Politics – Page 219 – a sibilant intake of breath

On risk and decision making

In a complex world, understanding risk and responding to it properly is an essential human skill. Every kind of important decision involves it: from making choices about where to get electrical power to deciding whether to walk home through a dark city or let your children use the internet.

The manipulation of risk-related thinking is an increasingly obvious trend, with two major facets. The first is manipulation of the data upon which people base their decisions. The media, for instance, grossly exaggerates many risks. Rare phenomena, by definition, are news. Things that happen all the time (car crashes, domestic abuse) are not. As such, we worry about serial killers and terrorist attacks, when there is a vanishingly small chance either will ever harm us. Even worse, some campaigns actively deceive so as to try and achieve political ends; one particularly harmful example is education systems that misrepresent the effectiveness of contraceptives in hopes of encouraging teenagers to refrain from sex. Such campaigns are both unacceptably patronizing and quite obviously harmful. Another obvious example is the cultivation and exploitation of fear, on the part of governments, as a mechanism for securing increased power and freedom from oversight and criticism.

Such campaigns blend into the second trend: a denial that risk-related decisions must be made at the level of individuals. A natural trend of those in charge is to strip people of their ability to choose, for any of a number of reasons. There are times at which it is reasonable to force people to take certain precautions. Requiring people to have car insurance is a good example. Such cases, however, must be evaluated through public legal and political scrutiny, and justified on the basis of arguments that are critiqued and data that are legitimate and verified.

The intelligent solution is to teach good risk-related thinking. That means learning how to identify the agendas of those providing information. It means having tools to make reasonable assessments of logical arguments, as well as supporting data. That means not keeping people ignorant or keeping essential information secret. And it means teaching a perspective of individual empowerment, where the reality of trade-offs between different risks is acknowledged. Alas, it seems unlikely that such an approach is likely to be widely adopted.

Ka-Boom!

A few minutes ago, something happened above me that was exceptionally loud. I was wearing my Etymotic ER6i headphones with the foam eartips, which boast a 35 decibel reduction in ambient sound. In spite of them, the noise was painfully loud for several seconds.

I assume it was a supersonic patrol of figher aircraft, maintaining some defence of London, nearby, and other potential targets. Definitely unnerving.

More security, less freedom

While we can all be very glad this alleged plot was foiled, the new rules on carry-on baggage are going to make travelling long distances by plane truly hellish. Without more information, it is impossible to evaluate how justified they are, but they certainly appear to be quite onerous. No water; no books, magazines, or newspapers; no portable electronics of any kind. Of course, either the restrictions or all duty-free shopping will eventually have to go.

It also seems that all EasyJet flights out of all London airports are cancelled. With my EasyJet flight to Dublin in six days, I wonder what is going to happen. They seem to be offering refunds on tickets. Maybe I should take it, then pay the cancellation fee from the hostel.

Such is the power of terrorism: even when we win, we lose.

[Update: 6:52pm] Both of my current roommates have had to re-schedule flights over this: one to Austria and one to Barcelona. It seems likely that another friend’s trip to Madrid will not be happening, and that yet another friend’s flight to Canada tomorrow will be boring and uncomfortable.

[Update: 11 August] Flights from London to Dublin are back on schedule, according to EasyJet. My friend also made it to Madrid today, after all.

Climate change and nuclear power

Among environmentalists these days, the mark that you are a hard-headed realist committed to stopping climate change is that you have come to support nuclear power. (See Patrick Moore, one founder of Greenpeace, in the Washington Post.) While appealing in principle, the argument goes, renewable sources of energy just can’t generate the oomph we need as an advanced industrial society – at least, not quickly enough to get us out of the hole we’ve been digging ourselves into through fossil fuel dependence.

I am sympathetic to the argument. A good case can be made for employing considerable caution when dealing with something as essential and imperfectly understood as the Earth’s climatic system. Nuclear power is strategically appealing – it could reduce the levels of geopolitical influence of some really nasty governments like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. It is appealing insofar as carbon emissions are concerned, though it is not quite as zero-emission as some zealots claim, once you take into account things like fuel mining and refining, transport, and construction. It is appealing insofar as it can generate really huge amounts of power, provided we can find people who are willing to have reactors in their vicinities.

The big problem, obviously, is nuclear waste. Nuclear reactors produce high level radioactive waste, as well as becoming radioactive themselves over the course of time. The scales across which such waste is dangerous dwarf recorded human history. Wastes like Plutonium-239 will remain extremely dangerous for tens of millennia. As The Economist effectively explains it:

In Britain only a few ancient henges and barrows have endured for anything like the amount of time that a nuclear waste dump will be expected to last—Stonehenge, the most famous, is “only” 4,300 years old. How best, for example, to convey the concept of dangerous radiation to people who may be exploring the site ten thousand years from now? By that time English (or any other modern language) could be as dead as Parthian or Linear A, and the British government as dim a memory as the pharaohs are today.

