Ben Muse

Where Are The Campers?

Nights spent camping in U.S. national parks have been declining since the early 1990s:

Rep. Dingell has a good idea

One of the best things we can to do hearten our friends, dismay our enemies, conserve energy, and enhance our national security, is increase taxes on gasoline consumption.  If we want to reduce our dependence on oil we need to face up to its true costs.

Greg Mankiw would like to see a tax of $1/gallon on gasoline, phased in over ten years at a dime a year.  He explains why, here: The Pigou Club Manifesto (October 20).

Now House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell is about to propose a carbon tax, that would increase the tax on gas by $0.50. (Dingell to propose 50 cent gasoline tax increase , Chris Good, The Hill, July 7) I'll look forward to learning more about the details.  But this sounds smart to me.

I'd prefer Mankiw's higher tax, but Dingell's proposal may be a good.  There should be some offsetting income tax break addressed to lower income tax payers, to relieve some of the burden for them.

Andrew Samwick took a trip to Hawaii with his family recently;  he estimates his family's annual fuel consumption associated with the trip, and draws conclusons for energy taxation: Getting There Was More than Half the ... (Vox Baby, July 7).

Update: If Dingell introduces this, it isn't because he hopes it will pass.  Here is Edmund Andres in the New York Times: Counting on Failure, Energy Chairman Floats Carbon Tax (July6):

The proposal came from Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and it runs directly counter to the view of most Democrats that any tax on energy would be a politically disastrous approach to slowing global warming.

But Mr. Dingell, in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on C-Span, suggested that his goal was to show that Americans are not willing to face the real cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. His message appeared to be that Democratic leaders were setting unrealistic legislative goals.

“I sincerely doubt that the American people will be willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,” said Mr. Dingell, whose committee will be drafting a broad bill on climate change this fall.

“I will be introducing in the next little bit a carbon tax bill, just to sort of see how people think about this,” he continued. “When you see the criticism I get, I think you’ll see the answer to your question.”

h/t to Mankiw: A saboteur joins the club (July8).  If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't.

Revised July 8.

Health impacts of climate change in the U.S.

Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone look at the U.S. health impacts of global warming: Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US (NBER working paper #13178, June 2007).  We're going to use more energy inputs to produce health.   From the abstract:

Is Chinese pollution killing fewer persons per capita than EU pollution?

Richard McGregor reports from Beijing on a new World Bank study: 750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution (Financial Times, July 3).  There are two parts to the story: (1) the deaths, and (2) the suppression of the numbers:

Good news for bon vivants!

Bridges Trade BioRes reports, "BELUGA CAVIAR BACK ON THE MARKET"

The downside of Botswana's diamonds

Botswana has been able to build a remarkable growth record on its diamond endowment, without falling victim to the resource curse (How did Botswana avoid the "resource curse"?, Ben Muse Oct 17, 2006).

But yet, as John Holm posts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Africa Forum, everything's not hunky-dory (Diamonds and Distorted Development in Botswana, Jan 8, 2007):

Yet there is another, more pessimistic side to the story of Botswana’s development.   To put the matter simply, diamonds have produced distorted development.  Most obvious has been the limited economic spin-off in terms of employment. Debswana, the diamond mining corporation owned jointly by the government and DeBeers, employs about 6,500 people, or just 2 percent of the workforce.  To be sure, there is significant secondary employment generated by the company’s contractors and consumption by Debswana employees.  The bottom line, however, is that after decades of rapid GDP growth, about 40 percent of the working age population is unemployed.  Apart from the diamond industry, no other economic sector has experienced much growth.  In the meantime, the educational system, well funded by diamond income, annually churns out large numbers of students who cannot find jobs, even when they have a university education.  Top planners in the education have concluded that government must restructure the system to prepare  youth for export to the global economy, since few jobs will be available inside the country in the foreseeable future!

