July 2009 Archives
I've been a bit mentally congested lately. I was making little progress on my research over the past week, I was bogged down by syntactic annoyances in Mathematica, and I had no idea of my next move in my work. Suddenly over the weekend, however, after sitting around reading for a few hours--Carl Schmidt, no less--I became spontaneously inspired to work on my research, and within a day, I had solved my primary problem in Mathematica and figured out a way to increase the speed of my algorithm by a factor of ~1000. This is all well and good, but a natural question arises: why can I go for weeks with no good ideas and feel terrible about everything I do, but suddenly get weeks worth of good ideas in a period of 2 hours? It is possible that these kinds of discontinuities are a symptom of some mental deficiency that I possess. But if anecdotal evidence is any guide, then I would seem to be in good company with my learning disability.
It is natural that good ideas should be discovered in discrete episodes. The structure of an idea or theory often hinges on a few details, and a muddled idea can develop very quickly once one of these key components is discovered. Indeed, this is the basis for Thomas Kuhn's interpretation of scientific progress as a series of paradigms punctuated by "revolutions". Data for a particular theory accumulates until key evidence reveals flaws in the underlying theory, at which point a new theoretical paradigm is proposed. Whether this is an entirely accurate description of scientific progress is a matter of some debate, but it is clear that personal research should go through some periods of fits and starts as key pieces of information are realized.
But what is not clear to me is why progress should be so inconsistent, and especially why a person can make enormous progress on a problem without consciously thinking about it. For example, why did the solution to my Mathematica conundrum become clear while reading Carl Schmidt's analysis of parliamentary democracy? And why is my progress so irregular that I will sometimes go for days without thinking of any useful or interesting ideas? There must be some kind of subconscious thought process occurring... if only I could do all my thinking without actually thinking about anything!
It is natural that good ideas should be discovered in discrete episodes. The structure of an idea or theory often hinges on a few details, and a muddled idea can develop very quickly once one of these key components is discovered. Indeed, this is the basis for Thomas Kuhn's interpretation of scientific progress as a series of paradigms punctuated by "revolutions". Data for a particular theory accumulates until key evidence reveals flaws in the underlying theory, at which point a new theoretical paradigm is proposed. Whether this is an entirely accurate description of scientific progress is a matter of some debate, but it is clear that personal research should go through some periods of fits and starts as key pieces of information are realized.
But what is not clear to me is why progress should be so inconsistent, and especially why a person can make enormous progress on a problem without consciously thinking about it. For example, why did the solution to my Mathematica conundrum become clear while reading Carl Schmidt's analysis of parliamentary democracy? And why is my progress so irregular that I will sometimes go for days without thinking of any useful or interesting ideas? There must be some kind of subconscious thought process occurring... if only I could do all my thinking without actually thinking about anything!
Threats to by striking French workers to bomb their place of employment unless they receive better severance packages is a subtle hint about the effects of rigid labor markets and extreme job security.
One of the unanticipated perks of having a president who is a.) a minority, and b.) fetishized abroad is that he can say things that are true, but which no other president could have. Now let's hope he actually acts on some of things he says instead of just deferring them to psycho labor Democrats in Congress.
In Cass Sunstein's Worst Case Scenarios and Risk and Reason, and Richard Posner's Catastrophe, the authors grapple with how and when policymakers ought to fashion regulation and incentives to manage risks--especially catastrophic ones. Though mundane in the details, proper environmental, economic, and safety regulations have enormous welfare effects: deciding whether the risks from global warming justify cap-and-trade, or whether the risk from arsenic in drinking water justifies a maximum mandated level of 5 micrograms per liter or 20 micrograms per liter, for example, are extremely technical questions in which real lives are at stake. Posner and Sunstein generally endorse cost-benefit analysis as a means of settling these questions. But alternative decision-making paradigms exist. One that carries particular sway in environmental circles is the so-called precautionary principle. This principle is stated in an extremely vague form that renders it useless and contradictory, which Posner and Sunstein recognize. In several off-hand comments, Sunstein tempers his rejection, but he does not give a thorough explanation of how the precautionary principle would practically be applied. I think, however, that it can be quantitatively specified in such a way that it can be used in traditional cost-benefit analysis.
The first problem with the precautionary principle is its general vagueness. Stating that society ought to "err on the side of caution" with respect to catastrophic risks is useless because the relevant question is how much society should err on the side of caution. Certain risks are too improbable to spend time worrying about, and the precautionary principle does not give any indication of what risks we should care about. More devastating, however, is the fact that the precautionary principle is ultimately contradictory because there can be risks to inaction as well as action. Banning GMO foods to avert the risk of ecological interference creates the risks of food shortages and environmental damage from increased farming due to decreased agricultural productivity. The precautionary principle is useless in this situation. Worse yet, it is prone to rampant abuse, as every party to a regulation could claim to be justified by the precautionary principle. There is a significant literature on the other problems of the precautionary principle, so I will not dwell on this matter. But the point is that it is generally deficient.
It is noteworthy that the precautionary principle appears to be very high regard in environmental circles. This is probably because the spirit of the precautionary principle captures a very intuitively appealing notion: risk aversion. Most people are risk averse: this is, after all, why insurance exists. Risk aversion is also not form of cognitive bias. Even with perfect information, people will usually be somewhat risk-averse. Given that a democratic government ought to somewhat reflect the interests and desires of its constituents, incorporating society's "average" level of risk aversion into cost-benefit analysis (CBA) seems reasonable.
