Green

Two interesting articles. The first is on the question – “Does Nature Have Economic Value?” and is very relevant to this post of mine, and the debate thereon. The second is an interview with the father of the “Green Revolution” (not MSS of the Indian revolution) – Norman Borlaug-

Reason: Environmental activists often oppose road building. They say such roads will lead to the destruction of the rain forests or other wildernesses. What would you say to them?

Borlaug: These extremists who are living in great affluence…are saying that poor people shouldn’t have roads. I would like to see them not just go out in the bush backpacking for a week but be forced to spend the rest of their lives out there and have their children raised out there. Let’s see whether they’d have the same point of view then.

I should point out that I was originally trained as a forester. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and during one of my assignments I was reputed to be the most isolated member of the Forest Service, back in the middle fork of the Salmon River, the biggest primitive area in the southern 48 states. I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it’s wrong to force poor people to live that way.

[...]

Reason: A lot of activists say that it’s wrong to cross genetic barriers between species. Do you agree?

Borlaug: No. As a matter of fact, Mother Nature has crossed species barriers, and sometimes nature crosses barriers between genera–that is, between unrelated groups of species. Take the case of wheat. It is the result of a natural cross made by Mother Nature long before there was scientific man. Today’s modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire.

Durum wheat was OK for making flat Arab bread, but it didn’t have elastic gluten. The thing that makes modern wheat different from all of the other cereals is that it has two proteins that give it the doughy quality when it’s mixed with water. Durum wheats don’t have gluten, and that’s why we use them to make spaghetti today. The second cross of durum wheat with the other wild wheat produced a wheat whose dough could be fermented with yeast to produce a big loaf. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering.

[...]

Reason: But the Cornell researchers went ahead and published their paper on the effects of BT corn pollen on monarch butterflies in the laboratory.

Borlaug: Several of us tried to encourage them to run field tests before it was published. That’s how science gets politicized. There’s an element of Lysenkoism [Lysenko was Stalin's favorite biologist] all tangled up with this pseudoscience and environmentalism. I like to remind my friends what pseudoscience and misinformation can do to destroy a nation.

[...]

Reason: Do biotech crops pose a health risk to human beings?

Borlaug: I see no difference between the varieties carrying a BT gene or a herbicide resistance gene, or other genes that will come to be incorporated, and the varieties created by conventional plant breeding. I think the activists have blown the health risks of biotech all out of proportion.

Reason: What do you think of organic farming? A lot of people claim it’s better for human health and the environment.

Borlaug: That’s ridiculous. This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive.

Fact, fiction and short stories

The UCLA has come up with a theory about the exact whereabouts of dreaded terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. And an Economic Times edit this morning pokes fun at the theory by invoking O.Henry’s Shamrock Jolnes-

The famed American short story writer, O Henry, perhaps more prescient in having known how his beloved nation would behave in the future, invented his fictional Jolnes as a counterpoint to Sherlock Holmes. Whereas the latter’s methods, as any Doyle fan would know, consist of eliminating all possibilities until the last one standing would have to be the truth, Shamrock Jolnes’ method of choice is to proceed immediately to a conclusion, however improbable it may appear.

This brilliant method, of course, eliminates all unnecessary doubt. Which, as we now know, quite came in handy when searching for all those WMDs in Iraq.

Of course, the UCLA team isn’t all that brazen. They do have some theories to fall back on. One is called the “distance decay theory,” which, scintillatingly, says that a person is likely to be found near the locale last seen at. The other bit, called “island biographic theory,” [sic] basically has it that life-sustaining resources attract sentient beings.

Just how these whiz Americans figure out these secrets of the universe is, of course, a civilisational mystery.

Now Shamrock Jolnes beats Sherlock Holmes hands down. Can Holmes ever manage to come up with stuff like this-

“Why have you that string on your finger?” I asked.

“That’s the problem,” said Jolnes. “My wife tied that on this morning to remind me of something I was to send up to the house. Sit down, Whatsup, and excuse me for a few moments.”

[...]

“Now, to get at the solution of this string.”

After five minutes of silent pondering, Jolnes looked at me, with a smile, and nodded his head.

“Wonderful man!” I exclaimed; “already?”