In fairness, we have some reason to believe that future generations will be more capable of dealing with high level radioactive waste than we are. There is likewise some reason to believe that we can bury the stuff such that it will never trouble us again. Much of it has, after all, been dumped in far less secure conditions. Chernobyl remains entombed in a block of degrading concrete, and substantial portions of the Soviet nuclear fleet have sank or been scuttled with nuclear waste aboard. (See: One, two, three) Off the coast of the Kola Peninsula near Norway, 135 nuclear reactors from 71 decommissioned Soviet submarines were scuttled in the Berrents Sea during the Cold War. In addition, the Soviet Union dumped nuclear waste at 10 sites in the Sea of Japan between 1966 and 1991.

In the end, I don’t find the argument for long-term geological storage to be adequate. We cannot make vessels that will endure the period across which these materials will be dangerous. As such, I do not think we can live up to our obligations towards members of future generations if we continue to generate such wastes – though that is unlikely to matter much to politicians facing US$100 a barrel oil. Pressed to do so, I am confident that a combination of reduction in the usage of energy and the development of renewable sources could deal with the twin problems of climate change and the depletion of oil resources. The short term cost might be a lot higher than that associated with nuclear energy, but it seems the more prudent course to take.

All that said, I very much encourage someone to argue the contrary position.

Tuna farming

The bitter joke among fisheries scientists is that the Japanese are engaged in a dual project of turning all available knowledge and energy to the farm-rearing of bluefin tuna while simultaneously expending all available effort to catch every wild example.

This month, they succeeded in one of those aims: Hidemi Kumai and his team at Kinki University managed to raise fry born in captivity to adult size and them have them breed successfully. Because of the complexity of their life cycle, it is a considerable achievement. (Source) These are valuable fish, with the record holder having sold for $180,000 in Tokyo. The three largest fishers of Bluefin tuna are the United States, Canada and Japan.

This is good news for those who enjoy bluefin tuna sashimi, though they should probably be hoping that the rearing process can be scaled up to commercial levels. According to the US National Academy of Sciences¹, present day stocks are only 20% of what existed in 1975. Some sources hold existing bluefin stocks to be just 3% of their 1960 level. Present stocks are only 12% of what the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has designated as necessary to maintain the maximum sustainable yield for the resource. Within another fifty years, it is quite possible that wild bluefin tuna will no longer exist.

[1] National Academy of Sciences. National Research Council. An Assessment of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. Washington DC National Academy Press, 1994.

On modes of reasoning

One major tenet of liberalism is the idea that greater awareness of the world gained by people collectively through science and individually through education can improve overall human welfare in the long term. Firstly, the idea is that people will gain a more accurate understanding of the world and how it works. Much more controversially, they might improve the way they reason.

A game much loved by economists illustrates the controversy:

There are two players. The first player is asked to divide $10 into two parts and offer one to the second player. If the second player accepts the offer, each player gets to keep their share. If the second player refuses, nobody gets anything.

Standard economic logic would call upon player one to offer exactly $0.01, which player two should happily accept. Both players are made better off and should thus be willing to make the deal, and each player has maximized their earnings, given the rules of the game.

Of course, the game doesn’t work this way with real people. Hardly anyone will accept an offer of less than $3. This is entirely logical if you view the game not as an isolated occurrence, but one event in a life. Over the course of a life, it pays to develop strategies that keep you from having advantage taken of you. Likewise, over the course of repeated interaction, it pays to have strategies by which other people can be compelled to give you a better deal. This one choice may not offer the scope for such development, but the existence of such heuristic devices (like rules of thumb) can be extremely efficient where people have limited information and thinking power.

Economists, on the other hand, are about the only people who make offers of less than $1. More tellingly, they are also about the only people who accept such meagre offers. Through exposure to economic theory, their mechanisms of logical thinking have been altered. It is probably fruitless to speculate on whether they have been improved. Economists can understand the importance of factors like those listed above, so playing this way isn’t obviously a sign that their thinking has worsened. Of course, if economic trailing makes them less likely to anticipate that people might reject a $0.01 offer, perhaps they are worse off overall.

What is more interesting than the consideration of whether the economically optimal strategy is inferior or superior is the consideration of how frameworks of understanding affect decision-making and, furthermore, what effect that has on the liberal conception of welfare improvement through improved knowledge. The previous blog entry, for instance, portrayed the costs of global warming in terms of how much it would cost people to deal with (a very common economic representation). Drowned polar bears and damaged ecosystems only matter insofar as they affect people. Personally, I find such an approach reprehensible – for the same reason I think the wholesale denial of animal rights is morally unacceptable.