Another distortion has to do with the size of government.  Diamond sales have fueled rapid expansion of government employment.  The result is that the public sector now employs almost 45 percent of the workforce (295,000), if parastatal corporations are included.  The national government alone employs one-third of the total workforce.  The result is the emergence of a bureaucratic behemoth with a capacity to penetrate and regulate many aspects of society...

Still another distortion is that the government is inclined to use its massive income to subsidize major sectors of economy and society.  Other African states have privatized sizeable sections of their governments over the last several decades.  In contrast, the Botswana government has been moving at a snail’s pace.  Regular money losers like Air Botswana and the copper mines continue to limp along with subsidies from the government.... 

A looming political danger to government is the power of the diamond trade unions.  If the unions should launch a sustained strike (Debswana holds a considerable diamond reserve, so government could survive a short strike), the government could be brought to its knees.  As a result labor laws serve to restrict union activity severely, particularly in the diamond sector....

I learned about Holm's post from a Lars Smith's post at Conservation Finance: Diamonds and the resource curse (Jan 12, 2007)

re "hunky-dory" see also : World Wide Words. Michael Quinion writes on international English from a British viewpoint and Answers.com.

North, to the Arctic

With respect to global warming:

Charles Clover reports for Seafood.com.news (paid registration required to read news stories) that "Russia building trawlers to exploit Arctic." (November 1):

Russian trawlers are already being built to exploit the Arctic seas opened up as the sea ice shrinks as a result of global warming, scientists warned yesterday.

Yet the international agreements which constrain oil, gas and fisheries activities in the High Arctic are at best rudimentary and at worst defective, a meeting in London heard yesterday.

Much of these fish will be in international waters and a race to exploit them and the oil and gas supplies in Arctic waters is already on. Russia has lodged a claim to the waters as far as the North Pole...

A year ago, I posted on new transportation routes that may be opened by the melting of the ice cap: Over the top (of the world) (Ben Muse, Oct 10, 2005).  The future may be bright for Churchill, Manitoba.

Modeling vampire-human interaction

Michael Stastny at Mahalanobis reviews the literature on dynamic predator-prey models of vampire-human interaction: Representative Vampires (Michael Stastny, Oct. 24):

As a predator-prey scenario, we can model the dynamics of the population using some differential equations. The problem for the vampires is to set a bloodsucking rate (humans per vampire) so as to maximize a utility function subject to the dynamics. However, the model has to be made more sophisticated to account for the cyclical bloodsucking patterns found in real vampires...

Stastny notes a literature pointing to additional applications of the model in political economy.

At the University of Florida: Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility, Scientist Says (based on an alternative predator-prey model). 

Joel, at Far Outliers, has been running a series of posts inspired by the original Count Dracula:

• The Real Dracula's Contemporaries
• San Juan Capistrano, Defender of Belgrade, 1456
• Dracula vs. the Transylvanian Germans
• A Vlach, Impaled

He [Dracula] took as many captives as he could find and impaled them "lengthwise and crosswise," according to Beheim's narrative. Their bodies were strung on Tîmpa Hill above the chapel. Dracula meanwhile was seated at a table having his meal; he seemed to enjoy the gruesome scenario of his butchers cutting off the limbs of many of his victims. Beheim tells us the additional detail that the prince "dipped his bread in the blood of the victims," since "watching human blood flow gave him courage." The stage was thus set for Dracula's later reputation as a blood drinker or vampire, and his subsequent fictional reincarnation as Count Dracula. As we will see, this episode at Tîmpa Hill did more to damage Dracula's reputation than any other act in his whole career.  (From Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times, by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally (Back Bay, 1989), pp. 120, 123-124)

How did Botswana avoid the "resource curse"?

Little, land-locked Botswana has had one of the best growth records in the world (What happened in Botswana?, Ben Muse, Jan 9, 2004).

Finding diamond mines didn't hurt.  But many countries have been unable to leverage rich natural resource endowments into growth.  Many think that under some conditions resource riches can lead to lower growth rates.  This is the resource curse.  Why was Botswana different?

