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Assorted links
1. The economics of global warming, by Marty Weitzman, highly recommended, very technical but hits the mark on many difficult issues, via Greg Mankiw.
2. Wunderkind Jesse Shapiro
3. Is Montenegro the next Mediterranean tiger?
4. Economic Report of the President
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 13, 2007 at 10:05 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I have been wondering why adolescent boys love Jean-Paul Sartre.
Posted by: Yan Li at Feb 13, 2007 12:11:20 PM
Weitzman's analysis left out the green golden rule issue of changing
discount rates for different time horizons. But, his botom line of
2-3% because of expected growth while worrying about "left-tail"
disasters is not unreasonable and consistent with Nordhaus who did
use the green golden rule approach, with a 3% short term rate declining
to 1% 200 years out, which Tim Worstall here said is apparently what
the UK Treasury is doing these days.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Feb 13, 2007 1:25:32 PM
You probably have heard for Casino Royal, but pay attention to Montenegro School of Economics (http://www.psee.edu.cg.yu/) ... Maja graduate there ...
If you are interested just as tourist check this
http://www.visit-montenegro.com/
http://www.montenegrosmiles.com/
Posted by: Dragana Ostojic at Feb 13, 2007 6:31:35 PM
It is curious that very few economists report that global warming is accelerating a massive wildlife extinction. Neither Stern nor Weitzman mention it. It is not a "theoretically possible rare disaster" -- it is certain. Do not depend upon Lomborg, who flunks ecology on this one. Economic analysis may be less important than a rather simple institutional change.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Feb 13, 2007 9:15:40 PM
“To its enormous credit the Review supports very strongly the politically-unpalatable idea, which no politician anywhere wants to hear, that the world needs desperately to start confronting the reality that burning carbon is expensive because it has a significant externality cost that must be taken into account.”
I am sorry, but is he joking? There are plenty of politicians that love to hear this. Mainly on the left, but also on the right. Why wouldn’t they? Opportunity for more power, prestige, control, votes. Maybe voters didn’t want to hear this (although even here there seems to be psychological reasons some people are attracted to “end of the world” theories).
The following sentence? “(This should have been, but of course was not, the most central .inconvenient truth.of all in Al Gore.s fable about inconvenient climate-change truths.)”
Is Al Gore one of the politicians anywhere who didn’t want to hear that burring carbon is bad?
It was a good paper. But I don’t consider interest rates the main problem of the Stern report, it is the skewed cost benefit (I mean cost-cost) analysis.
No one has convinced me Global warming is automatically bad. Rise in sea levels is just a joke, 1-2 feet over 100 years, who cares (which is why charlatan Al gore gives his audience the impression that the sea level rise is 20 feet). The sea-level increased 0.7 feet the last 100 years. How many noticed? The costs of protecting the land (the maximum cost) is a fraction of tenth percent of world GDP.
What exactly are the rests of the costs? A few more storms, maybe some freshwater lost (and some gained). The
gulf-stream-turning stuff so far has no scintific backing, the gulf-stream is as strong as ever. Well? How
exactly is 3 degrees of warming going to "threaten the future of human civilization"? I kind of feel left-out from the religious mass-hyseria. what am I suppose to fear exctly?
Back to Stern. Why does he refuse to include the benefits of warmer weather? People with high willingness to pay live in cold regions. Global warming, if the theory is correct, should be mainly global moderating, as most of the warming will be in cold places, in the winder, and the night.
What intellectual climate do we live in where Stern gets away with including the costs of more old people dying from heat waves, but not the reduction of old people dying from colds?
“massive wildlife extinction”
I will not dismiss you, but a few questions:
A) What kind of wildlife are we talking here? Do they have value for humans? In modern history we have not seen any valuable animals get extinct (as far as I know). Are we talking the usual nonsense, rare birds and insects that have no intrinsic value?
We know polar bears are thriving.
B) How expensive would it be to save most of these animals given a 3 degree rise in temperature? Can you do it 0,1% av world GDP? That is 50 billion dollars today, to rise to about 400 billion dollars per year around 2100, half the GDP of Africa today. Do you think that is enough to save your wildlife? Or should we spend 30-40 times as much in order to prevent warming?
Posted by: Tino at Feb 14, 2007 4:05:32 AM
Quick Fact check on the Ayn Rand hair-aryan assertion:
"Although Rand was a dark-haired, buck-toothed woman who could gently be described as “homely,” she "valorized female beauty, particularly the blond, blue-eyed, long-legged “American type” – one might also describe her taste as “Aryan,” which, given what we know of how people internalize hatred, might not be odd for a Jewish woman who grew up in Europe in the time of the pogroms."
The following are quotes describing the hair of the major characters in Rands three novels.
