Results for “pollution”
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My interview with Sam Matey

He is a podcaster who mainly does transcripts.  Our discussion was largely but by no means entirely about climate change, here is one excerpt:

Sam: And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They’re building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I’m feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.

Tyler: I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it’s very far from a national priority with any party that I’m aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there’s a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn’t, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.

So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.

And:

Sam: I agree that there’s not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?

Tyler: It makes sense, but keep in mind there’s also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it’s a bigger requirement than is often imagined.

Again, I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic either. I’m genuinely uncertain.

And this:

Tyler: Maybe, but there’s two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we’ve already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I’m very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There’s so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there’s this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there’s this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.

In the latter part of the dialogue we talk about Morocco, Kenya, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the productivity crisis in Canada, among other issues.  Will Buddhism rise or fall in influence?  And what does it mean to suggest that books are overrated?

Do recessions benefit our health?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

The human and economic costs of recessions are deep and well-documented. They can also have real health benefits, however, and seldom are they expressed so starkly as in this sentence in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.”

…Overall, the paper notes, age-adjusted mortality in the US fell by 2.3% during the Great Recession. The finding, from professors at MIT, the University of Chicago and McMasters University, broadly tracks previous research showing that that mortality rates rise in good times and fall in hard times.

And:

One answer is related to air pollution, which is lower in recessions, typically because of reduced economic activity. The benefits of lower pollution levels persist long after the recession — at least 10 years, according to the researchers’ estimates. Air pollution reduction accounts for more than one-third of the mortality benefits from the Great Recession.

And all of this:

The data do provide some additional clues. Except for cancer, for example, all major causes of mortality fell during the Great Recession. Decreases in cardiovascular-related deaths accounted for about half the mortality gains during that time. Furthermore, the mortality benefits were concentrated among Americans without college degrees. You might think that some of these improved health outcomes were due to people losing their stressful, low-paying jobs, but unemployment can be pretty stressful too.

For a 55-year-old, according to the paper’s estimates, about one-quarter of the economic costs of the Great Recession were countered by these mortality gains. So the Great Recession was still a very bad event — just less bad than we used to think. That is especially true for less educated Americans, who were hit harder by unemployment but also reaped the mortality gains.

At the top end of the age distribution, Americans aged 65 and older didn’t lose much from the Great Recession, in part because so many were already retired or working only part-time (in some cases, they were ensconced in jobs they were not going to lose). The researchers estimate that those over age 60 were also better off, on net, from the Great Recession.

Worth a ponder.  Here is the original paper by Amy FinkelsteinMatthew J. NotowidigdoFrank Schilbach Jonathan Zhang.

What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her.  Here is from Wikipedia:

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and scienceUS historynuclear pollutionJohn Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis.  So what should I ask her?

*Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics*

The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland.  One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word.  Here is one bit:

Marriage in rural Ireland is, I suggest, inhibited by anomie, expressed in a lack of sexual vitality; familistic loyalties that exaggerate latent brother-sister incestuous inclinations; an emotional climate fearful of intimacy and mistrustful of love; and an excessive preoccupation with sexual purity and pollution, fostered by an ascetic Catholic tradition.  That these impediments to marriage and to an uninhibited expression of sexuality also contribute to the high rates of mental illness among middle-aged bachelor farmers is implicit in the following interpretations and verified in the life history materials and psychological tests of these men.

And:

In the preceding pages I have drawn a rather grim portrait of Irish country life, one that differs markedly from previous ethnographic studies.  Village social life and institutions are, I contend, in a state of disintegration, and villagers are suffering from anomie, of which the most visible sign is the spiraling schizophrenia.  Traditional culture has become unadaptive, and the newly emerging cultural forms as yet lack integration.  The sexes are locked into isolation and mutual hostility.  Deaths and emigrations surpass marriages and births.

Recommended.  This seminal book, republished and revised in 2001, but originally from the 1970s, would be much harder to write and publish today.