“It is quite simple,” he said, holding up his finger. “You see that knot? That is to prevent my forgetting. It is, therefore, a forget-me-knot. A forget-me-not is a flower. It was a sack of flour that I was to send home!”

Absolutely knot!

To more serious stuff, while the authors do seem to be confident, the fact is that the UCLA study is based on probabilities – given these observed geographical phenomena, and these necessary conditions, what are the chances of … Though the Times of India calls it “science” (“but to return to the science, the UCLA findings rely on two principles used in geography to predict the distribution of wildlife…”), it is in fact a “model” or a theory; and the authors are not claiming that it is anything but.

Moving beyond the study, this is not to disparage the use of models or theories – they do have their own uses; after all, every scientist and researcher starts with them and then moves on to validate them. But models, and theories, have to be recognized as such, and so should their limitations. Further, there is nothing wrong in calling a field of study a science, if it follows the scientific method; the problem however is that as far as the general populace is concerned, “science” conjures up an image of incontrovertible facts; that something has been proven beyond doubt. And this is hardly the case, more often than not. As Hayek said in the lecture I linked to the other day-

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information? It is probably not surprising that those impressed by the example of the physical sciences should find this position very unsatisfactory and should insist on the standards of proof which they find there. The reason for this state of affairs is the fact, to which I have already briefly referred, that the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables.

Though he refers to economics (and other social sciences), and particularly to Keynesianism and its fixation with aggregate demand and full employment – they are after all statistically measurable, this applies to everything including the notoriously politicized “climate science.” When models that are based on certain assumptions are used as if their results are incontrovertible and universally applicable, we have a problem. And this is what Hayek calls a “scientistic” attitude-

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

[...]

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

“Scientism” is just as bad as the outright denial of the applicability of science to a particular field. The answer lies in knowing the assumptions under which a particular scientific theory hold true.

—

The IRS is going after Swiss bank UBS and wants it to disclose the names of Americans who have accounts there. Naturally the money is illegal since the IRS hasn’t been paid its due – the protection money also known as the voluntary income tax. It reminds me of a Jeffrey Archer short story – “Clean Sweep Ignatius”(its google books, some pages will be visible, some won’t). Its the story of a Nigerian finance minister who starts a “war on corruption,” to paraphrase an American insanity. After arresting a few ministers and sundry bureaucrats on corruption charges, he tells his president that many Nigerians have stashed their money in Swiss bank accounts. The president gives him carte-blanche, and Ignatius lands up in Geneva. He asks for, and gets, an appointment with the chairman of a bank. He first demands the names of all Nigerians having accounts there on the basis of the authority of the Nigerian president. The banker denies the request. He then offers a carrot – business with the Nigerian government; denied. Then Ignatius uses the stick – a complaint with the Swiss Foreign Office about non-compliance; denied. Immediate embargo on all trade with Swiss nationals, recall of the Nigerian Ambassador, exposure in front of the world press – all threats useless.

Finally, Ignatius pulls out a gun, places it on the chairman’s temple, and asks for the list of names. He doesn’t give it up, still. Ignatius removes the gun. “Excellent” he says, and opens the briefcase that he’s brought with him-

The two bankers stared down at the neatly packed rows of hundred-dollar bills. Every inch of the briefcase had been taken up. The chairman quickly estimated that it probably amounted to around five million dollars.

“I wonder, sir,” said Ignatius, “how I go about opening an account with your bank?”

Unfortunately for the Americans, Ignatius’ bank surely isn’t UBS.

—

Some days back, I started writing a satire based on the US stimulus package; “The Tale of Three Countries, by Darles Chickens” I called it. The character included Canard Maims, Mall Klarx, Adam’s Myth, Kruel Plugman, ARack ForMama, Splurge N. Gush and a few others. But what started as a satire soon turned into a dark tragedy – Darles Chickens became Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Tale…” began to sound like “The Masque of the Red Death.” And I stopped writing. Maybe I should finish it all the same.

Scientism and the pretense of knowledge

Over the last week or so, two different economics blogs have said that the lecture Friedrich von Hayek gave when he won the “Economics Nobel” back in ’74 is mandatory reading. The Keynesian “stimulus” is going to lead to massive runaway inflation, and neither the dunderheads at the pink papers nor governments are the least bit bothered. And that’s why Hayek’s lecture is important-

The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable. On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things…

Here it is – “The Pretence of Knowledge.”