Atlas Shruged:
Dagny has "A sweep of brown hair"
Fransico "hair was black"
Jhon Galt "chestnut brown of his hair"
Ragnar "purest gold hair"
Fountainhead:
Roark has "bright orange hair"
Dominique has "her pale gold hair"
We The Living:
Kira "Mass of brown hair"
So 2/7 are nordic blonds...and only 1/3 of the women are blond.
Posted by: Robert Sperry at Feb 14, 2007 4:09:39 AM
"The costs of protecting the land (the maximum cost) is a fraction of tenth percent of world GDP"
What I mean is that much of the land is not even worth protecting. I also meant a fraction of a procent, or a few tenths of a procent, not "a fraction of a tenth" as I wrote. The massive system in Holland cost something like 10 billion dollars,
if I remember currectly.
Posted by: Tino at Feb 14, 2007 4:11:49 AM
How odd that a “homely” female writer feauteredd attractive male and female characters in her love stories. That would be as utterly absurd as thin bookish male authors putting strong and charismatic male protagonists in
adventure and sci-fi books. If that doesn’t prove she was a Nazi nothing will!
Posted by: Tino at Feb 14, 2007 4:17:01 AM
Tino, kind of you not to dismiss me, and I can understand why you believe a course correction in economic affairs must produce a continuous "cost," --because that's the predominating cost-benefit understanding: i.e., you are NOT to consider that the productive capital will be employed elsewhere, in new creative forms, so there may be NO long-term cost. The confusion perhaps enters with the idea of "opportunity cost," which was first defined as a cost of time, energy, money of YOURS, of doing one thing instead of another -- then transferred as valid to the "cost" of a development foregone. Nonsense, I suspect.
But, (1) where did you get the idea that polar bears are "thriving?" They had better change coat color fast! And (2) as to your question "what kinds of wildlife," that would be "nearly all," except the hardiest and weediest species. I can post the lengthy ecological argument, (in fact I will separately: see next,) --but it may be easier to answer, if first, you please name ANY wildlife that you "value," taking any meaning of the word.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Feb 14, 2007 11:56:52 AM
Effects of climate change on fragmented wildlife ecosystems:
[i.] REGULAR CIRCUMSTANCE OF WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS :
(1) Ecosystems have at least a two-step-fractal CLUMPED distribution, local and regional, and at the regional level they are divided by ecotones or geographic features.
(2) “Wild genetic health” is some statistical description of regional-level species populations, usually pegmarked at over 500 individuals.
(3) (Unimportant supposition.) There is an “ecological genetics” which would describe how the condition of interacting with all the other relevant species in the rest of the ecosystem, affects the survival and thriving of wild genetic health in any single one of the populations.
(4) Normally, species populations go extinct all the time. Not the entire species, but locally or regionally an entire population. Why? A bad winter, no food, new disease, new predator, etc.
(5) The rest of the ecosystem frequently re-equilibrates to new sizes of the other populations, depending on the importance of the missing species to the food web, and other things.
(6) The missing species is returned by immigration. All ecosystems are throwing-off stragglers and adventurers always, and if a male and a female make it over the river or through the woods, --and they find each other,-- they will restart the missing species.
(7) The rest of the ecosystem will then re-equilibrate to what it was before,—although not after too much time, or if other different things have happened.
(8) Most plant and animal species thrive well only within small ranges of moisture and temperature. As the climate changes, the species move to other areas. It may take several seasons to initiate a noticeable response.
(9) In the previous rapid climate changes, we may assume that the wildlife ecosystems were spread out, continuous and contiguous,—enough for many fortuitous circumstances of species preservation, in the slow-motion tumult.
(10) If and when there is a massive extinction, then there are niches to fill, and the surviving “weeds” (tough plants and animals) spread-out to evolve and re-biodiversify the whole place. Among the smaller animals, new speciation takes a period of time somewhere around the order of ten thousand generations -- for each new species.
[ii.] WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS AFTER FRAGMENTATION BY HUMAN HABITAT:
(11) Human development now encircles all the wildlife areas, which are greatly reduced in size.
(12) This fragmentation of wildlife habitat effectively seals-off ecosystems, for many different species. They do not venture out into the human habitat due to conditions, or chemistry; or they are killed when they do so. This goes for both plants and animals. Some others are not affected at all.
(13) The Reduction in Size of the Ecosystem has an Immediate Consequence. One of the few truly reliable ordinal numerical relations in ecology is the species-area law, which finds that smaller areas have a smaller number of species, and bigger, bigger. There are different reasons for this. Consider the reason, that a fewer number of individuals in each population (fewer, because of less resources overall,) makes a local species population’s random extinction (always happening at 4) statistically MORE PROBABLE. The fact that it is more probable to lose whole species is called that area’s “extinction debt,” which gets paid in the number of species that eventually disappear from that area.
