An Extraordinary Story

On one of the Usenet groups I sometimes read, someone posted an account of her life as child and parent that I found both impressive and moving. Here it is.

Does Climate Catastrophe Pass the Giggle Test?

The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with climate change, with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second has to do with consequences of climate change for humans.

Most of the criticism I have seen, in comments to this blog and elsewhere, has to do with the first half, with critics arguing that the evidence for global warming, or at least the evidence it is caused by humans and will continue if humans do not mend their ways, is weak. I don not know enough to be sure that those criticisms are wrong; pretty clearly climate is a very complicated and not terribly well understood subject. But my best guess, from watching the debate, is that the first half of the argument is correct, that global climate is warming and that human action is at least an important part of the cause.

What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument. More precisely, I find unconvincing the claim that climate change on the scale suggested by the results of the IPCC models would have catastrophic consequences for humans. Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem—a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. And if, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.

But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them.

Human beings, after all, currently live, work, grow food in a much wider range of climates than that. Glancing over a U.S. climate map, it looks as though all of the places I have lived are within an hour or two drive of other places with an average temperature at least two degrees centigrade higher. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of much more than two degrees, it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn't continue to do so, about as easily, if average temperature shifted up by that amount—especially if they had a century to adjust to the change. That observation raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change of that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that any reasonable person could take seriously?

I can only see two ways of defending such a claim. The first is some argument to show that present arrangements are, due to divine intervention or some alternative mechanism, optimal, so that any deviation, even a small one, can be expected to make things worse. The second, and less wildly implausible, is the observation that people have adapted their activities—the sort of houses they live in, the varieties of crops they grow—to current conditions. Put in economic terms, we have sunk costs in our present way of doing things. Even if the planet has not been optimized for us, we have optimized our activities for the planet, with the details depending in part on the local climate. Hence any change in either direction can be expected to be a worsening, making our present way of doing things less well adapted to the new conditions.

That would be a persuasive argument if we were talking about a substantial change occurring over five or ten years. But we aren't. We are talking about a not very large change occurring over a century. In the course of a century, most existing houses will be replaced. If temperatures are rising, they will be replaced with houses designed for a (slightly) warmer climate. If sea levels are rising, they will be replaced, in low lying coastal areas, with houses a little farther inland. Over a century, farmers will change at least the varieties they are growing, very possibly the kind of crop, multiple times, in response to the development of new crop varieties, shifting demand, and similar changes. If temperatures are rising, they will gradually shift to crops adapted to a (slightly) warmer climate.

Climate aside, we do not live in a static world—consider the changes that have occurred over the past century. The shifts we can expect to occur due to technological progress alone, even without allowing for political and demograpic shifts, are much larger than the shifts required to deal with climate change on the scale I am discussing.

My conclusion is that this version of climate catastrophe, at least, does not pass the giggle test. There may be other versions, based on more pessimistic predictions of climate change, that do. But the claim that we now have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.

Treason or Murder

Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of "planetary treason."

The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. Converting food crops into fuel drives up the price of food. Driving up the world price of food results in more people in poor countries dying. Krugman is, no doubt, opposed to world hunger in theory. But he has come out passionately in favor of it in practice.

Treason or murder, take your choice.

"The Best Form of Foreplay

Is an empty dishwasher."

I'm not sure where I came across the phrase, but I think it embodies an important point. Most talk about sex in our society assumes the context of seduction, one night stands, affairs, short term relationships of one sort or another. Much, I suspect most, sex actually occurs in long term relationships, marriage or the near equivalent.

I gather that a lot of writing about how to make a flagging marriage work takes it for granted that the objective is to get back to the intense feelings of courtship, to "rekindle the passion." I doubt it works. A long married couple that wants to recapture the intense emotions of their courtship would be better advised to have children; they will discover that the parental focus on a child has the same intensity, the same insane illusion that the object of love, this time parental rather than erotic, is the most important being in the universe.

In a long term relationship, success has more to do with love, less to do with lust—which is not to say that the two do not correlate. Doing something for your spouse that she (or he) would otherwise have to do for her (or him) self is one way of encouraging it.

(Thoughts in part provoked by a silly and self-indulgent article in the Atlantic whose author, having had an affair and ended a long-term marriage, was moved not to apologize to husband and children but to pontificate in satirical mode on the problems of modern marriage.)

Parenting, Peer Groups and Keeping Kosher

Judith Harris, in her very interesting The Nurture Assumption, argues that children's personalities are formed primarily by their peer group, not their parents, hence that parental child rearing has a surprisingly small effect on how the children turn out. By her account, the contrary opinion comes in large part from confusing genetic influence with environmental influence. She mentions, however, an interesting special case—where the family is the peer group.

