and amphibian species used for food and medicine (with 23 to 36% of such species threatened with extinction) and (iii) birds that are internationally traded (principally for the pet trade; 8% threatened). Trends are not yet available for plants and other important utilized animal groups. Three other indicators, which lack trend data, show (iv) 21% of domesticated animal breeds are at risk of extinction (and 9% are already extinct); (v) languages spoken by fewer than 1000 people (22% of the current 6900 languages) have lost speakers over the past 40 years and are in danger of disappearing within this century (loss of linguistic diversity being a proxy for loss of indigenous biodiversity knowledge); and (vi) more than 100 million poor people [suffering from undernourishment] live in remote areas within threatened ecoregions and are therefore likely to be particularly dependent upon biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides.

This is all they have to say about indicators of the benefits humans derive from biodiversity, and it is biased. They do not mention that we now have the highest ever (iv) rate of production of new animal breeds, (v) rate of production of biodiversity knowledge, as measured, for example, by the number of scientific publications, and (vi) number of people (more than 6.5 billion) who are "not particularly dependent upon biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides." They also fail to mention that food supply per capita and the number and proportion of well-nourished people have steadily increased since 1970.

Government subsidies that harm the environment

2010-05-22T10:11:00.000+02:00

From here: $300bn for agriculture and fishing, $500bn for energy, $238-$306bn for transport and $67bn for water supply. These are worldwide annual figures. For comparison, the same article mentions that increasing nature protection on strategically selected locations from the current 12.5%-14% to 15% of all land and from 1% to 30% of the seas would cost $45bn a year.

Private, voluntary, peaceful nature protection

2010-05-20T11:06:00.000+02:00

Canadian logging companies will set aside 300,000 square kilometers for boreal forest protection on land for which they hold leases. In exchange, Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy and other environmental groups will "suspend do-not-buy campaigns against the loggers' products and actively endorse them." There is more on Nature. This is unreservedly good news. I would only suggest converting those land leases into permanent private property.

Why libertarianism doesn't work

2010-05-16T12:18:00.000+02:00

I agree with Paul Krugman that the free-market ideas advocated by Milton Friedman are not put into practice because people prefer the collectivist ideas advocated by Krugman and vote accordingly.

Happiness, prosperity and government policies

2010-05-12T13:34:00.001+02:00

Does money bring happiness?

It has long been assumed that economic prosperity brings happiness. However, the evidence is to the contrary. Economic growth in developed countries has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in mental and behavioural disorders, family breakdown, social exclusion and diminished social trust. In China, for example, a 2009 study by German sociologists showed that the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the 1990s has been accompanied by an alarming decrease in life satisfaction at every level of income, in both rural and urban areas.

[I]t is time to rethink the goal of politics: to promote well-being rather than wealth.

In her Nature review of The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, by Derek Bok, Felicia Huppert argues that "most people are unaware of and need education about what will give them lasting satisfaction." If people only knew about the "increasingly solid body of evidence about the causes of happiness" they would vote for policies that would "promote well-being rather than wealth." I think that people actually vote for policies that hamper wealth. I am also skeptical that prosperity makes people unhappy. But let me examine Huppert's arguments under her own assumptions.

Huppert says that giving money to someone else makes people happy. No wonder, given that she thinks that having money makes people unhappy. The problem of her argument is that the happiness of giving money comes at the cost of bringing unhappiness to those receiving it.

[Bok] proposes the provision of universal health insurance and measures to strengthen marriages, such as premarital education and incentives to persuade low-income couples to marry.

I know of no "solid body of evidence" that universal health insurance makes people happier. Huppert's own evidence that poor people, who tend to lack health insurance, are happier than rich people, who tend to have insurance, suggests the opposite. I wonder what kind of incentives would be useful to persuade low-income couples to marry. You should not give them money because it makes them unhappy.

Huppert ends with more bad news for her own argument:

[H]appiness and social well-being are likely to bring economic prosperity.

Given that she thinks that prosperity brings unhappiness, what are we to do?

Goldman Sachs and the public opinion

2010-05-02T13:43:00.000+02:00

Goldman Sachs offered two or three allegedly unsuspecting investors who should have known better the opportunity to bet on a risky financial product partly designed by the other side of the bet. Those investors lost $1 billion, which were later paid by British and German taxpayers, and three years later much of the public opinion portrays Goldman Sachs as the personification of evil.

Now governments around the world are about to force taxpayers to buy Greek government bonds for up to $160 billion. A third of this money will come through the International Monetary Fund.

At the same time the World Bank has committed $200 million to provide people in sub Saharan Africa with bed nets.

