Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby

My visit to UC Berkeley is ending this week and I am supposed to work, but algebraic manipulations are boring and blogging is (somewhat more) fun. After the dead serious Inquiry Into the Human Prospect by Heilbroner, I almost by accident, and in desperation, picked up Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby. Shakespeare Wrote for Money is a collection of columns Hornby has written for the American magazine Believer. In the column, he writes about books he has read the last month. He also writes about books he has abandoned and books he hasn’t read. And he writes as much about reading as about what he has been reading and everything is quite enjoyable. Hornby is a funny guy, and that he is English and lives in London while writing for an American audience makes for several funny comments upon the many differences between the two countries.

Shakespeare is also disturbing. I like to think of myself as a reader, but alongside Hornby’s average of more than a book per week I look like an analphabet. And as if not my to-read list was long from before, it is longer now, as I find myself tempted to read most, if not all, of the books Hornby writes of. Some are:

• Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Elizabeth Kolbert (This was on my list from before, should have read it long ago but still on my Amazon wish-list.)
• Imperium – Robert Harris (A novel about Cicero, of all things. Sounds like a good read, but I will likely read Cicero’s De Oratore first. That is the plan, anyway.)
• Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
• Light Years – James Salter (Was also on my list from before, higher up now, perhaps in part because Hornby reports that he only buys the book, but not that he reads it.)
• Essays – George Orwell (Well, I once bought his collected novels and have still only read Animal Farm, but I have recently taken to read essay collections rather than proper books.)
• 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare – James Shapiro (“The only thing you have to care about to love this book is why and how things get written.” How can I not want to read 1599?)
• In My Father’s House – Miranda Seymore
• On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
• Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

About Coming Through Slaughter, Hornby describes a situation I recognize myself in:

I had been having some trouble with the whole idea of fiction, trouble that seemed in some way connected with my recent landmark birthday [Hornby just turned 50; I am not there yet, but still am still bothered]; it seemed to my that a lot of novels were, to be blunt, made up, and could teach me little about the world. Life suddenly seemed so short that I needed facts, and I needed them fast. I picked up Coming Through Slaughter in the spirit of kill or cure, and I was cured-I have only read fiction since I finished it.  [...] It seems to me as though anybody who has doubts about the value of fiction should read this book: it leaves you with the sort of ache that nonfiction can never provide, and provides an intensity and glow that are the unique product of a singular imagination laying its gauze over the brilliant light of the world. Ondaatje writes about [jazz] music wonderfully well: you couldn’t ask for anyone better to describe the sound of the crack that must happen when one form is being bent too far out of shape in an attempt to form something else. [...] I am still thinking about this novel, remembering the heat it threw off, weeks after finishing it. [...] [H]urrah for fiction! Down with facts! Facts are for the dull, and the straight, and the old! You’ll never find out anything about the world through facts! [That was what I was afraid of when I decided life was too short for fiction. I found my cure in Neil Gaiman. Neil releases a new book next week, by the way, and I have, in the heat of the moment, ordered a signed copy. And I who thought I didn't bother about such things anymore.]

Getting back to my list of books now added to my to-read list:

• Skellig – David Almond (At some point voted the third greatest children’s book of the last seventy years.)
• Sharp Teeth - Toby Barlow (A novel about werewolves in Los Angeles, written in blank verse!)
• Tom’s Midnight Garden – Philippa Pearce (Made Hornby cry!)
• Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences – Lawrence Weschler

Reading all of that will probably kill me, but it is there on my to-read list at least, and if I ever get to half of it I’ll by quite happy about it. It is fun and interesting to read about other’s reading. I am, however, ambivalent about it, as I feel in trouble with my own reading. I read to slowly (or rather, I do not spend enough time reading, but life has so much else to spend time on, like work, kids, music, love), and my to-read list grows way too fast. Another problem, which Hornby also seems to have, is that I tend not to read books from my to-read list, but rather whatever comes along.

Zilberman Comments on Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is on my to-read list (which of course grows faster than I read). David Zilberman, a professor here at UC Berkeley, has a nice comment on the economic principles which can be taken from Guns. Zilberman hails the book as ‘one of these rare classic books written during our lifetime,’ no small acclamation.

