Science – Page 119 – a sibilant intake of breath

The moral choices in assigning rights

The best piece of writing I have come across in the last week or so is a chapter from the Bromley and Paavola book on environmental economics that I have been reading. By A. Allan Schmid, it is called “All Environmental Policy Instruments Require a Moral Choice as to Whose Interests Count.” The argument is that the idea of solving environmental problems in a purely technical way (internalizing externalities, to borrow from the economics lingo) is impossible. When a policy is represented that way, there is always a moral choice being concealed. In tort law, this becomes explicit through an instrument called nuisance.

If my neighbours are making homemade beer and the process produces a constant cloud of nasty smelling gas that wafts into my yard and through my windows, I could seek remedy in court. It would then be decided whether or not the smell constitutes nuisance. If not, the court effectively grants a right to produce the smell to my neighbours. I would then be free to try to convince them to use that right differently, for instance by paying them not to make beer.

If the court rules in my favour one of two things can take place. They can grant an injunction, forbidding my neighbours to make beer without my permission. This is great for me, since I can effectively sell them the right to make beer if the amount they are willing to pay exceeds the amount the smell bothers me. This is what Coase is alluding to in his argument that it doesn’t matter who you assign rights to, as long as bargaining can occur (See: Coase Theorem). Of course, he ignores the distributional consequences of assigning the rights one way or another. As an alternative to an injunction, the court can fix a set amount of damages to be paid. This relieves the nuisance, but gives me less scope to take advantage of the court’s decision.

What the example illustrates is that in creating policies to deal with externalities, the rights in question must be effectively assigned to one party or another. We either assign companies the right to pollute, which people around them can negotiate for them not to do, or we assign those people the right not to live in a polluted place, in which case the company has to go to them with an offer. The assigning of rights, then, isn’t a mere technical instrument for achieving an environmental end, but a matter of distributive justice.

Consider the case of fisheries access agreements in West Africa. West African governments have the sovereign right to exploit the waters in their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). They can also choose to sell that right, as many have done, to the EU. The governments end up getting about 10% of the value of the fish that are caught, while suffering the loss of future revenue that is associated with the depletion of the fisheries (since they are exploited at an unsustainable level). In this case, the distributional consequences of West African governments being rights holders are fairly adverse. The incentives generated inflict harm on the life prospects of those whose protein intake previously came from fish caught by artisinal fisheries now rendered less productive due to EU industrial fishing. Likewise, the life prospects of future generations of citizens are harmed.

One of the best bits of the Schmid piece is the following:

A popular phrase contrasts “command and control” with voluntary choice. Another contrasts “coercive” regulations with “free” markets. This is mischievous, if not devious. At least, it is certainly selective perception. First of all, the market is not a single unique thing. There are as many markets as there are starting place ownership structures. I personally love markets, but of course I always want to be a seller of opportunities and not a buyer. Equally mischievous is the idea that externalities are a special case where markets fail. Indeed, externalities are the ubiquitous stuff of scarcity and interdependence.

He puts to paid the idea that there is a tradeoff between economic efficiency and moral principles. That is simple enough when you realize there is an infinite set of economically efficient outcomes, given different possible preferences and starting distributions.

Those wanting to read the entire piece should see: Schmid, A. Allen. “All Environmental Policy Instruments Require a Moral Choice as to Whose Interests Count.” in Bromley, Daniel and Jouni Paavola (eds). Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices. Oxford : Blackwell Publishing. 2002. pp. 133-147.

Seeking sources

I have decided to take on two of the three potential tutorial students for the St. Hugh’s summer school, primarily because it is a good opportunity to gain teaching experience. As such, I am in the process of finding sources on the following topics that would be appropriate for clever high school students:

Causes and consequences of the 1973 oil price shock
The creation and history of OPEC
Distributive justice issues, regarding food
Corporate involvement in Latin America, same sector

If anything jumps to mind immediately to anyone, I would appreciate if you would leave a comment.

Fish paper finalization

Embedded in Starbucks, working on the revision of the fish paper, I am reminded that this is a particularly good environment in which for me to get things done. Critical factors include the absence of food I could go make, inability to connect to the internet (without paying for wireless access – £5 an hour, shocking!), and an atmosphere that is just distracting enough to keep my mind on target. Somehow, typing on a laptop in a coffee shop just feels very efficient. The entire introduction to the NASCA report was written in TextEdit in the Starbucks on Granville Street, near Georgia Street, while waiting for Sasha Wiley. The ready availability of caffeinated beverages is another natural advantage; on hot Oxford summer afternoons, there is little more capable of inducing work than four shots of espresso served over ice.

With Dr. Hurrell in France between yesterday and August 3rd, the fish paper is my top priority. That seems in keeping with a) the importance of publication if I hope to get anywhere in an academic context and b) the name recognition of a journal run by MIT. Getting it ready for publication involves two kinds of tasks – one relatively easy, and one relatively hard.

