Author: rolfgroeneveld

Dear students, please question my authority

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

Some more thoughts on the Stapel saga.

In most fraud cases Diederik Stapel told his students that he would perform his experiments, collect the data, do the analysis, and give the students the results. Some students wanted to be at the experiments (a good suggestion, because you can learn a lot from it), but he wouldn’t allow them. A few students wanted to see the raw data, but when they pressed him he expressed doubts whether they were good enough to be his PhD students. A filthy intimidation tactic if you ask me. But not only his students were duped: other academics, like the Dutch professor Roos Vonk, co-authored articles that turned out to be based on fake data. In the end the whole fraud came out because a few students finally had the courage to stand up to him (and, possibly, the university board where he had a lot of friends – luckily the board did the right thing and took their complaints seriously). Other students, who allowed themselves to be intimidated, now have flawed dissertations. A few of them have left science because of the affair.

Dear students, learn from this. I promise I won’t cook the books, but don’t take my word for it – don’t take anyone’s word for anything. Not just your thesis supervisor. After you graduate you will work with other people, like your boss or your co-authors. They can make mistakes. They can lie. When your name is on a proposal, a thesis, or an article, than you (and your co-authors) are responsible for its contents. Convince yourself that its contents is correct. Yes, I do the same with your contributions.

I know that in some cultures it is impolite to question the advice of your superiors, much like foot soldiers are supposed to follow their sergeant’s orders. That may work in the army, but we’re not in the army here. The one order I give you is not to take orders from me.

Great jelly report, shame about the mudslinging

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

Nando Boero, the man who named a jellyfish after Frank Zappa, has just written a new FAO report on the impact of jellyfish in the Mediterranean and Black seas. As far as I can judge it is a fairly comprehensive overview of these impacts, including some sensible recommendations, including

  • Develop jellyfish products (if you can’t beat them, eat them!)
  • Use cutting nets to destroy jellyfish
  • Destroy the polyps (this may actually be an argument against wind farms, whose concrete structures are excellent breeding grounds for jellyfish polyps)
  • Prevent spread by shipping and so on

It’s just a shame that the report concludes with some unnecessary mudslinging against my profession:

One of the paradigms of current economy is growth. Production, income, and consumption must grow, in order to have a healthy economy. The expectation, thus, is infinite growth.

I have never, ever met a serious economist (surely not an environmental economist) who says that production and consumption can or should grow indefinitely. We are all aware of the second law of thermodynamics, and we are all aware that the earth’s resources are finite. Yes, I know The Economist newspaper recently argued that in order to alleviate poverty we need to increase economic output. But that is an issue of raising people’s income above some absolute level: nobody says our income should rise forever. In any case, are we going to tell 1.1 bln people living on less than $1.25 a day that they should remain poor?

Obviously this is not possible, since our planet is finite, and the biomass ecosystems can produce is limited. The growth of human populations is exerting an unbearable pressure on natural systems that, obviously, are on the edge of collapse.

As I explain in this post, this would be true if economic growth is the same as producing ever more stuff, by putting in ever more other stuff. But it’s not. A lot of economic growth comes from meeting needs (material and immaterial) ever more efficiently, which does not necessarily imply using and producing more material. Can we keep increasing that indefinitely? Personally I don’t think so either. I’d bet our stock of ideas is likely to be as finite as our stock of fossil fuels, but that I’d also expect the bottom of that stock is still a long way off. Again, it is important to remember that not all economic growth is material growth. The economy also grows if we learn how to produce the same amounts with less inputs, for instance by being less wasteful. So for the foreseeable future I believe we can raise those 1.1 bln people above the poverty line while remaining within the boundaries of our planet.

The scientific community is warning about this problem since the times of Malthus and Darwin, but it is apparently unheard by decision-makers, economists having much greater influence than ecologists.

For the record: Malthus was an economist. And economists having influence on policy makers? If only. If this really were the case we would have an effective tax on carbon emissions, much less farm subsidies, and much healthier fish stocks.

Damn you, lack of global warming

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

The lack of Spring is taking its toll. We’ll have to wait another two weeks for our fresh maatjes:

The first barrel of fresh herring will be auctioned two weeks later than usual. The reason is the bad weather. Plankton, which is the main food source of herring, has been growing very slowly due to the lack of sunlight. (Source: Trouw.nl)

Actually, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. “Fresh herring” is a bit of a oxymoron because all herring is frozen. If they weren’t you’d have to worry about this uninvited guest. So go on and order some onions with it.