Thus, worldwide governments backed by the public opinion allocate $160 billion to protect the wages and pensions of 11 million Europeans and $0.2 billion to protect 25 million Africans from deadly malaria.

The public opinion does more evil than Goldman Sachs.

Health care: lessons from Cuba

2010-04-30T12:27:00.000+02:00

Life expectancy and other measures of good health in Cuba are only slightly worse than those in the U.S. and Europe, despite the fact that Cubans spend much less money in health care and medical education. In an article in Science Paul K. Drain and Michele Barry suggest that this is because cheap preventive care as practiced in Cuba is more cost-effective than the expensive, high-tech cures typical of rich countries.

How can we move towards a Cuban-like, cost-effective care? By removing government regulations that limit the number and variety and inflate the fees of health care workers and hospitals, that limit the availability of medicines, and that generally ban cheap but effective care. You don't need Harvard-educated doctors, five-star hospitals and million-dollar machines to take your blood pressure.

Although it has nothing to do with the topic of their article, Drain and Barry call for lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. So do I. And I also call for lifting the trade embargoes, tariffs and regulations the European Union has erected against Cuba and all other countries.

Market-phobia and China-phobia to feed the world?

2010-04-27T11:07:00.000+02:00

Nature recently published an interview (What it will take to feed the world) with Marion Guillou, the chief executive of France's National Institute for Agricultural Research, "Europe's largest agricultural-research agency." She says:

One really big research area is studying the volatility of prices. It is the main problem. Remember the food riots in several countries in 2008? We are still trying to understand what happened, but much of it was because of financial speculation. We already have enough food to feed everyone on the planet at 3,000 kilocalories per day, but it is a question of price. We need research to find out which economic tools are available to stabilize prices at the international level, and to ensure, for example, adequate available reserves of cereal. We need to propose economic solutions, and regulation of markets of agricultural foodstuffs to avoid the yo-yo whereby prices can go so high that people do not have access to food. We also have to guarantee minimum prices if farming is to remain viable.

A free market would guarantee that farming is viable and people have access to food. The main problem is not the "volatility" of prices. The problem is that important people believe that financial speculation causes price volatility, when it actually has the opposite effect, and that prices must be set by centralized research and regulation and not by supply and demand.

Market-phobics typically hate China. Guillou is no exception:

China is heavily involved in training and technology transfer to Africa, and in Europe we should be trying to offer Africans an alternative; we have the scientific capacity. It would be a pity if we were to leave all collaborations in the hands of the Chinese.

Increased funding to preserve linguistic diversity

2010-04-22T15:59:00.000+02:00

In a letter to Nature Yoshina Gautam and Aashish Jha ask for "increased funding [...] to preserve language diversity, particularly in developing countries." They don't say why but refer to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. According to the UNPFII the protection of indigenous languages is important because

As a result of linguistic erosion, much of the encyclopedia of traditional indigenous knowledge that is usually passed down orally from generation to generation is in danger of being lost forever. This loss is irreplaceable and irreparable.

Customary laws of indigenous communities are often set out in their languages, and if the language is lost the community may not fully understand its laws and system of governance that foster its future survival.

The loss of indigenous languages signifies not only the loss of traditional knowledge but also the loss of cultural diversity, undermining the identity and spirituality of the community and the individual.

Biological, linguistic and cultural diversity are inseparable and mutually reinforcing, so when an indigenous language is lost, so too is traditional knowledge on how to maintain the world’s biological diversity and address climate change and other environmental challenges.

We stop to speak a language when we die or when we switch to another language. In the latter case we can still pass down our knowledge and laws by translating them or by importing some words to our new language. (Curiously, the UNPFII does not advocate this but the opposite - "translating laws and key political texts into indigenous languages so that indigenous peoples may better participate in the political and legal fields.")

But let's say that in some cases it is linguistically impossible to translate something or import the relevant keywords. I trust that most people who voluntarily stop speaking a language do so for their own good and the good of their children, so any possible losses of traditional "indigenous" knowledge, laws, identity, spirituality, biodiversity and solutions to climate change must be relatively unimportant to them. The same goes for people who decide not to learn an "indigenous" language - the advantages of doing so are probably not worth the effort for them.

But it is possible that speaking a certain language is not worthy for an individual but good for the rest of society. For example, if speaking a given language is a key to alleviating the problem of climate change much of the benefit may go to society as a whole and not to the speakers. In this case, it makes sense to pay some people to speak that language.

The UNPFII agrees and advocates "allocating the funding and resources needed to preserve and develop indigenous languages, and particularly for education [in the mother-tongue of indigenous children]." If we subsidize education in one language but not in other, then more people will get educated in the former, the risk of losing the language is smaller, and we are more likely to keep the key to the problem of climate change.