How to travel in India

An MR reader asks me:

….what have you found to be nonobvious activities with high return on time invested in India?

Perhaps it is all obvious, but here is my list:

1. Make sure you visit a bunch of smaller temples, not just the famous, very well known sites.

2. Never turn down a trip, or side trip, to any particular part of India.  Never say “Nah, it is not interesting there.”  Because it is.

3. Along those lines, try to see many different parts of the country.  Think of India as more culturally diverse than say Europe.

4. Most of the typical “sights” are overrated, the best sight is India itself.  I enjoyed the (Indian) visitors to the Taj Mahal more than the Taj itself.

5. The very best food is often in mid-tier restaurants, smallish, often with lines, find out when you should arrive.  There isn’t a good enough reason to risk street food, given the quality available elsewhere, though in many other countries I do recommend street food.

6. Try to visit residences from all income classes.

7. Noise pollution still matters.

8. You cannot expect people to be on time, or to be able to avoid social pressures to join situations, spend more time somewhere, see another family member, and so on.

9. Unless you have been to India very recently, the infrastructure is much better than what you might be expecting from a previous trip.

10. India has the world’s best hotels, and many of them are less expensive than you might think, especially in off-season.

11. When choosing when to visit, do look into issues of heat, monsoon, and air pollution, before making concrete plans.

What else?

Unintended Geoengineering

In my post SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited I noted that regulations requiring ships to reduce sulfur have increased global warming. Science has a new piece on the phenomena and the implications for intended geoengineering:

Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.

The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.

SuperFreakonomics on Geoengineering, Revisited

Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.

The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.

Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.

“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”

King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:

The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.

Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.

Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.

…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.

Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.

Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.

Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:

Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of the US’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.

…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.

Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.

Thinking about congestion pricing in terms of the quantity dual

Ask a YIMBY person: “What about the extra traffic from all those new people moving in?  Won’t the ambulance arrival times be slower?  Won’t the air pollution be worse?  Won’t….?” and you will get a reassuring answer that a) yes there will be some problems but they can be managed by other means, and b) the external benefits of new arrivals will outweigh those problems.

Fair enough.

But then ask that same YIMBY person: “What about the extra traffic coming from all these out-of-NYC visitors?” …and you will get a very different answer.  “Tax them!”

So the basic view, at current margins, is “residents good, visitors bad.”

Maybe!  But, to follow up on the recent debate, that differential treatment is never justified.  What if a guy starts visiting a girlfriend in the East Village — by car — for one night every two weeks?  Then he is a visitor to be taxed.  Say the relationship goes well, he is there 2/3 of the time, and he rents a space for his car in her apartment building garage and uses it periodically.  Is he then “a resident”?  Are his per hour externalities for the world then suddenly so much more positive?  (Does he stop spitting on the sidewalk?)

Again, maybe, but you can see the a priorism embedded in the standard “YIMBY plus congestion tax” mix of proposals.  Somehow the differential views on residents and visitors do not need to be justified.

If you wish, think of the cars issue in terms of quantity allocation.  There is only so much space for cars in lower Manhattan.  How much of that space do you wish to allocate to residents with cars or to visitors with cars?  (This question can hold whether you are doing the allocating with prices, with planning, or by some other method.)

If you favor YIMBY plus a congestion tax, in essence you think resident car use is better than visitor car use.

But how do you know that?  Repeating to me on Twitter that pollution is bad, traffic in NYC is too slow, externalities are present, and so on is a non sequitur that does not address the question.

Alternatively, you might think visitor car use is better at the margin.  Then you might place bigger taxes on cars garaged in lower Manhattan, and lower the tolls on the George Washington Bridge.

I don’t see a good a priori case against the visitors.  Maybe there are diminishing returns to being exposed to the genius of NYC, and at the margin we want to encourage the dad who drives from Westchester County with his 15 year old son to see a concert at the Village Vanguard, to get the kid excited about the saxophone.  Or maybe there are increasing returns to being exposed to the genius of NYC (you have to soak up book wisdom at the Strand for twenty years running), which would then cut the other way.