From this standpoint, one can view a regulation that eliminates one risk as insurance. From the usual two-state model, a person's willingness to pay for this insurance is simply the difference between his wealth in the better outcome and his wealth at the point at which his utility function equals the expectation value of his utility from the two outcomes. For a given degree of risk-aversion, willingness to pay is thus some function of the probability P and magnitude L of the possible loss, say W=W(P,L). In a similar way that standard CBA uses wage premia in risky professions to infer the value of a statistical life, one could use information from how much people pay for insurance to estimate the function W(P,L). In a standard cost-benefit analysis one could then allow the costs of acceptable regulation to exceed the benefits by N*W(P,L/N) in a population of size N.
Granted, this process would be highly uncertain in the same sense that valuing a statistical life is uncertain: values cluster around $6-7 million, but range from $0.7 million to $15 million. Calculating the function W would also be extremely difficult because risk-aversion is very different for qualitatively different risks. Without delving into the complete details, we can say that any quantitative attempt to address risk-aversion in a social setting, however, is better than the vague handwaving of the usual precautionary principle. Moreover, this approach solves the problem that occurs when action and inaction each carry risks. Given the probability and monetized magnitude of each, one can calculate society's "willingness to pay" for averting each risk and then add this onto the costs and benefits from the usual CBA. Given how tenuous many assumptions in CBA are anyway, this proposition is probably not unreasonable.
You remember how it happened. You went to some chic Whole-Foods copycat, paid an exorbitant sum for some panini oozing in foreign cheese, and were about to eat it when you read that curious oxymoron on the plastic container: "biodegradable plastic". Once the part of the novelty of upper-crust retailers, bioplastics are now part of the mainstream. All of the University of Washington's disposable utensils, for example, are made of corn-based bioplastics that can be conveniently composted in one of the many receptacles on campus. But given that the public (and the farm lobby) touts ethanol (another corn derivative) as environmentally friendly, even though it produces more CO2 than gasoline per unit energy, I was left wondering whether corn-based plastics are really better for the environment than their petroleum cousins.
Manufacturing and disposal are environmentally detrimental in an enormous number of ways, so it is often difficult to compare the effects of one material with the effects of its substitutes. Given the exigency of global warming, one starting point is to compare the carbon footprint of a kilo of corn-plastic with a kilo of real plastic. A little work on Google gives very wide range of answers, that seem to cluster around a 40% or so reduction in carbon. One study says 42%, for instance. It is not surprising at all that there should be a wide variance in the carbon footprints of bioplastics. Much of the energy used in the manufacturing is in the form of electricity, whose carbon footprint per kilowatt-hour ranges from nearly zero (e.g. wind, hydro, nuclear) to very large (e.g. coal). This suggests that producing a fork from scratch out of corn instead of petroleum probably produces a modest amount less CO2.
But there are complications. Realize that a lot of plastics are actually recycled, producing considerably less carbon. I had a difficult time determining a figure for the carbon savings from recycling versus new production, but some sources claim that recycling cuts the carbon footprint of a kilo of plastic by about 50%. This seems believable, though I wouldn't put too much stock in this figure. For disposable products like plastic cutlery, this puts recycled plastic on par with bioplastic. Depending on the energy source used in manufacturing, bioplastic is probably preferable due to the fact that it is more easily disposed of by commercial composting.
What about items like plastic bottles that can easily be recycled? Conventional bioplastics are not recyclable. Contamination of ordinary plastics with bioplastics ruins the recycling process, potentially causing net recycling rates to decline. This is particularly problematic because it is often difficult for consumers to distinguish between bioplastic and conventional plastic. On the other hand, recycling rates for items like plastic bottles are fairly dismal anyway, so the compostability of bioplastics may give it an edge in disposability.
From an economic perspective, bioplastics also present some problems. To the extent that manufacturers substitute bioplastics for recycled plastics, demand and prices for recycled plastic will decline. Recycling post-consumer plastic is already difficult/impossible to do profitably as detailed in a fascinating Economist report on waste. Even a relatively small substitution from recycled plastic to bioplastic could severely undermine the plastic recycling industry, forcing it out of business or to rely even more on public subsidies that would be more efficiently spent on other forms of carbon sequestration.
Finally, it is worth noting that bioplastics and regular plastics have two very different environmental consequences. One increases farming, which is quite bad for the environment. But the other increases petroleum production. It's unclear to me which is worse, but there is one remark worth making. Recycling plastic does not actually require any petroleum in theory--it only requires energy. So recycled plastics don't directly contribute to increasing petroleum production (at least up the recycling efficiency). Bioplastics, on the other hand, always require a farm to grow corn. From this standpoint, recycled plastic may have a lesser environmental impact as long as renewable energy is used in production, or as long as the amount of fossil fuels does not exceed to the amount used in bioplastic production.
While I am somewhat uncertain of the relative environmental impacts of both types of plastic, it seems that bioplastics are generally superior for items like disposable forks that would never be recycled anyway, while recycled plastic is best used in products that have high probability of being recycled again. Like ethanol, bioplastics unfortunately will probably be touted by the farm lobby as part of their wildly successful rent-seeking enterprise to fleece the American taxpayer and immiserate third-world farmers. One should consequently remain skeptical about their environmental benefits, but welcome them in strictly disposable applications.