How much must we spend in those subsidies? If other things are equal and the administrative costs are small, the subsidies should be about as large as the benefits we all derive from climatic and environmental improvements brought about by knowledge that can't be translated. I don't know if that is a dollar or a billion dollars. Yoshina Gautam, Aashish Jha and the UNPFII don't say either.

Neoliberal food policies in Africa

2010-04-16T19:57:00.000+02:00

In the PNAS article Neoliberal policy, rural livelihoods, and urban food security in West Africa: A comparative study of The Gambia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali William Moseley, Judith Carney and Laurence Becker (whom I will collectively call MCB) tell the story of what they call "neoliberal" policy reform of the food industry in those three countries. Their narrative is very interesting and, despite their politically correct language, very enjoyable. I summarize it below but I recommend reading the original. Then in the article's conclusions MCB advocate some neocommunist policies.

Between 1966 and 1984 the Gambian government, with the help of foreign governments and aid agencies, planned and financed rice production. As is typical of government-run enterprises, "projects often ran aground" by "ignoring sociocultural norms" and by insufficient attention to detail.

Then, starting in 1986, the government removed subsidies, price controls and import tariffs, and dismantled the state bureaucracy that run the rice trade. This left rice consumers "dependent" on imported rice. What MCB mean by "dependency" is that the removal of import tariffs and the other reforms suddenly made imported rice cheaper and more attractive than locally produced rice. Nobody forbade consumers to keep buying local rice, but they have since preferred the imported one. MCB tell a similar story about the Ivory Coast:

Gone was the state agency with a monopoly on importing rice, control of rice supplies, and the responsibility for regulating the national rice price. Privatization meant that the state’s monopoly on imports shifted to a small group of private importers close to the president. With regulation gone, imports rose, because consumers preferred the less expensive and lower quality (yet better milled) imported broken rice.

In 2006 rice in the international market was cheaper than in 1980 but then in 2007 and 2008 it got very expensive. MCB explain that Malians suffered less from this price hike than Gambians and Ivorians because "Mali’s landlocked status made imported rice relatively more expensive, a factor that favors domestic rice producers," because Malians find local rice more tasteful and because Mali's government banned rice exports to neighboring countries. I can understand why distance to ports makes imported stuff more expensive, but I can't figure out why landlockedness may have a similar effect. Anyway, MCB are effectively arguing that there was less of a price hike in Mali because rice was already expensive there and because the government decided to depress local prices at the expense of local farmers and consumers from neighboring countries (those bloody Ivorians be damned).

In their conclusions, and out of the blue, MCB advocate reestablishing tariff barriers and subsidies to local rice production. Tariffs would make rice more expensive to consumers. Subsidies would make farmers happier but taxpayers more "vulnerable" (I love to use MCB's terminology). MCB also advocate that new seed technologies "should be designed with the needs of the poorest farmers in mind, including women," which reveals that MCB think that food production is a goal in itself and not a means to feed people. Finally, they say that consumers are "unidimensionally obsessed with rice" and that governments should make sure that they eat more of other foods that, as MCB also note, are less affordable and less convenient to cook.

Just as the "neoliberal" policies criticized by MCB are small steps towards a liberal society, the neocommunist policies they advocate would be steps towards a society where consumption is a means to production and, as a result, rice is scarce and expensive, especially for those taxpayers who would pay for it without actually eating any.

Increasing equitability by culling the poor

2010-04-09T12:09:00.000+02:00

I quote in full a letter to Science by Arthur H. Westing:

The special section on Food Security (12 February, p. 797) presents various technological fixes to address the problem of sustainably and equitably feeding the 9 billion humans now projected for 2050. However, population controls are not mentioned as a possible strategy. Suggestions for reducing demand are essentially limited to eating less meat and more insects, as well as establishing good governance and eliminating pervasive worldwide corruption. Why not make reduced world population a central part of the proposed mix of solutions for the future?

In the long term there can be as many humans as the food industry can support, and no more. Natural fecundity and mortality ensure this is the case in the absence of any "solutions." But the key to Westing's idea is to eat "equitably." So he is in fact arguing: "if you will not be able to eat as well as I do you do not deserve to live."

Athletic, educational, scientific and technological races

2010-03-29T12:00:00.001+02:00

There are two paths to success in this world. One is to create things of value. The other is to take things of value away from other people. There is more honor in the former.

This is Steve Landsburg in one of two blog posts devoted to explaining the problem of racing.

Take the school-test-scoring race. William K. Lim complains in Science that too much effort goes into test training in some Asian countries. For example, last year in South Korea parents spent $16 billion, and kids spent much of their time, inside and outside school, in test training.

