Month: March 2008

Australia has a baby bonus.  The birth rate shot up on the day the bonus first went into effect, July 1, 2004.  As Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans explained, over 1000 births were delayed from June to July and about 300 births were delayed by more than two weeks.

The bonus is scheduled to rise from $4,187 to $5,000 this July 1 and Leigh and Gans have pleaded with the government to phase it in order to prevent too much birth delay which they think could be unhealthy for the child.  Alas, the government has declined.

All of which leads Andrew to denounce, in delightful Aussie-speak, the bonus as an "unhealthy incentive for women to over-cook their babies."

I couldn’t agree more.  As a libertarian and a humanist I join with Andrew to denounce all government incentives to overcook babies.

Hat tip to Dave Undis.

Here is a good Sachs article, summarizing his views, namely that a carbon tax is not nearly enough to solve the problem.  He writes:

…low-emissions
technologies developed in the rich world will need to be adopted
rapidly in poorer countries. Patent protection, while promoting
innovation, could slow the diffusion of these technologies to
low-income countries unless compensatory actions are taken. As with
medicines, patent protection may be double edged: promoting innovation
but slowing diffusion to the poor.

Economists like to set corrective prices and then be done with it,
leaving the rest of household and business decisions to the magic of
the market. This hands-off approach will not work in the case of a
major overhaul of energy technology. We will need large-scale public
funding of research, development and demonstration projects;
intellectual property policies to promote rapid dissemination to poor
countries; and the promotion of public debate and acceptance of new
options. We will need to back winners, at least provisionally, to get
new systems moving.

While this makes a great deal of sense, I am already feeling the "yikes are we reallly up to that?" response.  Sachs also writes: 

Consider three potentially transformative low-emissions technologies:
carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), plug-in hybrid automobiles and
concentrated solar-thermal electricity generation. Each will require a
combination of factors to succeed: more applied scientific research,
important regulatory changes, appropriate infrastructure, public
acceptance and early high-cost investments to “ride the learning curve”
to lower costs in the long term. A failure on one or more of these
points could kill the technologies.

Again, this more than makes sense.  It is a sober breath of fresh air in a debate that too often looks for easy palliatives.  My worry, however, comes in Sachs’s fairly optimistic-sounding book.  He stresses that for no more than one percent of global gdp per year, we can avoid a doubling of carbon emissions, relative to pre-industrial levels, by 2050. 

I am much more pessimistic, partly for reasons Sachs already outlines.  I won’t recapitulate all of my previous writings on the topic (follow the links here), so let me give a kind of "splat" response: Chinese CO2 emissions are much worse than we had thought, China resists outside pressure, Chinese governance is often of very poor quality, China is currently subsidizing energy consumption, China thinks it is our problem to solve, China won’t automatically keep on becoming prosperous, the super eco-conscious Europeans in fact haven’t made much of a dent in the problem in terms of percentage change, the U.S. has done better on carbon emissions than most of the Kyoto signatories, the price of oil rose fivefold in a relatively short period of time without much helping, a gradual increase in carbon taxes (in a Hotelling model) can lead to more extraction today thus worsening the problem, and if the rich countries massively cut their carbon consumption the prices of coal and oil would plummet and the incentive for someone to buy and smoke the stuff will be all that much stronger.  Valuable stuff in the ground tends to be dug up and used.  And by the way, curing the ozone problem was easy and even a "simple" international organization such as WTO gets tied up in gridlock.

Did I mention that some of the world’s nations might even benefit from global warming, most of all Russia, and thus they might wish to sabotage various partial solutions and that Russia holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the UN?  And that geo-engineering is massively risky and might be considered by some countries to be an act of war?

That’s not even all the arguments I can think of.  And no, they are not arguments for ignoring the problem but they are arguments against optimism.  As I read Sachs, the core message is: "We can solve this problem if we try."

I would sooner start with the list of these problems.  Yikes, and yes I know it might scare some people into simply letting things slide.  But if action is to have any chance of succeeding we need to understand the problem.  I’d like the book — and yes I know this is a popular book, but even popular books should advance the debate — to start with the tough stuff and tell us what to do.

