Marginal Revolution

Assorted links

1. Jeff Ely will laugh at this.

2. Markets in everything: waiting in line for swine flu shots.

3. John Cassidy blog on "rational irrationality."

4. What does your doctor really think of you?

Dolphin markets in everything, Gresham's Law edition

I enjoyed this story:

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

Here is the full article and I thank David Curran for the pointer.

So how would dolphin bimetallism work?  I think we know!

Geoengineering with Iron Fertilization

As even their critics admit, Levitt and Dubner have performed a useful service in drawing greater popular attention to geoengineering.  Garden hoses to the sky,however, are not the only approach.  Iron fertilization is simpler, cheaper and much more easily testable. 

Most people are aware that CO2 and temperature are positively correlated in the long historical record but fewer people know that iron dust correlates negatively on the same scale - that is, temperature and CO2 levels are low when iron-dust is high.  The graph illustrates.

 

The basic mechanism that appears to drive the association between low temperature, low CO2 and high iron-dust levels is that iron-rich dust sometimes sweeps off the continents into the oceans where it creates a plankton bloom.  Phytoplankton take up CO2 in order to grow and as they die and produce fecal matter (I kid you not) carbon sinks to the lower depths or bottom of the ocean where it may remain for 100 to a 1000 or to even to millions of years (in the latter case eventually becoming oil).

A big advantage of iron fertilization as a way of reducing CO2 is that this process occurs naturally all the time and thus may be studied.  It is also possible to run experiments.  Indeed a dozen small-scale experiments over the past decade have already been run with all showing that iron fertilization does create phytoplankton blooms and some showing carbon sequestration.  Interestingly, private firms looking for future carbon offset sources are driving much of the research into iron fertilization.

Of course, all the usual caveats about uncertainty and unintended consequences apply.  Oceanus, the magazine of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has an excellent issue on this topic.

Famous Economists Quiz

The Jeopardy contestants didn't do very well but here is your chance.  Robert Whaples has created a quick quiz for his students on famous economists.   I expect most MR readers will get all the answers right but fortunately the quiz is timed.  I answered all questions correctly in 49 seconds.  Go for it!

The test of time?

Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers' votes the "novelists who may be read in 2029".

George Simmers, on his literary greatwarfiction blog, has jumped the gun by 20 years with some satirical reflections on the top five novelists in that poll.

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

I love Galsworthy and for that matter Wells.  Here is the article.  Here is further commentary.  By the way, no one back then voted for Agatha Christie, who is now probably the most frequently read of the British writers from that era.

For the pointer I thank the always-excellent Literary Saloon.