Lim is worried that struggling to "memorize facts for regurgitation" detracts from "nurturing the creativity and thinking skills required in successful scientists." As a result, "Asian science will continue lagging behind the West." "A radical transformation of the educational culture must happen before homegrown Asian science can challenge Western technological dominance."

Notice the irony. Lim rejects the test-scoring racing culture but embraces the scientific/technological racing culture. But both cultures are silly and they are silly for the same reason. Landsburg explains it:

When your kid is an Olympic gold medalist, mustn’t you feel a little sheepish about all the superhuman effort that went into nothing more than taking a gold medal away from someone else?

Rare earths and a shortage of (bad) news

2010-03-26T13:01:00.000+01:00

A news article in Science by Robert F. Service is titled "Nations Move to Head Off Shortages of Rare Earths" and subtitled "Looming scarcities of a handful of essential elements could shake the electronics industry, unless manufacturers and mining companies develop more sources soon."

Service actually reports that rare earths are so abundant and cheap that mining companies do not bother to exploit most ores and some refining businesses have even closed in recent years for lack of demand. So better headings for the article would be:

Rare earths not so rare

Manufacturers and mining companies keep finding new sources of essential elements for the electronics industry

But, alas, such information does not deserve the name of news. Or even worse, it may look like good news.

Adults should be allowed to take risks

2010-03-25T16:27:00.000+01:00

The title of this post comes from a Nature editorial from 2007. A Nature editorial this week ends with this words:

'Let the buyer beware' may be a commercial maxim, but science can certainly reduce the risks.

However, the editorial is more about politics than science. Nature asks for government regulation of dietary supplements.

In the absence of adequate regulation, false claims by supplement makers abound. At best, these claims can cheat consumers of their money. At worst, as in the case of ephedra, widely touted for weight-loss, they could cost users their lives.

I would let the buyer beware and the seller build his reputation and pay for his mistakes. Both should be allowed to take risks.

And speaking of false claims - at best, false claims by governments cheat consumers and tax-payers of their money; at worst, as in countless cases, they cost lives. A difference between politicians (including voters) and sellers is that politicians usually pay much smaller prices for their mistakes than sellers do.

Ecosystem stewardship: a new lexicon for bureaucrats

2010-03-23T16:14:00.000+01:00

The article Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet by F. Stuart Chapin III and coauthors proposes a new lexicon for writers of bureaucratic literature. For example, in old parlance a resource manager is a "decision-maker who sets course for sustainable management" while in the new ecosystem-stewardship parlance it is a "facilitator who engages stakeholder groups to respond to, and shape, social–ecological change and nurture resilience."

The new lexicon will appeal to bureaucrats of all stripes, from Bhutanese officials fostering Gross National Happiness to British Conservatives overhauling energy policy.

The article is in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, which purports to publish "polished, concise and readable reviews in all areas of ecology and evolutionary science".

Resilience, xenophobia, and the transition to misery

2010-03-18T14:52:00.000+01:00

The Resilience Science blog quotes with not the slightest hint of disapproval The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience, by Rob Hopkins:

In the Transition approach, we see cutting carbon as one of many ‘Resilience Indicators’ that are able to show the increasing degree of resilience in the settlement in question. Others might include:

- the percentage of local trade carried out in local currency

- percentage of food consumed locally that was produced within a given radius

- ratio of car parking space to productive land use

- degree of engagement in practical Transition work by local community

- amount of traffic on local roads

- number of business owned by local people

- proportion of the community employed locally

- percentage of essential goods manufactured within a given radius

- percentage of local building materials used in new housing developments

- percentage of energy consumed in the town that has been generated by local ESCO

- amount of 16 year olds able to grow 10 different varieties of vegetable to a given degree of basic competency

- percentage of medicines prescribed locally that have been produced within a given radius

Gross National Happiness (Not)

2010-03-09T19:19:00.000+01:00

A few students in the capital, who lived within walking distance from school, but would rather have their parents chauffeur them to school in a car, have now begun walking.

Some have started picking up rubbish they find along the way and throwing them in a bin and stopped carrying plastic bags to schools.

Many others are insisting their friends and family members join them in a daily five-minute meditation and mindfulness session every morning and evening.

These were some of the initiatives, 16 class 12 students from various schools in Thimphu informed the prime minister about when they were asked what they understood and observed from the GNH (Gross National Happiness) workshops and the initiatives they took in their respective schools.

Doing things one would rather not do and spending five minutes twice a day in "mindfulness" sessions? If happiness is properly measured, Bhutan may well be in recession.

Does resilience thinking have any impact at all on the ground?

2010-03-07T11:52:00.000+01:00

Victor Galaz asks this question in Resilience Science and attempts to answer it with "two very interesting examples." Resilience thinking inspired "a climate vulnerability and resilience assessment" of an area in Colombia, and "a reframing* of Colombian biodiversity policy" that is "now being used for systematic country-side consultations."