We do observe a lot of people living in NYC for a few years when they are younger, and then leaving for saner pastures.  But they move there to be moved and inspired for a while.  That suggests there is some temporary nature to the net benefits from the exposure to NYC.  We also see more generally, for political economy reasons, that status quo urban policies tend to favor residents and punish visitors to an undue degree.  And, if we stick with the pro-YIMBY intuitions and reallocate more road resources toward residents, do we not have to worry about the traffic, noise, and congestion from the required extra construction?  These arguments don’t prove any conclusion, but they do suggest there should not be an a priori bias against reallocating some traffic space away from residents and toward visitors.

The point here is to have consistent views across YIMBY and a congestion tax.  And if you think we should reallocate vehicle space more toward residents and away from visitors, please make a comparative argument to that effect.  Repeating observations about crowding and externalities is not an argument on either of these questions.

Addendum: For an extra point, “throughput” and “demand” are not the same.

I’ve been seeing this error frequently.  Congestion pricing may well increase throughput, which is how many users get through a road or some other chokepoint in a discrete period of time, say an hour.

It is much harder for congestion pricing to increase overall demand.  For instance, at a zero explicit price the ride takes much longer but overall more people will travel through than if you charge them $20 to do the trip.  That said, the $20 price may well increase throughput, but if it decreases demand there is still an opportunity cost from the policy.  Don’t use the possibility of higher throughput to argue the congestion toll does not have costs for many of the visitors (of course some visitors will gain due to heterogeneity effects).

Why the NYC congestion pricing plan is bad

I am seeing some critical comments on my latest column, mostly from people who are not reading it through, or in some cases they are making basic mistakes in economics.  Let me start with part of my conclusion:

I suspect that I could endorse a properly targeted version of congestion pricing for Manhattan, for instance, one that encouraged mass transit without discouraging density.

Many people are responding by making a version of that point and thinking it contradicts me.  Here are a few basic facts about the current proposal:

1. The off-peak price is too high at $17, relative to $23 for peak.

2. There is an odd and unjustified discrete notch at 60th St, which will cause further distortions of its own.

3. There is no difference for cars passing through and cars with passengers spending money or doing something productive in lower Manhattan.

This is not the traffic congestion charge you should be looking to implement.

A second line of responses (Erik B. and Alex) suggests that the congestion charge will not lower the flow of humans into Manhattan.  I am sorry, but demand curves slope downward!  The resulting auto commute does become more predictable and regular, but that holds only because there are fewer trips and to some extent because trips are time-shifted.  (Note that the small gap between the $17 and $23 prices suggests a small benefit from time shifting.)  Fewer outsiders will benefit from Manhattan, and those outsiders will skew richer and older.  The methods for improving the quality of the trip really do lower the number of trip-makers, probably both peak and off-peak.  It is not going to mean higher or even constant throughput for vehicles or humans.  (If you think it does, does that imply a big subsidy to car trips would get us to a carless city?  There are some non-linear scenarios where a congestion charge boosts throughput, such as when otherwise no cars move at all in extreme gridlock.  In reality, it seems cars are moving at about 12 mph in Manhattan.)

The actual possible gain — oddly not cited by the critics — is that a congestion charge might get a given visitor more effective time spent learning from Manhattan.  Though do note an offsetting effect — the higher the traffic problem, the more you will make each trip to Manhattan a grand and elaborate one, and it is your externality-less domestic time in Long Island that will suffer all the more.  So per person learning externalities from effective time spent in Manhattan could go either way, noting the number of visitors still goes down.

