Author: rolfgroeneveld

My thoughts on Daniel Bromley’s critique (2): Are private property rights a silver bullet for overfishing?

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From the diagnosis that missing property rights drive overfishing it’s only a small step to prescribing property rights to manage fisheries. In his Fisheries article Daniel Bromley criticizes that idea that, in his terms, “Private ownership is necessary and sufficient for socially beneficial stewardship.” He cites an article that investigates the link between catch shares (i.e. ITQs) and stock collapse. The article fits in a sequence of articles that link ‘ownership’ of a resource to ‘stewardship’:

Examining specific cases, Beddington et al. (10), Hilborn et al. (11), Grafton et al. (12), and Griffith (13) argue that rights-based fisheries reforms offer promising solutions. Rather than only setting industry-wide quotas, fishermen are allocated individual rights. Referred to as catch shares or dedicated access privileges, these rights can be manifest as individual (and tradable) harvest quotas, cooperatives, or exclusive spatial harvest rights; the idea is to provide – to fishermen, communities, or cooperatives – a secure asset, which confers stewardship incentives.
Source: Costello et al., 2008, Science

The first author of the article, Chris Costello, explains it as follows in laymen’s terms:

The difference [between rights-based management and other sorts of fisheries policy instruments] is comparable to renting an apartment versus the house you own. […] If you own something, you take care of it – you protect your investment or else it loses value. But there’s no incentive for stewardship when you don’t own the rights to it.
Source: Marine Science Institute, UCSB

The ownership-stewardship link

This link between ownership and stewardship is also made elsewhere in the literature, and it has explicitly been object of research in at least one article that I have seen. The fundamental idea here is that people must have a stake in conservation of natural assets before they support it: if they don’t have a stake in it, why would they care? This idea is also part of the rationale behind many PES schemes, or programs like CAMPFIRE.

Bromley’s arguments against this idea are twofold. First, if the interest rate is very high, the owner of the asset is better off depleting the asset and investing the proceeds in, say, a savings account. Second, other people besides the owner might also be affected by how the owner manages the asset.

To hell with Orange Roughy and the Eiffel Tower!

The reply to the first argument is that interest rates are rarely so high that it becomes optimal to deplete a resource and put the proceeds on the bank. Some species do indeed grow so slowly that leaving them in the ocean would be like leaving your money on a low-interest bank account – you would earn more by withdrawing your ‘money’ from that account and investing it somewhere else. Orange Roughy, with an annual growth rate between 4% and 6%, springs to mind. Most species, however, grow much faster than this. You could also argue that in a well-working market, if it is optimal for the owner to deplete a resource and put the value thus generated on the bank, it would be optimal for society.

But this is probably not a well-working market, and that is how we get to the second argument. People might appreciate natural assets, like fish, for more than just their consumptive value. Economists call this existence value: economic value ascribed to things just for their mere existence, like whales or pandas. But even if you don’t like this concept (it’s debated), you can still argue that living creatures should be preserved for their own sake: call it intrinsic value, or animal rights. All these are considerations why we don’t like leaving natural assets at the mercy of a small group of owners. Imagine how Parisians would react if the Eiffel Tower were sold to the highest bidder, who is allowed to sell it on the scrap market if the steel price is high enough.

But should it be private?

The question, however, is whether we need private property rights to induce stewardship. The Costello paper does not say so explicitly. Other authors do refer to ITQs as a way to privatize ocean resources, and that this is a good thing (but I have to admit I still need to read that book). But making fish resources private property, i.e. making fish stocks the property of a single person or company, is a pipe dream anyway. How do we deal with stocks that cross borders? How do we deal with interactions between species through predation or bycatch? Imagine owners of top-of-the-food-chain stocks getting sued by owners of lower species, just like dog owners are liable for what Brutus does to Fifi.

