The Alien Life Letdown

For the longest time it seemed obvious to me that alien life did not exist. Extraterrestrial life seems important enough to have either science or religion saying something clear about it. Then it occurred to me: what if alien life isn't a big deal? What if life on other planets exists, but it's just some simple cell or bacterial life? Or maybe if we're lucky, it's grass. Alien grass, that would be, well, something.

Buy Local, Waste Resources, Part II

The Freakonomics blog does what I tried to last year, but so much better than I could have dreamed. First, the thesis:

Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon emissions.

Now the numbers:

In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals.

And the issue of transportation:

It’s not even clear local production reduces carbon emissions from transportation. The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser estimates that carbon emissions from transportation don’t decline in a locavore future because local farms reduce population density as potential homes are displaced by community gardens. Less-dense cities mean more driving and more carbon emissions.

And here's what happens to cost:

A local food system would raise the cost of food by constraining the efficient allocation of resources. The monetary costs of increased input demands from forsaken gains from trade and scale economies will directly bear on consumer welfare by increasing the costs of food. And, as we try to tackle obesity, locavorism is likely to raise the cost of precisely the wrong foods. Grains can be grown cheaply across much of the country, but the costs of growing produce outside specific, limited regions increase quickly. Thus, nutrient-dense calories like fruits and vegetables become more expensive, while high fructose corn syrup becomes relatively cheaper. 

Finally, higher costs on certain foods may be a solution to the big health challenge in the developed world. But higher prices on any food are precisely the wrong prescription for the great health problems in the developing world, where millions remain undernourished.

A Freakonomics commenter gives a pretty good response:

Well, if we’re going to think like economists, then lets talk about how we got here. The food distribution network cannot thrive as it does now without the massive public works program called the Interstate Highway system, which subsidizes distant food movement.

Which is why I have called several times for a higher gas tax.

Emptying the Bottle: Early December '11 Links

Here is the best of what I've shared on Twitter recently:

• People with sweet tooths may be sweeter and night owls are smarter.
• The world's underground economy is $10 trillion.
• "Renewable energy" doesn't exist (earlier).
• In college, follow your dreams, but be sure the dream can pay the bill.
• Education is more important than economic growth in creating democracy.
• In the future (present?), neuroscience will blur the guilty and not guilty.
• Six ideas Tyler Cowen wants to see die.
• In the world of Facebook, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend.
• Triumph the Insult Comic at Occupy Wall Street [video] via Justin.
• Don't tell my students, chewing gum helps you learn (earlier).
• Why we always root for the underdog.
• Liberalism increases the chance people will feel good AND Conservatism makes people less likely to feel bad (earlier).

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Maybe There Are Only Two Continents

Global Skin Color

Here's the source of the map below and the explanation why it represents the the skin color of the indigenous people:

The twin role played by the skin – protection from excessive UV radiation and absorption of enough sunlight to trigger the production of vitamin D – means that people living in the lower latitudes, close to the Equator, with intense UV radiation, have developed darker skin to protect them from the damaging effects of UV radiation. In contrast, those living in the higher latitudes, closer to the Poles, have developed fair skin to maximize vitamin D production.

And it doesn't take that long for decedents' skin color to change:

for many families on the planet, if we look back only 100 or 200 generations (that's as few as 2,500 years), "almost all of us were in a different place and we had a different color."

If my more racist ancestors could see me now.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXV

Penguins don't have property rights:

The World Can Fit in Texas

If the entire population of Earth, almost 7 billion people, lived in the same population density as New York City, they could fit inside of the state of Texas. And yet Texas is still trying to keep people out.

Of course that's not counting the farmland required to feed them, but still, pretty cool.

How Hurricane Katrina Helped Ex-cons

They were forced to leave "home":

Ex-prisoners tend to be geographically concentrated in a relatively small number of neighborhoods within the most resource deprived sections of metropolitan areas. Furthermore, many prisoners return “home” to the same criminogenic environment with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers that proved so detrimental prior to incarceration. Yet estimating the causal impact of place of residence on the likelihood of recidivism is complicated by the issue of selection bias. In this study, I use a natural experiment as a means of addressing the selection issue and examine whether the migration of ex-prisoners away from their former place of residence will lead to lower levels of recidivism. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana Gulf Coast, damaging many of the neighborhoods where ex-prisoners typically reside. The residential destruction resulting from Hurricane Katrina is an exogenous source of variation that influences where a parolee will reside upon release from prison. Findings reveal that moving away from former geographic areas substantially lowers a parolee's likelihood of re-incarceration.

