The good, the bad and the unprejudiced

The unprejudiced is Philip Cafaro, who impartially considered the facts and then wrote this in Conservation Biology:

As we write the next chapter in Earth's environmental history, we will do so consciously, choosing to preserve wild nature or to reduce the world to a human life-support system and eliminate wild nature forever. Scientists will play an important role. On the one side stand the biotechnicians, servants of commerce and industry, intent on reducing nature to its lowest common denominator in return for power and prestige. On the other side stand, among others, the conservation biologists, who find beauty and value in wild nature's own stories and are determined that they be allowed to continue. Theirs is the better, more generous story.

What should parks be?

On the morning of 18 May 2005, 14 pickup trucks with about 150 people armed with machetes, pistols, rifles, shotguns, and automatic weapons rolled into a camp in the eastern part of the Parque Nacional Laguna del Tigre, Guatemala. At 338,000 ha it is the largest national park in Central America and an important RAMSAR site.

Thus begins an editorial by Kent H. Redford, John G. Robinson and William M. Adams in the latest issue of Conservation Biology. The armed gang belonged to villages illegally established within the park. They took four hostages; the regional governor promised them a school, technical assistance, and a road into the heart of the park; and they released the hostages.

Although the violence of this case may be unusual, the complexity of the scenario is not.

Conflicts of interest arise regarding land uses within parks. Redford et al. argue that we can't solve these conflicts until we recognize that

parks fit into a variety of categories and incorporate people and their economic endeavors in different ways. Parks set out to achieve different things, and they suit different situations.

This, however, does not eliminate conflict. People that regard themselves as parties to a park will disagree about the policy decisions for that particular park, and there is no way to make all of them happy. As the example above illustrates, when the government has the last word it is likely to adopt the policy that benefits the party that shouts loudest.

A solution is to leave the matter to the people who value the park most. The only way to know who values something most is to have well-defined and ample property rights. I. e., people must be able to buy and sell their property and use it as they see fit. Once you have a market, the land ends up in the hands of the people who find that land most valuable. And those people will use that land in the most valuable way.

Skeptics of markets counter that markets work if there are no externalities, and no transaction costs, and perfect information, and so on and so forth. They say that markets don't work in the case of nature conservation; that, as private individuals can't do the job, governments must intervene. But public parks are not a success. In theory they could work - they could preserve pieces of land for valuable social uses. They do not because government management suffers from poor information, enormous bureaucratic costs, and all sorts of externalities.

Proponents of state intervention also forget how often governments unjustifiably destroy natural resources. In Laguna del Tigre the government subsidizes wildland encroachment by building roads and schools, and giving "technical assistance". Once you let governments do things, they do good and bad things. But mostly, I am afraid, bad things.

Skeptics of markets think that people just don't work for the public good; that no landowner will use his or her land for the public good. They miss the fact that public parks exist because many people spend their time, effort and money to lobby for parks. Environmentalists profess to work for the public good. Ample and well-enforced property rights would allow them, and everybody else, to own land and care for it.

Self aid

William Easterly writes (found via Econlog):

While the aid community planners were dithering about whether to increase foreign aid by a few tens of billions for all poor countries, the citizens of just two large poor countries – India and China – were generating an increase in income for themselves of $715 billion every year.

Irrational voters

Bryan Caplan is about to publish a book which still has no definitive title. In it Caplan argues that voters are both ignorant and irrational (as voters, that is; not in other aspects of their lives). To attract votes, politicians promise policies that are popular instead of optimal. So democracy delivers bad policies. The alternative is not dicatorship, which usually works much worse, but individual decision-making and responsibility. Educating voters or cleaning up the campaign finance mess will not work.

In classical public choice theory voters are rationally ignorant because they lack incentives to inform themselves. Learning about policy is costly, the probability that anyone's vote will affect the outcome of elections is negligible, and the costs of choosing the wrong candidates are borne by everyone, not just the voter. According to Caplan "voter ignorance is a product of natural human selfishness, not a transient cultural aberration."

If voters' mistakes were random in direction the problem would disappear because in large electorates mistakes would cancel out. But on many matters of policy voters make systematic errors. There is no cancelling out; the average voter is wrong. Witness popular beliefs related to economic policy:

People do not understand the "invisible hand" of the market, its ability to harmonize private greed and the public interest. I call this anti-market bias. They underestimate the benefits of interaction with foreigners. I call this anti-foreign bias. They equate prosperity not with production, but with employment. I call this make-work bias. Lastly, they are overly prone to think that economic conditions are bad and getting worse. I call this pessimistic bias.

And it is not only that voters are ignorant. Caplan's main original contribution to public choice theory is that voters are irrational.

Economists usually presume that beliefs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. In reality, however, we often have cherished views, valued for their own sake. [...] Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity. Like the adherents of traditional religion, many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet critical questions with pious hostility.

Just as ignorance is more profitable to voters than information, irrationality is more profitable than rationality. It feels good, it is inconsequential because your vote is not decisive, and everyone, not only the voter, shares the costs. For the individual voter the costs of irrational ideology are negligible compared to the benefits.

So we should expect people to "satiate" their demand for political delusion, to believe whatever makes them feel best. After all, it's free.

What is the role of special interest groups in this scheme of things? What about the media? Caplan has answers. Until his book comes out you can read this appetizer.

Predicting economic and climate change

This week's issue of Nature has a news piece on current efforts to integrate economic and climate models in order to predict global change for the 21st century. Economic development affects climate, climate affects economic development, and both affect human well-being. After reading the article I conclude that economists are baffled by the naive assumptions of economic growth fed into the climate change models, and climate modellers are baffled by the uncertainty of economic models. What is easier to predict - the future shape of the world economy (even in the absence of climate change) or global climate (even in the absence of economic change)? How reliable is the joint prediction of the future course of the two interacting systems?

Two things, however, are clear. First, human well-being depends much more on economic growth than on climate change.

For example, changes in malaria incidence that result from people becoming rich enough to have mosquito nets outweigh any changes in the geographical spread of malaria caused by global warming.

Second, technological progress is paramount. And technological progress depends on economic prosperity and economic freedom.

Taxes and education

By Brian Micklethwait in Samizdata.net:

Which British individual has done the most good for the world during the last half century or more since the Second World War? I nominate Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, who died last Saturday.

Cowperthwaite applied laissez faire ideas to Hong Kong, which contributed to its prosperity, which by way of example encouraged Chinese politicians to make pro-market reforms, which are lifting China from misery.

Cowperthwaite was criticised during his time in office for not taxing the people of Hong Kong more, and for ignoring, in particular, education. But has there ever been a more stupendous exercise in business education and everything-else-you-can-think-of education than Hong Kong? Hong Kong has been a University of How To Do It for millions upon millions of Chinese, Chinese who are now struggling to turn China itself from a suicidal and murderous world threat into a creative contributor to the world.

The Telegraph has more details.

On the "get worried" professionals

In a comment to an excellent post by Scott Burgess in The Daily Ablution, Joe Peden diagnoses the environmentalist sermonizing about the forthcoming end of the world

as a disasterizing obsessive-compulsive neurosis whose recommendations, if followed, would lead to only useless activities at best, and probably destructive activities in many cases - bringing about the very conditions allegedly sought to be avoided to begin with.

In any case, the arrogance and hubris of these people is hard to not notice, and is probably telltale of extreme ignorance.

There will always (or at least until the end the world) be people who enjoy scarying others, or who make a living out of it or, more dangerously, who feel morally obliged to do it. That's life.