[...] Diamond’s book provides context to the recent economics of natural resources. Extraction of resources in the present without consideration of the future can be destructive. The challenge of sustainability and building institutions that allow for the resource base to survive and flourish in the long run. If we don’t plan for the future, the cost may be very high.

Allow me to paraphrase: If we don’t plan for the future, it might cost us the future!

Progress and Its Problems by Larry Laudan

From time to time, I read books on philosophy of science. A good while ago, I read Progress and Its Problems by Larry Laudan. The book has the subtitle Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth. I have had this book for a long time, but has hesitated to read it after I found Kuhn vs. Popper by Steve Fuller an unsettling read. (I actually wrote a longer review of Kuhn vs. Popper than what I posted here, but never got around to edit the last part of it properly; I guess I should, as my ‘review’ is actually just a weird sort of summary.)

Anyway, another reason for my hesitation was that I was quite frustrated with philosophy of science and did not realize it was my understanding (or depth) which frustrated me. Most who has tried to produce knowledge (to be a scientist) and tried to understand Popper and Kuhn must agree that both their theories are artificial. Laudan, however, presents a theory for scientific growth which makes good sense and agrees well with empirical (anecdotal?) knowledge of scientific development.

The central element in Laudan’s theory is the research tradition:

[...] I propose that the rationality and progressiveness of a theory are most closely linked-not with its confirmation or its falsification-but rather with its problem solving effectiveness. I shall be arguing that there are important nonempirical, even “nonscientific” (in the usual sense), factors which have-and which should have-played a role in the rational development of science. I shall suggest, further, that most philosophers of science have mistakenly identified the nature of scientific appraisal, and thereby the primary unit of rational analysis, by focusing on the individual theory, rather than on what I call the research tradition. This study will show, moreover, that we need to distinguish between the rationality of acceptance and the rationality of pursuit if we are to make any progress at reconstructing the congitive dimensions of scientific activity [p. 5,* italics in original]

Laudan aims to shift the research focus from a search for truth (which we cannot identify anyway) to a focus on progress:

[...] the rationale for accepting or rejecting any theory is thus fundamentally based on the idea of problem-solving progress.  If one research tradition has solved more important [scientific] problems than its rivals, then accepting that tradition is rational precisely to the degree that we are aiming to “progress,” [that is], to maximize the scope of solved problems. [...], the choice of one tradition over its rivals is a progressive (and thus rational) choice precisely to the extent that the chosen tradition is a better problem solver than its rivals [p. 109].

Unfortunately, I do not have the time to give a decent and comprehensive account of Laudan’s ideas, for that, I must refer you to the book. (I am not even sure a decent account of short length is probably; the book is perhaps as brief as it can be. Laudan mostly writes economically.) Some key parts that to some degree can be studied out-of-context: The discussion of anomalous problems (pp. 26-ff). On problem solving and ambiguous tests (pp. 42-ff). The deconstruction of Kuhn and Lakatos (pp. 73-ff). On the progressiveness of ad hoc modifications (p. 115). The discussion of rationality at the beginning of chapter four (pp. 121-ff) should be read by every rational scientist, and perhaps in particular economists for whom rationality has such an central, theoretical role. On scientific revolutions, and Kuhn again (pp. 133-ff). Finally, on the justification for scientific research (pp. 224-225).

Some further interesting points: The note on on why Adam Smith wrote his treatise on moral philosophy (to resolve tensions between his economic theory and the Newtonian thesis of a balance of forces in nature (endnote 10 to chapter 2, p. 230). The (long) note on Foucault (“[...] Foucault has benefited from that curious Anglo-American view that if a Frenchman talks nonsense it must rest on a profundity which is too deep for a speaker of English to comprehend[!]“) (endnote 12 to chapter 6, p. 241). Again finally, the note on sociology of knowledge is also great (endnote 29 to chapter 7, pp. 244-245). Why do so many nonfictional writers put so much of interest in small print at the back? Who started this odd tradition?