I was reminded of this reading comments to several posts on my adult son's blog, in which he and commenters argue about whether and why one ought to have children, a discussion set off by his discovery that his views had over time become more nearly "socially conservative." I was struck by the number of people who seem to take for granted serious conflict between parents and children, both in their own background and in their concerns with what might happen if they had children.

That doesn't fit my experience. I cannot remember any point in my childhood at which my parents did not seem more nearly my sort of people than my age peers. The closest I came to rebellion, at some point in my teens, was informing my father that I had been feeling put upon, had considered the division of duties within the family, had concluded that I was getting off very lightly considering how much more my parents had to do, and had concluded that my feelings were due to adolescence not unfair treatment. I felt he should be warned, in case any of those unjustified feelings showed up in our interaction. Nor has there been any point so far in my interaction with my children—in particular the two I and my wife brought up (Patri's mother and I separated when he was an infant)—when they didn't feel like "us" not "them." Since the older is now in college, I think it's reasonable to conclude that that situation is not going to change.

My guess is that both as a child and as a parent, I was in a family that fit Judith Harris' special case—and I can see that parenting might be a lot less pleasant if I were not.

Which gets me to another book, one I have recently been rereading—Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish. While organized as a list of words with detailed commentary, what it actually is is a picture of Ashkenazi-American culture in the first half of the Twentieth century, the world within which the author, and my parents, grew up. Features of that world included not only linguistic differences from the surrounding society but a lot of ritual, things done at particular times for particular reasons.

My friend and ex-colleague Larry Iannacone long ago raised the question of how, in a society like the U.S. with open entry to the religion industry, a religion can survive that imposes costly requirements on its adherents, requirements that do not produce any matching benefit. Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions—Judaism without koshruth rules, LDS with beer and coffee? His answer was that such restrictions do produce a "benefit"—they make it more difficult for adherents to interact outside of the religious community, and thus give them an incentive to spend time and effort producing community public goods, doing things that make being part of that community attractive.

It occurs to me that what I am seeing in Leo Rosten's affectionate description of the world he grew up in may be a special version of that relevant to the first half of this post. If you are brought up in an environment which is sufficiently special to make your age peers at school feel like "them" rather than "us" and your parents and siblings and relatives like "us" rather than "them," that may result in your identifying with the latter group. If their norms are better than those of the surrounding society, at least by their standards, they will see that as a good thing. Keeping their children is a benefit that may more than balance the costs of rules and rituals.

It doesn't have to be done through religion, of course, and in both of my cases it wasn't. My parents once raised the question, long after I was an adult, of whether they should have tried to bring me up in that same world, despite the fact that neither of them believed in their parents' religion. My response was that I preferred to have been brought up in the religion they did believe in—roughly speaking, 18th century rationalism, the ideology of Hume and Smith.

Which, of course, might be just as effective a way of making most of the outside world, including my age peers as I was growing up, feel like "them."

Cell Phone Bands—A Question

The frequencies used for both ordinary phone calls and 3G connections are different in different countries—one set in the U.S. and some other countries, a different set in Europe and much of Asia. A phone that can use four frequencies for phone calls and three for 3G can work just about anywhere. With three for phone calls, it works well in some parts of the world, less well in others--because there will be some areas where the missing frequency is the only one supported. With two frequencies for phone calls, a phone works in either Europe or the U.S., depending on what the frequencies are, but not both.

This raises an obvious question: Why don't all phones have four and three? One possible answer is that additional frequencies are in some way costly, require more expensive hardware or use more power. That does not strike me as very likely, but it isn't a subject I know much about.

A second possible answer is that phones are being deliberately designed to work well in only one area, in order to enable some form of price discrimination.

Do any of my readers know the answer? From the standpoint of this consumer, the consequence of the limitation is that, not uncommonly, the phone I am most interested in is out in a European version but not an American version.

Cell phone gadget frustrations

As long term readers of this blog know, I have for years been searching for a cell phone equivalent of my beloved Psion PDA's, a pocket computer with a useable keyboard. The closest I have managed so far is the G-1, which at this point it has most of what I want, including a word processor that can read and edit Word documents. But the keyboard is too small for real typing, the screen small for web browsing, and it does not support an external keyboard. Also it is from T-mobile, a carrier about which I have some reservations—although I have now learned that I could switch back to AT&T, which does not sell the G-1 but does support it.

I recently came across online references to the new HTC Touch Pro 2, which has a considerably larger screen and keyboard than my G-1 and seems to meet most of my other requirements. But ... .

The model currently out supports only the European 3G frequencies, and I live in the U.S. AT&T is supposed to be bringing out a U.S. model, but according to leaked pictures it will have a shrunken QWERTY keyboard in order to fit in an entirely unnecessary numeric keypad.

There are times when it would be nice to be dictator of the world. At least for a minute or two.

Harald Podcasts are Now All Up

I have now recorded all of my novel Harald (not counting the glossary). If you notice any problems, let me know by email.