Who’s the sucker here: Kiribati, Mauritania, or the EU?

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

In many developing countries with large fish stocks most of the fishing is done by fleets from rich countries such as Japan, Spain, or The Netherlands. The EU has made a few new deals recently and they make interesting case studies.

On the EU’s latest deal with Kiribati (H/T Adam Baske):

Kiribati has secured a US$1.71 million deal for 15,000 tonnes of tuna per year with the European Union. Under the agreement, the EU is now able to deploy four purse seiner and six longline vessels in Kiribati’s waters.

There are many Pacific Island Nations making such deals. It’s a classical Prisoner’s Dilemma: if those countries stick together in the negotiations they could earn a lot more than if they go it alone. No wonder the Parties to the Nauru Agreement are not amused. Dr Transform Aqorau of the PNA comments:

“Kiribati could have generated an annual income of US$11.3 million from its agreement with the EU. But as I said, countries have their own reasons for doing what they do, but you have to wonder why in the face of great need by our people, we allow our natural resources to be sold short?”

On the other side of the globe Mauritania seems to have taken the other extreme. The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reports (25 May 2013) that ever since Mauritania’s fishing deal with the European Union has come into force, hardly any European fishing vessel has entered Mauritanian waters. Fishing in Mauritania has become unprofitable for these vessels due to several restrictions, including the distance they are required to keep from the coast, the fee they are required to pay, and the number of Mauritanian workers they are required to hire.

European fishing in Mauritania’s waters is often portrayed as a hostile takeover of a poor African country’s resources by rich nations’ fishers, so you may be tempted to cry victory over Western imperialism. But this is no victory for Mauritania (my translation from Dutch):

According to Jedna Deida, a Mauritanian fisheries consultant, four thousand people in the port city of Nouadhibou have lost their jobs because the foreign fishing fleets stay away. A few thousand earned a living as crew. Many others worked in processing factories. “It’s a terrible situation, ” Deida says. “People can’t pay their children’s schools. It’s been like this for months.”

Many coastal (can I call Kiribati coastal?) developing countries struggle with the same question: should we allow foreign fishers in our waters? Under what conditions? Shouldn’t we develop our own fisheries? But what if we earn more from lucrative deals with big foreign vessels than from our own small-scale fleet?

Why economists argue with ecologists (6): Can we price nature?

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

Can we express nature’s value in currency, such as dollars, euros, or yuan? I usually get one of the following three replies to this question.

The first is the hardcore ecologist:
“Most certainly not. Nature has a value in itself. Pricing nature is disrespectful to nature; it violates nature’s intrinsic value; it’s cynical and perhaps even blasphemous. Can’t we just enjoy something without putting a price tag on it? Why does everything have to be expressed in money?”

The second is the hardcore economist:
“Well, duh. People have preferences. Do you prefer an apple or an orange? Do you prefer a highway or a forest? From preference orderings we can derive the amount of compensation people would need for building that highway. So of course we can price nature. We do it every time we make a choice between nature and something else.”

The third is the pragmatic ecologist:
“I don’t like it, but if we don’t do it policy makers won’t listen to us. Economists rule the world, so to promote nature conservation we need to speak the language of economists, and that is money. So I’ll just hold my nose and price nature. But I will also remind people that the price tag does not mean that nature can be substituted for something else.”

Believe it or not, but my view is closer to the hardcore ecologist than any of the other two. So what am I doing teaching monetary valuation of the environment next June?

When we do monetary valuation of, say, a coral reef, we don’t value a coral reef. Does my wage say how much I am worth as a human being? (Boy, am I glad I never pursued that career in Dutch folk music.) No, at best it gives an indication of the value of the skills and expertise I am offering in the labor market as a teacher and researcher. Likewise, coral reef valuation aims to estimate the economic value of the goods and services provided by a coral reef, like diving tourism, coastal protection, or nursing juvenile fish. By “economic value” I mean how badly we want or need those goods and services, and how easy it would be to get them elsewhere if the coral reef disappears. That tension between how badly we want something and how easily we can get it is also called relative scarcity. Water is not scarce in The Netherlands, even though it is an essential resource. The fact that it is so easy to get makes that it has a very low market price. On the other hand, diamonds are hugely expensive, not because we need them so badly but because they are so difficult to come by. You rarely see newspaper headlines about the scarcity of people, but there is common mention of scarcity of skills or labor. The last time we put price tags on humans was during the shameful era of the slave trade. Likewise, monetary valuation does not, and should not, even pretend to price nature as such.