You might think such a congestion charge improves welfare (a sounder point than suggesting it will not have a standard price effect), but the whole point is that Manhattan density involves massive positive externalities, including for visitors and note that visitors also finance the  externality-rich activities of the natives:

In some urban settings, the clustering of human talent is of utmost importance. Manhattan is the densest urban area in the US, and it succeeds in large part because it is so crowded. You want to be there because other people want to be there. Even though I don’t live there, I nonetheless benefit from Manhattan, both when I visit and when I consume the television shows, movies, music, and art works that come, either directly or indirectly, out of this urban environment. Manhattan also supports America’s financial center, many tech start-ups, and much more.

I don’t want Manhattan to be less crowded, even though it probably would make many Manhattanites happier and less stressed. I want Manhattan to be efficient for me and others, not just for the residents. If there is any part of America where ideas rubbing together lead to great things, it is Manhattan (and the Bay Area). Arguably, Manhattan should be more crowded, at least if we consider everyone’s interest. That militates against congestion tolls, even though such charges are usually a good idea.

The actually useful solution is to make mass transit, most of all the subway, a reliable and predictable method of getting around.  Right now it is not.  (I doubt if lowering the already low subway prices gets you much.)

If you look at visits into Manhattan, whether by car or not, they already face lots of implicit taxes.  Those include poor roads, mediocre subway performance, high variance public infrastructure including on issues such as trash, pollution issues, some degree of crime, awful connecting infrastructure (NJ Transit anyone?) and much more.  And yet Manhattan is one of the world’s very top TFP factories and we are already taxing entry in so many different ways.

It does not make good economic sense to impose higher yet entry fees into that TFP factory.  Given that multiple externalities are present, the correct mix is to lower many different costs of entry and mobility (including within Manhattan), while shifting the relative use benefits toward mass transit and the subway.  Density really does have positive externalities here, and we all know how much idea makers and distributors are undercompensated.

There are a few more threads of responses on Twitter.  One is to note the noise and pollution costs of vehicles.  That is relevant, but fairly soon we will have lots more electric vehicles, which should be encouraged.  The tolls will become a revenue source that lasts forever and they will not be taken away, but the noise and pollution costs of the vehicles soon will be much lower.

Another thread is to argue that most of the people who drive will switch to mass transit if there is a congestion cost.  Some will, but we are asked to believe that a) current traffic congestion is so awful, b) people put up with it anyway, and c) they nonetheless can be easily nudged into taking mass transit.  That is an uncomfortable blend of views that fails to understand the initial motivations behind the car trips.  There are plenty of people with young kids, or elderly relatives, or multiple packages, or multiple stops, or unreliable mass transportation for getting back home at the end of the evening.  Many of those people cannot feasibly switch to mass transit and that is precisely why they put up with the bad traffic.  Say you finish your Manhattan doings at 10:45 p.m., and have to get back to your New Jersey home in a timely and safe manner.  The PATH train will work for some, but a lot of these people really do need cars to consummate the trip.

(It is a theoretically defensible argument to claim that this congestion tax is the only way of financing mass transit improvements. That may or may not be true, but if it is one should still “regret” the plan, which is not the attitude people are taking.  And are there guarantees this will lead to a refurbishment of the subway?  It has proven remarkably difficult to improve the system, and that is with rising NYC budgets.  Another argument that might work is if non-car visitors so hate seeing cars in Manhattan that the net human inflow, due to auto trips, goes down rather than up.  Do note however that the car trips are still helping to finance retail and cultural infrastructure that attracts the non-car visitors, so don’t just take complaints about cars at face value.  Furthermore this car hatred factor also should become less serious as we transition to electric vehicles.)

On net, do you think our most important cities should be more or less dense?  If you support YIMBYism, which surely does make traffic worse, have you not already answered that question?  So either become a NIMBY or — better yet — be a little more consistent applying your intuitions about the net positive externality from Manhattan density.  A simple way to put the point is that an export tax on your TFP factory is unlikely to be the best way to reduce congestion.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Noise pollution and killer whales.

2. “We estimate an MPC [marginal propensity to consume] out of unrealized crypto gains that is more than double the MPC out of unrealized equity gains but smaller than the MPC from exogenous cash flow shocks.