The easy task is contextual editing, as described in a previous post. I need to cut down a few sections that are non-critical, and perhaps reflective of the original status of this work as a term paper for an international law class. I need to tweak the language in a few spots and come up with a few neat ‘bullet point’ style recommendations of the sort Fernando and I generated for the NASCA report. I wouldn’t expect the above to take more than a couple of days.

The hard bit relates to a few scientific claims that are attributed to Clover – a journalist – rather than to specific scientific papers. Ideally, I should be able to cite both him and a scientific source for each. In practice, it may be hard to find sources that say exactly what he does. The statements in question are part of a general pattern broadly corroborated by scientific sources, but it is obviously better to have specific support than general support.

By the time I leave for Scotland on the 27th, the final copy of the paper should have been sent off to the editors of the journal. Naturally, I would appreciate if someone were able to give it a fine-tooth-comb going over, so as to ensure that no minor mistakes of language remain in the final version.

PS. Another pigeon hole check has revealed no Etymotic ER6i headphones. Once they arrive, I will finally be free from the lowest-common-denominator background music that is a feature of all corporate coffee shops. (I can hear Ms. Wiley gnashing her teeth at my corporate tolerance, halfway across the world, but I find the very plastic conformity of all Starbucks locations to be among the primary reasons for which they are such good places to get work done.)

Environment and representation

Revising the fish paper, and reading Bromley and Paavola on environmental economics, the question of the nature of ethical resource relations between the rich and poor world keeps arising. In particular, the issue of paternalism is persistent. The question must be asked of whether there are individuals or groups who ‘know better’ when it comes to environmental choices and, if so, how the superiority of their understanding can be verified and legitimated.

Whether it is Angolan diamonds or West African fish, there is often a case to be made that rich world access to commodities in the poor world has harmful effects. It may fuel conflicts (as with diamonds), it may reduce the future possibilities for resource use within the poor countries (as with fish), and it may enrich corrupt or non-representative elites while not benefitting the population at large. People have generally been critical of the Chinese government for striking resource deals with states that the west shuns because of their poor human rights records and lack of democratic credentials.

The big question, it seems, is how to treat the interests of people in non-representative political systems. Do people in democratic systems (or rich countries) have an obligation to effectively act as their agents, anticipate their preferences, and try to guide outcomes towards satisfying them?

Much recent policy seeks to do exactly this. When China decides that the electricity and prestige generated by the Three Gorges Dam is worth more than the flooded territory and other costs of construction, on what basis can or should we say that they are wrong? We can accuse them of short-term thinking (though our right to do so in anything beyond an advisory manner is dubious) or of violating the rights of individuals (which almost always happens when people are forced to do things in systems that lack political and legal accountability). All that said, the idea that rich states or international organizations can take up the cause of representing the general population of China strikes me as a problematic one.

Naturally, there are also accusations of hypocrisy. How many environmental choices within the rich world have been made on the basis of short-term thinking? How many have harmed a great many individuals for dubious value? Do not the states which are undergoing the process of development today have the right to make the same mistakes as states that have already developed did in the past? To the last of those, it can be responded that our level of understanding about the world has improved substantially since the industrial revolution. When developed states first used DDT, they were not aware of important consequences the introduction of that chemical into the environment would have. Arguably, the same can be said of all the coal that was burned to generate steam power and electricity. The trickier question is whether improved knowledge creates an obligation on the part of developing states to make choices that avoid incurring the kind of harms already suffered in the developed world.

There are also international efforts to encourage better environmental policy that might reasonably be seen as empowering, rather than paternalistic. The Publish What You Pay Initiative and Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative are trying to encourage (or require) resource extracting firms to publish the details of their contracts with governments. This allows scrutiny by the domestic regulators of the firms, by different branches of the governments involved in the contracts, by people living under the authority of those governments, and by international bodies. Presumably, having access to such information could allow for the mobilization of political energy, on the part of any or all of those organizations. At first glance, this model is more appealing than the paternalistic one.

In the end, this is reflective of a larger overall tension within environmental debates. There are certain groups that are often willing to promote optimum outcomes (scientists and economists in particular) that are based on analyses that are rigorous according to standards established within their own disciplines. Then, there is a political process that arrives at decisions on the basis of ongoing political realities – many of which have nothing to do directly with the nature and importance of the environmental issues in question. Finally, there are those who assert the fundamental rightness of views or policies on the basis of some combination of these considerations and others. Such a view suggests that there is an ideal policy (or at least a better policy) out there, but that its nature is not fully captured in technocratic assessment and does not arise spontaneously from the political process. I believe this intuitively, but have a great deal of trouble sketching out the details.