So the answer is yes. Resilience thinking is having an impact on the rhetoric used "on the ground." Mission accomplished.

---

* "Results of the suggested modification include, amongst other things: i) a new conceptual framework for biodiversity management, based upon the resilience thinking paradigm applied to socio-ecological systems; ii) a model that accounts for the various stability domains in which natural and social systems appear in the territory; and iii) a revision of the state – pressure – response model, in order to include new drivers of change and to devise a hierarchical cross scale interactions affecting biodiversity." (Sic)

A sane criticism of GDP abuse

2010-03-06T21:51:00.000+01:00

Here.

Progressive thinking

2010-02-28T15:15:00.000+01:00

In the editorial Progressive thinking Nature argues that "it is time to abandon GDP [gross domestic product] as the overriding measure of social development and economic health" because current GDP growth does not guarantee future well-being. For example, according to the editorial, forest logging, ineffective health care and excessive house construction all contribute to GDP but are not productive investments in the long term.

I wish the Nature editors good luck in identifying which current investments will be truly productive in the long run. However, more of my respect goes to the millions of investors who not only think but actually risk their money in the same progressive pursuit.

New welfare indicators

2010-01-29T11:46:00.000+01:00

Pedro Beça and Rui Santos think that GDP is not a sufficiently good indicator of welfare and devise a new indicator that gives more weight to things they like, such as government-spending in education and health care, and subtracts things they dislike, such as divorce, drug and alcohol use, consumption inequality and the use of "natural" resources.

If I were to construct a new welfare index I would give more weight to nature hiking and bird-watching, playing tennis, badminton and football, and indie music, and would subtract spending in quads and off-road motorcycles, hunting, wind farms, airport security, and folk music.

The currency of the intrinsic and existence values of biodiversity is money

2010-01-28T09:10:00.003+01:00

William M. Adams and Kent H. Redford ask what would be the currency for the quantification of the intrinsic and existence values of biodiversity. The answer is money.

The debate about ecosystem services and biological conservation is about humans making decisions. Making decisions means making sacrifices. If we decide to plant a piece of land with eucalyptus to sequester carbon, we are giving up the opportunity to, for example, plant corn for food, or restore a forest for biodiversity. If we instead opt for some of the latter actions we are giving up the opportunity to sequester more carbon.

What are we willing to sacrifice in order to preserve the intrinsic and existence values of a species or an ecosystem? The set of things, such as alternative uses of land, human effort or human-made capital, that we are willing to sacrifice is the relevant measure of the intrinsic and existence values of biodiversity or nature. We can quantify this set of things using money.

Some values are easy to estimate. Prices reflect the value of things when costs and benefits accrue only to the people engaging in voluntary market transactions. As market prices are public, the information on values is readily available. Prices do not capture the true value of things when there are externalities. Thus, prices do not reflect the true value of nature because nature is valuable to many other people besides those directly engaged in markets for natural products. People make sacrifices for the sake of preserving nature and it is straightforward to quantify those sacrifices in terms of money. However, free-riding problems and other transaction costs discourage people from making as many sacrifices as nature is worth of.

So, the problem of quantifying the intrinsic and existence values of natural objects is not the lack of currency. The problem is that we can not accurately estimate the difference between what people actually pay for nature and what we would pay if all the relevant transactions were free from coordination friction. In the absence of explicit markets for intrinsic and existence values, the challenge is to analyze aspects of human behavior that give us clues about how much we really value nature. This information will help us to make better decisions.

Obama's business as usual

2010-01-27T21:36:00.000+01:00

Three years ago, shortly before Obama announced his candidacy to president of the U.S., I wrote down my three global scenarios for the future of humanity. I was inspired by the similarly ambitious but more lavishly funded and less humorous efforts of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Global Scenario Group. My two more likely scenarios were the Business as Usual and the Business as Usual.

Yes, both had the same name. In one of them the ruling politicians employed the sustainability rhetoric, at least initially. Otherwise it was just like the other.

Ecosystem services and conservation biologists - the means and the end

2010-01-21T15:52:00.001+01:00

William M. Adams and Kent H. Redford, on one side, and Matt Skroch and Laura López-Hoffman, on the other, publicly disagree on the effects of applying the concept of ecosystem services to biological conservation. But when you read their papers it is evident that while they disagree on the means - how to account for the true value of biodiversity and ecosystems - they agree on the end. And the end is not to advance human welfare:

There is much we agree on. They [Skroch and López-Hoffman] close with a sentence that could have been the abstract for our [Redford and Adams] editorial: "it is now our responsibility to ensure that these new tools are used in ways that we intended; namely, to protect the diversity of life on Earth."

