Results for “pollution” 206 found
Assorted quotations
1. “Only a few authors have bothered to approach the disintegration of America in an innovative way.”
2. “They estimated that without antibiotics, one out of every six recipients of new hip joints would die.”
3. “The urban refugees come from all walks of life — businesspeople and artists, teachers and chefs — though there is no reliable estimate of their numbers. They have staked out greener lives in small enclaves, from central Anhui Province to remote Tibet. Many are Chinese bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, and they say that besides escaping pollution and filth, they want to be unshackled from the material drives of the cities — what Ms. Lin derided as a focus on “what you’re wearing, where you’re eating, comparing yourself with others.” The link is here.
4. “It is the first time that the West has lost a soft power contest with Russia.”
5. “I do take painting seriously,” he said. “It’s changed my life.”
Hayek’s liberaltarian essay “”Free” Enterprise and Competitive Order”
I’ve been preparing a class on Hayek for MRUniversity.com, and I was struck by my reread of this essay, which was presented at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting of 1947 (it was later published in Individualism and Economic Order, pdf of the book here).
In this piece Hayek argues the following:
1. It is not enough for classical liberals to seek to limit the state, they also must outline what governments could and should do better.
2. Monetary policy should be used to limit unemployment, albeit in a rules-based framework.
3. Eminent domain is an essential function of government, especially in urban cities, and it needs to be thought through more carefully.
4. Many of the biggest dangers of monopoly stem from patent law and intellectual property protection, rather than from monopoly of the traditional “sole seller” sort. On this issue Hayek sounds like Alex or Larry Lessig.
5. It is not enough to defend “freedom of contract” in the abstract, rather the details of the law really matter.
6. Hayek questions whether limited liability for corporations is always the right way to proceed.
7. Finally, although inheritance taxes have in the past sometimes been abused, “…inheritance taxes could, of course, be made an instrument toward greater social mobility and greater dispersion of property and, consequently, may have to be regarded as important tools of a truly liberal policy…”
You will recall that in other settings Hayek endorsed the idea of a social welfare state and also the taxation of pollution.
Assorted links
1. My quasi-debate with Greg Mankiw (Korean language account, imagine a dialogue between Average is Over and his JEP essay on inequality). There is more here, and here, both in Korean. There are brief excerpts in this Korean news video.
2. Robert Graboyes on supply-side innovation in health care.
4. Trauma as a major medical issue in Africa.
5. Which are the world’s worst cities for air pollution? More provincial than you might think.
6. Can a famous jeweller become a great philosopher? By the excellent Oliver Burkeman.
7. Michael R. Strain reviews Average is Over at National Review.
Earth orbit debris: an economic model
That is a 2013 paper by Adilov, Alexander, and Cunningham, here is the abstract:
Space debris, an externality generated by expended launch vehicles and damaged satellites, reduces the expected value of space activities by increasing the probability of damaging existing satellites or other space vehicles. Unlike terrestrial pollution, debris created in the production process interacts with firms’ final products, and is, moreover, self-propagating. Collisions between debris or extant satellites creates additional debris. We construct an economic model to explore private incentives to launch satellites and to mitigate space debris. The model predicts that, relative to the social optimum, firms launch too many satellites and under-invest in debris mitigation technologies. We discuss remediation strategies and policies, and calculate a socially optimal Pigovian tax.
While we are on this topic, I very much liked the movie Gravity, which although it has some dialogue hearkens back to the silent classics of the past. It has spectacular visuals, a “great stagnation” element, a don’t try to be Icarus, live in the mud, and be reborn and baptized in the water element, a reinterpretation of The Book of Job, and a “who builds the best infrastructure anyway?” theme. On top of all that, it is subtle running commentary on the 1969 film *Marooned* and how much the world has, and hasn’t, changed since then.
Assorted links
1. More on the Morlocks of Singapore.
2. Who are (were) the top American communists?
3. Long profile of Leszek Kolakowski.
4. How badly are the formal arts hurting?
5. Will the Chinese attempt to clean up air pollution result in much higher carbon emissions? And debt in China and what they are doing about it.
China’s experiment with cap and trade
Dirk Forrister and Paul Bledsoe report from the NYT:
China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has begun its effort in the southern city of Shenzhen, paving the way for a national Chinese market in a few years. Like Europe, which voted to extend and improve its emissions market, and Australia and New Zealand, Shenzhen chose a carbon market as the most efficient way to lower its greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Shenzhen program, the government will set limits on carbon dioxide discharges for 635 industrial companies and 197 public buildings that together account for about 40 percent of the city’s emissions. Polluters whose emissions fall below the limit can sell the difference in the form of pollution allowances to other polluters. These companies must decide whether it is cheaper to reduce emissions or pollute above their limit by buying allowances, whose price will be set by supply and demand. But the pressure will be on, because the limits will decrease over time. Six more regional pilot programs are planned over the next year.