On what basis, however, can the desirability of this kind of policy be asserted? One mechanism is democratic endorsement. Many theorists assert the value of open discussion as a mechanism through which policy might be chosen. Of course, translating discussion into action brings it up against all the barriers produced by existing distributions of power. Likewise, people are not equally capable of engaging in discussion – especially when expert knowledge is a required currency in order for arguments to be taken seriously.

These are not questions to which I see straightforward answers. There is no group that can be trusted to evaluate the situation from a neutral perspective. There is likewise no solid way to assert which values are important, and how important each is with respect to others. The easiest solution, from the perspective of those trying to act in the world, is to identify those areas where present practice deviates most substantially from ideal practice as best understood, and where the gap between the two can be closed or reduced through available and acceptable means. I call this the strategy of picking low-hanging fruit. Of course, the assumption behind this strategy is that the big questions above will eventually be resolved to the satisfaction of most, allowing for further progress. There is plenty of reason to be skeptical about that.

Movie physics

Apparently, the physics in The Da Vinci Code are no better than the history or theology. (Though this review is more about general plausibility than physics, per se.) Let it be known that Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is among the greatest of all websites.

The review of The Core is funny enough to be worth reading, even if you haven’t seen that awful, awful film. People making films should probably take a careful look through their generic list of bad physics. Of course, scientific accuracy may not be terribly likely to put people in cinema seats, or sell DVDs.

On fundamental physics

Watching this video about the Large Hadron Collider (a particle accelerator under construction at CERN), I was reminded of something I was wondering about a few weeks ago. People talk about the universe being the size of a grain of sand, or the size of a marble, in the moments immediately following the big bang. That seems comprehensible enough, but there is a fundamental problem with the analogy. The marble sized thing isn’t just all the mass in the universe, expanding into space that existed prior to the ‘explosion.’ Instead, space and time were supposedly unfurling simultaneously.

The big question, then, is how it can be said that it was expanding at all? If there was nothing to expand into, how is this process of explosion something that is comprehensible, as such? To imagine it requires a perspective where the camera is outside our universe, an idea that invalidates the notion that the big bang was the origin of our universe. And, even if our universe is embedded in a higher dimensional space, the emergence of our lower-dimensional realm still requires some explanation. I wonder if it will ever become an object of knowledge for us: both as a species with a certain amount of information about how the universe works – verified through repeated experiments and predictive power – and as a collection of individuals who almost never know more than a tiny fraction of what all people know as a collective.

The video is a bit over-hyped, as well as a transparent attempt to defend spending a great deal of money on pure research, but perhaps it will interest some people regardless. Some of the prospects associated with the LHC – such as looking for evidence of supersymmetry or investigating the nature of gravity – are very exciting indeed, from the perspective of advancing our basic understanding about the nature of matter, and the kinds of interaction that take place in our universe.

Fish paper publication upcoming

I may be delerious because it’s 6:30am, but this seems pretty unambiguous:

I really enjoyed the piece you wrote on EU policies regarding fishery sustainability off the coast of West Africa. I’d like to work with you to prepare your piece for publication in [the MIT Internatinal Review].

You mentioned on your cover letter that you would be willing to “re-focus it in the most appropriate direction and summarize other sections.” This will probably comprise the bulk of our work together, as your piece was very well written to begin with.

An excellent bit of news by which to start the day. I am off to London.

Thesis development

Talking with Dr. Hurrell about the thesis this evening was rather illuminating. By grappling with the longer set of comments made on my research design essay, we were able to isolate a number of interwoven questions, within the territory staked out for the project. All relate to science and global environmental policy-making, but they approach the topic from different directions and would involve different specific approaches and styles and standards of proof.

Thesis idea chart

The first set deal with the role of ‘science’ as a collection of practices and ideals. If you imagine society as a big oval, science is a little circle embedded inside it. Society as a whole has a certain understanding of science (A). That might include aspects like objectivity, or engaging in certain kinds of behaviour. These understandings establish some of what science and scientists are able to do. Within the discipline itself, there is discussion about the nature of science (B), what makes particular scientific work good or bad, etc. This establishes the bounds of science, as seen from the inside, and establishes standards of practice and rules of inclusion and exclusion. Then, there is the understanding of society by scientists (C). That understanding exists at the same time as awareness about the nature of the material world, but also includes an understanding of politics, economics, and power in general. The outward-looking scientific perspective involves questions like if and how scientists should engage in advocacy, what kind of information they choose to present to society,

The next set of relationships exist between scientists and policy-makers. From the perspective of policy-makers, scientists can:

Raise new issues
Provide information on little-known issues
Develop comprehensive understandings about things in the world
Evaluate the impact policies will have
Provide support for particular decisions
Act in a way that challenges decisions

For a policy-maker, a scientist can be empowering in a number of ways. They can provide paths into and through tricky stretches of expert knowledge. They can offer predictions with various degrees of certainty, ranging from (say) “if you put this block of sodium in your pool, you will get a dramatic explosion” to “if we cut down X hectares of rainforest, Y amount of carbon dioxide will be introduced into the atmosphere.”