Her President, Festus Gontebanye Mogae, laid out his thoughts recently at the Center for Global Development.  Michael Clemens reports:

What did happen on Easter Island?

Jared Diamond has popularized the use of Easter Island as a model of ecologically driven social collapse brought about by unsustainable consumption (Easter Island's End , Discover, August 1995).  He argues that the original inhabitants overharvested the available resource base.  The result was disaster:

Harvesting salt hay

Eric Williams reports on an old Cape Cod agricultural activity, harvesting hay (Spartina patens) from salt marshes: A missing piece of history (Cape Cod Times, May 22, registration probably necessary after a few days). 

Salt haying took place in marshes along the North American Atlantic coast from very early colonial times (the process is described here: Marshing and Salt Hay - see also the links at the end of this post). 

Trading off diversity for productivity

It's easy for an economist to sympathize with fisheries scientists who argue, as Carl Walters and Steven Martell do in their new textbook, Fisheries Ecology and Management, that fisheries science is about choice and trade-offs:

Texts on fisheries and ecosystem management typically begin with discussions about the objectives of management. It is easy to say that the objectives of modern fisheries management should be to ensure sustainable harvests, viable fishing communities, and healthy ecosystems, i.e., to sustain a mix of production, economic, and ecological values. Unfortunately, such platitudes are of little value in guiding either management or science, because there can be conflicts among the component objectives.

A more useful statement of objectives for scientists and managers would be to say that the central objective of modern fisheries science should be to clearly expose trade-offs among conflicting objectives, and the central objective of modern fisheries management should be to develop effective ways to decide where to operate along the trade-offs, and how to operate successfully..."

They elaborate on four trade-offs: harvest now versus harvest later, ecosystem diversity versus ecosystem productivity, efficiency versus jobs, and the allocation of fishery management resources among different activities. 

Their discussion of the ecosystem tradeoff is especially interesting:

...It is foolish to pretend that there is some ecosystem principle stating that ecosystems are most productive of harvestable surpluses when they are maintained in the most natural and diverse possible state. An aquatic ecosystem in its natural state, in fact, exhibits no net production at all; the various organisms that prosper in this state have already appropriated all surplus production, otherwise they would be growing in abundance and/or would likely have already been subject to invasions by other species that could use them as resources.  Further, long-term data sets on places such as the North Sea do not even support the reasonable proposition that the simplification of ecosystems through fishing might cause increased variability, vulnerability to invasion by exotic species, or even "dynamic instability" among the abundances of interacting species...

...If we set up multiple fisheries in ecosystem models, then search for an "optimum" mix of fishing efforts to maximize some simple economic objective like total profit from the ecosystem...we find that this optimum mix often involves an ecosystem-scale "farming" strategy...That is, the optimization tells us to use some of the fisheries to deliberately overexploit (control/cull) the competitors/predators of a few most valued species, so as to direct as much ecosystem production as possible through these species. This is, of course, exactly what people do in modern farming, through cultivation and pest-control practices. Almost every fisheries scientist who has seen such results has reacted with disgust and has turned to alternative objective functions that represent both broader values (existence as well as catch values) and also the "risk-spreading" value of maintaining a diversified "portfolio" of productive populations. But the simple fact is that we do not have strong, objective evidence from past fisheries experience to demonstrate that it would ultimately be destructive to engage in ecosystem-scale farming, i.e., to move a long ways along a trade-off relationship between natural diversity and the total economic value of fish production.

Terry Anderson and Peter Hill (in their new book on property rights in the 19th Century American West, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier ) suggest that this is what happened in the American West, when cattle replaced buffalo.