I should have written a proper review of Laudan when I had it fresh in mind. What I can say is that it reinserted a feeling of aim and purpose into my own work as a researcher (something neither Kuhn nor Popper will likely do for you). It also felt like some sort of closure, as my thirst for further insights into the philosophy of science has since dried up(?). My unread volumes on Popper and Feyerabend will likely remain unread for a while still. But, in parts Laudan only sketches out his ideas. Some day I will most likely try and follow some of the loose ends; perhaps there are some interesting problems at the end of some of them? (A [long run] better solution would of course be to befriend someone in the philosophy department, but who has the [short run] courage for that?)

I am trailing off. Let me rather conclude with a sobering economic comment on research funding from Laudan’s epilogue:

Far too much scientific research today is devoted to problems which are as cognitively trivial as they are socially irrelevant. If the “pure” scientist is to deserve the generous support presently being lavished on him [Laudan might be thinking of English college professors here], he must be able to show that his problems are genuinely significant ones and that his program of research is sufficiently progressive to be worth gambling our precious and limited resources on it [p. 225].

* Page numbers refer to the 1978 paperback edition.

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012

I think anyone in a creative trade could take some advice from, and even enjoy, Neil Gaiman:

Hattip: Neil Gaiman’s Journal

An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect by Robert L. Heilbroner

The Giannini Library at UC Berkeley discarded a pile of books, and I picked up Heilbroner’s An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect. The book is old (1974; books discarded from libraries usually are), and much of the discussion feels dated. Other parts are still relevant. But, let me take it from the top.

On the first page, Heilbroner asks Is there hope for man? Heilbroner then lists three large problems which together makes his question pertinent: population growth, the spread of nuclear weapons, and environmental problems (including resource depletion, pollution, and climate change). All three problems are to different degrees still relevant today. Both population growth and environmental problems still pose threats on global scales. They are also, I think, largely viewed as connected. We still worry about nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, but the Armageddon-like prospect of nuclear war is not upon us like it must have been during the cold war.

Heilbroner is a careful writer, and before he plunges into his analysis, he discusses its validity:

The problem caused by the intrusion of subjective values into its inquiries has always troubled social science, which has struggled, without too much success, to attain the presumed “value free” objectivity of the natural sciences. Alas, this ambition fails into account that the position of the social science investigator differs sharply from that of the observer of the natural world. The latter may stage his reputation as he regards the stars through his telescope or the cells through his microscope, but he is not himself morally embedded in the field he scrutinizes. By contrast, the social investigator is inextricably bound up with the objects of his scrutiny, as a member of a group, a class, a society, a nation, bringing him with feelings of animus or defensiveness to the phenomena he observes. In a word, his position in society-not only his material position but his moral position-is implicated in and often jeopardized by the act of investigation, and it is not surprising, therefore, that we find behind the great bulk of social science arguments that serve to justify the existential position of the social scientist [pp. 22-23*].

Heilbroner moves on to point out that while the moral position of the analyst (himself) has potential implications for his analysis, the moral position of the reader has implications for how to comprehend the analysis. In the end, Heilbroner finds that his conclusions about the human prospect do not accord with his own preferences and interests.

Parts of the book is not as relevant today as it was when it was written. For example, a lengthy discussion of whether a socialist or capitalist society is better able to take on the challenges Heilbroner has identified is today only of academic interest. That the discussion builds upon the work of Freud and his followers makes it arcane in my eyes, but I am relatively short-sighted. An interesting remark, though, on the necessity of regarding the political aspect:

We live in an age in which the very capacity for socio-economic analysis marks us off from the past. We read with amusement or shock the historical prognoses of the classical historians or political philosophers, into which socio-economic dynamics do not enter at all ( for the very good reason that the relevant social systems had not yet evolved) and in which, instead, we find purely political predictions , usually of dynastic rise and fall, and so forth. But however more “scientific” our socio-economic method may seem by comparison, its omission of a political dimension is nonetheless crippling, even fatal, for a comprehension of the human prospect [p. 100].

In the following discussion, Heilbroner asserts that the nation-state must be ‘considered as the embodiment of purely political, as well as socio-economic, behavioral forces’ (p. 112). I am not sure I fully understand Heilbroner here, but his assertion made me think about all the different historical configurations of the map of Europe. Does his assertion have implications for observed political behavior when political borders change? Would it be possible to empirically test his assertion in some sense?