This view puts me at odds with the hardcore economist who argues that ethics can be fit in preference orderings and compensated for. I don’t agree with this line of reasoning. It would imply that one person can block a policy if he finds it absolutely unacceptable – after all, he would require an infinite amount of compensation in order to be left “as well off” as without the policy. In practice we would call him a protest bidder and remove his data point from our analysis. Another problem is that this line of reasoning assumes that moral objections are purely individual. Moral considerations, however, typically pretend to hold for everybody. If I think eating meat is wrong, I can allow you to order a hamburger while still condemning it. If it were a purely individual preference, for instance if I would have no quarrels with eating meat but I simply don’t like hamburgers, I would have no reason to condemn your ordering of a hamburger. So when we talk about the intrinsic value of a coral reef or a species, we have no other option but to debate it with others. The outcome of that debate may be that the majority dismisses the idea of an intrinsic value of a coral reef. But at least the argument would have its proper place in the political process, which it would not have if we tried to express it in a monetary value.

It also puts me at odds with the pragmatic ecologist. First, I find his line of reasoning insincere. If you think coral reefs are unique, unsubstitutable, and should be preserved for their own worth, just say so and don’t start using economic value as an argument of convenience. Second, economic value implies substitutability, period. If I compensate you for the loss of an environmental asset, I substitute the environmental asset by something that makes you just as well off as with the asset. So I have substituted the asset by something of similar value to you. If I cannot substitute the asset by all the wealth in the universe, then its value must be infinite: hence Michael Toman‘s characterization of Costanza’s $33 trillion paper as “a serious underestimate of infinity”. Third, valuation should be done sincerely, and with the prime goal to make sure that all relevant information is available for public decisions. If you blur the line between moral considerations and purely economic ones, you will be tempted to overstate the economic arguments because the moral ones didn’t work.

The bottom line is that when you do economic valuation, you need to define very precisely what it is you are measuring, and whether the methods you use answer the question you ask. I am deeply skeptical of measuring such notions as existence value (an economic value derived from no more than knowing something exists), because I doubt whether people understand the concept, and whether we will ever be able to distinguish it from moral considerations. But perhaps that is what the role of economists should be in this issue: to properly phrase the question, to explicitly lay out the arguments and considerations, and to quantify those considerations that can be quantified.

Mapping marine economics (5): Getting the incentives right

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

On October 23, 1924, Canada and the United States of America signed their first Halibut Convention. Halibut fishers had long pressed for an international treaty to regulate the fishery, but it had taken a few years before Canada was finally allowed by its former colonial ruler, Great Britain, to sign its own international treaties. It was an important step to prevent overfishing of halibut, because the convention provided for a three-month closed season in winter. After a few years, however, those three months turned out to be insufficient. New fishers had entered the halibut fishery, and many fishers had invested in bigger vessels. So fisheries managers shortened the fishing season to compensate for the increased fishing capacity. What did the fishers do? They bought even bigger boats. Small wonder what the fisheries managers did in response. Around 1990, the Alaskan halibut fishing season comprised no more than a few 24 hour periods, spread over the year. In those few days the fishers caught all the fish they used to catch in nine months. It was a textbook example of what fisheries scientists call a derby fishery.

What went wrong here? No matter the good intentions of the fisheries managers, they overlooked an essential factor in the system they were supposed to manage: human ingenuity. Animals can be inventive (ever seen your cat figure out how to open your fridge?), but humans are champions at this. When fishing days were limited, they bought bigger boats. When boat length was limited, they built wider boats. Human ingenuity has brought us the wheel, the steam engine, the Internet, and the smallpox vaccine, but it has also exaggerated overfishing. So how do we make sure it works only in our benefit?

