Whence all this writing?

For those reading these all facebook and wondering why I'm writing so many notes, I should clarify that they're from a blog.

Faster than a speeding automobile

Yesterday, on my walk home from school I was followed by a horrid screeching noise. It turned out to be a car, in exceedingly bad condition. It was stuck in traffic, and so ended up matching my pace for eight minute walk back, squealing in agony every time that it stopped.

The screeching made me notice the fact that I was actually walking faster than the cars. Traffic isn't usually that slow in Toronto, but I have noticed the same thing happening a few other times. Being in a car here is infinitely slower than in Fredericton.

Fortunately, I live 8 minutes from school, about the same distance from a grocery store, right beside a streetcar and subway stop, and lots of other cool things are nearby. So I can easily ignore the traffic creeping along around me as I walk about, but it's incredible what people put up with for the sake of "mobility".

Conform to the Norm

A comment to the last post wondered why vegetarianism is viewed as odd and considered an abnormal choice.

Well, vegetarianism is considered an abnormal choice to make because it IS an abnormal thing to do, meaning that it deviates from behavioural norms. Most people eat meat.

And THAT (deviating from the norm) is considered worthy of a dismissive reaction because, despite our rhetoric of individualism, we are a conformist culture. This is true of every culture, they each have their own norms and accepted modes of behaviour.

Having moved in and out of Cuban, French and Canadian culture, it's something I've been able to confirm through my own experience. It can be quite funny to watch people do things which they are certain are THE one right and natural way to do things, but are in fact just a local standard.

Perhaps one irony is that in our culture, the idea of individualism is something to be conformed to.*

We interpret phenomena through the lens of our cultural norms. Behaviour that deviates from norms is automatically suspect, or at least difficult to understand. So vegetarianism is looked down upon precisely because it is not normal, and people haven't figured out why one ought to be one. Again, this comes down to the fact that our moral codes are generally based on actions we perform directly. Few would take food from the poor, but many buy foods such as meat which make food more expensive and scarce for the poor.

Sooner or later, events and reality will intrude, making it easier for people to reason their way around the various reasons why it could make sense to be vegetarian. Real world events can be a strong catalyst for the re-evaluation of moral codes.

For now, those that choose that path will just have to take comfort in the fact that there are at least enough of them to make a viable community for support. That, provided with health, cost and moral benefits hopefully can be enough for those inclined to do so.

p.s. Just in case anyone got the wrong impression, I'm not actually a vegetarian, though I do eat a fairly meat reduced diet, largely for cost reasons (I'm a poor student). I don't think it necessarily has to be an all or nothing proposition though. Any amount of meat reduction is environmentally beneficial.

* Now that I think about it, how would you go about NOT conforming to individualism?

Turning off the tap hardly matters

I came across some interesting figures on water use for food production today. I'd already known that most water use goes to agriculture. The numbers for water use are roughly 70% agriculture, 20% industry, and 10% for domestic use.

Some agricultural uses take much more water than others. A pound of beef, for example, takes about 4000 litres of water (I couldn't find any universally accepted figures. Click on the image below for a rough idea of water required for different foods).

This is because not only do you have to give the cow water to drink for years, but you also have to water the feed that the cow eats. I'm sure there are other water needs as well.

As humans, we tend to focus on the things we do personally with effects directly visible in our lives. So, if people decide they ought to do something to reduce water usage, they may decide to focus on something immediately present, like turning off the tap.

Eating beans instead of beef would be infinitely more effective; a vegetarian could leave a tap running for hours, and still use less water than your typical meat eater. But since we don't directly see it, people often focus on the much smaller amounts of water usage that they directly control in their houses.

Another under-appreciated fact is that the 70% of water used by agriculture and the 20% used by industry are ultimately used to make things used by us. So, in an indirect sense, it's really our water usage. This applies to pollution and resource usage more generally.

Which is why it's nonsensical when some people assume that the solution to our environmental problems lies with greedy industries*, and if they cleaned up their act, everything would be fine. Ultimately, the problem lies with all of us who consume the products of industrial society.

This is a chart of estimated household usage, for comparison. Note how slight the amounts are compared to those used to produce our foods:

* This is not to say that greedy industries aren't part of the problem. Industry lobbying to mislead the public and preserve the status quo has been quite harmful. The industry financed propaganda campaign against climate change in the US is a prime example.