That’s why I think the whole question is moot. Private property rights – real private property rights, like owning land, or a dog – are nearly impossible to implement in a fishery. Some form of property rights, be it state property, common property, or private property, is necessary but not sufficient. Although most fish resources fall under some form of property regime, many are still overfished; nevertheless, high-seas fisheries, which are as close to open access as it gets, are managed worst of all. If you want people to support conservation, it surely helps to give them a stake in it. However, unlike Zimbabwean farmers, who have little to expect from biodiversity conservation but crop damage and sleeping sickness (which is why CAMPFIRE was developed), fishers do have a stake in good management of fish stocks – regardless of the property rights regime. So why shouldn’t they be good stewards already?

My take-home lessons from Fish In Figures 2014

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Mmm… Marine biodiversity

Friday I ended my working week at a shindig in Catch By Simonis (should definitely have a seafood platter there someday!) where LEI presented the latest edition of their annual status report of the Dutch fisheries sector. My take-home lessons:

The beam trawl, which used to be by far the most important fishing gear in the Dutch demersal fishery, is disappearing rapidly. Its users were squeezed between high fuel prices, low fish prices, and public outrage at discards and disturbance of the sea bottom. So Dutch cutter fishers are lining up to use the pulse trawl, which combines bottom trawling with tiny electric pulses. The biggest advantage for the fishers is the lower cost of fuel: about 30% of revenues where the beam trawl burns about 55%. Environmental NGOs, notably Greenpeace, are less convinced, but I don’t agree with them. Yes, some species like cod and sharks might be affected (the effects are still under investigation) but it sure beats the effect of the traditional beam trawl on shellfish and other benthic life, let alone its use of fossil fuels. As for the taboo on electric fishing: pulse trawling is nowhere near what this guy tried to do.

A number of possibilities were discussed to raise prices. There is an interest in MSC certification, but people are skeptical about the price premium. This is a genuine concern as the price premium for certified fish has so far been disappointing. The main ‘advantage’ of certification seems to be that big players in the value chain (restaurant chains, supermarkets) might simply refuse to sell non-certified fish.

Another development is the involvement with fresh fish markets. This fits within a wider trend towards ‘local’ food (which is usually a bit too much romanticized, me thinks). So far it’s very small-scale but I like it. Why is it that the Dutch don’t appreciate fresh fish? Johan Baaij, a fisher who is involved in a project called Vers van de Visser (fresh from the fisher), argued that the consumer has no idea where the fish comes from, or who is involved in it. It reminded me about how many people think kibbeling is a fish species.

All in all I got the impression that the fishing sector is more or less where our farmers were, say, 15-20 years ago: financial problems, public unease with bulk production and its impact on the environment, but also a lot of creativity and entrepreneurship, and a readiness to engage with their critics.

My thoughts on Daniel Bromley’s critique (1): Is open access the problem?

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In 2008 Daniel Bromley gave a keynote lecture at the biannual conference of the MARE Centre in Amsterdam where he strongly criticized economists for giving flawed adivce to policy makers (to use the more polite terms). The conference organizers must have had a hard time finding an economist willing to write a reply to his lecture, because they even contacted me – I chickened out. I felt I hadn’t been working on fisheries issues long enough yet to have a well-founded opinion on Bromley’s writings. Shortly after his keynote lecture, he published an article in Fisheries with a central message similar to that in his earlier keynote, but phrased in stronger terms – and with a lot more impact. In his Fisheries article he took a few arguments further to the point where just about every economist I know disagreed wholeheartedly (again, I’m being polite here). I discussed it with some of them, and with other fisheries scientists. I also discussed it in class once, but the students, most of whom were no native English speakers and had little economics background, had serious trouble with Bromley’s rather difficult use of vocabulary.

Lately, after coming across other work written by Daniel Bromley (and his co-author, Seth Macinko), I started reading these two articles again. Although I broadly agree with the mainstream economic analysis of fisheries management, I got the impression that perhaps he has been misunderstood by my fellow economists and it would be a shame if his ideas were ignored because of the impression his Fisheries article made on most economists (again, to put it politely). I decided to put my thoughts on his criticism of fisheries economics in a few posts.