Enter ITQs (and discards)
In Alaska the policy makers introduced Individual Transferable Quota, or ITQs. ITQs work much like tradable water rights, or tradable pollution permits: the government sets the maximum allowable catch, and ITQ owners have the right to catch (mostly, actually, to land) a share of that maximum. The possibility to trade ITQs allows inefficient fishers to sell their share to more efficient fishers at a price that makes both better off than without the trade. In the Alaska halibut fishery it worked: the derby fishing was over while the catch of halibut remained within limits. ITQs are now all the rage all over the world, as they seem to be the best instrument so far that fisheries scientists have come up with. But that does not mean they are perfect.

The problem is that ITQs limit landings, not catch. Monitoring catch is very difficult unless you send a police officer with every fishing vessel. So instead of monitoring how much fishers catch out at sea, managers monitor how much fish fishers bring to shore, in ports, auctions and so on. But landings are not the same as catch. If you run out of plaice quota while having plenty of sole quota left, you’d be sorely tempted to throw back your catch of plaice and keep your catch of sole. What is being thrown back is called discards. Discards have been in the news lately due to the proposed EU discard ban, for reasons good and bad. Nobody likes throwing away food, and throwing away half the catch of edible fish, as happens in some fisheries, comes across as criminally wasteful. Moreover, discards distort fishery statistics because by definition, they are the difference between catch (which fisheries scientists want to know) and landings (which they actually measure). But let’s not forget that estimates of the survival of discarded fish vary wildly and depend on the type of fishing gear, the species, and how long the fish stays on board before being thrown back into the sea. In other words, not all discarded fish die. Moreover, the quota system is at least as much to blame as the fishers themselves. If you introduce ITQs in a mixed fishery like the Dutch cutter fleet, where fishers catch many different species in one single haul, but you do not consider the ratios in which those species are caught, you are bound to put fishers in a situation where taking your unused quota back to shore seems more of a waste than discarding fish. Perhaps you say it is wrong to discard fish. Well, it is also wrong to steal a bike, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lock yours.

There is no panacea
The bottom line is that fisheries management does not manage fish – it manages people. So to do it properly you need to understand how people think, how they make their decisions, and why. This holds not only for fisheries management, but also for other ecosystems where human activity is a key player, like rangelands. Coastal ecosystems are rarely untouched by humans, because by definition they are located where people are most likely to settle first; they are also important holiday destinations. So to manage mangrove ecosystems you need to consider how, why, when, and where shrimp farmers cut, pollute, or otherwise degrade mangroves. To manage coral reefs you need to understand how, why, when, and where clumsy divers do the most damage.

The research in this domain has provided us with innovative policy instruments like ITQs, TURFs (territorial use rights for fishers), and PES (payments for ecosystem services). What these instruments have in common is that each was once hailed as the answer to all the problems in marine and coastal management, and that each turned out not to be. Every medicine has side effects; there is no panacea. What is needed is the right medicine for the right situation.

So what do I do?
This year I had a paper in Ecological Economics on policy instruments to manage transgenic maize – not exactly a marine topic, but still an example of how applied economic models can give quantitative insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of policy instruments. My contribution to this year’s EAERE is about certification as an instrument to nudge fishers in a more sustainable direction. In BESTTuna we analyze, among others, how instruments like ITQs and Vessel Day Schemes can manage Pacific tuna stocks. I have been involved in the supervision of Diana van Dijk, who investigates the performance of multiannual quota and limits on adjustment of quota in a volatile fishery with costly capital adjustment.

And there is still plenty to do. The debate on ITQs and PES is far from over, and there are plenty of questions on how to consider human behavior in the design of policy instruments. There is a theme session on modelling human behavior coming up at this year’s Annual Science Conference of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), which I organize together with Jan-Jaap Poos of Wageningen IMARES and Olivier Thebaud of CSIRO. One of the more difficult, and therefore more interesting, questions is how we include institutions and social norms in our analyses: can we model it? Or should we leave it to other social sciences that have better, qualitative tools to analyze these issues?

My tuna paper for the upcoming EAERE conference

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

My paper for the upcoming EAERE conference (PDF here) deals with certification of a fishery that is practically unmanaged. Usually you should steer clear of such fisheries as they tend to be heavily overfished, but what if a bit of consumer power can still nudge fishing effort from bad practices to slightly less bad practices?