Yet many states force prisoners to stay.

The Limits of Moral Math

One concept I come back to regular is moral math. The idea that we are constantly calculating how good/bad we can/should be. Perhaps there are limits to how much we are willing to sacrifice to feel moral. Here's an environmental example:

For those students for whom the environment was not important to their self-esteem, receiving negative feedback on the ecological footprint questionnaire actually prompted them to be less likely to write to their politician about environmental issues (relative to the students who received positive feedback about their footprint). In other words, for people who aren't green minded, alarming feedback on a footprint questionnaire can actually make them less sympathetic to green causes.

So:

it's been shown that if changing their behaviour seems too difficult, many people change their attitudes instead, in this case ditching their pro-environmental beliefs (as a way to reduce what's known as 'cognitive dissonance', which is when there's a mismatch between our attitudes and behaviour).

But we can combat this by actively writing down our intentions:

The researcher found that the percentage of people who agreed to volunteer didn't differ as a function of whether the instructions invited active or passive responding. Yet there was quite an astonishing difference in the percentage of people who actually showed up to participate in the project several days later. Of those who agreed to participate passively, only 17 percent actually appeared as promised. What about those who agreed to participate through active means? Of those, 49 percent kept their promises. In all, the clear majority of those who appeared as scheduled (74 percent) were those who had actively agreed to volunteer for the program.

On the first day of class I ask my students to write down and get signed by a parent their desired/expected grades. Now I just need to find a way to make them not discount it.

Honest Discussion of Nuclear Power

I've tried (and tried) to show that safety isn't a concern, but that doesn't mean it's the right choice:


End all energy subsidies and tax all externalities so we can tell which is really the best choice.

Worthwhile Sentences on Death

From the oldest federal judge in the country: "At this age, I'm not even buying green bananas."

From Justin Scott: "either you cannot bear the idea of a horrific earthquake in Japan (or Haiti, or China) with God, or you cannot bear it without him."

From The Atlantic: "And they never—and I mean never—ask the critical Kantian question: what if everyone in the world consumed these supposedly sustainable alternatives to conventional food?"

From Oprah Winfrey: ‎"Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed."

From Justin Landwehr: "Life is too short to spend it doing things that you wish would hurry up and end."

Update: From Harry Houdini: “Nobody wants to see a man die, but everyone wants to be there when it happens.”

Disaster Aid to Japan

The picture above is from the earthquake and resulting tsunami that have ravaged Japan. Like other international disasters, people, companies, and nations are rushing to their aid. I've been a pretty big critic of foreign aid in past. In Haiti's recent crisis I've recommended trade, not aid to help them rebuild their country. I've even pointed out the flaws of personally volunteering abroad, especially on short term non-technical trips. I stand by those ideas. However, in Japan's case, foreign aid may meet my standard of doing more long term good than harm. Not everyone agrees with me.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon makes a compelling argument on why Japan, the world's 2nd/3rd largest economy, should not receive the limited funds of charity. Although I agree with him complaint about how we focus too much on sudden tragedies while ignoring ongoing ones, I think on Japan he might be wrong. It is Japan's stable political and economic system that makes it a good candidate for donation. The problems that normally go with foreign aid, corruption and misuse, are much less likely to occur there.

Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one supporting donations to Japan. My go-to-for-everything Tyler Cowen supports it and my local comedy theater is raising money too. That's right, for this weekend's shows 50% of all ticket sales will go to relief aid. As usual I'll be performing this Friday night at 10:30. This particular show is free, but as I'd like it, donations will be accepted at the door. The photos are from the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog. Here are some equally wonderful interactive before and after photos.

Cities Are Greener

From the most recent Freakonomics podcast:

if you love nature, stay away from it. We're much more likely to harm nature, as Thoreau did surrounded by the woods than if we lived in tall urban apartments by ourselves. There's a statistical partner to that, which is together with Matthew Kahn, I've assembled data on carbon emissions associated with living in different parts of the country. And there are two facts which I think are important to come out of that: one of which is that people who live in cities do tend to emit significantly less carbon than people who live in countries. And this is controlling for income controlling for family size. That's coming mainly from driving, from the fact there's just a lot fewer carbon emissions associated with dense living. It's not just the move to public transportation, it's also that for drivers within cities, they're just driving much shorter distances. And then of course, it's because of smaller homes. The higher price of urban space means that people are living in smaller homes even with the same family size. And that leads to lower electricity usage, lower home heating usage, and those are the facts that make cities seem, at least to my eyes, significantly greener.