Global warming and political pollution

2010-01-11T00:25:00.000+01:00

Robert H. Frank correctly argues in The New York Times that "because of the wide variety of activities involved and the large number of people affected, there is no practical way to negotiate private solutions" to the problem of greenhouse gases and global warming. He concludes:

In the case of global warming, markets fail because we don’t take into account the costs that our carbon dioxide emissions impose on others. The least intrusive way to have us weigh those costs is by taxing emissions, or by requiring tradable emissions permits. Either step would move us closer to [...] the outcome we’d see if there were perfect information and no obstacles to free exchange.

Unfortunately, Frank does not discuss that politics fails because we don't take into account the costs that our opinions and votes impose on others; that because of the wide variety of activities involved and the large number of people affected, there is no practical way to negotiate perfect taxes or tradable permits; and that imperfectly-designed taxes or tradable permits can move us even further from the ideal outcome.

Stolen e-mails and climate change

2009-12-26T13:38:00.000+01:00

What do the famous stolen emails mean for our understanding of climate change and policy?

An Associated Press story summarized a widespread opinion on the issue.

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data - but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked. [...]

[T]he exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

I agree. But this is not the whole story. There is much more about climate change and policy than "the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions." Climate scientists make bold predictions about the future. Some of those predictions include catastrophic outcomes. Some climate scientists advocate for immediate, drastic cuts in carbon emissions. Yes, climate scientists tell us that the world is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. And yes, they are almost certainly right when they say so. But they are telling us other things as well.

The stolen e-mails undermine the credibility of many of the most outspoken climate scientists. Knowing that they are willing to censor both their more skeptical colleagues and those who ponder alternatives to emission cuts, and to hide and massage data in order to make a stronger case to the public is not enough to make me doubt that the world is warming because of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. But it does make me more skeptical of their more extreme, more catastrophic and less certain predictions.

Social harmony versus soulless individualism

2009-11-26T11:51:00.000+01:00

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

2009-11-20T11:43:00.000+01:00

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

2009-10-13T20:14:00.000+02:00

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

2009-09-22T12:07:00.000+02:00

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

2009-08-18T19:47:00.004+02:00

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

2009-08-16T18:03:00.004+02:00

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

2009-08-10T11:58:00.002+02:00

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.

Engineering ecosystems for services

2009-07-24T13:39:00.003+02:00

From Nature:

[Peter] Kareiva is a great fan of the ecosystem-services argument for preserving nature. But he admits that the problem of what to do when novel ecosystems provide better services than the native ones is "a question we don't talk about that much".

And Kent H. Redford and William M. Adams write in Conservation Biology:

[E]cosystem services need not be provided by native species. Many introduced species will do the job as well, or perhaps better. Zebra mussels are highly effective in filtering particulates from water, although their impact on ecosystems is in other ways strongly negative. Ecosystems managed so as to deliver services may do their job perfectly well if existing species are replaced with exotics; they may even do it better. Environmental policy based on the optimization of ecosystem-service values will not necessarily lead to the conservation of biodiversity. [...]

A logical extension of the alteration of natural systems to increase flows of ecosystem services is to replace naturally occurring parts with novel, artificial alternatives.

Of course, this is the kind of thing humans have been doing for millennia in order to get food, clothing, refuge and entertainment.

A biologist offers investment advice

2009-07-16T15:59:00.001+02:00

Here.

Evolution of the social discount rate

2009-07-13T10:59:00.005+02:00

Peter D. Sozou argues in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Individual and social discounting in a viscous population) that caring about the long-term welfare of one's local community may make evolutionary sense because it benefits one's kin. But,

What of a social discount rate for decisions that impact on the whole population, rather than a locality or specific group? This question arises, for example, in the problem of global climate change. In the absence of competition between planets, there is no basis for behaviours that benefit the planet as a whole to be directly adaptive, and therefore no evolutionary basis for directly determining a social discount rate for global welfare. This seems to lead to a puzzle: why do people care at all about the long-term welfare of humanity as a whole? People may have evolved preferences for positive valuation of long-term general social welfare in ancestral environments in which such preferences would have mainly or always influenced actions with only local effects, and that therefore would have helped kin. But in the modern, global environment, such preferences may cause people to care about global problems such as climate change.

A more plausible explanation is that, as expected by an evolutionary analysis and as shown by people's actual behaviors, people do not really care about the future of humanity but do try to appear as if they care. Appearing to care may be adaptive because it may help to attract partners and friends.

Global inequality

2009-07-10T16:10:00.002+02:00

Rohit Bhargava reports that 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity. This calls for government redistribution.