This piece offers some further details, including this:
The caps require the emitters to collectively cut their carbon intensity by 6.7 per cent a year between this year and 2015.
After reading multiple sources, however, it seems that all these numbers involve fudges. And over the longer run the cap is defined relative to gdp:
Beijing has not agreed to binding caps on its emission volumes, but has set a target to cut emission intensity – carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 from the 2005 level.
Here is further analysis from The Economist, which reckons that actual binding carbon caps will take ten years to evolve. This will be one good way to study whether these regimes are time consistent, noting that Europe’s regime has been in place for about ten years and still doesn’t work.
China estimate of the day
A government policy to promote coal use in Northern China has cut the life expectancy of some 500 million people by more than five years, on average.
That comes from a big new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which used a quasi-natural experiment to quantify the health effects of air pollution from coal use.
From Brad Plumer, here is more.
What made Buchanan special as an economist?
Matt asks this question. I am a bit on the run, so I will do this in link-less form, but all the sources should be easily googled. Here goes:
1. He developed the “theory of clubs,” which sets out the conditions under which private associations supply excludable public goods at optimum levels.
2. For his time he had the best and most rigorous analysis of the incidence of public debt.
3. With Gordon Tullock he pioneered the economic analysis of voting rules in terms of transactions costs and external costs imposed on others. Any current blogosphere discussion of say the filibuster will rely on this approach, though we now take it so for granted we don’t realize how impressive it was at the time.
4. He had pioneering economic analyses of bicameralism, logrolling, and other aspects of legislatures, again with Tullock.
5. Along with Harsanyi, he formulated aspects of the “original position” before Rawls did and he was a major influence on Rawls. By the way, I have seen Buchanan numerous times with top professional philosophers, and he has no problem holding his own or better.
6. He helped pin down, including on the technical side, the economic concept of externality.
7. He provided the most important revision to optimal tax theory since Ramsey, namely the point that supposedly efficient methods of taxation can be too easy to use. That was in The Power to Tax, with Brennan. His piece on static vs. dynamic versions of the Laffer curve, with Dwight Lee, is also significant.
8. He provided a public choice analysis of why Keynesian economics would not lead to the appropriate budget surpluses during good times and thus would contain dangerous ratchet effects toward excess deficits.
9. He thought through the conflict between subjective and objective notions of value in economics, and the importance of methodologically individualist postulates, more deeply than perhaps any other economist. Most economists hate this work, or refuse to understand it, either because it lowers their status or because it is genuinely difficult to follow or because it requires philosophy. Yet it stands among Buchanan’s greatest contributions even if a) I do not myself agree with his approach, and b) I do not think it is easily summarized or even well-explained. Buchanan took Knight and Shackle very seriously and he understood that the typical pragmatic dismissal of their caveats was not in fact well-founded.
10. His Hayekian work on “order defined only through the process of emergence” and “economics as a science of exchange and catallactics” is a very important take-down of the scientific pretensions of much of economics. It doubted whether the notion of efficiency could be independently conceptualized at all. Again, this work is disliked or ignored. Buchanan may be going too far, but it is a very important and neglected perspective.
11. He thought more consistently in terms of “rules of the games” than perhaps any other economist. This point remains underappreciated and underapplied. It makes technocracy out to be a fundamentally different endeavor.
12. He did important work in the history of economic thought, reviving interest in the Italian school of public finance and public choice.
13. His late papers with Yoon on the work ethic, increasing returns, and economic growth remain underappreciated. I also admire his work with Yoon on the anti-commons.
There is more, but that is a start. Try his article on why pollution should be taxed for Pigouvian reasons. I could add that Buchanan understood the importance of monetary rules, and favored a regime where the supply of money would be elastic in response to negative economic circumstances.
Beijing notes
It is a gargantuan, imperial city, and while there is always a walking path the point of walking is not always clear. “The Middle Kingdom does Dubai.” There is no need to tell me about all the parts of the city which do not look like Dubai, I have seen many of them, and furthermore Dubai has such parts as well.
An iPad, plus Baidu access to Chinese characters, makes it easy to ask questions of strangers. Hardly anyone speaks even minimal English. It is less harried than I had expected. The sky rarely appears, at least in late July. The contemporary art district, 798, is worth more than one visit. I am not interested in seeing the Great Wall. My hotel, rather than having a “Medical Devices” conference, has a meeting on “Australian Property Holdings.”
The main problems here are the air pollution, and that no one, including taxi drivers, seems to know how to get anywhere. The rate of change is high and many people are from the provinces, so there is a real information gap.
The main upsides stem from what scale enables. Even if you have been to many places, Beijing will manage to astonish you.
Most of all, I am struck by how Taiwan is more Chinese than is China.