Maybe the technical costs of Sachs’s fix are one percent of global gdp.  But when we consider the imperfections of institutions, I fear that the costs are much much higher.  At the end of Sachs’s article he writes:

By 2010 at the latest, the world should be breaking ground on
demonstration CCS coal-fired plants in China, India, Europe and the
U.S.; the wealthy nations should be helping to finance and build
concentrated solar-thermal plants in states that border the Sahara; and
highly subsidized plug-in hybrids should be rolling off the assembly
line. Only these steps will enable us to peer much farther down the
path of truly transformative change.

Under one meaning of the word "should," this may sound just right.  Under another meaning of the word "should," it’s further reason for thinking the proffered formula doesn’t have much chance of success.

JP MorganChase was in talks on Sunday night for a deal that would quintuple its offer for Bear Stearns,
the beleaguered investment bank, in an effort to pacify angry Bear
shareholders, according to people involved in the negotiations.

More.  Last week we were wondering why the price was above $2 a share.  And last week some of you were calling this deal a bailout of Bear Stearns.  Now Bear shareholders are alleging they were coerced into taking this deal.  This is a) good news that the firm is worth more than we had thought, b) bad news for dealing with the next round of problems (it is harder for any subsequent solution to be viewed as legitimate), and c) another reason why the answer isn’t just more regulation.  By the way, note that JPMorgan isn’t actually paying that much more.

On Wednesday David Leonhardt posed the question, here is part of my answer:

To understand the depths of the current crisis, let’s go back to an
apparently unrelated episode in economic thought: the socialist
calculation debate. Starting in the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises, the leader
of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, charged that socialism
was unable to engage in rational economic calculation. Without market
prices, he reasoned, no one knows how much economic resources are
worth.

The subsequent poor performance of planned economies
bore out his point…The irony is that the supercharged
capital markets of the American economy are now – at least temporarily
– in a somewhat comparable position. Starting in August, many asset
markets lost their liquidity, as trading in many kinds of junk bonds,
mortgage-backed securities and auction-rate securities has virtually
vanished.

Market prices have been drained of their informational
value and thus don’t much reflect the “wisdom of crowds,” as they would
under normal circumstances. Investors are instead flocking to the
safest of assets, like Treasury bills.

The absence of trading
is a big problem. Financial institutions have been stuck holding
illiquid assets, whose value cannot be easily determined. Who wants to
lend to the institutions holding them? No wonder there is a credit
crisis and a general attitude of wait and see.

And here is another problem, namely the relationship between Mises’s argument and the degree of leverage.  When leverage is high the needs for exact calculation are much greater:

This gridlock is especially harmful because leverage is so high, and
financial institutions are so interconnected through swaps and loans.
Institutions that rely so heavily on debt are precarious and need
up-to-date information about valuations. When they don’t have it,
markets freeze up. This is what has taken policymakers by surprise and
turned a real estate crash into a much bigger financial problem.

Do read the whole thing; I also consider why price declines don’t necessarily restore asset liquidity.

Money has no value in space. When seven astronauts are living together in a cramped atmosphere the psychology of small isolated groups kicks in. Whoever has squirreled away the most M&Ms, tortillas or coffee has the most bargaining power. Those are items that are most prized at the end of a mission if someone runs short in their own stash. Astronauts’ meals are color coded on shuttle missions — and reliable sources tell ABC News some astronauts aren’t above switching the colored dots on their dehydrated meals if they have run out of say, lasagna, on day six and have way too much creamed spinach left.

Here is more and the story is interesting throughout.  Are they not allowed to bring money on the ship or does money temporarily lose its function as a general medium of exchange?  Does the use of money, or the promise of money, break down spaceship norms?  They’re allowed to bring iPods, so can songs become a medium of exchange?  Or does preventing a general medium of exchange produce network externalities (increasing returns) to enhance the liquidity of all the other goods which need to be traded?  You do in fact get the tortillas being squirreled away.  Can this be a case where the emergence of a general money would be inefficient?

So there is a possibility that what has looked like peak oil to some
observers (something I believe is coming), was actually GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries
investing by not extracting oil.

Here is more.  In these models, once oil prices start falling, they can fall very fast indeed.