So if, as the author also claims, that cities are the engines of economic and social growth without the environmental destruction, why don't we all live in big cities? The government:

I think that at the federal level there are three issues, one of which is the home mortgage interest deduction. The home mortgage interest deduction essentially acts as a push away from urban apartments into suburban homes. [...]

Second policy that's problematic, and we're still doing this, and this I actually give President Obama much less credit for—we've been huge on building infrastructure in this country for a long time. [...]

But I worry about a renewed push towards building new transportation infrastructure in this country. The work of Nathaniel Baum-Snow finds that every new highway that cut into a major city in the post war period reduced that city's population by eighteen percent because of suburbanization. Transportation is sort of the opposite of urban clustering. You're sort of subsidizing people to spread out.

And the third thing, which is not really a federal issue, but it's huge is our local system of schooling. Certainly for anyone who's a parent like myself, the suburban school districts offer huge enticement to leave cities.

If you're not subscribed to this podcast yet, I highly reccomend it (and others).

End All Energy Subsidies

Not only to save money. Not only to see which sources of energy are self supporting. But also because it might be good for the environment:

I might change the bottom left key to negative externalities/no negative externalities, but the chart still shows the mismanagement of taxpayer funds.

The Future Will Be Rented

I've expressed my concerns about owning homes in a previous post. In a recent article from The Economist, they mention some popular sites where all kinds of things can be rented. Here are some examples:

• Movies/TV: Netflix 
• Car: Zipcar 
• Toys: Rent-That-Toy
• Designer purses: Bag Borrow or Steal
• Kids Clothes: thredUP
• Work shop: TechShop
• Lodging: CouchSurfing

Here's a few they missed:

• Caskets: Rom Massey & Sons
• Cell phone: TravelCell
• Rent tools: Home Depot
• Textbooks:  Chegg
• Anything: Zilok

Cheaper. Greener. Less risky. The future will be rented and the future is now.

Energy Efficiency is Better, Not Greener or Cheaper

From the Scientific American:

The researchers looked at light consumption since the year 1700. Even though today's compact fluorescents are 500 times more efficient than candles and whale oil lamps, what we spend on overall lighting hasn't gone down. It's just increased proportionately to our wealth. For the past 300 years we've consistently spent just about seven-tenths-of-one-percent of our gross domestic product on artificial lighting.

When one factor changes, others will too. That's not to say light improvements aren't good, they just aren't necessarily going to help us spend less on them.

Thoughts on the Gulf Oil Spill

I've talked before about the gulf oil disaster when answering a reader's question about boycotting BP. However, I decided to hold off on my full evaluation until the leak had been stopped (hopefully) and the situation could be measured. Let me first say I underestimated how big a deal the issue would be. When I first heard about it I filed it under "overblown scary news" category and moved on. Here we are 3 months and 2.5 million gallons of oil a day later and it has become the worst man made oil spill in American history. Like anything newsworthy, the disaster in the Gulf is not always correctly considered. So here are 4 things to consider: Perspective, Incentives, Accidents, and Options.

Perspective: There has been somewhere between 93-184 million gallons leaked from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As breathtaking as that number is, the US pumps 2 billion (that's 2,000 million) barrels of oil off the coast per year. Though the costs of offshore drilling are now seen as enormous, they are only a small percentage of the benefits. This is a strong argument against Obama's struggle to put a moratorium on offshore drilling.

The other important fact to recognize is that oil naturally seeps into the ocean, although never in such large amounts at one time. The amount of the spill is less than the the amount naturally leaked all year. This does not mean the crisis isn't real, but it does mean zero contamination is not the goal.

Not only does oil naturally seep into the ocean, it also spills in other ways. Shipping oil from nation to nation ends in 4 times the amount leaked from drilling. Also, runoff from car and boats results in over 12 times more ocean oil than leaks in extraction. These numbers are different after such a large spill, but it's worth noting just how rare drilling spill like this are and what impact ending US drilling could have.

Incentives: The primary problem is not corporate or regulatory, but property. Everybody owns the ocean, so nobody owns the ocean. For this reason markets cannot be fully functional. The solution to this is messy and can't be fleshed by me and certainly not in one post. The good news is that there are some markets. For example BP has already been punished. Like I linked in June, it has lost 1/3 of it's value in the stock market, which is probably a farily good assessment of how much the crisis will cost them. It's a good reminder that we certainly don't want small businesses running oil drilling. We don't want companies without deep pockets causing big problems.