This is a contentious issue. The Marine Stewardship Council simply does not certify a fishery if it has no plausible management plan. This is understandable, because before you label a fishery ‘sustainable’ you should check whether it has any mechanism to prevent future overfishing. It’s the classical problem of open-access resources: if users cannot be excluded from harvesting, it will be a free-for-all, at the future’s peril. So we need some institution that does the excluding.

But now take a look at the Western Pacific tuna fishery. It may not be completely open-access, but given the sheer size of the area (I’m talking half the largest ocean on the planet here) and the number of sovereign states involved, it comes pretty close to a free-for-all. Some of the tuna species (skipjack) are hardly affected, but they are caught in ways that affect other species (yellowfin) that are doing less well (although, admittedly, not as disastrously as some others). Some fishers use Fish Aggregation Devices (FADs), which attract schools of skipjack as well as juvenile yellowfin; their catch tends to end up in your sandwich as canned tuna. Other fishers do not use FADs but look for free-swimming schools of tuna. These fishers can select schools consisting purely of skipjack or yellowfin, which enables them to avoid catching juvenile yellowfin. There are good economic reasons to leave juvenile yellowfin in the sea: just compare the price of a tuna steak to that of canned tuna. So we want less tuna from FADs, and perhaps more from free-swimming schools.

But this is where it gets tricky. We could tell consumers to stop buying tuna from FADs, and lure them towards the tuna from free-swimming schools by using some sort of ‘FAD-free tuna label’ (if you can find the space besides MSC, dolphin-friendly, FOS, RFS, Grüne Punkt, Fair Trade, and all the other labels out there). But remember this is an open-access fishery, so the free-swimming schools are very likely to be as overfished as other schools. If we could simply shift consumer demand from FAD tuna to FAD-free tuna that would be good, but there is a risk that the FAD-free tuna label also boosts overall demand for tuna. After all, the label may attract tuna-conscious consumers who feel they can now finally buy tuna without feeling guilty. And enhancing overall demand may make matters worse rather than better. This is a major concern with certification in general, but so far I haven’t come across anyone looking at this problem for tuna.

I wrote this paper with Martin Quaas of Kiel University. I’m very happy to work on this issue with him: he works on many fisheries problems, and he has ample experience in the type of microeconomic modelling that we apply here. It’s a huge problem, with many facets, and I feel we have so far only scratched the surface of it. We (not Martin, but me and my colleagues at Wageningen University) further explore the issue in the BESTTuna project, but then in a much more applied and detailed manner. BESTTuna is huge, with partners all over the Western and Central Pacific and about 12 PhD students from the same region. This paper is just me and a German professor covering the same issue in a handful of equations. But such simplified analyses can yield insights that more detailed studies don’t.

Wise words from the Bird

/ rolfgroeneveld / 1 Comment

Originally I planned to include in my PhD thesis the following quote:

Learn all that stuff and then forget it.

At the time I thought it was Miles Davis who said that, but it might as well have been Charlie Parker (sorry Miles, Bird makes for a better blog post title). I’m not really into jazz: the quote tricked me into looking up some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on Spotify but after a few songs I always decide to turn on Pelican instead. The closest to jazz that I listen to frequently is the Tom Waits. I absolutely love Tom Waits. Oh, and Ethiopians like Mulatu Astatke or Getatchew Mekuria, but only when I’m in the mood.

But this quote – wow, I could tattoo it on my forehead if I were into that kind of thing (don’t worry, I’m not). It defines how I view the theories I work with, as well as the musical traditions I play. I consider myself a mainstream economist, but I do have my question marks regarding the behavioral and ethical models applied in my field. I don’t think there is any meaningful way of measuring existence value, if it exists at all. I don’t believe economic valuation can capture moral or religious considerations. I appreciate the role that social norms, traditions, or downright stupidity can play in human behavior. But I also think that it is too easy to throw your hands in the air and declare the entire body of neoclassical economics as overly abstract nonsense, or worse, to refuse to learn microeconomics because economists did not predict the latest financial crisis.

The bottom line is that you can only criticize a theory if you fully understand it. By the same token, you can only renew a musical tradition if you master its techniques, its rhythms, its harmonies, and its social context. Miles and Bird could only invent and develop bebop because they understood what came before it. Likewise, if you want better economics, well, make sure that you first understand the orthodoxy.