Buffalo were treated as a common property resource in the Old West, and hunted almost to extinction. They remained common property - unlike cattle - because the transactions costs of creating property rights were too high:

The fourth and perhaps most important reason that property rights to buffalo did not evolve was that bison were difficult to control and manage. Ownership and control required either that an owner control a sufficiently large amount of land over which bison could freely range or that he be able to fence them. U.S. land policy was directed toward settled agriculture with small-scale farms, and this made it difficult to establish ownership and control of large land areas...Homestead policy during the hunting era established 160 acres as the maximum size that a settler could claim. Some settlers were able to control more access through multiple claims and fraud, but rarely were property rights secure enough to establish claims to the several thousand acres needed for a viable buffalo herd. To fence buffalo in a smaller area was improbable because barbed wire was not patented and produced in commercial quantities until 1873 and because federal land laws prohibited fencing of the open range. In other words, artificially high transactions costs made it almost impossible for anyone think of establishing ownership of a buffalo herd...

With buffalo being undomesticated, they were not suitable for any sort of settled agriculture. The buffalo were difficult to handle, particularly in stressful situations, and could not be herded or driven to market like cattle...

...Basically, buffalo and cattle consumed grass of the Great Plains and converted it to products in demand in the East and Europe. Hence the entrepreneur had to ask what was th most profitable way to convert the grass into marketable products. The fact that cattle could easily be trailed to a rail head or even to market meant that cattle were valuable for their meat and hides, while the intractable buffalo were valuable only for their hides. In the 1880s, a buffalo hide was worth $3.00, while a cow was worth $20 to $25...

All in all, perhaps the history of the American bison was close to economically optimal. They were magnificent animals that populated much of the Great Plains, and they formed an economic resource that supported Indians and early settlers. They were exploited rapidly by both the robe trade and the hide (leather) trade, perhaps more rapidly than private rights would have allowed. Nevertheless, it is likely that, given the low economic value of buffalo and the fact that they were primarily valuable as an amenity resource, the appropriate degree of preservation occurred.

The buffalo resource collapsed in the early 1880s. As a sidenote - the collapse was very sudden. Anderson and Hill quote John Hanner:

The extirpation of the buffalo was so rapid that it even caught the hunters by surprise. Curiously enough, not even the buffalo hunters themselves were at the time aware of the fact that the end of the hunting season of 1882-83 was also the end of the buffalo, at least as an inhabitant of the plains and as a source of revenue. In the autumn of 1883, they nearly all outfitted as usual, often at the expense of many hundreds of dollars, and blithely sought "the range" that up to that time had been so prolific in robes. The end was in nearly every case the same - total failure and bankruptcy. it was indeed hard to believe that not only the millions, but also the thousands, had actually gone, and forever.

I wonder why the collapse was so unexpected? Walters and Martell point out that with many species of fish, catch per unit of effort can remain high, while the overall population is declining. The remaining fish group together within ever smaller geographical areas, and the fishermen target on these, rather than continuing to search empty water. As a result, catch-per-unit-of-effort may stay high until close to the end, and be a poor indicator of a declining stock. Did something like this happen to the buffalo?

How is fisheries policy made?

Carl Walters and Steven Martell of the University of British Columbia have a new text on Fisheries Ecology and Management.

Lots of fisheries science, but also lots of tart asides on the practice of fisheries management.  Like this (following a discussion of tradeoffs between management goals) :

...In many cases there is not even a clearly defined forum in which trade-off relationships can be presented to all who consider themselves stakeholders, so that debate might lead to some consensus about the best balance. Rather, these trade-off issues are debated in multiple jurisdictions, using multiple routes to access political decision-makers, and with scientific exaggeration and misinformation used routinely as debating tools.

Light pollution

Light pollution

Urban lighting makes it harder to see the stars.  This makes it a concern to star gazers and amateur and professional astronomers.  The International Dark-Sky Association tries to publicize the problem and promote solutions.  The Italian Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute has another useful set of resource pages.  Click here for the Institute's "World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness."

But ecologists are also becoming concerned.  Ben Harder points to some of the research in the story "Degraded Darkness" in the most recent issue of Conservation in Practice (a publication of the Society for Conservation Biology).  Lots of species behave different in the light and the dark, or change their behavior when lights are on after dark.