More about efficiency

On facebook, I've been getting some comments that make clear that it hasn't been exactly clear what the devil I meant by efficiency in the last post.

I'm talking about the economist's version. I studied economics, so its natural to me to think of that type of efficiency....but, I should probably have stated my unstated assumptions. They make arguments clearer.

So....what do economists mean by efficiency? I'll illustrate using something they show in first year called the "Production possibilities frontier". (PPF)

In the simplest version, you might have to two types of goods, and you could split your production between them. The wikipedia example that I linked to has two goods, food and computers. Any point on the line represents maximum efficiency.

If you're at point A, you can produce more computers, but at the cost of less food, and vice versa. This is true of any point on the line. Since you're using your resources to their maximum potential, you can only get more of one thing by getting less of another.

If you're producing at a point inside the curve, then you can get more of both, just because there is still room to be more efficient.

A couple of notes about the PPF. First, the curve is curved because of declining marginal productivity. In other words, we start producing food on the best agricultural land, with the best farmers. If we keep trying to produce more food, then eventually we have to use land not as suited for farming, and take labourers who are better at making computers and worse at making food. So we have to give up more and more computers to produce less and less food.

Second, economists generally shy away from saying how we should allocate resources between the two resources; they leave that one up to the politicians. But if you say you want 75% food and 25% computers (or vice versa), then they do say that you ought to produce those in the most efficient way possible (ie. on the frontier, the line).

In the real world, economist's say that we should strive to be somewhere on the line. They don't have an actual PPF curve for the whole economy, but the theoretical concept applies. Inefficiencies in production anywhere or anyhow mean that we're producing "inside the cuve" or "getting less production than we might have gotten for the same inputs".

This is the rationale behind most contemporary economic commentary, which is why I've chosen the PPF as an example.

Any lack of free trade means that we're producing somewhere inside the curve. We can have more food, and more computers and more stuffed teddy bears for that matter by using open global markets. We reduce inefficiencies and move closer to the frontier of maximal production.

But notice there's no temporal aspect to that curve. It's talking about maximizing efficiency in the present. This is generally what economists mean as well. If, in the future circumstances change that change our production possibilities, well, then our production possibilities will change.

Ta-da! Economists generally talk about these changing circumstances as if there is no problem, because we will find a way to adapt, somehow, and in any case under the new production constraints we can and should still produce in some maximally efficient way at the production possibilities frontier. This is the core of my disagreement of the concept.

I'll use an example to show why this is problematic. Imagine some people on an island. It's a closed system, isolated from the outside world. There is no foreign trade, which is true of our world as a whole as well (we don't import or export to Mars).

Let's say we have two production possibilities: Giant statues, and food. The inputs for both of these things are labour and wood. Labourers carve giant statues in a quarry, then wood is needed to transport them to where they will be displayed. Farmers farm food on land, but they also get lots of fish and other food from the deep ocean. To do this, they need wood from large trees with which to build ocean-going canoes.

Things are going well for the Islanders. They have become pretty efficient. The island now works as a unified whole, producing more food than ever before. This unity has not only facilitated canoe building and fishing, but also allowed improved land agricultural productivity and irrigation systems. The islanders are also able to build lots of giant statues to thank the Gods for their plenty.

The islanders have enlarged the carrying capacity of their island. Previously, it could not have supported such a high population, but now, thanks to their efficient allocation of resources, it can, which also means more skilled labourers to make better statues, and more people to take canoes out to fish the deep. The population has expanded to the extent that can be supported by the increased resources, and living standards have risen as well.

Yay!

There is just one problem: the island is running out of trees large enough to build canoes or move statues. Trees take a while to get that large. Maybe someone notices the problem, and suggests that the islanders cut down less of them. But the island is already near maximum efficiency. So to do that would mean either less statues (which offends the gods), or less food (which means people starve and get angry).

Either possibility is unacceptable. So the islanders keep cutting down the trees, until they run out. They are then unable to get food from the deep ocean, or move their statues. So, they have a new production possibilities frontier. No statues can be made, and much less food can be produced. "Since circumstances changed that changed their production possibilities, well, then then production possibilities will change".