Accidents:  Sometimes incidents like this are just calculated accidents. No matter how much you want to blame someone, it may just be a risk we were willing to take. That is probably not the case here, because it seems obvious that BP did not correctly assess the cost and benefits of leaks and cleanup. The reason why is probably some combination of bad corporation and government incentives. This accident idea is shown nicely in this satirical Onion video entitled: Truck Accident That Killed Rafters in Canyon Sparks Truck-Canyon-Rafter Reform Debate

Options: More regulation from Congress won't solve the problem because the original laws weren't being enforced. Also, most oil in the world isn't produced by companies but by nations. For those two reasons, "green energy" isn't the solution. Solar, wind, etc are years from profitability and it's well known that biofuels are largely a disaster. Not only are the crop subsidies destructive to market allocation, they are extremely destructive of natural resources. The growing of sugar cane and corn encourages farmers to cut down valuable forests. It also adds to the Gulf's "dead zones" created by fertilizers washing into the ocean.

Oil, comparatively, has been one of the most important products in human history. It helped with deforestation when it replaced wood as the primary energy source. Despite oil's bad press this century, it was one of the most important resources two centuries ago. Fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution that brought humanity out of continual poverty. Though not as safe to produce as nuclear (earlier post), it is safer than coal. Speaking of nuclear power, my biggest fear is that the spill will become my generation's Three Mile Island resulting in heavy regulation that harms workers and consumers for decades.

Outrage like this can lead to bad ideas like the dispersant that has mostly been effective in getting the problem out of sight, while actually hindering real cleanup efforts. The solution is not easy and it is not complete. No matter what we do there will still be millions of oil in the water for a very long time. What I'd like to see is the US government enforce the legal obligations BP and it's affiliates have. Paying for the cleanup, lost wages, and other legal obligations. Then, and this is easier said then done, I want a simplification of the oil regulatory system. One less reliant on hard working and honest regulators. Although the public anger over the spill is appropriate, I'd like to see if harnessed correctly.

Another Benefit of the Gas Tax

Here's an interesting argument for a gas tax from good friend Justin Scott; to decrease the world's production of plastic. Here's a map of continent sized floating patches of garbage:

One of these is predicted to weigh over 3 million tons and is responsible for not only killing marine life, but also releasing poisons into our food supply. Scary to think plastic has only been around for a hundred years, so we don't fully understand what the environmental impact is going to be. I'm not one to be a pessimist, but it's hard when you see these photos of a bird's stomach.

Emptying the Bottle: Mid-March '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• "Green" bio fuels are worse for the environment.
• Congressman Ron Paul is so frugal he returned over $100,000 from his allotted office budget.
• Ways the government has actually made it harder to hire people.
• Imprisoning criminals is cheaper than redistribution of wealth.
• A strong handshake signals that you're healthy.
• "Touch screen" phone that projects on your hand.
• Nullification, popular before the Civil War, makes a comeback.
• Inequality of returns to effort is a good thing.
• Some aid to Haiti hurts local businesses.
• The government can't create unless it takes [cartoon].
• Bird uses bread as bait for fishing [video].
• Spending isn't just a political problem, it's a citizen problem [graphic].
• Prediction markets make you an insta-expert.

If you'd like to follow my shared items live, subscribe.

Buy Local, Waste Resources

One of the implications of doing comedy in Carrboro, NC is that I often hear the call to "buy local". The obvious problem with this is that it limits trade and limits the market, which makes citizens poorer. What is less obvious, is that it is actually worse for the environment:

Let's suppose that people do decide to "buy local" with the goal of saving the world and reducing their carbon footprint. This will increase the demand for locally grown foods, but it will also have an unintended and likely deleterious consequence; it will increase the demand for farm implements and labor.

Since the decision to buy locally is essentially the decision to forsake comparative advantage, every unit of agricultural output will be more resource intensive than it would be under specialization, division of labor, and trade.

In other words, each additional unit of output will require more resources than it would under trade. To take a concrete example, this means that the cultivation of spinach in Memphis will require more fertilizer, more rakes, more tillers, and more hoes than the cultivation of spinach in California.

If property rights are protected, the proper use of resources is calculated in the price. If you purchase based on price, then you are doing what is best for the environment. That said, it is likely that not all property rights are well defined. The cost of the pollution produced in shipping products across the country is not fully paid by producers. However the solution is to tax the pollution, like a gas tax, not stop trade. This may not satisfy the soul of the socially conscious, but that sounds more like a problem with the soul than with the solution.