To start with, there is the conceptual confusion on what is open access, what are commons, and whether fisheries resources fall under any of those regimes. In casual conversations with colleagues I do find that some of them present fisheries as an example of open access resources; some economics textbooks do the same. But are fisheries open access resources? In his book Environment & Economy: Property Rights & Public Policy Bromley distinguishes four property regimes, similar to the four property regimes in ancient Roman law:

  • No property (res nullius): the classical open-access regime
  • Common property (res communis): a regime where a group of people owns, manages, and uses the resource together
  • State property (latin name not given, but I believe it should be res publica): the government, as a representative of society as a whole, owns and manages the resource, and sets the rules by which citizens are allowed to use the resource
  • Private property (I believe this should be res privata but my Latin is pretty non-existent): an individual owns the resource and has the right to manage and use it as he or she pleases.

If you look at it this way you see that most fish are caught within the Exclusive Economic Zones of individual countries; in fact, only one sixth of global catch comes from the high seas. Within the EEZs aquatic resources are either private property (for example, oyster and mussel fishers own parcels, which they seed, and they have the exclusive right to harvest them) or state property (with regard to most fish species, the government sets the rules on how much to catch, and with which methods). So strictly speaking, open access is more an exception than a rule.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the open access regime is irrelevant to our understanding of fisheries problems. By looking at fisheries under open access, we lay bare the mechanisms that make fisheries policy so difficult: the individual fisher reaps the benefits of catching one more fish, whereas all fishers bear the costs to the resource, i.e. the future productivity lost because the fish is in the basket instead of the sea. In theory, state property regimes are able to deal with this problem as governments can exclude people from fishing. In reality, however, governments have problems of their own that prevent them from keeping in check the forces that lead to overfishing: many fish stocks are shared by several countries, there is lobbying by special interest groups, rent-seeking, and so on. It’s like Hobbes’s Leviathan (named after a sea monster!), which starts with how unrestrained human nature leads to a war of all against all, and then explains how this restraining of human nature should take place. To understand the regime you also need to understand the forces it is supposed to rule.

Another confusion, by the way, is that between open access resources and common property resources. The confusion started when the American ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote his Science article named The Tragedy of The Commons, where he explained how common lands will inevitably be degraded because the individual land user reaps the benefits of an extra sheep while imposing the costs of overgrazing on all users. Daniel Bromley has repeatedly argued against this article and I understand why. The problem is the choice of words: commons. Commons are owned, managed, and used by an exclusive group of users who have every possibility and motivation to make good arrangements and stick to them. In fact, researchers like Elinor Ostrom found that many commons are managed quite well. The “Tragedy” that Hardin describes takes place in open access regimes, like the high seas. Unfortunately the confusion is still omnipresent: just this week The Economist refers to the Tragedy of the Commons to discuss the problems with high seas fishing.

To me, this underlines the importance of defining your concepts well, and being wary of oversimplification. It’s too easy to use the broad brush of open access to paint all problems with resource overexploitation. We need to get into the details to really understand the matter. How are rights, priviliges, obligations, and such distributed? How do they work on paper (de jure) and how do they work in practice (de facto)? How are things like decision-making, monitoring, and enforcement organized, and what resources do they need? What is the role of official laws on one hand and unofficial norms and customs on the other hand, and where do they contradict? I feel that these questions have been overlooked in the debate that was unleashed after Bromley’s Fisheries article.

On discounting (1): Vindicated!

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Warning: geeky post. It’s got math in it.

I first came across the concept of discounting somewhere in 1994 or 1995 when I studied Environmental Studies at the Hogeschool Delft (a hogeschool is more or less comparable to a polytechnic institute). Somewhere in my final year I suddenly got interested in environmental economics so I took an introductory course in that field given by the Open University of The Netherlands. (This course got me firmly on the track that eventually led to the work I am doing now. Thank you Open University!)

I remember reading the course’s textbook on discounting and thinking: this is madness! Looking back at that moment, and at the literature that has evolved since, I feel vindicated. I was right.