One can defend that position on pragmatic grounds: human beings with a reverence for nature have a better chance of living good lives and/or not wiping ourselves out. Saying we should cultivate the belief on those grounds is similar to Rorty’s conception of ironic liberalism. By contrast, the belief that the integrity of natural systems matters for its own sake has an intuitive appeal of a sort very un-chic and difficult to defend in a world full of poststructuralist rejections of firm ontological foundations to moral truth. Anyone who can devise an argument for the inherent value of nature not subject to such criticism will earn my appreciation.

PS. Inside nested padded envelopes, the dust-infested Canon A510 is en route to a registered service depot. If they decide to cover the problem under the warranty, I expect they will replace the camera outright, rather than trying to open and clean it. Doing so would take a fair amount of some technicians time and, if the camera isn’t properly sealed, it would only be a matter of time before parts of my sensor would start getting opaque again. Hopefully, it will come back in time for my trip to Ireland later this month.

PPS. I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4. Please report any bugs you come across on the bug reports page. Note also that, due to a barrage of spam comments, I have tightened the comment filtering settings. My apologies if any of your comments get zapped by the filters.

Global warming damage curves

Perhaps the biggest question about global warming is what environmental economists refer to as ‘the shape of the damage curve.’ I would say that the scientific evidence that global warming is taking place is essentially ironclad (though the relationships of some events, such as more severe hurricanes, to it are rather more tenuous). Equally true is the fact that human beings are contributing to the warming of the planet. What the damage curve represents is the amount of harm caused by each additional unit of global warming, expressed in terms of the cost that would be required to mitigate it. Mitigation costs include everything from relocating people to dealing with larger malarial areas, making agricultural changes, and increased building heating and cooling costs in different areas. The costs are net of any benefits that global warming provides: such as being able to grow certain crops farther north, or having a longer growing season overall.

The most benign possibility would look something like this:

The damage increases steadily with the amount of mean global temperature change. This is helpful because it allows us to predict the degree of future damage quite effectively and make reasonably good choices with regard to how much reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions we should undertake.

A worse option looks like this:

The damage increases at an increasing rate, as temperature does. This seems intuitively more likely than the first option, since bigger increases are likely to unbalance more and more complex biological and climatological systems.

An even worse option looks like this:

It is possible that climate change would involve a big jump that we wouldn’t see coming until it was too late. An example would be the much talked about possibility that the Gulf Stream, which warms Western Europe, could be disrupted. The biggest reason this is problematic is because we might believe we were in a scenario like the one in chart one, only to be proved spectacularly wrong.

The trillion dollar question, of course, is which of these approximations we should adopt as the basis for policymaking, until such a time as compelling evidence for one of the possibilities or another emerges (hopefully not by means of humanity actually following one of those curves too far). The most cautious option is to assume that the progression would be like chart 3, with the break at an unknown location. The prudent policy, then, would be to try and stabilize GHG levels at their present positions. Of course, that could involve massive reductions in possibilities for economic growth in the rich world and poverty reduction in the poor world. A tricky decision to make, in the face of such important considerations on both sides.

Personally, I don’t think any serious action will be taken until some very real evidence of the harm that can be caused by global warming has manifest itself. As for the question of what should be done, in the ideal circumstance, I am profoundly uncertain. What do other people think?

Newsfilter: Vanity Fair on 9/11

There is a Vanity Fair article that is getting a lot of attention right now, about the response of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) to the September 11th hijackings. To me, it seems well worth reading, especially for the primary source material that is included. While it is obviously a particular selection of the available evidence, it does demonstrate convincingly that this was not a scenario for which a plan existed, or during which an accurate appraisal of the situation was forthcoming.

I still mean to go see United 93, if it is still playing in Oxford. Would anyone else be interested in going?

Treason

In the spirit of short entries, I have a confession to make: I am not a social scientist. Even worse, I don’t believe in social ‘science.’ Science is about things where you can access physical reality closely enough that you can be decisively proved wrong. Science is about improving our ability to act usefully in the world. Adding a bunch of regressions to your study on civil wars does not accomplish that.

PS. Political theory is about a million times more interesting than international relations theory.

[Update: 2 August] This entry doesn’t quite say what I mean, especially as regards the definition of science. It will need to be revisited when the ideas are clearer in my mind.

Tutorials very successfully concluded

My tutorials this afternoon went exceptionally well. Discussing an area that you really know a great deal about with someone who is interested but just starting out in their scholarly examination of it is both engaging and rewarding. I am especially enjoying the tutorial on distributive justice. I remember how interesting it was to first read Rawls, Mill, Singer, et al and it is particularly gratifying to be sharing such ideas with someone else. The only danger is assigning a reading list that is far too long. As far as the tutorials on globalization and global justice go, I need not have worried about being short on communicable knowledge.

The other tutorial, on OPEC and the oil price shock, was also quite interesting. I have gone over 20th century Middle Eastern history enough times now that I feel quite comfortable talking about it and have a list of sources in mind basically all the time. In general, the tutorials were a reminder of the excitement that can be associated with the conveyance of knowledge.

I am looking forward to the four tutorials that remain with these two students.