The problem of time discounting is much debated in the current climate change debate. Heilbroner puts it clear:

[The] devaluation of the future is generally considered to be an entirely rational response to the uncertainties of life. But if we apply this same calculus of “reason” to the human prospect, we face the horrendous possibility that humanity may react to the approach of environmental danger by indulging in a vast fling while it is still possible-a fling entirely justified by the estimation of present enjoyments over future ones. On what private, “rational” considerations, after all, should we make sacrifices now to ease the lot of generations whom we will never live to see [pp. 114 - 115]?

Heilbroner finds it difficult to believe the ‘contemporary industrial man’ is willing to make the necessary sacrifices (p. 115). While I have not discussed all parts of the analysis, much of it is as I said not so relevant today as it undoubtedly was in 1974, it is nonetheless clear that Heilbroner finds little support for a positive view on the future:

[W]ith the full spectacle of the human prospect before us, the spirit quails and the will falters. We find ourselves pressed to the very limit of our personal capacities, not alone in summoning up the courage to look squarely at the dimensions of the impending predicament, but in finding words that can offer some plausible relief in a situation so bleak [p. 136].

In fact, the only consolation Heilbroner can offer, is that the idea of Atlas, the Greek god which figures on the cover of the book and who bears ‘with endless perseverance the weight of the heavens in his hands’, springs from elements within us (pp. 143 – 144).

*Page numbers refer to the 1974 edition (paperback).

Existential Chess

Mato Jelic is a great chess commentator on YouTube. He does not always explain the simpler things as thoroughly as I would have liked, but he has dug up some really great games from chess history. The video below is not so much chess, however, but about much larger things. The game is one of his own games, and not any game, but against former world champion Boris Spassky. If you are not so interested in the chess-part, you can forward to 2:16.

Climate Wizard: Data & Projections

Everyone with a remote interest in the climate problem would take an interest in Climate Wizard, an online source for climate data and projections. In particular, it can be a valuable tool for researchers. The wizard has both temperature and precipitation data and projections under different emission scenarios. Annual averages, season averages or monthly averages are all there. Further, the wizard provides projections from different climate models, model averages, or model projections ranked from lowest to highest. The wizard produces maps, but values can also be downloaded, it seems. Data and projections are well documented. Behind the Climate Wizard are The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi.

The figure below shows the average projected change in annual temperature by the late century in a low emission scenario for the Scandinavian peninsula. Around 2 degrees. Further investigation shows that the most change is expected in the fall.

Hat-tip: G-Feed

Current Problems with Global Sustainability: Talks by Paul Ehrlich and Clive Hamilton

Tonight, I attended talks by Paul Ehrlich and Clive Hamilton here in Berkeley. Ehrlich is perhaps best known for his Population Bomb which was published as far back as 1968. Clive Hamilton is an Australian professor and author of several books related to climate change and sustainability. It was an odd event where everyone seemed to agree with everyone that climate change is happening, that it will change the world as we know it, and that profound changes to political, economic, and social systems are required to do anything about it. It was also both enlightening and interesting, even encouraging. Although both Ehrlich and Hamilton drew stark pictures of the current situation, the future of the planet and us on it, it made me feel both wanting and obligated to try and do something about it.

Hamilton spoke first and spent most of his time talking about the new, geological time period we have entered. The period where human’s impact disturbs the entire earth system. While scientists still haven’t fully agreed upon all the details, there seems to be little doubt the earth has moved into a new phase. The next ice age (which was coming up in about 50 000 years) is cancelled, the long period of stable temperatures will be end, but we do not know exactly what we are in for. At least we have been vigorous in the current spell of stability, for example developing agriculture. (‘We’ is of course a stretch here; someone is better. The undue usage of ‘we’ in the sense of humanity was touched upon in the ensuing debate, as was also a key element of the climate problem; it’s intergenerational dimension.)