Assorted tax links
The new Bruce Bartlett book on taxes is out, I presume it is excellent. Here is his column on the Romney and Obama plans.
David Brooks had an excellent column on tax expenditures.
Ezra Klein had a very good summary post on the OECD tax report.
Arthur Laffer is toying with the idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Should speed limits be higher?
Arthur van Benthem, who is on the job market from Stanford, says no:
When choosing his speed, a driver faces a trade-off between private benefits (time savings) and private costs (fuel cost and own damage and injury). Driving faster also has external costs (pollution, adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers). This paper uses large-scale speed limit increases in the western United States in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions. First, do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social (private plus external) costs? Second, do the private benefits of driving faster as a result of higher speed limits exceed the private costs? Third, could completely eliminating speed limits improve efficiency? I find that a 10 mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3-4 mph increase in travel speed, 9-15% more accidents, 34-60% more fatal accidents, and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14-25% (carbon monoxide), 9-16% (nitrogen oxides), 1-11% (ozone) and 9% higher fetal death rates around the affected freeways. I use these estimates to calculate private and external benefits and costs, and find that the social costs of speed limit increases are three to ten times larger than the social benefits. In contrast, many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefit from driving faster. Privately, a value of a statistical life (VSL) of $6.0 million or less justifies driving faster, but the social planner’s VSL would have to be below $0.9 million to justify higher speed limits. The substantial difference between private and social optimal speed choices provides a strong rationale for having speed limits. Although speed limits are blunt instruments that differ from an ideal Pigovian tax on speed, it is highly unlikely that any hidden administrative costs or unforeseen behavioral adjustments could make eliminating speed limits an efficiency-improving proposition.
Robert Frank responds on Black Friday
Here is the email I received from Bob:
I enjoyed your observations about my Black Friday op-ed in Thursday’s NYT. If you’d permit me to respond, I’d propose to post something like this:
Like Tyler, I think we needn’t worry much about consumers who elect to wait in line for hours in the hope of getting bargains. That’s indeed wasteful, as one of the commenters pointed out. But it’s fairly easy to drop out of that game, and some, as Tyler speculates, may actually enjoy the process.
But the arms race that’s led to longer store hours poses a more serious problem for employees, many of whom had little choice but to truncate their holiday time with family and friends.
I had a recent conversation about this issue with a friend in Ithaca who owns a wine store. Traditionally, New York State wine merchants were not allowed to do business on Sundays. But last year that restriction was repealed, and I asked my friend how the change had affected him.
His overall sales were about the same, he told me. The change had thus been a clear negative from his perspective, since it meant that he and his wife were no longer able to spend Sundays together with their children. The upside was that customers who lacked the foresight to shop in advance for their Sunday wine needs could now be accommodated. If we’re willing to discount the cost of an inconvenience suffered by those who could easily have avoided it, the costs in this case seem clearly to outweigh the benefits.
Even so, an econometrician might find it difficult to convince a skeptic that the former Sunday closing mandate was justified. Fortunately, a definitive answer to that question isn’t required for an assessment of my tax proposal, which isn’t nearly as costly as a flat prohibition.
Arms races arise because, as Charles Darwin saw clearly, important aspects of life are graded on the curve. It’s not how strong or fast you are that matters, but rather whether you’re faster or stronger than your direct rivals. And for merchants, it’s not how early you open that matters, but rather how your start time compares with rivals’. If the stakes are sufficiently high in such cases, arms races are inevitable.
If staying open longer hours is misleadingly attractive to individual merchants, the best solution is not to prohibit longer hours but rather to make them less attractive by taxing them. My 6-6-6 tax proposal doesn’t prohibit earlier store hours on Thanksgiving. It simply makes them less attractive to individual merchants.
Many on the Right are quick to denounce such taxes as “social engineering”–which they usually define as using the tax code “to control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives.” But that’s what virtually all laws do. Stop signs are social engineering, as are prohibitions against theft and homicide. Laws restrict behavior because individuals often choose to behave in ways that cause harm to others. For someone who cares about personal liberty, discouraging harmful behavior by taxing it should be far less objectionable than prohibiting it outright.
Yet many on the Right suddenly lose their ability to think clearly when confronted by proposals to tax harmful behavior. The first message I received in response to my Black Friday op-ed, for example, came from a chaired professor of philosophy who had this to say: “Another sad elitist call for government to butt in so as to promote your special interest. Maybe there are those who judge the black Friday ride just right for them. But do you care? You just know it should be shut down and so you will empower the government to do just that. Well, over my dead body.”
Oh, please. Perhaps this professor is among those who denounce all taxation as theft. But mature adults realize that we have to tax SOMETHING. Right now, we tax many useful activities. The payroll tax, for example, discourages hiring. The income tax discourages savings. Every dollar we can raise by taxing activities that cause harm to others is a dollar less we must raise by taxing beneficial activities.