3. Why so little recent progress on improved Covid vaccines? (NYT)

4. How well does he understand decentralized or for that matter centralized systems?: ““I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good.”  Nice!

5. Claims by Marco Rubio.

6. The deputy mayor Midsummer’s Eve culture that is Helsinki.

The Growing Market for Cancer Drugs

In my TED talk on growth and globalization I said:

If China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. Now we are not there yet, but it is happening. As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously. And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world. Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it’s software, whether it’s a computer chip, whether it’s a new design.

…[T]oday, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population are scientists and engineers. The United States has been an idea leader. A large fraction of those people are in the United States. But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership. And for that I am very grateful. That is a good thing. It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development. But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone….We all benefit when another country gets rich.

A recent piece in the FT illustrates:


AstraZeneca’s chief executive returned from a recent trip to China exuberant about an “explosion” of biotech companies in the country and the potential for his business to deliver drugs discovered there to the world….Many drugmakers are tempted by China’s large, ageing population, which is increasingly affected by chronic diseases partly caused by smoking, pollution and more westernised diets….the opportunity lies not just in Chinese patients, but also in the country’s scientists. “The innovation power has changed,” said Demaré. “It is no more ‘copy, paste’. They really have the power to innovate and put all the money in. There’s a lot of start-ups and we are a part of that.”

As I concluded my talk:

Ideas are meant to be shared, one idea can serve the world. One idea, one world, one market.

Are We Running Out of Exhaustible Resources?

No, or so says a new paper by Felix Pretis, Cameron Hepburn, Alex Pfeiffer, and Alexander Teytelboym:

Mineral and material commodities are essential inputs to economic production, but there have been periodical concerns about mineral scarcity. However, there has been no systematic recent study that has determined whether mineral commodities have become scarcer over the longer run. Here we provide systematic evidence that worldwide, near-term exhaustion of economically valuable commodities is unlikely. We construct and analyse a new database of 48 economically-relevant commodities from 1957–2015, including estimates of worldwide production, reserves and reserve bases, prices, and production, using publicly-available data and further data requested from the United States Geological Survey. We explore trends in prices, reserves-to-production ratios, and production itself, on a commodity-by-commodity basis, using econometric techniques allowing for structural changes, and further estimate overall trends robust to outlying observations. For almost all commodities, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no trend in prices and exhaustion, while production has increased. Price signals appear to have guided consumption and provided incentives for innovation and substitution. Concerns about mineral depletion therefore appear to be less important than concerns about externalities, such as pollution and conflict, and ecosystem services (e.g. climate stability) where price signals are often absent.

Julian Simon lives…

Via Jason Crawford.

Buying a Coal Mine Gets Easier!

Long time readers will know that I have been advocating for buying a coal mine and shuttering it, especially a coal mine in India or China. The basic idea is that there are plenty of coal mines which are barely profitable so buying and shuttering these mines could be a relatively cheap way to reduce air pollution and climate change (much cheaper, for example, then letting the coal mine produce and then paying for carbon extraction). (I give an example of how this might work with an actual coal mine for sale here).

One objection, which I noted earlier, was BLM use it or lose it rules:

There are also some crazy “use it or lose it” laws that say that you can’t buy the right to extract a natural resource and not use it. When the high-bidder for an oil and gas lease near Arches National Park turned out to be an environmentalist the BLM cancelled the contract! That’s absurd. The high-bidder is the high-bidder and there should be no discrimination based on the reasons for the bid. See this Science piece.

Well some good news.

The Bureau of Land Management unveiled a draft rule late last month that would place conservation “on equal footing” with energy development and other traditional uses — a proposal that seeks to confront the agency’s long record of prioritizing extraction across the federal estate. A key provision of that rule would grant the BLM, which oversees one-tenth of all land in the United States, the authority to issue “conservation leases” to promote land protection and ecosystem restoration.