Ehrlich seemed to just talk from the top of his head. I presume he has addressed hundreds of audiences on the same and related topics throughout the years, because he never seemed to loose track or run out of words (which I do on a regular basis). He talked about a range of problems, from how the yield gap most likely will be closed (the yield gap is the difference in agricultural yields from the mid-Western prairie and from the Amazon; according to Ehrlich, the gap will not be closed by Amazonian yields getting up to speed, but by mid-Western yields collapsing), the dependence of agriculture upon fossil fuel, biodiversity loss (in particular the loss of pollinators); I am sure he touched upon population, but also a range of other issues.

The debate after the talks were at least as interesting as the talks themselves. A particularly interesting remark from Ehrlich was upon social science. Social science is extremely important, more important than the sciences. The problem is there is no social science. It is a mess, with no direction, no common language, and most topics of investigation are wholly unimportant. He claimed to have read an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (‘the top journal in economics’), which concluded that in the last 30-40 years, economists has not really figured out anything. Economists study the economics of college football! This critique is of course somewhat unfair, but I see Ehrlich’s point. Economists and other social scientists should get their act together and start thinking about what matters most (survival of the species humans, which did not seem to require specification at this point). The debate flourished. The worry about the aging population was more or less made fun of (‘it is an obvious fact of demographics and arithmetic’), the Vatican was scorned for their view on women and family planning, and the entire event concluded on the note that the climate problem is not one of information or knowledge (we know what is happening and why) or technology (we have the necessary technologies to deal with the problem), but one of political and social action. It was a memorable night.

Ehrlich had a couple of other great comments which comes to mind: We should abolish the current university systems (‘dissolve the departments!’); the university system was dreamed up by Aristotle over 2500 years ago, and cemented by the Royal Academy 250 years ago; time calls for something different. (What we need instead, Ehrlich forgot to mention.) And we should get the money out of American politics. Hamilton, on his part, said carbon sequestration had cost us ten years in battling climate change, that geoengineering will likely cost us ten more, and that consumption is more important than population growth in the sense that more rich people is a much bigger problem in terms of climate change than more poor people. (That last thing became a bit convoluted, I must admit, but it is in a ballpark.)

The Many Meanings of Style

As a writer, I try to concern myself with style of writing. But what does style mean? In Jacques Barzun’s Simple & Direct, I found the following passage, which I found clarifying at least in the sense that when I feel confused about style, it could be because style is deep and has many facets.

Style can mean a great many things. In one sense, everything urged in this handbook is assumed to make for a good style. In another sense, which will come up under Tone, a mode or pitch of expression will be called a (plain, high, arrogant, low, facetious) style. Still a third and a most important conception of style is that which has in view the particular mixture of words, constructions, rhythms, and forms of expression characteristic of a writer, and which makes his work recognizable even when unsigned. Style so understood is a natural outgrowth of the person’s mind and not something put together by an act of will [p.67, revised edition, 1985].

Not an act of will! Much deeper than where will reaches, in other words. Oh mercy.

More on Simple & Direct.

Related post:

• Writing Reveals the Self

Marine Resource Economics Impact Factor

Today, I discovered the impact factor of Marine Resource Economics is above 1. The MRE impact factor has only been measured since 2009. It started out in the territory around 0.5, which I found agreed well with my perception of the quality and standing of the journal. 1 is kind of a watershed, as I understand it, and the difference between 0.9 and 1.1 is more significant than the difference between 1.0 and 1.2.  Now that MRE is above 1, it is in the territory of journals like the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Land Economics. It still has a lower impact, but less significantly so.

Seminar at Berkeley

Today, I will present the project Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management in the Barents Sea in the Environmental and Resource Economics seminar at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. The abstract:

While bioeconomic analysis has advanced to where high-level ecosystem management is technically possible in terms of multidimensional, stochastic optimization, the sentiment that the underlying, biological models are of limited interest is omnipresent. The existing models cannot capture the observed ecosystem or foodweb dynamics. For viable optimization schemes to apply, models have been, and will have to be, relatively simple when compared to population dynamics models. There exist a crucial tradeoff between biological detail and stylized simplicity. Biologically detailed models have been promoted by biologists who want their models to replicate what they observe in nature, while stylized simplicity has been promoted by resource economists who want to analyze economic decisions. We aim to narrow the gap and cheapen the tradeoff. We develop a bioeconomic model of the ecosystem in the Barents Sea. The model is fitted with data assimilation methods and captures the observed dynamics in the ecosystem and the economy. Using stochastic optimization, we study numerical solutions of the model. Optimal, non-concave harvest profiles underline the importance of the ecosystem approach. In the extension of our project, we will study how solutions from our top-down, optimization approach perform in a high-dimensional, bottom-up, simulation approach.