"...Many of the effects of artificial light may resonate up and down food chains, dragging whole ecosystems into imbalance. And by modifying the playing field on which nocturnal organisms develop, interact, and reproduce, artificial light may sculpt not only their individual lives but also the biological evolution of their species...

It's tempting to assume that artificial light distresses only a few exquisitely sensitive species. But mounting evidence suggests that the disappearance of darkness can affect plants and animals in a variety of ecosystems.  Snake populations are declining in the vicinity of developing parts of California, for example. And intriguingly, it seems that not all the blame lies with familiar culprits like new roads and neighborhoods. Nocturnal snake species are thinning out more rapidly than diurnal snake species, even in areas where development isn?t cutting directly into snake habitat. "There are certain areas in southern California," says biologist Robert Fisher of the U.S. Geological Survey, "that have what seems like suitable habitat for these nocturnal snakes. But they?re not there, even though their diurnal counterparts are." ...

Moore [a Wellesley College scientist - Ben] suspects that artificial illumination alters aquatic ecosystems from the smallest organisms on up. The implications are far reaching and could ultimately link light pollution to water quality. Minute zooplankton lurk well below the surface during the day to avoid predators, then rise to graze on algae at night. But artificial light discourages them from venturing toward the surface. "If their grazing is inhibited . . . effects will cascade up the food chain," Moore says. Algae populations could explode in response to reduced predation, and those blooms would deplete dissolved oxygen critical to fish, crowd out other photosyn-thesizers, and cast unwanted daytime shade on submerged aquatic vegetation that provides habitat for juvenile fish..."

An interesting article available on the web.  (materials from a conference on the ecological impacts of artificial lighting can be found at the web page of the Urban Wildlands Group).

Ecology's systemic impacts and associated unanticipated consequences bring to mind the interactions between markets we study in economics.  The Scientific American recently had a neat article on the impacts of reintroducing wolves into the Yellowstone National Park: "Lessons from the Wolf"  Evidently, the reintroduction of wolves reduced elk populations, fewer elk browsed on willow trees, willow populations in stream bottoms rebounded, stream banks were stabilized, beaver populations grew by exploiting the willow for food and construction material, and trout habitat improved.  Wolves outcompeted coyote populations, reducing coyote numbers and increasing the population sizes of coyote prey (voles, mice, etc.).

Economic analyses of federal regulatory proposals

"Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, fall the environmental, cost-benefit, and small entity analyses." T.S. Eliot didn't write exactly that ("falls the shadow"), but it applies to federal regulation.

Various statutes and executive orders require environmental analysis, cost-benefit analysis, economic analysis of the impacts of a regulation on small businesses, governments, and non-profits, and more, before a good (or bad) idea can become regulatory reality. Most of these requirements are informational: a regulation isn't generally precluded because it may fail a cost-benefit analysis, or have an adverse impact on small entities.

These statutes and orders are an attempt to deal with a principal-agent problem. Civil servants focus on a problem defined by their agency mission. Highway administrators want to build highways - they believe in highways, and their constituency groups also want highways. But the public has a wider range of interests. They want to build highways, but they want to protect the environment as well, and they want to provide opportunities for small businesses. These analysis requirements attempt to force agencies to face some of these other, broader issues.

The lineage of the cost-benefit requirement can be traced back to the Nixon Administration. It took its modern form early in the first Reagan administration in Executive Order 12291. This served through the Reagan and Bush administrations and was superseded by E.O. 12866 early in the Clinton administration. Despite Reagan-era liberal concerns that cost-benefit analysis was simply a tool to prevent needed social and environmental regulation, the Clinton administration continued the practice. The new Bush administration has not replaced E.O. 12866 - it did introduce new guidelines for 12866 analysis last fall.

Does the cost benefit requirement do any good? Winston Harrington and Richard Morgenstern ("Evaluating Regulatory Impact Analyses") survey the literature on the different ways of approaching this question. This survey was prepared for an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference on evaluation of regulation last fall.