For non-economists: the idea behind discounting is, basically, that time is money. Nobody is indifferent between receiving €100 now and receiving €100 in a year’s time: almost everybody prefers the first over the latter. Economic textbooks give two reasons why this is the case:

  • If you receive your money now you can invest it, or put it on your savings account and earn interest;
  • People are impatient: they care less about things they need to wait for.

The first reason is what we call the opportunity cost of capital; the second reason is called pure time preference. My objection was not against the idea of discounting as such, but against the fact that both effects are captured by the same formula:

PV(Xt) = 1 Xt
(1+r)t

where Xt is some amount of money earned in t years’ time, r is the discount rate (which captures interest as well as pure time preference), and PV is the present value of Xt. The present value of a future cost or benefit is what it is worth to you now, in other words, how much you are maximally willing to pay now in order to earn Xt in t years. After all, if you earn PV now you can leave it on your bank account, wait for t years, and earn Xt :

Xt = PV(Xt)*(1+r)t

My objection was that we use the same formula to describe both the interest on your bank account and the psychological phenomenon that I don’t like to wait for nice things (but I sure like to postpone nasty things). How can we be sure that our brains work the same way as a bank account?

From what I learned later I gather that economists prefer to use a single variable r to capture both effects because it is easy, and because it induces time consistency in the choices based on discounting. If capital markets work well, the market interest rate should give a good reflection of people’s pure time preference as well as their expectations of the returns on their investments. As regards consistency, assuming a fixed discount rate for every year fits neatly in the omnipresent assumption that people make rational choices: if you are indifferent between €100 now and €105 next year, you are also indifferent between €100 in 2030 and €105 in 2031.

But this is where things get awry – and where I get my bit of vindication. It turns out our brains don’t work as neatly as the formula suggests: we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, time inconsistent. Behavioural experiments have shown that people apply what is called hyperbolic discounting: they apply higher discount rates to the near future than to the distant future. If you tell me you are indifferent between €100 in 2030 and €105 in 2031, and I ask you again in 2030 whether you would rather have your €100 now than to wait a year for an extra €5, it is likely that you will ask to have your money in 2030 (which would by then be the present).

Interestingly, hyperbolic discounting is one of the explanations for addiction in the behavioural psychology literature. Anyone who has been a smoker recognises this: you don’t want to be a smoker all your life, so you set a date for your last cigarette. Then when the time comes, you’re “not ready for it yet”, or “this is not the right time”, or you think “aah, just one for the road.” So you keep smoking. And years later, when you look back on all those years coughing, smelling, getting your fix in the rain, and spending all that money, you regret not having kicked the habit earlier. If that isn’t time inconsistent, I don’t know what is.

Stop reading music

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No musical instrument illustrates the yearning gap between classical music and traditional music like the four-stringed wooden box I’ve been playing for the last 13 years. It starts with the name. Ask me what I play, and I would tell you I play the fiddle; ask a classical musician what it is I play and he would say “violin”. But really, it’s the same instrument. (Admittedly, this only applies to English – the Dutch call it viool, no matter how you play it.) I sometimes meet violinists (that is, classically trained musicians) who approach traditional music as a simple sort of classical music – a subset of classic, to use a mathematical term. If you can play Paganini‘s works, sure you can play The Maid Behind The Bar, right?

Wrong. They’re totally different paradigms. Different worlds. It’s almost like you’re playing a different instrument. And let me be blunt: a classical training is a serious impediment to playing traditional music.

It starts with the fact that we know the composers of almost all compositions in classical music, but most tunes in traditional music have composer “unknown”. The composer of a classical piece still owns it, as it were. Change the notes and it’s not the same piece anymore; even worse, it would be disrespectful, like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Yes, classical musicians interpret the music they play in their own way, through the intonation and the dynamic they (or the conductor) choose. But they must stick to the written music. On the other hand, apart from recent compositions, traditional music is public property. In fact, part of the fun of playing traditional music is the freedom of interpretation: let’s put in some more syncopation by playing these notes a bit differently… Did you know that this tune sounds great when you play it in a minor scale? If I bind those notes and skip these it sounds really great on the fiddle. Also, there are often many versions around of the same tune.