So now, a good economist could say, all these islanders have to do is keep on producing at the edge of this new new PPF, and they will have the most efficient allocation of resources possible. They can adapt to their new circumstances.

Unfortunately for the islanders, in this case adaptation to the new PPF means starvation. They run about smashing statues, cursing the gods, fighting wars, and so on until the population has been greatly diminished to match the new PPF.

The island was Easter Island. This silly story actually happened.

They were an isolated, interconnected system, as our planet it today (we don't import much from the Moon). Population and living standards had risen to match the maximal production of the system, which was attained by producing at the production possibility frontier. In our case we've matched our expectations and needs to the expansive production enabled by our enlarged PPF.

You might contend that we wouldn't be so stupid as a bunch of isolated, primitive pacific islanders who cut down all of the trees upon which their sustenance depended. If so, you ought to pay attention to the news about climate change and the political response. Or you could note the fact that most of our transport and agricultural system are based on oil inputs (including fertilizers and pesticides). Oil is technically a renewable resource, like the trees.

But, like the Islanders, we're using it at a rate far above it's replenishment rate, and ignoring the fact that we don't seem to have any replacement that can keep our productivity similarly high. If and when production peaks and it becomes more expensive, this will reduce our PPF.

This is a problem because we have been producing things as efficiently as we can, and increased our population and living standards to match our expanded PPF. So, we have few redundancies or slack in the system to help us if we are no longer able to produce at such a high rate, much like the Islanders.

Efficiency is overrated

One of the unquestioned assumptions of our culture is that efficient is better. It seems like a fairly self-evident proposition (perhaps because it's been drilled into us so many times); after all, who is for inefficiency? But it's not always a good thing.

On a personal level, it's pretty easy to understand that efficiency should not be the highest goal. Being perfectly efficient means not stopping to smell the flowers or not having time for five minutes of chit-chat, because you've got something more productive already planned.

So no one really lives their lives perfectly efficiently, nor should they. But on a societal level, people are more willing to take for granted that we should strive after efficiency as much as possible. It's the reigning orthodoxy of our time, underlying support for free trade and globalization.

As far as efficiency goes, I don't think there's much doubt that if you want to maximize the number of computers produced, or dishwashers, or crappy toys or what have you, then the more free trade and globalization the better. Our society has become ever more efficient in this sense of late, using resources to their maximum potential and it is increasingly inter-linked.

There is a tradeoff however. By using resources near their maximum potential, it means there aren't many left over that can be used if something unforeseen happens. And increased efficiency due to interlinked globalized networks has left us vulnerable if any parts of those networks fail. Our set-up maximizes current production by leaving us no reserve capacity.

Efficiency eliminates redundancies. But redundancies serve a useful purpose as backup mechanisms. As an example, we have two of many of our useful organs. If part of us fails, we can still function.

As a society however, we've gotten rid of most of these useful but burdensome safeguards. We have created a productive but fragile society.

The system works alright as long as everything stays connected, and nothing unforeseen surprises us. But we're now much less able to do without these connections than in the past, and we're worse at not being surprised.




N.B.: One problem with arguing against efficiency is that it's hard to do so in a systematic way. If the goal is maximum efficiency, then everything is clear. You find inefficiencies, and proceed to eliminate them. That's what we've been trying to do for the past few decades. But if your goal is "a fair bit of efficiency, but not so much as to leave us vulnerable to disaster if there is a disruption"....then it's not so clear precisely what you should aim for. So I can describe the problem, but I can't say precisely what to do about it.

Assume a can opener

At law school pub night I was talking with a second year and an economics grad student. The economist was very happy when I told him that I had studied economics in undergrad:

Him: Awesome, reinforcements! I've been arguing with this guy all night (the second year), he's trying to tell me that economics is not a science.

Me: Economics is not a science, nor should it be considered one.

Him: ....buh...bwa?....What? Whose side are you on? Of course it's a science!

Me: Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), managed according to "scientific" economic principles, blew up.

Him: ....Shut up!

Me: The efficient markets hypothesis is bunk.

Him: You, you....JUDAS!!!!


It's possible that it could have been dorkier, but I'm not sure how.