Arctic Sea Ice Briefly Continued

I had a couple of recent posts, pointing out what appeared to be an inconsistency between the claim on a JPL page that the latest data showed arctic sea ice continuing to shrink and the publicly available data, which appears to show that a ten year decline reversed a bit over a year and a half ago. None of the commenters on the posts managed to explain away the discrepency, so I emailed someone at NASA. He was a pleasant and courteous correspondent, but seemed unable to distinguish between the question "do we have reason to expect arctic sea ice to continue to shrink" and the question "is what JPL said on this page about the evidence true?" Eventually he conceded that he was a media person, not a scientist, sent my question off to a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and sent me the response.

That response again ignored the question of whether what JPL said was actually true, to focus on whether the conclusion they were arguing for was true. I emailed him, pointing out that what I was asking was not whether there was good reason to expect further shrinking but whether the JPL assertion about the current data was true or false.

I got back an evasive answer that came down to (not a quote) "the long term trend is down, so objecting that JPL says the current data shows that trend continuing when it doesn't is merely a technical semantic objection."

I concluded that he, unlike the gentleman at NASA, understood my question, and that his real answer was that it was all right to lie to people about the evidence as long as you were telling them what you thought was the truth about the conclusion. I sent him off a reference to the Orwell piece that discusses the dangers of suppressing the truth for fear that it would "play into the hands of" the opposition.

And I now know that nothing said by NASA/JPL ought to be trusted. Readers of this blog may want to check the JPL claim against the data for themselves before deciding whether or not they agree with that conclusion. I have provided the links above.

G-1 Root and Tether: Help

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my online exchanges with T-Mobile support imply that T-Mobile does not object to my tethering my G-1, although they don't support it. I'm not sure if that's really the corporate view of the matter, but having been told so by two levels of their tech support I think I am entitled to try it.

So I did. The first step is to get root access, taking advantage of a bug in the original version of the OS. I successfully downgraded my OS to the original version (CR29), and I believe I got root access--at least, the attention symbol in the Terminal window is # rather than $.

I have been unable, however, either to make Android-WiFi-Tether work under CR29 or to install the upgrade that is supposed to take the OS back up to a more recent version while preserving root access.

Is there any kind soul among my readers with suitable expertise who would like to advise?

Carbon Taxes, Cap and Trade, and All That

Suppose something some people do has substantial, widely dispersed, negative effects on other people; the standard example is air pollution. Since I am not bearing the cost of my actions, I may do things, such as light a fire in my fireplace, even when the net cost, to me and others, is larger than the benefit, and fail to do things, such as install a scrubber in the smokestack of my power plant or switch to low sulfur coal, even when the benefit of doing them would be larger than the cost. The obvious solution is direct regulation. Have some government agency tell power plants to install scrubbers, use low sulfur coal, and in various other ways modify their acts to take account of external effects.

There are at least two things wrong with this solution. The first is that the agency is very unlikely to know enough to do it right. How is it to figure out what the lowest cost way is of reducing pollution—scrubbers, low sulfur coal, both, or one for some power plants and some for others? How, indeed, is it to figure out when pollution ought to be reduced and when the cost of the reduction is more than the benefit? Carbon dioxide, after all, is said to be a pollutant via global warming; it does not follow that we should all stop breathing.

The second problem is that even if the agency had the information, it might not be in its interest to use it correctly, to require reductions of pollution if and only if they are worth their cost and by the least costly means. Such an agency is run, after all, not by philosopher kings but by bureaucrats appointed by elected politicians. If states that produce high sulfur coal are politically influential, it might be wise to impose regulations designed to discourage utilities from switching to low sulfur coal even when that is the lowest cost way of reducing the amount of air pollution they produce (a real world example, as it happens; see Regulation Magazine Vol. 14 no.4). If the steel industry has made generous campaign contributions to the majority party, perhaps it should be spared, in the national interest, the rigors of regulation of its emissions.

An alternative which many economists prefer is a "Pigouvian Tax," named after the economist who came up with the idea. Let the agency determine the external cost imposed by each ton of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere. Firms are free to pollute as much as they want, provided they pay for their pollution. It is then in the private interest of each firm to find the lowest cost ways of reducing its pollution and implement them, provided that the cost of the reduction is less than the benefit.

This does not eliminate all of the problems, since the agency still has to measure cost and still may be biased in its estimates of the differing costs of different effluents in different places by political considerations. But it looks like a considerable improvement on direct regulation.

A very similar alternative is currently being discussed under the label of "cap and trade." The government sets the total amount of effluent that may be emitted—say 80% of the pre-regulation level. Each firm is issued permits for its share of that amount, 80% of the sulfur dioxide it produced last year. A firm that reduces its emissions below that level can sell the excess permits to other firms; a firm that pollutes above the level it has permits for must buy additional permits. In effect, the price of the permit is the equivalent of the effluent fee under Pigouvian taxation. A firm that pollutes more than its share must pay that price for each additional ton of effluent. A firm polluting less than its share gives up, for each ton it emits, the opportunity to sell a permit for that price. Once the level of emissions is set, the market determines the cost of reducing emissions to that level and sets the required tax.

