This is a guest post by Matthew Watson, a lecturer in geophysical natural hazards at the University of Bristol and the lead researcher for the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project (SPICE), whose experiments are currently on hold. He blogs at The Reluctant Geoengineer.
The Case For Climate Engineering Research
By Matthew Watson
As project lead for the SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), I have been on quite a journey over the last eighteen months. SPICE is important, challenging, socio-politically charged, and high-profile: a heady mix for a youngish researcher like me. It looks to answer the question “Can we emulate the cooling observed after large volcanic eruptions to ameliorate the worst effects of global warming?” Despite playing to my apparent Messiah complex, the trials and tribulations of steering the project through rough seas has been more than enough to keep my feet on the ground. That is a challenge that faces all who research such grand things.
Do host cities really get the benefits their boosters promise, or are they just engaging in some fiscal gymnastics?
Sam Lee of NYU and Petra Persson of Columbia send an e-mail:
We have written a research paper [“Human Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution”] that theoretically analyzes the impact of prostitution laws on voluntary sex work and sex trafficking. The central message of the paper is a new policy proposal (see Q6 below). Here are some of the questions we ask and the answers we find:
Q1: Which regulatory approach, legalization or criminalization, is more effective against trafficking?
A1: Neither. Either approach can increase or decrease trafficking, depending on the appeal of voluntary sex work, which in turn depends on things such as the female-male wage gap.Q2: What about studies that document higher trafficking inflows into countries that legalize prostitution?
A2: In the presence of sex tourism (which is, for example, non-negligible for Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands), the increase in trafficking in the legalizing country can be more than offset by a decrease in trafficking in the neighboring countries. Thus, overall, trafficking can actually decrease.
A reader named Mark Kozel writes to say:
I heard that Chicago will be pouring up to $14 million into police overtime to prevent murder and violent crime.
It got me thinking: is it cheaper to prevent this kind of crime, or to just let it happen and clean up the mess afterwards?
It would be hard to find many people, even economists, who would arguing that “just letting it happen” isn’t an outcome that society should even think about accepting.
What happens to your reputation when you’re no longer around to defend it?
I overlapped a little bit at the New York Times with Charlie LeDuff and let me just say that his reputation as a one-of-a-kind reporter is thoroughly deserved.
He now works for the Fox TV news station in Detroit. If you have ten minutes to spare, you should check out his recent piece: “Charlie LeDuff Golfs the Length of Detroit”.
Is it a) one of the most interesting pieces of reporting you’ll ever see? b) a kind of cultural criticism that almost never shows up in mainstream journalism? c) a golfing adventure that even the most adventuresome golfers have never considered?
The podcast we’re putting out next week is called “Legacy of a Jerk.” It’s about how people’s reputations change, for better or worse, after their death. We talk at some length about Ty Cobb, widely considered to be one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived — and one of the nastiest humans. Suffice it to say that his reputation gets a second look in our episode.
With that idea in mind, I read with great interest Robert F. Turner‘s essay in the Wall Street Journal today about Thomas Jefferson having supposedly fathering a child with his slave Sally Hemings. Turner, a law professor at the University of Virginia, edited The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission
I recently had occasion to e-chat with Rocky Kolb, a well-regarded astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Talk turned, of course, to the recent likely discovery of the Higgs boson — but, as Kolb talk about that, he raised an even broader and more interesting point about scientific discovery.
He was good enough to write up his thoughts in a guest blog post that I am pleased to present below:
Faster Than Light
By Rocky Kolb
After the news coverage of the past week, everyone now understands what a Higgs particle is, and why physicists were so excited about the July 4th announcement of its probable discovery at CERN, a huge European physics accelerator laboratory. (The disclaimer “probable” is because it could turn out that the new particle seen at CERN is not the Higgs after all, but an imposter particle with properties like the Higgs.)
For a few days it was common to see, hear, or read my colleagues struggling to explain why the discovery of a Higgs particle is a triumph for science. But after a week of physics in the news, the media has moved on to cover the Tom Cruise–Katie Holmes divorce and shark sightings near beaches. Perhaps all the public will be left with is a memory that there was a triumph for science. Science works: theories are tested and confirmed by experiment.