The title of this post is a reference to an old joke making fun of economists for creating theories that heroically ignore the real world. Google it.

The truth can be misleading

You may have heard recently that Barack Obama was angry about a nuclear site that the Iranians reported to the IAEA. If you read about it, you probably read an article that did not contain untruths. This one is as good an example as any:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/g20_summit_obama_iran

It contains factual statements of what Western leaders said. It's important and useful to know that Western leaders are acting belligerant, and denouncing Iran in strident tones. It likely signifies a renewed commitment to the policy of being ever so angry with Tehran and laying the PR groundwork for a bombing campaign if needed.

But anyone reading that article, or hearing about this on CNN is likely to walk away with the impression that Iran had been illegally concealing a uranium enrichment facility, and been caught red-handed. This shows their perfidiousness, and ill intent. That's the impression I got from scattered news reports anyway.

In the real world however, all that's happened is that Iran decided to create a new uranium enrichment facility, which is within their rights, and announced it to the IAEA, as per the rules, more or less*. Then, the Western leaders decided to pounce upon the announcement for propaganda purposes. This story makes that clear:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092601359.html?hpid=topnews

It really doesn't seem to me that there was any dramatic revelation here, except that Obama is clearly continuing the Bush administration policy towards Iran. But through repetition of true but misleading statements, a lot of people have gotten the false impression that Iran is up to new tricks.

* There is a technical dispute as to whether or not they should have announced it when they first began to build it (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=23884&prog=zgp&proj=znpp), but there is no uranium enrichment ongoing there at the moment.

Cubans in a dollarama

A couple of months ago, I took some Cubans to a dollar store in Fredericton. They were friends of a co-worker, and I had promised to help them around town a bit while they were visiting for an agricultural exchange.

I was remembering this because their was a story on the news that Ex-Honduran president Zelaya has made a surprise appearance in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The coup that ousted him happened when these Cubans were in town, and they wanted all of the latest news, as the coup brought back bad memories of the decades of fascism in Latin America.

But the dollar store was the real highlight of the day, counter intuitively. They had never seen such a thing. The prices were cheaper than in the hard currency stores in Cuba, AND the quality was better.

This was a fair bit different than the reaction Canadians have in stores like that. They walked up and down the aisles in joyous wonder, looking like kids on Christmas morning. They could find a use for everything, either for themselves, or friends and neighbours.

I think there are some interesting lessons here, but they’re hard to articulate. It certainly shows how much we take for granted.

Also, I would note that while Cuba does not deserve most of the negative propaganda used against it, this illustrates it’s not the paradise that some people imagine either. Since coming back I’ve found opinion on that country very polarized between thinking that it’s all bad or all good, but the reality is very nuanced.

Carbon tax

We face two major foreseeable problems in the near future. One is that the carbon emissions upon which our society is based seem to be heating the atmosphere, and will continue to do so in the future. At a certain point, and we may already be past it, these emissions will trigger what are known as "feedback effects", where the process becomes self-reinforcing and impossible to stop. An example would be the melting of the icecaps causing the surface of the earth to be darker on average, hence reflecting less light and absorbing more heat.

The other problem is that we are running out of the sources of carbon emissions upon which our society is based, particularly oil. Discovery of new fields has been declining, and new sources such as the oil sands are much more costly and take much more energy to extract. While this is good as far as the global warming problem is concerned, it is bad in that:

1. Almost every economic activity we do now uses oil as an input in some way.
2. We have done very little to prepare for when this is not true.

In other words, when oil demand exceeds oil supply, it will hit every area of our economy, and we have done little to prepare for it.

Both of these problems could be mitigated in the same way: learn to use less oil now. If we wait until a crisis is forced on us by oil demand exceeding oil supply, the transition will be more painful than it could have been otherwise. And if we somehow do find a way to keep using as much oil as we do now, and don't stop, then we'll only aggravate the climate crisis.

So, it makes sense to cut back on oil use. The problem is that this means transforming our society, which people are usually hesitant to do until forced. But it we wait until we're forced, the transition will be much more painful. It means, for example, eating more locally produced food, relying less on goods shipped in from overseas or on large transport trucks, shifting away from a suburban model of development, and many other things.