The big question, then, is which of these dynamics to study. Again and again, I find the matter of how scientists understand their legitimate policy role to be among the most interesting. This becomes especially true in areas of high uncertainty. The link from “I know what will happen if that buffoon jumps into the pool strapped to that block of sodium” to trying to stop the action is more clear than the one between understanding the atmospheric effects of deforestation and lobbying to curb the latter. Using Stockholm as a ‘strong case’ and Kyoto as a ‘weak case’ of science leading to policy, the general idea would be to examine how scientists engaged with both policy processes, how they saw their role, and what standards of legitimacy they held it to. This approach focuses very much on the scientists, but nonetheless has political saliency. Whether it could be a valid research project is a slightly different matter.

The first big question, then, is whether to go policy-maker centric or scientist centric. I suspect my work would be more distinctive if I took the latter route. I suspect part of the reason why the examiners didn’t like my RDE was because they expected it to take the former route, then were confronted with a bunch of seemingly irrelevant information pertaining to the latter.

I will have a better idea about all of this once I have read another half-dozen books: particularly Haas on epistemic communities. Above all, I can sense from the energy of my discussions with Dr. Hurrell that there are important questions lurking in this terrain, and that it will be possible to tackle a few of them in an interesting and original way.

The Salmon of Doubt

One more promising bit of academic news, from the MIT International Review:

Your paper is indeed still being considered (congratulations!), having made it through a particularly rigorous selection process. You will receive a more formal note to this effect in the forthcoming days.

This is, of course, the eternal fish paper, still passing through journal selection processes on its way to eternity. So much time has now passed since I wrote that paper that it feels like a familiar alien life-form that has been observing me continuously, but which I can only properly recognize when it glances at me in a certain way. Needless to say, this is an odd relationship to have with a piece of your own work.

I am very cautiously optimistic. If the paper gets through to publication, it will be my first published work in a journal not run by the University of British Columbia.

Research design essay blasted

I just got the feedback on my research design essay, and it is enormously less positive than I had hoped. The grade is a low pass and there are two written statements included: one that is fairly short and reasonably positive, the other longer and far more scathing. It opens with “[t]his research design is not well thought out.” Both comments discuss the Stockholm Convention and Kyoto Protocol as though they are the real focus of the thesis; by contrast, they were meant to be illustrative cases through which broader questions about science and policy could be approached.

The shorter comment (both are anonymous) says that “the general idea behind the research is an interesting one” while the longer comment calls the cases “well-selected… [with] fruitful looking similarities and differences.” The big criticisms made in the longer comment are:

The nuclear disarmament and Lomborg cases are unnecessary and irrelevant.
I haven’t selected which key bits of the Kyoto negotiations to look at.
My philosophy of science bibliography is not yet developed.
Not enough sources on Kyoto or Stockholm are listed. Too many are scientific reports.

It blasts me for not yet having a sufficiently comprehensive bibliography, and for the irrelevance the commenter sees in the nuclear weapons and Lomborg examples. The whole point of those is to address the question of what roles scientists can legitimately take, and how the policy and scientific communities see the role of science within global environmental policy making. The point is definitely not, as the comment seems to assume, to compare those cases with Stockholm and Kyoto. Taken all in all, this is hands-down the most critical response to anything important I have written for quite a number of years.

To me, it seems like the major criticism is that the thesis has not been written yet. I mention being interested in the philosophy of science, insofar as it applies, but have not yet surveyed the literature to the extent that seems expected. The same goes for having not yet selected the three “instances or junctures” in the Kyoto negotiations that I am to focus on.

As is often the case when I see something I was quite confident about properly blasted, I am feeling rather anxious about the whole affair – to the point, even, of feeling physically ill. I always knew there was a lot more work to be done – a big part of why I have decided to stay in Oxford over the summer – but I expected that the general concepts behind the thesis plan were clear enough. The long comment definitely indicates that not to be the case. I can take some solace in what Dr. Hurrell has said. He has more experience with environmental issues than probably anyone else in the department and has also had the most exposure to the plotting out of my particular project. Of it, he has said: “[the] Research Design Essay represent[s] an excellent start in developing the project and narrowing down a viable set of questions to be addressed.” Still, I would be much happier if the examiners had said likewise.

The major lesson from all this is to buckle down, do the research, and prove them wrong for doubting the potential and coherence of this project. The issue is an important one, even if it is more theoretical and amorphous than many of the theses they will receive. A simple comparison of Kyoto and Stockholm would be enormously less interesting.