Positive rights, negative rights and the UN

2009-07-02T19:44:00.001+02:00

William Easterly writes in his blog:

So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator's side.

Migration, poverty and wealth

2009-06-20T13:12:00.000+02:00

The Annan report on climate change says:

Poverty and environmental degradation have caused migration from rural to urban areas.

The opposite is true. Migration is caused by wealth - the new wealth of cities.

Global warming, mass migration, and xenophobia

2009-06-19T12:42:00.004+02:00

Kofi Annan writes:

Copenhagen needs to be the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated. The alternative is mass starvation, mass migration and mass sickness.

Unlike starvation and sickness, migration away from abjectly poor areas where people cannot cope with climate and other hardships is something any rational person should welcome. What makes migration look bad is xenophobia. But Annan seems to take xenophobia for granted. For Annan, xenophobia is not worth discussing; only CO2 is.

Economic value and biological conservation

2009-06-05T13:17:00.000+02:00

Mark Sagoff writes in Bioscience (The Economic Value of Ecosystem Services):

The concept of economic value presents a dilemma. If conservationists refer to total value, they must concentrate on just those [ecosystem] service providing units that are in jeopardy. It serves no purpose to “valuate” services that are not threatened. If conservationists refer to marginal value, however, they tie themselves to the familiar conceptual framework of market failure, externalities, common pool resources, discounting, transaction costs, and so on. Conservationists then go down a long and weary road, at the end of which they will find mainstream environmental economists waiting for them.

How to fight envy

2009-06-04T15:34:00.002+02:00

Michael Sargent reviews the book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better in Nature. Sargent and the authors of the book agree that more unequal societies fare worse because of envy, which they call "neuroendocrinological stress."

Governments can get there by using redistributive taxation and an extensive welfare state, as in Sweden, or by restraining income disparities and minimizing public spending, as in Japan. The book ends optimistically: whatever route is chosen, the authors argue, the current economic slump may be a providential opportunity to start righting the balance.

But why stop at equalizing income? Shouldn't we also "right the balance" of physical beauty, sports ability and dancing skills?

Robert Costanza and the broken window fallacy

2009-06-03T14:00:00.003+02:00

Robert Costanza writes in Nature:

There is evidence in developed countries that economic growth beyond a certain point does not improve well-being, owing to the hidden, external costs of that growth, including climate impacts. For example, an oil spill increases gross domestic product (GDP) as someone must pay to clean it up, yet it detracts from well-being. Increased crime, sickness, war, pollution, fires, storms and pestilence are all positive for GDP because they increase economic activity.

Crime, sickness, war, pollution, fires, storms and pestilence all decrease economic activity.

Costanza also wrongly equates economic growth with GDP growth.

Inequality, poverty and water

2009-05-08T10:56:00.003+02:00

In response to an article by Wendy Barnaby (Do nations go to war over water?) that dispels the notion that population growth and climate change will lead to "water wars," Thomas H. Meek and Laura A. Meek write (Increasing inequality is already making shortages worse):

Barnaby's implication that poorer nations will become wealthier in the coming decades is at odds with the global reality of an increasing gap between rich and poor and with the repeated failure of such development plans. [I edited the literature references out.]

I am much wealthier now than twenty years ago. The same is true for several hundred million Chinese and Indians. There is an increasing gap between Bill Gates and I and my Chinese and Indian fellows. The fact that I and the others are wealthier is not at odds with the "global reality of an increasing gap between" Bill Gates, or the average Norwegian or the average Irish, and us.

Access to water is already a serious issue for people in many parts of the world and, given recent United Nations estimates, the situation is not likely to improve.

Access to water is still a serious issue but, according to recent United Nations estimates, the situation is improving and likely to keep improving in the future.

The language of science - heroes and villains

2009-05-07T13:36:00.003+02:00

Toñi Fenoy, a Spanish housewife, is learning English so that she can read scientific papers on the rare Alexander disease, which affects her child Juanma. Meanwhile, some scientists strive to write their papers in as opaque a language as possible.

Cultural heritage and private property

2009-05-06T17:06:00.003+02:00

Officials at the University of California are moving to give two of the oldest-known skeletons in North America to a local Native American tribe, against the recommendation of university scientists who say the bones should be retained for study.

Under federal law, bones are returned to a tribe that can prove 'cultural affiliation' through artefacts or other analyses. At nearly 10,000 years old, the skeletons in question — unearthed in 1976 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) — are so ancient that they are not culturally linked to any tribe. [From Nature]

Whoever wants those bones should buy them from UCSD.