In a system run by philosopher kings, there is one important difference between the two alternative versions. A straight Pigouvian tax requires the agency to estimate the damage done by an additional ton of the pollutant. A cap and trade system requires it to estimate what the optimal amount of the pollutant is, how far it is worth reducing it. One can imagine some situations where the former information is more readily available, some where the latter is.

In a system run by elected politicians, there is another large difference—who gets the money. With an effluent fee, the tax goes to the government. With cap and trade, the payments are by one firm to another. Firms that can easily reduce their output of effluent end up richer than they would be without the scheme, since they can sell their excess permits to other firms for whom reduction is more difficult. Indeed, the regulated industry as whole may end up richer as a result of the regulation. Depending on the details of the situation, the increased income from the higher price for (say) electric power due to the higher cost due to the regulation might be more than the cost to the firms of reducing their emissions to meet the limit.

Which brings us to current proposals for cap and trade of carbon dioxide as a solution to problems of global warming. In a system run by philosopher kings, the only important difference between that and a carbon tax is the information required to set the level of emissions or amount of tax. In the real world, cap and trade has the (political) advantage of getting large parts of the regulated industry in favor of the regulation and thus eliminating a lot of potential opposition. The cost, possibly more than a hundred percent of it, is shifted to the customers, which is to say the general public—a dispersed and politically impotent interest group. And if the government retains considerable flexibility in just how emission permits get allocated, it can use some of them to buy political support from other groups or to reward them for past support.

Cap and trade has a political disadvantage as well, of course; a carbon tax would bring in lots of money. But that money would show up in the budget, get labelled taxation, and so make it harder for the administration to deny that it is raising taxes to pay for its programs. And much of it might end up spent to get the carbon tax passed by buying off organized interest groups that were potential opponents.

Think of the cap and trade version as eliminating the middle man.

The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality or What is Wrong with Modern____

Suppose you are the first city planner in the history of the world. If you are very clever you come up with Cartesian coordinates, making it easy to find any address without a map, let alone a GPS—useful since neither GPS devices nor maps have been invented yet.

Suppose you are the second city planner. Cartesian coordinates have already been done, so you can't make your reputation by doing them again. With luck, you come up with some alternative, perhaps polar coordinates, that works almost as well.

Suppose you are the two hundred and ninetieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good ideas have been used, all the so-so ideas have been used, and you need something new to make your reputation. You design Canberra. That done, you design the Combs building at ANU, the most ingeniously misdesigned building in my personal experience, where after walking around for a few minutes you not only don't know where you are, you don't even know what floor you are on.

I call it the theory of the rising marginal cost of originality—formed long ago when I spent a summer visiting at ANU.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn't worth looking at, modern music isn't worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen's, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it.

Two Great Depressions

Current economic problems have brought back beliefs and arguments concerning the Great Depression. One account I have encountered goes roughly as follows: "After the stock market crash, Hoover cut taxes and government expenditure in order to revive the economy. Instead of reviving, things got worse and worse until Roosevelt came in, introduced the New Deal, and so eventually ended the Depression." The obvious conclusion is that we should deal with present problems, as the administration is dealing with them, by vastly expanding government expenditure.

The first half of this is a simple factual claim, easily checked. The current Statistical Abstract of the United States is conveniently webbed, but does not go back far enough to provide figures for expenditure under Hoover; Historical Statistics of the United States, so far as I can tell, is webbed only in a for-pay version. But earlier volumes of the Statistical Abstract are also webbed. The 1935 volume contains figures both for federal expenditure and for prices in the relevant years. Federal expenditure was:

1929 3,298,859
1930 3,440,269
1931 3,779,868
1932 4,861,696

Far from being cut, it increased every year.

These figures greatly understate the increase, because during this period prices and national income were falling. Measured in purchasing power rather than in dollars, federal expenditure roughly doubled over the final three years of Hoover's administration. Relative to GDP, it nearly tripled.

The second half of the story is trickier, because it depends on assumptions about what would have happened without the New Deal—that the Depression would have continued forever, or at least for much longer. That seems implausible, judging by other depressions and recessions; the Great Depression was unusually long, not unusually short. Arguing that since the economy eventually recovered the New Deal was a success is like arguing that if the doctor bleeds the patient and the patient survives and eventually recovers, the treatment was a success.

We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn't happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it's obviously the start of a depression.

Harding did what Hoover is supposed to have done, reducing taxes and government expenditure. By 1923 the recession was over. It was the Great Depression that didn't happen.