(14) The Isolation of the Ecosystem’s Borders has an Immediate Consequence. The blockage of migration, by human habitat, ends or greatly slows down the reconstitution of missing species (which would have happened at 6.)
(15) As the remaining ecosystem re-equilibrates over and over, in response to successive losses of species, larger oscillations of the simplifying food web serve to accelerate the local extinctions.
(16) The only way to correct this is to build and preserve wildlife corridors, land and river connections, between and among wildlife areas.
(17) In addition, many existing wildlife areas need to be greatly expanded. Why? Because AS THEY ARE NOW , they do not accommodate the pegmark number of individuals (at 2,) in a full interacting ecosystem (at 3,) for continued genetic health. Saving two animals in a zoo will not provide the ecological sharpness for species definition. Among many reasons for this, you can find: changes in the act of predation; density-dependent reproduction; etc.
[iii.] FRAGMENTED WILDLIFE ECOSYSTEMS DURING RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE
(18) As the plants and animals change their geographic places in response to the different moistures and temperatures (in 8,) many will be extinguished at the contact with human habitat (in 12.)
(19) This accelerates the extinction rate that is ALREADY ACCELERATED by the reduction in ecosystem size (at 13) and the isolation of ecosystems from each other (at 14.)
(20) The global warming hockey-stick graphs, whatever their cardinal inadequacies, all show a temperature change far, far beyond the comfort zone of many plants and animals. And realworld evidence abounds, that they are changing their ranges.
[iv.] CONCLUSION
(21) We have just embarked upon one of the greatest mass extinctions in history, and it is a profound and extra-millenial tragedy, and a spiritual disaster.
(22) Since humans are creative and economic growth could happen along many paths, it is an intellectual scandal, and needless.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Feb 14, 2007 12:09:48 PM
Tino
I will dismiss you because of this “There are plenty of politicians that love to hear this. Mainly on the left, but also on the right. Why wouldn’t they? Opportunity for more power...” blah blah blah. I am SO tired of this conspiracy theory BS about how politicians are engaged in some grand global conspiracy to incredibly slowly use the environmental movement to get more power for, presumably, future political leaders.
How about some real evidence for this grand global coordination you speak of. You widely overestimate the competence and initiative of politicians, and badly misunderstand their incentive structures.
Posted by: aaron_m at Feb 14, 2007 5:55:05 PM
Aaron:
Thank you for demonstrating the sheer stupidity of the environmentalist movement.
Who said anything about a “conspiracy”? Are all independent reactions to incentives conspiracies? Politicians have jumped on the global warming issue, as could be expected. They have nothing to lose (it’s not their money), and much to gain. The evidence? Turn on C-span.
Polar Bears:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=252201796298639
By the way, Polar Bears are something like 125-250.000 years old . The last Interglacials period was warmer than the high range of estimate of global warming. If they (and many other species) survived than, why will they become extinct now?
The 0.6 degree increase we have witnessed the last 100 years has not hurt the polar bears. I also hope you realize that this is a species that does fine in Zoos. If we want to preserve them even with the worst case scenario the costs of doing it in an artificial environment is lower than the trillions needed to reverse global warming.
I don’t understand your ramblings about capital. Let me just point out the overwhelming majority of capital is simply not affected by temperature increases.
Posted by: Tino at Feb 14, 2007 6:12:27 PM
My point was the overwhelming majority of capital is simply not affected by temperature decreases.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Feb 14, 2007 7:09:02 PM
Lee Arnold,
Like many others I am trying to grapple with the actual state of the science on global warming, and I am not impressed with some of the people who are simply ignorant and hysterical like Al Gore on the one side, with dubious "deniers" (for lack of a better phrase) on the other hand who spout off things that were shown to be false a couple of years ago. Thanks for the posts. They bring up a couple of questions I have though.
1) Your point 20 brings up the hockey stick graph, which I kind of thought was under a cloud at best, and simply debunked at worst. What do you think of this article (pdf)?
1a) In particular what do you think of the graph on page 15?
2) To be frank I am dubious of claims of current mass extinction of species I have heard in the media by various individuals, (some with radically better credentials than I have). It is one thing to say that there are a huge number of species in a given area, it is another thing entirely to say that destroying a given area, such as logging on public property in the Amazon "Rainforest" causes a like number of species to become extinct, or even a small number of species for that matter. Finally, claims that global warming is causing such extinctions now strikes me as far fetched, and any such species lost ought to be laid to blame at the feet of the lack of property rights.
Consider this quote from an article on Julian Simon: "Fear is rampant about rapid rates of species extinction," he continues, "but the fear has little or no basis. The highest rate of observed extinction, though certainly more have gone extinct unobserved, is one species per year ..."
(One species per year!)
"... in contrast to the 40,000 per year that some ecologists have been forecasting for the year 2000.