But, we're going to have to do these things sooner or later, so it would make sense to prepare for the transition now, by imposing a tax on carbon emissions and oil use. The problem is, if a politician says: "I want to impose a carbon tax, to shift us away from driving, towards locally produced food, and to make it more difficult to live in the suburbs and commute every day", then people say something like:

"My god, a carbon tax. But I use gasoline! That would make it more difficult to commute in to work from the suburbs each day, and to drive, and to buy things from overseas. That idiot, his plan would never work, it would have all of these negative effects."

The negative effects are the point of course. And while it would cost everyone money, we could give it back by cutting other taxes. That, and the fact that it would help prepare us for a low carbon, low oil future, constitute the positive effects.

Also, you could start it at a low level and gradually increase it, smoothing the adjustment. It would be simple, effective and fairly efficient.

Which is probably why almost no one is interested (though French president Sarkozy put a small one in place recently), because no one really wants to prepare for the future if it means inconveniences today. Instead, you get oddities like the 3000 page cap and trade bill the Democrats are trying to push through congress. It's hard to say what that bill will do if passed, but it seems doubtful that reducing carbon dioxide or oil dependence will be among its major effects.

The alternative to putting in plans for an effective transition yesterday is having the adjustment roughly thrust upon us if and when oil prices spike, or never adjusting and continuing to heat the atmosphere, with severe impacts upon civilization as we know it. We eventually have to do the things that a carbon tax would promote, the question is how hard the adjustment is going to be.

And, based on the short-termism of most political discourse today, the answer is probably that the adjustment will be much harder than we like.

law school

I'm in Toronto now, I started studying at U of T law school a couple of weeks ago.

I like it so far. I have but 9 hours of class a week, and Fridays off. Yet somehow I'm already busier than I ever was in undergrad. I'm not exactly sure why either, but it something to do with the amount of reading, and the sort of reading. Most of what we've done so far is reading cases, and discussing those in class, to figure out the legal rules contained therein.

The people are are all great. I've been very impressed by everyone in my class, they're very smart, and also very cool, well adjusted people. And everyone has done lots of travel, or other interesting things. Normally I'm not sure how to talk about how I've spent the past two years in Cuba and France; people sometimes find it hard to relate to, but it's fairly normal here.

They say law school is like high school, and I can see why. There are about 190 of use, and we all have the same classes, in the same buildings, so we always see everyone, and I expect I'll know everyone pretty soon. We even have lockers.

Development work

As some reading this know, I spent some time in Cuba as what's known as a "development worker". I had a great time, and learned a lot, but it's never been clear to me that I accomplished much of anything, nor could I have. I had my doubts about the usefulness of much development work before going, and the experience reinforced them.

My official role was to help Cuban state run agricultural enterprises form business plans to sell higher quality products to the internal hard currency markets. I didn't know anything about business plans, though the Cubans knew even less. I spent much time understanding how their system worked, and more I did, the less I became convinced that whatever business planning framework I had was relevant. I tried as best I could to adapt what I had learned about our business planning methods to the Cuban systems I came to understand. People were generally very happy with the work that I did, but I suspect that where it was useful was in places where the capabilities for doing such planning were already in place.

I came to think about this because I was reading something by Ivan Illich, a former Austrian priest and philosopher who lived much of his life in Mexico and seems to have lived it better than his namesake from Tolstoy's story.

http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm

Much of that rings true to me. I like to think that I managed to avoid harming anything, and that the main outcome of my time in Cuban was a broadening of my own education, and travel. Which is how Illich implored his listeners to use their privileged status instead.

I think my most lasting and useful effects were produced by showing people how to use our technological systems. I traveled the land, installing anti-spyware programs, explaining the intricacies of windows XP, and resetting antiquated CRT monitors to refresh rates that were easier on the eyes.

Once, entering a building of touristic interest in Cienfuegos, I came across an old man listening to a TV. He was the guard. The TV was loud.

To hear me, he walked over to it, and turned down the volume, one slow push of the button at a time. I showed him that if you held down the button, you could reduce the volume much faster. He was baffled, and grateful. "I've been doing that the wrong way for fifteen years!" he exclaimed.

It is always satisfying to use your knowledge to help another.