The project is interdisciplinary and finds itself where paths (or trails, really) from economics, biology, ecology, applied mathematics, and statistics meet. Thus, it is at the outskirts of all those disciplines. It is a rather dark place. It remains to be seen whether we can shed some light around. But enough of the Nordic realism.

I find it difficult to present papers from the project because they belong in a setting which cannot be taken light upon. My presentation will therefor span at least two papers, with focus on how to build a biological model for ecosystem-based management which lends itself to subsequent bioeconomic analysis. To drive home the importance of getting the biology right, I will also discuss how we proceed with the bioeconomic analysis.

Picture credits: Philip Steven, http://www.imr.no.

 

 

Sigur Ros at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco

Yesterday, I finally got to see Sigur Ros live. I have been listening quite carefully to them for years, but have never found the occation to see them live before. They played the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in downtown San Francisco. The Bill Graham is a pretty large venue with room for 7000 souls. It was sold out.

While it hurts a little to say it, the gig was somewhat underwhelming. First of all, they started by playing the first two-three songs behind a curtain. The curtain was used for projections, with the band barely visible. Now, the music is what matters of course, but part of the live experience is the personal feel. The curtain did not feel very personal. And while I’m sure the projections were great, I have long since disliked the excessive use of projections and video art on live music concerts. In my view, it distracts from the music most of the time. Nuvel. Another thing is that they could perfectly well have used a more transparent curtain. Projections would have worked just as fine; perhaps not the part where the lead singer (Jonsi) stood infront of a spotlight playing his guitar with a bow, I would not mind.

Things got more interesting once the curtain dropped. It turned out they were a bunch of people on stage. Four main members and perhaps six more on various horns and strings. The benefit of such a large ensemble is that one has much more depth and, in the case of Sigur Ros, it could be essential to pull off certain parts of their music that sometimes have many, many layers. (Their live album Inni demonstrates, however, that they work very well without orchestral backup.) The drawback is that the more people are involved, more stuff can go wrong. Wrong is perhaps strong (although they did mess up a couple of times; whether they were genuine fuckups or a technical errors, I do not know), but they were never really tight. They never nailed it. In periods, if felt like they did not even try. The beat on Popplagid was everywhere. Much of the music Sigur Ros make is pure magic, but their live performance last night was never really magic. Jonsi demonstrated a magic voice, but that was it. The crescendos was not as intense and sound-drenched as they should have been. The strings were too low. The guitar-bow thing was too low. Perhaps they had their heads elsewhere (Perhaps I had?) Perhaps they were exhausted after a long tour.

After all my whining, I should say I did enjoyt the concert. Sigur Ros makes really great music, and a slightly uninspired and cluttered performance cannot take the greatness away. Just too bad it did not really work out, because I think it could have been a blast if everything clicked and they’d just let go.

UPDATE: Walked by a homeless singing on the street the other day. Realized there is always some magic present when someone sings their heart out. Sigur Ros really did that, sing their heart out and created magic, I just missed it.

 

Some Observations From the Berkeley Bioeconomy Conference

I attended the Berkeley Bioeconomy Conference some time ago, and would like to relay some notes and observations. It was interesting, as I am not a regular of the bioeconomy research community. First of all, the term bioeconomy (seldom or never bioeconomics, notably) seems to mean the economics of biofuel. A couple of highlights:

• A carbon tax in the US has become slightly less unlikely because of the huge budget deficit. A tax on carbon would generate a lot of revenue. So, the financial crisis still has positive effects on the climate. First, it slowed down economic growth. Now it can lead to a carbon tax in the US. Well, a carbon tax is at least not as unlikely as before, but still unlikely. A couple of further moments are that the budget deficit did not origin within the financial crisis, but the situation did become worse after the crisis hit. And, the crisis has probably had a number of negative effects on the climate as well, like switching to dirtier fuels and perhaps less public and private money for research.
• If production of crops for biofuel  has adverse effects on food production and prices, it is difficult to pin down empirically (at least in one study from Brazil).
• When one delves into sustainability, it could unleash an array of potential issues to worry about, of conceptual, theoretical, philosophical, and regulatory nature. One second thought, any issue one could delve into could unleash any number of issues of different natures, a part of the art of getting anything done in research is not to engage all at the same time perhaps.
• Few places are as ideal as Brazil for biofuel production. If it does not work there, it will likely not work anywhere.
• Is a non-parametric estimate the same as a spline?
• Electricity generated from shale gas is cheaper than hydropower(?!), and it is better to use natural gas to make electricity than to run cars (electric cars have great milage).
• Voting is not necessarily an efficient tool to decide upon labeling of genetically modified food; willingness to pay could be higher in the minority. How the issue is framed is also of importance (a lesson from Kahneman there).
• Price volatility of fussil fuel correlates with the business cycle (it is demand driven). Volitility in biofuel does not correlate with the business cycle and hence a bad agricultural year (bad weather) could deepen a recession.
• Tinbergen, apparently (revealing some holes in my background here), told us that one should have one policy instrument for each policy target. Is that really true? It is at least easy to imagine a policy instrument active (in lack of a better word) in several dimensions.

Quote of the Day (and some more)

I somewhat arbitrarily picked up Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers by Jacques Barzun in a used book store. At the beginning of the book, there are some great quotes. The best one is perhaps the following from C.S. Lewis:

I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate to the left or right, the reader will most certainly go into it.

Requires the slightest idea about regular behavior of sheep, but does not have that? Barzun also offers a definition of the perhaps elusive term rhetoric (as many words, it holds so much [to me] that a definition is difficult to put down precisely):

Rhetoric is the craft of setting down words and marks right; or again: Rhetoric shows you how to put words together so that the reader not simply may but must grasp your meaning (p. 2, revised edition; his italics).

Simple and direct, I presume, but Barzun still needed two tries. I think I prefer the latter. Barzun writes sensibly about writing (read well, for example, perhaps the best advice), but feels somewhat outdated in places. For example, he makes a good case for the senselessness of workaholic (derived from alcoholic that comes from al-cohol, worka-holic does thus not work because -holic has no meaning), but I perceive workaholic as established. It is, for example, listed on my dear dictionary.com. (Simple & Direct was published in 1975; the revised edition is from 1985, and some 30-40 years should not matter for a book on rhetoric; Strunk’s Elements of Style, more than 100 years since the first edition, I think, is for example still highly regarded.)  Nevertheless, I find Simple & Direct useful and interesting and hope to post more from and on it when time permits (progress is slow, as always).

Fisheries Management Under Irreversible Investment: Does Stochasticity Matter?

In the latest issue of Marine Resource Economics (vol. 28, no. 1) I co-author an article together with colleagues at the Norwegian School of Economics. We explore what optimal management looks like when capital has to be managed as well as the fish stock. In fisheries, fleet investments are to some degree irreversible; fishing boats has little alternative use. While little has been written on the multidimensional decision problem of how large a fleet to own (the capital decision) and how much of it to use (the fishing decision), we also look at the effect of stochasticity. Things quickly become messy in these models as the number of potential scenarios is large. While it is manageable in our present case, I do not look forward to seeing further extensions. Or rather, I would love to see creative takes on analysis and presentations of high dimensional problems.

Our abstract:

We present a continuous, nonlinear, stochastic, and dynamic model for capital investment in the exploitation of a renewable resource. Both the resource stock and capital are treated as state variables. The resource owner controls fishing effort and the investment rate in an optimal way. Biological stock growth and the capital depreciation rate are stochastic in the model. We find that the stochastic resource should be managed conservatively. The capital utilization rate is found to be a nonincreasing function of stochasticity. Investment could be either higher or lower depending on the interaction between capital and the resource stock. In general, a stochastic capital depreciation rate has no strong influence on optimal management. In the long run, the optimal harvest for a stochastic resource becomes lower than the deterministic level.