And this quote from the same article:
Some of Simon's other claims, however, are so far from received opinion as to be hard to take seriously - his view on species loss, for example, regarding which he asserts that "the highest rate of observed extinctions is one species per year."
That was hard to accept. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the guru of global species extinction, said in 1991: "Believe me, species become extinct. We're easily eliminating 100,000 a year." A year later, in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life, he had modified that figure somewhat, saying: "The number of species doomed each year is 27,000." Apparently, these numbers were a tiny bit slippery. Still, both of them were a far cry from Simon's "one species per year."
Simon, on the other hand, pointed out that the higher estimates did not come from observation, they came from theory, specifically from Wilson's own theory of "island biogeography" which correlates species extinction with tropical forest destruction. The theory's "species-area equation," supposedly, predicts that for each additional unit of forest destroyed, so many more species die out.
This was another mathematical argument, reminiscent of the one made long ago by Malthus, and it was exactly the type of Neat Mathematical Certainty that Julian Simon took so much joy in shooting big holes through, which is what he proceeded to do now. The problem with the theory, he wrote in a paper on species loss with Aaron Wildavsky, is that it is not borne out by the empirical facts.
"The only empirical observation we found is by Lugo for Puerto Rico, where 'human activity reduced the area of primary forests by 99 percent.... This massive forest conversion did not lead to a correspondingly massive species extinction.'" Simon quoted Lugo to the effect that "more land birds have been present on the Island in the 1980s (97 species) than were present in pre-Columbian times (60 species)."
There's more quotes, but I recommend reading the whole article for anyone who doesn't beleive it.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Feb 14, 2007 10:00:04 PM
happyjuggler0
(1) That article is invalidated by the new IPCC report, which will have a hundred times more references. Have a look through the entire roster of posts at RealClimate, which have covered its substantive points at length. I didn't bother going past the page 3 inaccuracy -- Richard Lindzen clearly agrees that additional carbon dioxide will have a large effect on the climate, he just also believes that there are rheostatic effects which will mitigate it. He hasn't been able to move it past the status of conjecture with any climatology journal, though. And so on.
(1a) The p.15 borehole data are also in the more inclusive first chart at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=7, along with Huang's correction of the data. You realize of course that there are many major proxies, and this picture is quite advanced?
(2) It has in fact been suspected by ecologists since the late 1970's that climate change will accelerate this accelerated extinction. Yes, the argument originally comes from theory. Also according to the theory, an "extinction debt" incurred by area-reduction is probabilistic, and can take a hundred years to be paid. So Simon and Wildavsky's paper is misleading. All wildlife areas ever examined follow the species-area law, for all the regular reasons, so you will have to explain why it isn't eventually going to happen.
As for real evidence, even the highly judicious listing policy of the IUCN Red List has begun to confirm it; see a brief summary of their reasoning, criteria, and vast findings at
http://www.iucn.org/themes/ssc/red_list_2004/GSAexecsumm_EN.htm
The fact that Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg couldn't bother to learn the science astounds me, (actually I suppose it is their publishing editors who astound me,) but there it is.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Feb 14, 2007 10:55:16 PM
Tino,
Your argumentation technique is piss poor:
1) Rejecting your unsubstantiated theories does not make me part of the “environmentalist movement.”
2) You ask “Are all independent reactions to incentives conspiracies?” Of course the sum of independent reactions do not by definition add up to a conspiracy, but I did not make this claim. What I do reject is your insinuation that politicians are planning to use climate change to get more power. I suspect that the opposite is true; namely that power hungry leading politicians see climate change as a threat to their power base.
3) You say “Politicians have jumped on the global warming issue.” This is utter nonsense. It is widely understood that states have done next to nothing to address climate change despite all the talk (i.e. Kyoto etc… entail essentially no change). Any marginally intelligent person can see this just by observing the fact that there has not been any change in the way we get from A to B, no reduction in their levels of consumption, and how our economies continue to be just as dependent on fossil fuels. Any person who knows how to search on google can find out that emissions are increasing not going down.
4) You say “They have nothing to lose (it’s not their money), and much to gain.” More nonsense! If as you say voters do not want to take on costs to address climate change then politicians have votes to loose. And what is it that they have to gain? You just state that they have tons to gain but never explain your thesis.
5) You say “The evidence? Turn on C-span.” In other words you have no evidence.
Posted by: aaron_m at Feb 15, 2007 8:24:14 AM
大家好，我是臺灣人，從臺灣一個人搬家來到美國，環境很陌生，感覺很孤單。以前在臺灣幾家知名的徵信社工作過，我是一個優秀的徵信工作者，希望早點找到適合自己的工作。希望通過貴站，認識更多的朋友。
Posted by: 謝文豪 at Apr 1, 2008 10:40:10 PM