Second, traditional music was originally developed to accompany dancers, so the most important element of it, high above the rest, is the rhythm. You can be a virtuoso all you like, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Classical music, on the other hand, remains a work of art, strongly associated with the composer. So all facets, including melody, harmony, and arrangement, are to be appreciated, and rhythm is usually not the most important part of it.

Third, a classical training starts with reading music, whereas a good workshop in traditional music teaches the tune by ear. Let me be even clearer on this. I know a musician who took classical music lessons as a kid and she told me her father would slap her if she gave only the slightest hint of playing by memory rather than from sheet music. On the other hand, in most fiddle workshops people have recorders with them (mobile phones, nowadays), and the teacher distributes sheet music only at the end of the workshop, if at all.

This will sound mean to you if you are a classical musician, but every now and again I meet violinists who cannot learn a tune by ear, and even if they know the tune they still cannot play it by heart. Like barrel organs, they’re lost without their sheet music.

So kids, when you want to learn to play music, stop reading it.

Scenario issues: scenarios versus policies

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I usually emphasize in my lectures that you should strictly distinguish policies from scenarios. Policies are what we choose; scenarios simply describe what might happen, regardless of what we choose. In practice it is not as clear-cut as that may seem.

Look at it like this. Suppose we have two policy options. To choose the right policy we also need to know how each policy plays out in the future. But there we have a problem: we don’t know what the future will look like. Usually, however, we do have a rough idea of developments that may take place. We could take some of those developments and explore how they might combine. By doing this we develop a number of scenarios that illustrate what the future could look like (not what it will look like). We can then evaluate our policy options in each scenario. For example, with two policy options and two scenarios we could make a table like this:

Scenario 1 Scenario 2
Policy 1 You win $100 You lose $100
Policy 2 You lose $50 You win $80

In any environmental economics textbook you will find different possible rules to choose between policy options under such uncertainty. Perhaps you want to minimize the possible losses from your policy. By such a maximin rule, as it is called, you would ignore the best outcomes and focus on the worst ones. So you choose Policy 2 because the worst that could happen under Policy 2 is that you lose $50 where under Policy 1 you could lose $100. It is also possible that you want to get as much as possible out of your policy. By following a maximax rule, where you ignore the worst outcomes and focus on the best ones, you would go for Policy 1. After all, Policy 1 could yield $100 where Policy 2 can, at best, yield only $80. And there are more decision rules.

Every year I see students, when asked exam questions like the problem above, give answers like “I would choose Scenario 1”. Which is why I keep emphasizing: you don’t choose scenarios. Nature chooses the scenario. Or God, or Fate, whatever you want to call it. But not the policy maker.

But now comes the tricky part. Suppose the policy maker cannot choose all possible policies at once. Perhaps she works at some government department that decides on some policies, but there are other policies that are decided by other departments. Or the effect of her policies depend on what other governments do.

We’re having discussions about this all the time in VECTORS. For example, an Environment Ministry might want to evaluate a ballast water treatment policy to combat invasive species, but the effects of the policy also depend on international trade policies which are decided by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, or even other countries’ policies. The trade policy might then become part of the scenarios as far as the Environment Ministry is concerned. This is very confusing, and I notice that a lot of people are uncomfortable with including policies as part of scenarios. It seems to me that they prefer their scenarios as pure, roll-the-dice, chance events. Their objection to including policies in scenarios is that, eventually, people decide on policies. They are not chance events. My reply would be that we can only decide on a particular domain, like ballast water treatment policy, or fisheries policy, or MPA allocation. What happens outside that domain is something we cannot influence, so it has to be considered a chance event. But I agree it feels uncomfortable, and the line is difficult to draw.