In my recent book, The Darwin Economy, I defend the claim that taxes on activities that cause undue harm to others could generate more than enough revenue to balance the federal budget and restore our crumbling infrastructure. We should tax congestion, noise, and pollution. We should tax passenger vehicles by weight. We should replace the income tax with a more steeply progressive tax on consumption. But until we’ve done all that, no champion of liberty has any cogent reason to oppose replacing taxes on useful activities with taxes on harmful ones.
Why they call it Green Energy: The Summers/Klain/Browner Memo
The LA Times reports that Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner “raised warning flags” about the loan guarantee program for renewables long before the Solyndra bankruptcy. The article doesn’t have a lot of new information (the key players are clearly protecting themselves) but it does link to a fascinating briefing memo written for the President in October of 2010 by Summers, Ron Klain (then chief of staff to the Vice President), and energy advisor Carol Browner.
The memo says that OMB and Treasury were concerned about three problems, “double dipping” (massive government subsidies from multiple sources), lack of “skin in the game” from private investors and “non-incremental investment,” the funding of projects which would occur even without the loan guarantee.
The memo then illustrates with one such program, the Shepherds Flat Loan guarantee. Here is the relevant portion of the memo:
The Shepherds Flat loan guarantee illustrates some of the economic and public policy issues raised by OMB and Treasury. Shepherds Flat is an 845-megawatt wind farm proposed for Oregon. This $1.9 billion project would consist of 338 GE wind turbines manufactured in South Carolina and Florida and, upon completion; it would represent the largest wind farm in the country.
The sponsor’s equity is about 11% of the project costs, and would generate an estimated return on equity of 30%.
Double dipping: The total government subsidies are about $1.2 billion.
Subsidy Type Approximate
Amount
(millions)Federal 1603 grant (equal to 30% investment tax credit) $500
State tax credits $18
Accelerated depreciation on Federal and State taxes $200
Value of loan guarantee $300
Premium paid for power from state renewable electricity standard $220
Total $1,238
Skin in the game: The government would provide a significant subsidy (65+%), while the sponsor would provide little skin in the game (equity about 10%).
Non-incremental investment: This project would likely move without the loan guarantee. The economics are favorable for wind investment given tax credits and state renewable energy standards. GE signaled through Hill staff that it considered going to the private market for financing out of frustration with the review process. The return on equity is high (30%) because of tax credits, grants, and selling power at above-market rates, which suggests that the alternative of private financing would not make the project financially non-viable.
Carbon reduction benefits: If this wind power displaced power generated from sources with the average California carbon intensity, it would result in about 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions through 2033. Carbon reductions would have to be valued at nearly $130 per ton CO2 for the climate benefits to equal the subsidies (more than 6 times the primary estimate used by the government in evaluating rules).
In my view, the Summers/Klain/Browner analysis was a damning indictment of the Shepherds Flat project. The taxpayers were expected to fund by far the largest share of the bills and also of the risk and in return they weren’t getting many benefits in terms of reduced pollution. In contrast, Caithness Energy and GE Energy Financial Services, the corporations behind the project, weren’t taking much risk but they stood to profit handsomely. I guess that is why they call it “green” energy.
In short, the Shepherds Flat project was corporate welfare masquerading under an environmental rainbow.
So are you surprised to learn that shortly after the memo was written the Shepherd Flats loan guarantee of $1.3 billion was approved? Of course not; no doubt you also saw that the memo authors were careful to inform the President that the “338 GE wind turbines” were to be “manufactured in South Carolina and Florida.” Corporate welfare meet politicized investment.
In the Solyndra case just about everything went wrong, including bankruptcy and possible malfeasance. Caithness Energy and GE Energy Financial Services are unlikely to go bankrupt and malfeasance is not at issue. As a result, this loan guarantee and the hundreds of millions of dollars in other subsidies that made this project possible are unlikely to create an uproar. Nevertheless, the real scandal is not what happens when everything goes wrong but how these programs work when everything goes right.
Government is raising the value of a life
The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.
The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.
The article is here. If the goal is to give current people what they want, arguably this makes sense and perhaps it does not go far enough. Death is…BAD. If the goal is to maximize real gdp per capita, or most other macroeconomic indicators, it makes sense to value human life at replacement cost (and here) and this policy change does not make sense. I'm not arguing for either standard and indeed I think they both lead to absurdities. Instead the point is this: theoretical ordinal welfare economics and applied welfare economics, as represented by wealth measures, do not coincide as much as many economists like to think. This gap becomes increasingly important as health care and safety provision increase, relative to the size of the economy as a whole.
What the Chinese have done is to neglect health care investments (until very recently) and basically maximize gdp growth. They wanted to have fewer people anyway, so why spend money to keep ailing people around? We find this horrible when presented in such explicit terms, and yet we admire their achievement of the end of growth maximization.
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?