I think that the CERN Higgs discovery was, indeed, a triumph for science. However, the Higgs was not the only dramatic announcement at CERN in the past year. But the other dramatic result is something many physicists would rather forget.
A Bloomberg article by Michael J. Moore shows that finance and investment employees frequently commit the cardinal sin of failing to diversify their personal holdings by holding too much of their own company’s stock:
Current and former Morgan Stanley employees, who receive company shares to match their 401(k) contributions, held 24 percent of retirement assets in the firm’s stock before last year’s decline, the highest percentage of any of the banks. They lost $570 million in 2011 as the shares plunged 44 percent.
Bank of America Corp. (BAC) employees lost the most, $1.37 billion, as the lender’s stock dropped 58 percent last year. Workers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C), both based in New York, also lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
JPMorgan employees, some of whom received stock in the company until last year to match retirement contributions, devoted 18 percent of their funds to the lender’s shares at the end of 2010. Bank of America employees put 13 percent of their assets in the bank’s stock, while the figures for Citigroup and New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) were 8 percent and 2 percent, respectively.
If we want our kids to thrive in school, maybe we should just pay them.
A response via Twitter concerning our recent post about Cambodian villagers who reportedly converted to Christianity to save money:
@DavidFCox: I had an Indian friend that changed religion 4 times to get best education
I was recently humbled and thrilled to return to my undergraduate alma mater, Appalachian State University, to receive its Distinguished Alumni Award. Here’s the introductory video the school made:
Levitt and Dubner answer your FREAK-quently Asked Questions about junk food, insurance, and how to make an economist happy.
A reader and podcast listener named Paul Tucker writes to say:
While listening to the “Herd Mentality” podcast piece about the Petrified Forest National Park, I thought you missed a very pertinent display at the park. At the south entrance to the National Park the visitor center has the Rainbow Forest Museum. In the museum there is a room dedicated completely to the theft of petrified wood. It is called the Guilt Room. The room is filled with pieces of petrified wood and the packages they arrived in and their accompanying letters of remorse and contrition by people who are trying to assuage their guilt by returning the offensive fossils.
As @VikingPlastics (a “global supplier of engineered sealing solutions” in Corry, Pa.) correctly notes, @freakonomics has a lot of followers but we do not follow anyone. In fact, we made a podcast about this. We briefly followed Marketplace‘s Kai Ryssdal, but have returned to our anti-social ways.
So Viking has made us a cash offer to follow it:
We ran a blog post a while back about how alumni should think about giving money to their alma maters. A recent NBER paper (abstract; PDF) by Jonathan Meer and Harvey S. Rosen looks at the “donative behaviour” of alumni who received financial aid. It has some really interesting conclusions:
The empirical work is based upon micro data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university. We focus on three types of financial aid, scholarships, loans, and campus jobs. …
Our main findings are: 1) Individuals who took out student loans are less likely to make a gift, other things being the same. We conjecture that this phenomenon is caused by an “annoyance effect” —
alumni resent the fact that they are burdened with loans. 2) Scholarship aid reduces the size of a gift, but has little effect on the probability of donating. The negative effect of receiving a scholarship on donations decreases in absolute value with the size of the scholarship. We do not find any evidence that scholarship recipients give less because they have relatively low incomes post graduation. 3) Aid in the form of campus jobs does not have a strong effect on donative behavior.
Apple has just released an app called Podcasts which, yes, helps you download and manage podcast from the iTunes store.
Coverage of the app can be found here, here, here, and here.
I haven’t used the app yet so I cannot comment on it — some of the iTunes reviews indicate some fixes are needed — but I have to say that I do like Apple’s taste in the podcasts it has chosen for its promo materials:
I love the New York Times (and not just because I used to work there) but goodness gracious, this kind of thing really hurts its credibility.
An article about News Corp.’s decision to split off its publishing business (including the Wall Street Journal) from its entertainment business contains the following sentence:
Both companies would maintain their controversial dual-class share stock structure, which enables the Murdoch family to control nearly 40 percent of the voting power.