ITQs and organisational costs

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There is a fair bit of controversy in fisheries science on the merits and caveats of ITQs, catch shares, or whatever you want to call them. I won’t go into the details of that debate here, but the following news caught my attention (H/T Adam Soliman/Ecology Action Center):

California fishers say quota system is all wet
(…) Commercial fishers, industry experts and government officials are among those who say that while fish populations are recovering, too few people in California are benefiting from that rebound in part because there aren’t enough qualified monitors to oversee the program. (…)

Apparently, all fishers under the California catch share system are required to have on-board observers to monitor their catch. This is quite expensive, especially for small-scale fishers. It is one of the great disadvantages of an ITQ system: how do you make sure that fishers do not catch more than their fair share? Monitoring landings, if at all possible, runs the risk of increasing discards. The latest trend in the EU is to install cameras, something which the Californian fishers in the article seem to favour as well.

Monitoring costs are part of the organisational costs of a policy instrument: you need people to do the paperwork, to decide who gets what, to monitor compliance, and so on. These costs usually depend little on the size of the transaction or the parties involved in it. That’s why the fishers complain:

Also, operators of small, family-run boats say the costs of the monitors, which are the same for them as for corporate boats, have created inequality.

I’m not sure what to say about this complaint. I don’t agree small-scale fishers or farmers should be protected for the sake of being a small-scale fisher or farmer; neither am I buying the argument that small-scale fishers are inherently more ‘sustainable’, whatever that means. Small-scale fisheries can offer valuable sources of income in developing countries, where poverty is rife and people have little to fall back on when they lose their job. California is not a developing country; although few Europeans would be impressed with its social security system, you cannot expect the local fishery to provide one. But I do believe that transaction costs usually prevent markets from finding efficient solutions, so a system that requires such heavy monitoring costs is likely to cause substantial losses in efficiency.

Matilda, three songs, and the melancholy of travelling

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‘Tis the season again. In The Netherlands this means that a bunch of radio jocks have a public fasting exercise to collect donations for the Red Cross. Serious Request it’s called, and, guess what, the main thing is to make your donation together with your request for your favourite song. I’m not too much of a listener to 3FM (their radio station), but it’s becoming a bit of a tradition for me to request Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues every year:

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/9ZmqbcBsTAw&source=uds

Waits wrote the song in the 1970s, when his music was usually a bourbon-soaked mix of jazz and blues, with a Sinatraesque ballad thrown in here and there, and as major themes booze, gambling, and bad women. Everything changed, however, when he met Kathleen Brennan. She got him to give up drinking, introduced him to the music of Captain Beefheart, and thereby induced his major shift to the almost absurdistic albums he made from that point on, like Swordfishtrombones, Raindogs, and Bone Machine. I must admit I usually prefer the post-Brennan crazy stuff. His 1970s ballads could verge dangerously on the sentimental and the cliche-ridden; meanwhile, nothing beats the spooky weirdness of What’s he building in there?, or the brutal stomp of Singapore.

Except, that is, for this one song. The lyrics conjure up strong images, yet are sufficiently abstract to give the song an enigmatic quality – and to provoke lots of debate on what the song is about. Some think it is about addiction, or even suicide. Tom Waits himself usually introduces the song by saying “this song is about throwing up in a foreign country.” Supposedly he wrote the song after a drinking binge in Copenhagen with Danish singer and violinist Mathilde Bondo (hence the subtitle “Four sheets to the wind in Copenhagen”). Another story is that he wrote the song after hanging out with LA’s down-and-out (“every single guy…a woman put him there” he is reported to have said).

I used to think the song was about the First World War – seriously. When I started listening to Tom Waits I had been playing Irish music for a few years. The standard repertoire includes The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by the Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle:

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/Z8YLUZgzEnE&source=uds

That song is about WW1, telling the story of one of the many Australian soldiers caught up in the murderous meat grinding machine of Gallipoli, in what was in those days the Ottoman Empire. The title of Bogle’s song (and the chorus in Waits’) refers to Waltzing Matilda, an Australian folksong about a transient worker that was (and still is) Australia’s unofficial national anthem. Apparently, ‘To waltz Matilda’ is Australian slang for travelling by foot with your belongings stuffed in a rucksack. Bogle’s song describes how Waltzing Matilda accompanied the soldiers’ march to and from the battlefield, their remembrance marches, and perhaps even their afterlife:

And their ghosts may be heard as you pass by a billabong
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

So when I heard Waits sing:

I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I’m tired of all these soldiers here
No-one speaks English and everything’s broken
And my stacys are soaking wet

I couldn’t help but imagine a lonely American, lost somewhere in a faraway corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire (say, present-day Egypt, or Jordania), with nothing but his once fancy, but now torn and dirty clothes and shoes. And what about these lines?