Are the analyses done well (presumably a bad analysis won't accomplish much good)? Do they have the basic things you should find in a good analysis (a selection of alternatives, an executive summary? This is an "extensive content test.") Do they not only have the requisite parts, but are the parts well done? ("intensive content test"). Are their predictions borne out? (an "outcome test"). Do they make a difference in the nature of the regulatory process outcomes? (a "function test"). More to the point, do they improve the functioning of the regulatory process? (a more demanding version of the function test).

Richard Hahn and Patrick Dudley do an "intensive content" test in this recent AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies report, "How Well Does the Government Do Cost-Benefit Analysis?". They review 55 EPA studies from 1982 to 1999 to see to what extent they include the basic elements of a good analysis. Hahn and Dudley focus on analyses of economically significant regulations - those with costs or benefits over $100 million a year.

Hahn and Dudley found that:

• Not all studies included estimates of total costs; costs to industry were reported more often than costs to federal and state governments.


• Benefit estimates were not presented as systematically as cost estimates; benefits were less likely to be monetized.


• Comparisons of costs and benefits (through net benefit or cost effectiveness analysis) were often not made even when they could be made: "Of the rules in the sample that monetized benefits, only 54 percent calculated net benefits. Of the rules in the sample that quantified benefits, only 69 percent calculated cost effectiveness or net benefits." (page 11)


• The percent of analyses including at least one alternative dropped from 89% in the Reagan administration, to 74% in the Clinton administration. It was uncommon to calculate net benefits or cost effectiveness for alternatives.


• There was no clear trend in the quality of the analyses across the administrations

A useful 79-point checklist in the appendix shows the elements Hahn and Dudley would like to have seen in these analyses.

Harrington, Morgenstern and Nelson performed an "outcome" test in the RFF discussion paper "On the Accuracy of Regulatory Cost Estimates." This is a nice article - I posted on it in October 2002 in "Do government economists make mistakes?".

Harrington and Morgenstern survey literature on "function testing." They note that an examination of individual documents for the presence of alternatives suggests that the document was meant for use in designing the regulation. Absence of alternatives (or alternatives that are obviously strawmen) suggests not.

Statistical studies relating the characteristics of analyses to regulatory outcomes may also be helpful. Do the regulations differ systematically with characteristics of the regulatory analysis? This may suggest that one affects the other, although whether for better or worse may be unclear. Harrington and Morgenstern point to two studies. One found that higher quality analysis was associated with more stringent (although not necessarily better) environmental regulation. A second found that analysis "had at best a slight effect on cost-effectiveness."

Case studies may also identify relations between analysis and regulatory outcomes. Meta-analyses of lots of case studies can begin to suggest patterns. Harrington and Morgenstern point to a volume of case studies of EPA regulation (Morgenstern, Richard D. editor. Economic Analyses at EPA: Assessing Regulatory Impact). The authors of these cases studies - generally "closely connected with the regulatory process they were writing about" - felt that the analyses had improved the ultimate regulations by leading to changes that reduced costs or increased benefits. A clear lesson from these studies was:

"...the critical importance of timing to the usefulness of RIAs [cost-benefit analyses - Ben]. Several case-study authors mentioned the fact that many RIAs are not initiated until after the regulatory process is well under way, often after the preferred alternative has been selected...In this situation, the usefulness of the RIA is obviously undermined. Worse, it puts pressure on the analyst not to deliver bad news about benefits and costs, especially abut the preferred alternative, leading to cynicism about the role of RIAs in the regulatory process. Most analysts believe the RIA should begin before the regulatory process begins, in order to develop information useful in decisionmakng."

Minor editorial revisions 4-14-04

What Caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s?

What Caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s?

Dust storm near Stratford Texas, 1935
NOAA photo archive

Severe drought produced the "Dust Bowl" in the 1930s;  similar droughts in the 1950s and 1970s were not as destructive.  Why?