The Sheer Awesomeness of Adventure Tourism

Yes, elephants are - and should be - a commodity. Photograph by Eric Isselee.Several years ago, before I traveled across the Pacific Ocean to explore Japan, I considered becoming an economics professor, wrote an article on space tourism which appeared in the Duke Journal of Economics, applied for a Fulbright Grant to study economics in the Tanzanian bush, was rejected, and realized a future as an economics professor wasn't meant to be.  But in the process I did almost a year's worth of research into the various forms of tourism and the capacity of tourism revenues to provide economic incentives for conservation in places like East Africa.  I'm still convinced that my project would have established tourism as both an environmental panacea and the key to East African development.

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Doomsday Clock Reset at Six Minutes to Midnight

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which measures the civilization-ending potential of nuclear weapons, climate change, and potentially dangerous emerging technologies in the life sciences, issued a press release yesterday announcing that the famous Doomsday Clock would be reset from five minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.  From the BAS Board:

It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization--the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

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Joe Lieberman or Arrow's Impossibility Theorum in Action

Joe Lieberman's recent promises to kill Health Care reform if it includes either a public option and opt-in Medicare haven't made him very popular on the internet or my email in-box.  It doesn't help that pretty much everyone left of center hates him already; he is Benjamin Linus as far as I'm concerned: not trusting him isn't enough, just having him around means he's probably going to ruin it for everyone.  The health care bill was already such a mess that I've avoided writing about it because it just depresses me and now Tricky Joe steps in and kills two of the more interesting parts of the bill.  However, rather than simply bemoan Lieberman's existence, I thought I'd point out that this is a tailor made example of Dr. Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorum.

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Private vs. Privatization

The free market is understood to be the optimal delivery mechanism for most goods and services.  As competition intensifies, the weaker competitors are selected out and the stronger competitors are selected in.  The stronger competitors grow and evolve to meet the demands of a particular consumer base.  Friedrich von Hayek called this behavior of the market a "spontaneous order" and posited spontaneous order as a generalized Theory of Evolution.  Darwinian Evolution can itself be described as a special case of spontaneous order, as can language, memetics, pedestrian traffic, the popularity of music, the price mechanism, Wikipedia, and the order of the universe.  For his work on the price mechanism, Hayek won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics.

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Mass-Cooperation in Common-Pool-Resource Management

Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in EconomicsMass-cooperation is a term usually reserved for internet phenomena: wikipedia and couch-surfing are two common examples.  The idea of mass-cooperation flies in the face of received economic wisdom: that humans are rational and self-interested--or, as pro-regulation types interpret it: people are cold and selfish.  This is often expressed through the parable referred to as "The Tragedy of the Commons", the lesson of which is that people are too short-sighted to plan for the future, and, if given the opportunity, will use up all of their common-pool resources due to individual self-interest trumping group-consciousness.  The tragedy of the commons paradigm has been applied to both small-scale resource pools, such as local fisheries, and large-scale resource pools, such as the world's oceans.      

Nevertheless, the recent Nobel recognition of Elinor Ostrom, whose empirical research into common-pool-resource management turns the "tragedy of the commons" trope upside down, indicates that theories of mass-cooperation are finding a mainstream audience.  For years, evolutionary game-theorists such as John Maynard Smith and Brian Skyrms have been quietly chipping away at the wall between biology and economics while authority figures have continued to justify their own intrusion into collectively-owned and managed resources via the "tragedy of the commons" allegory.  The debate between the tragedy of the commons and mass-cooperation pits the narrative against the empirical, and while there is no doubt that the former is the sexier of the two, perhaps we should pay heed to the latter when formulating solutions for tricky, controversial topics.  Ostrom's discoveries could have radical implications on how we solve problems as diverse as welfare, aid for Africa, and climate change.

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Not even Nobel Bats 1.000

After Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, the natural reaction was to compare him to MLK Jr., Nelson Mandela or Mother Theresa, a comparison that makes his win hard to defend.  Yet, the Nobel Prize is no stranger to controversy, even among seemingly uncontroversial choices.  Here are a few of the less deserving Peace prize winners.

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Why Obama Deserved His Nobel Prize

Nobel Peace Prize Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland holds a picture of President Obama. Nothing like heading into a three day holiday weekend with a big splashy story like President Obama wining the Nobel Peace Prize.  Even for those that greatly admire the President, like myself, the immediate reaction is one of disbelief or even being a little bit embarrassed.  It feels premature, or worse, that the most prestigious award in the world got caught up in something of a fad .  However, that reaction stems in large part due to the raucous noise of American politics, which has a tendency to boil everything down into dichotomies (either he's MLK 2.0 or a failure 9 months into his administration) and simplify complex issues into gut charactures without appreciating the subtleties of the issue in question.  The right question is: what is the purpose of the Nobel Peace prize and is Obama a good choice for that purpose?  What effect this will have on domestic politics, should he accept it (Seriously? The President of the U.S. refuses the Peace Prize, that's your advice?)  or just the derogatory "for what?", are questions of a postmodern world that values perception over reality.

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