You can ask any sailor and the keys from the jailer
And the old men in wheelchairs know
Matilda’s the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go

I figured the old men in wheelchairs could very well be the veterans in Bogle’s song:

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Renewing their dreams of past glory
I see the old men, bent, stiff, and sore
These tired old heroes of a forgotten war
And young people ask: what are they marching for?
And I ask myself the same question

Bogle wrote his song in 1971, so it is possible – but I’m quite sure it is a coincidence and Waits did not have The Great War in mind when he wrote Tom Traubert’s Blues.

Not that I care much for whether he did. To me, this image of a forlorn Westerner, lost in a country where he does not speak the language while the world is crumbling all around him, fits the lyrics perfectly. The song has a loneliness and a lostness to it that Waits must have recognized in the LA skid row (or in the Copenhagen porcelain truck after his drinking binge with Mathilde). I usually play the song on my mp3 player when I’m abroad for work. When you are in the bus from the center of Reykjavik to your hotel in a depressing office quarter at the border of town, nothing fits your mood better than hearing this grinding voice wail

It’s a battered old suitcase
To a hotel some place
And a wound that will never heal

Just writing it gives me goosebumps: a wound that will never heal. When we travel, we leave behind the places and people we know and love. But we also develop a fondness for the place we’ve travelled to, which only gets stronger as we stay there longer. What I’d give for just one more bike ride along the coast of Santa Barbara, or a Guinness in Gogarty’s, Dublin, or a fried fish and a vinho verde in some small unassuming restaurant on the Azores… Wherever you go, even if you go home, part of you still wishes you were back somewhere else.

The curious silence on activist science

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My two cents on the Seralini retraction story (Retraction Watch has all the details which I won’t rehash here):

The first author, Gilles-Eric Séralini, is board member of an anti-GMO lobby group. Its website presents rather gleefully the horrible pictures of lab rats with huge tumors. What it does not tell you is that no matter what you feed them, this type of rats is highly likely to grow such tumors – indeed, they were bred for this very purpose. Previous research by Mr Séralini was funded by Greenpeace. Mr Séralini has been accused before of questionable, politically motivated scientific practices.

To me this reeks of the kind of political bias in research I come across all too often. What bothers me most, however, is the deafening silence about it in the news media. Accept a cup of coffee from a Monsanto employee and your reputation as an independent scientist is in tatters; but when it comes to furthering your own political views everything seems to be allowed, including sloppy science and misleading, exaggerated headlines. I wonder which is the more damaging.

The other problem is the natural law that it is always the initial headline that sets the image. The retractions, the errata, and the rectifications at best get page three. A few months ago heavy accusations of highgrading and overfishing thrown at a Dutch fishing company were all over the news. The news of its acquittal by the authorities never made the papers.

Grow Fins likes Cow Burps

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And the latest contender for the title of “Funniest Titled Environmental Economics Blog” is the UK-based Cow Burps:

  • We like to think ‘Cow Burps’ is a humorous and unique name therefore reflecting the idea that the blog should be fun both to write and read
  • We liked the idea of ‘burps’ as a euphemism for the interesting blog posts that we hope to write
  • The predicament of rising beef/dairy demand from an increase in population and rising middle classes in conflict with climate change impacts and habitat damage/deforestation is a perfect example of a situation where the use of environmental economics can provide better information to decision-makers. You can read more about this on the post How many cows?
  • And lastly, it reminds everyone to examine conventional wisdom, with cow burps being a much higher source of methane than cow farts!