On the other hand, there is also the “forget it” part. Don’t let the tradition hinder your creativity. Dare to break its rules, to explore its boundaries. Dare to question a theory’s hidden assumptions, don’t accept such excuses as “this is how we have always done it.” Know the rules, but don’t obey them.

The quote, by the way, never made it into my thesis. My professor thought it cynical, as if I recommended the reader to forget all I wrote. I didn’t agree, of course, but I also figured that if he interpreted the quote like that, so would many others. So I left it out. I still regret that decision.

I’m an economist, I know nothing

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

One of the most difficult things about working in resource economics is being supposed to say something about stuff you actually haven’t a clue about. Does bottom trawling wreck the benthic ecosystem? How high are discard rates? Is the Plaice Box working? I don’t know, but to make an economic analysis I should.

It’s not like economics can’t deal with uncertainty. Sure, in the ideal situation we know everything: if A causes B, and we know the costs and benefits of A and B, we can do a cost-benefit analysis to tell whether A is a good idea. This is when the relation between A and B is deterministic. But mostly the relation between A and B is not.

The natural scientists could say “well, we don’t know for sure whether A leads to B, but what we can tell you is that the probability that A leads to B is 20%”. Most of the environmental economics textbooks call this risk, as opposed to uncertainty, which I will explain below. Risk is something we can deal with. For example, if B costs €100 then the expected value of the “B costs” of doing A is €20. You can also take into account that people don’t like risk, so perhaps they are willing to pay €25 to prevent B from happening if we do A. Note that this is €5 more than the expected value of the B costs; hence the costs of risk bearing are €5.

The natural scientists could also say “sorry, we have no idea. A could lead to B; it may also have no relation to B at all. We simply don’t know, and we can’t give you any probabilities either.” This is what the textbooks call uncertainty. Uncertainty is nastier to deal with (and, unfortunately, also more widespread) than risk. Under uncertainty all we could say is something like “if you do A, the worst that can happen is B; the best that can happen is no B.” There are strategies like maximin (choose the best of all worst outcomes), maximax (choose the best of all best outcomes), and minimax regret (choose the outcome that gives you, in the worst case, the least explaining to do), but that’s about all you can do.

The natural scientists could also say “it depends on who you ask. Some scientists say A probably leads to B, but others are not so sure. This is an ongoing debate in our field.” This is not so different from the previous case, and we could treat it similarly to uncertainty. Let’s call it a case of competing hypotheses.

The worst case, however, is where some scientists tell you “all the evidence suggests that A leads to B, and don’t let those evil impostors from the A institute tell you otherwise. They are paid by the A industry to deny our science.” No surprise that the A institute tells you that the idea that A could possibly lead to B is preposterous, and that anyone who claims that A leads to B is a leftist bureaucrat out to vilify the poor, hard-working entrepreneurs in the A industry, if not to establish an anti-A-ist communist state. Let’s call it a case of polarised hypotheses. Examples abound: genetically modified organisms, climate change, bottom trawling, MPAs.

The problem with polarised hypotheses is that the moment you choose to include a hypothesis in your uncertainty analysis you imply it is something to be taken seriously. I have no idea of climate science, and I don’t have the time to acquire all the knowledge that would enable me to distinguish the genuine scientists from the flat earthers. But I’m convinced that it is easy to take advantage of my ignorance, and that there are a lot of folks out there who try to do so. Is it a coincidence that one of the most prominent climate skeptics was once paid lavishly by the tobacco industry to deny the harmful effects of second-hand smoke? On the other hand, I’ve seen sufficient nonsense in the news (100 cod in the North Sea, all fish gone by 2048, dolphin meat in canned tuna) to be equally skeptical of the toxic combination of overzealous NGOs and lazy journalism.

So what do you do, as an ignorant economist who cannot fully judge the arguments? You check the messenger. Where does this person work? How much has he or she published, and in which journals? What is the disciplinary background of this person? (For example, one of the more prominent Dutch climate skeptics is an economist whose only peer-reviewed publications were in a journal specifically established to give climate skeptics the stage they can’t get elsewhere.) How much of what this person does is science and how much is advocacy? (I’m allergic to the kind of advocacy dressed as science that was behind, for example, the nonsensical claim that the planet’s ecosystem is worth $33 trillion every year. You can’t estimate this value, period.) I tend to pay much attention to contradictions: The Economist, for example, is an economically liberal newspaper that used to play down the threat of climate change, but nowadays it argues in favour of limiting greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I know Richard Tol, who is often quoted by climate skeptics, does not deny that greenhouse gas emissions are a problem. Funnily the skeptics never quote him on that; they only do so when he bashes wind power.