Conservation Biology, finance and Nauru

2009-04-23T16:12:00.002+02:00

John Gowdy and Lisi Krall draw the wrong lessons from the recent history of the small island nation of Nauru in The fate of Nauru and the global financial meltdown, published, as so much financial commentary these days, in the journal Conservation Biology.

Gowdy and Krall's story goes like this. The current economic system of the world, including Nauru, is market capitalism. Phosphate mining savaged the paradisiacal island of Nauru and deprived Nauruans of their traditional living means. While there was still some phospate on the island the government of Nauru decided to put part of the revenues in a trust fund. Neoclassical economists think this - transforming natural resources into investments - is good. But the fund, once worth one billion Australian dollars, is now gone due to the vagaries of financial markets. "The people of Nauru face a bleak future with no source of income other than foreign aid."

Gowdy and Krall draw three conclusions. First, market capitalism is no good. Second, neoclassical economists are evil or at least plain wrong. Third, because neoclassical economists are wrong, David W. Orr is right.

In contrast, I draw this conclusion: Don't trust your finances to your government.

Conservation Biology and financial reform

2009-04-21T17:55:00.005+02:00

Conservation Biology, a journal officially devoted to "the study and preservation of species and habitats," has opened its pages to finance reform proposals. David W. Orr writes (in his article Shelf life):

[W]e ought to build a slower economy. [...] It would require buyers, for example, to hold stock for, say, 6 months before they could sell.

Although Orr is very worried about the upcoming end of the world, this is the only specific proposal he offers in order to avert it - at least in this article. He says nothing, for example, about the possibility of requiring lovers to remain together for, say, six years before they can break up.

Environmentalism, self-hate and money-giving

2009-04-13T20:06:00.002+02:00

If you make people hate themselves they will donate more money to your cause.

Impact of biological invasions in Europe

2009-04-03T11:36:00.005+02:00

In the Science article Will threat of biological invasions unite the European Union? Philip E. Hulme, Petr Pyšek, Wolfgang Nentwig and Montserrat Vilà write:

Even the crudest estimate of total known monetary impact of alien species in Europe is close to €10 billion (about U.S. $13 billion) annually (European Commission, Towards an EU Strategy on Invasive Species; COM(2008) 789, EC, Brussels 2008). This figure is an underestimate, as potential economic and environmental impacts are unknown for almost 90% of the alien species found in Europe.

I checked Towards an EU Strategy on Invasive Species and this report refers to another report [Kettunen, M., Genovesi, P., Gollasch, S., Pagad, S., Starfinger, U. ten Brink, P. & Shine, C. 2008. Technical support to EU strategy on invasive species (IS) - Assessment of the impacts of IS in Europe and the EU (Final module report for the European Commission). Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), Brussels, Belgium. 40 pp. + Annexes, May 2008, (DG ENV contract)] that I am unable to find using Google and searching the IEEP. But the summary in Towards an EU Strategy on Invasive Species indicates that the €10 billion is not the "total known monetary impact of alien species in Europe" but only their costs (such as eradication and control, agricultural and forestry damage, loss of commercial fisheries, damage to infrastructure and damage to human health). Total impact should include the benefits of invasive species.

Costs of a specific agency such as [the proposed] European Centre for Invasive Species Management, if run on a budget similar to European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's, would amount to less than 0.5% of the annual cost of biological invasions in Europe but could bring much greater dividends to the European economy and environment.

Could.

[Update: Rodolphe E. Gozlan and Adrian C. Newton make the same point.]

Climate change and the economic crisis

2009-03-30T15:13:00.000+02:00

Jeffrey Sachs:

The scarcity of primary commodities and damage from climate change in recent years contributed to the destabilization of the world economy that gave rise to the current crisis.

He also talks about sustainability (twelve times in a one page article), concerted global efforts, public-sector leadership, and public-private partnerships. The whole article looks like the agenda of any European socialist or conservative party.

A question for Ecological Economics and Resilience Science

2009-03-29T13:20:00.002+02:00

Margaret Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association of the UK said:

The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases. Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?

Some words and phrases the LGA recommends not using and not even attempting to replace with vernacular synonyms are governance, spatial, innovative capacity, paradigm, and synergies.

How much do people value the environment?

2009-03-28T14:16:00.000+01:00

Of the $300 billion U.S. citizens gave to charity in 2007, $7 billion went to the environment/animals and $100 billion to religion.

Dangerous water policies

2009-03-27T10:28:00.003+01:00

In a post about the myth of water wars the GEF Blog quotes Tony Allan:

It is a paradox that the water pessimists are wrong but their pessimism is a very useful political tool [...]. The water optimists are right but their optimism is dangerous because the notion enables politicians to treat water as a low policy priority [...].

Quite the opposite - it is when politicians treat water as a high priority when bad things, such as water scarcity, happen.