Well, guess what other family-run news organization maintains a dual-class share stock structure? Yes, the New York Times — as well as the Washington Post and others, as Rupert Murdoch pointed out in announcing News Corp.’s move. This fact, however, isn’t mentioned in the Times article. But here’s the reality: given the turmoil in the newspaper business in general and at the Times in particular, it’d be easy to argue that if anyone’s dual-class ownership is “controversial,” it is the Times‘s more than the Journal‘s.
The Times article also omits that the new publishing unit will include News Corp.’s education unit and HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest book publishers. (Our books are published by William Morrow, a division of HC.) The Journal‘s coverage of the story is superior.
Once a week, the British Prime Minister goes before the House of Commons for a lightning round of hard questions. Should the U.S. give it a try?
We recently solicited your food questions for economist Tyler Cowen, whose latest book is An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
Below are the answers to some of your questions. Cowen talks about food subsidies, the Malthusian trap, “ethnic” food, the the meal he’d like to share with Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. Thanks to all for participating.
Q. Any advice on choosing the best food when eating at a college cafeteria? – Philip Mulder
A. That is a good time to start your diet. Otherwise, look for items which can sit and stew for a long time. Indian food works okay in such contexts, as do stews, as the name would suggest. Stay away from anything requiring flash frying or immediate, short-term contact with heat. The vegetables won’t be great, but often they are not great (in the U.S.) anyway, so now is the time to fill up on them! The opportunity cost of eating the bad-tasting but nutritious food is especially low in these circumstances.
Whenever you look at a political system and find it wanting, one tempting thought is this: Maybe we have subpar politicians because the job simply isn’t attracting the right people. And, therefore, if we were to significantly raise politicians’ salaries, we would attract a better class of politician.
This is an unpopular argument for various reasons, in part because it would be the politicians themselves who have to lobby for higher salaries, and that isn’t politically feasible (especially in a poor economy). Can you imagine the headlines?
But the idea remains attractive, doesn’t it? The idea is that, by raising the salaries of elected and other government officials, you would a) signal the true importance of the job; b) attract a kind of competent person who might otherwise enter a more remunerative field; c) allow politicians to focus more on the task at hand rather than worry about their income; and d) make politicians less susceptible to the influence of moneyed interests.
How using peer pressure — and good, old-fashioned shame — can push people to do the right thing.
A British reader named Dominic Ellison sends the following photo and note:
I saw the attached notice in the window of a neighbor’s car that had been pranged and lost its bumper.
I felt that it was an interesting test in game theory and was reminded of what I think is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, as the reader must certainly ask a number of questions:
Does the owner really have CCTV evidence? If so, why does the poster not allude to make, model or registration?
Would the consequences be genuinely worse if not come forward? For example, was it a drink driver not wishing to be identified at the time?
Interesting if perhaps not so surprising: in a new working paper called “The Cost of Friendship,” Paul Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, and Yuhai Xuan argue that even in as performance-based an industry as venture capital, people tend to collaborate with people who have similar backgrounds, often to their detriment:
This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people’s desire to work together. Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance. Addressing these problems in the venture capital syndication setting, we show that venture capitalists exhibit strong detrimental homophily in their co-investment decisions. We find that individual venture capitalists choose to collaborate with other venture capitalists for both ability-based characteristics (e.g., whether both individuals in a dyad obtained a degree from a top university) and affinity-based characteristics (e.g., whether individuals in a pair share the same ethnic background, attended the same school, or worked for the same employer previously).
I am told it is true but haven’t yet seen evidence.
Am in London for work and, as always, delight in reading the newspapers here. From today’s Telegraph, my favorite article:
Accident and emergency departments have seen a 15 per cent rise in sports injuries as an unfortunate side effect of Olympic fever, figures show. Young men and boys are the most likely to be treated and peak times are Saturday afternoons and lunchtime Sundays. The figures indicate more people may be taking up sport in the run up to the Euro 2012 football tournament and the London Olympics. However more are ending up needing emergency treatment after knocks, cuts, sprains and strains, broken bones and head injuries, officials NHS figures show.
Paying workers as little as possible seems smart — unless you can make more money by paying them more.
I admire both of these books, and their authors, and even their covers.
Our latest full-length podcasts are “You Eat What You Are,” Parts 1 and 2. They were inspired in part by Tyler Cowen‘s latest book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
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