The article does a pretty good job of explaining conservation leases but it’s hilarious how the author reflexively labels PERC a right-wing think tank with deep ties to fossil fuels that supports “free market environmentalism” in scare quotes and never feels the need to resolve this with their support of conservation leases. Blank out, as Ayn Rand would say.

Few people have done more to advance the idea of conservation leases than Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC, a right-wing, Montana-based think tank that promotes “free market environmentalism” and has deep ties to fossil fuels. Regan points to Williams’ and DeChristopher’s cases to highlight how legacy “use it or lose it” rules have biased public land management in favor of extraction.

“We have these ‘use it or lose it’ requirements that define ‘use’ in these really narrow ways that preclude conservation groups from participating in the leasing markets that affect the use of vast swaths of the American West,” he told HuffPost. “Conservation should be considered a valid use of public lands, and groups should be able to acquire those leases and decide to conserve them in some form or restore them.”

Regan argues the inability of conservationists to participate in federal land leasing, even when they are willing to pay more than a driller or rancher, has only helped fuel conflict in Western states.

…“Why don’t environmentalists just buy what they want to protect? Well, in many cases they can’t,” Regan said.

Hat tip: Robert Keller.

Robin Hanson on AI and existential risk

So, the most likely AI scenario looks like lawful capitalism, with mostly gradual (albeit rapid) change overall. Many organizations supply many AIs and they are pushed by law and competition to get their AIs to behave in civil, lawful ways that give customers more of what they want compared to alternatives. Yes, sometimes competition causes firms to cheat customers in ways they can’t see, or to hurt us all a little via things like pollution, but such cases are rare. The best AIs in each area have many similarly able competitors. Eventually, AIs will become very capable and valuable. (I won’t speculate here on when AIs might transition from powerful tools to conscious agents, as that won’t much affect my analysis.)

Doomers worry about AIs developing “misaligned” values. But in this scenario, the “values” implicit in AI actions are roughly chosen by the organisations who make them and by the customers who use them. Such value choices are constantly revealed in typical AI behaviors, and tested by trying them in unusual situations. When there are alignment mistakes, it is these organizations and their customers who mostly pay the price. Both are therefore well incentivized to frequently monitor and test for any substantial risks of their systems misbehaving.

And more generally:

As an economics professor, I naturally build my analyses on economics, treating AIs as comparable to both laborers and machines, depending on context. You might think this is mistaken since AIs are unprecedentedly different, but economics is rather robust. Even though it offers great insights into familiar human behaviors, most economic theory is actually based on the abstract agents of game theory, who always make exactly the best possible move. Most AI fears seem understandable in economic terms; we fear losing to them at familiar games of economic and political power.

There is much more at the link, common sense throughout!

Advice for the new World Bank chief

From my latest Bloomberg column:

First, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the World Bank should not make climate change more of a priority. Climate-change issues are more closely associated with rich and middle-income countries than with the poorest countries. The very poorest countries, because they have small economies, do not as a rule emit much carbon. Indoor air pollution, such as burning wood or fuel for heat or cooking, is usually more of a problem. Those emissions can be toxic, and the World Bank should try to help reduce them. But that won’t do much to cut carbon emissions.

The World Health Organization estimates that about seven million people die each year from the direct effects of air pollution. For poorer countries, alleviating that problem should be a greater priority than fighting global climate change.

The reality is that if the World Bank can help elevate some very poor countries into middle-income countries, climate-change problems will become somewhat worse — at least in the short to medium run. “We make climate-change problems worse” is not a marketable slogan. But it is selfish to try to get the World Bank to do more good for the wealthiest nations and less good for the poorest nations, which is essentially what prioritizing climate change would do. And of course the world’s wealthier nations are broadly coincidental with the major shareholders of the World Bank…

If there is any area where the World Bank should double down, it is in public-health interventions. Over the last several decades, the successes have been extraordinary. In Africa, for instance, child mortality rates have plummeted, and many public-health indicators have improved considerably, especially outside of major conflict zones. Why not invest more in what is working?

Recommended, with further arguments at the link.