Yes, I know science is not made by majority votes, but that doesn’t mean that I should take into account every pseudoscientist with an opinion. And I know that reputation isn’t everything, and that many revolutionary insights were first ridiculed, but I can’t be a master of all. So I have little choice but to listen to the mainstream.

Overcoming cultural barriers

/ rolfgroeneveld / Leave a comment

In 2010 I spent about four months in Santa Barbara, California to teach a course at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and to write a paper with Christopher Costello. I rented a single room in one of those suburbs that we Europeans only know from Steven Spielberg movies: green, spacy neighbourhoods with all single-story, detached houses. My landlord was a colourful guy named Charlie, who lived mainly from renting out the rooms in his house to students and the occasional visiting professor. He ran a mobile cafe (called Gay Cafe Santa Barbara) in one of those old-fashioned aluminum trailers, the proceeds of which went to some LGBTQ-friendly cause I still don’t fully comprehend. His son drove in a small sports car with the number plate “LESBIAN” which I’m sure was Charlie’s idea.

We got along quite well. Charlie had lived in The Netherlands for a few years, where he picked up some Dutch words and a love for Dutch spiced cakes. (He bought his cakes in the place where I replenished my stock of Indonesian bumbu – the Dutch have an exotic brand of homesickness.) We talked a lot about life in The Netherlands and in California, about politics (like many Californians, Charlie was a staunch Democrat), and other issues. In a place like California, where people are friendly but keep their distance, Charlie was the closest I had to a friend.

One morning I entered the living room and Charlie grinned at me sarcastically, asking: “have you been in the kitchen yet?” On the kitchen floor lay a paper waste bag, torn open where the paper was wet from the coffee grind I had put in it a few days before. Coffee grind spilled from the waste bag all over the kitchen floor. “You know,” Charlie said grimly, “I have once thrown a tenant out because he did this repeatedly.” No need to argue who cleaned up the mess and where wet waste like food and coffee grind went from that moment on. I had learned my lesson.

What went wrong here? Unlike European sinks, many American sinks are equipped with a disposal: an electric device that shreds kitchen waste into pieces small enough to pass through the plumbing system. Apparently, American plumbing systems are designed to deal with such solid waste without clogging. Charlie did tell me: don’t throw wet waste (coffee grind, sauce, tomatoes) in the paper waste bags, because they will tear open. Turn on the disposal, and throw your waste in the sink. “It’s not a sink, it’s a disposal,” he said. But when I had made coffee I just couldn’t get myself to throw it in the sink. In Europe we learn never to throw such stuff in the sink: you may flush it down the toilet if you need to, but sinks get clogged if you throw all kinds of solid stuff in them. Surely he couldn’t mean that I was to throw it in the sink? So I tried to press as much water as possible out of the coffee grind – and in the paper bag it went.

I was reminded of this episode when I thought about the issues in supervising students from cultures very different from my own. For example, I have found that some students from Southeast Asian countries are very reluctant to send their teacher or supervisor work in progress. For me as a supervisor this is a problem. I’d much rather be kept informed of a student’s progress, or lack thereof, than to be kept in the dark for very long. The longer it takes, the more time is wasted if it is done the wrong way. But apparently it doesn’t work like that in Southeast Asia. If you send something to your supervisor (a draft paper, say, or data analyses), you better make sure that it is perfect. Better to send a perfect document five minutes before the meeting than to send a rough draft two days earlier. With the result that neither I, nor our professor, have time to prepare for the meeting by reading the material.

We have tried several ways to convince these students that it is okay to send work in progress. Asking politely. Threatening to cancel the meeting if I don’t get the stuff on time. Explaining patiently why it is better to send incomplete material early than to send complete material late. Getting angry when I receive the material late. But just like I had to overcome a cultural barrier to throw my coffee grind in the sink disposal, I guess these students need to conquer a strong inner voice that says: “surely he can’t mean I’m supposed to send him this?” Yes, I do. I promise I won’t be angry.