Extra Credits
Published on 10 Jul 2018The golden age of science fiction represents a very flawed but fascinating American view of the future; authors Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were all influential to this time period.
July 11, 2018
The Golden Age of Science Fiction – Modernity Begins – Extra Sci Fi
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Environmentalists against science
At Catallaxy Files, Jeff Stier looks at situations when activists who normally fetishize their devotion to science will go out of their way to fight against scientific findings that don’t co-incide with their preferences:
The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about “too little” versus “too much” regulation, split along the ideological divide. Too little regulation, goes the argument, and we are exposed to too much risk. Too little, and we don’t advance.
This binary approach, however, represents the dark-ages of regulatory policy. It was more frequently relevant when our tools to measure risk were primitive, but today’s technology allows much more precise ways to evaluate real-world risks. With less uncertainty, there’s less of a need to cast a broad regulatory net.
Regulation not warranted by countervailing risk just doesn’t make sense. That’s why a pseudoscientific approach, dubbed the “precautionary principle,” behind much of today’s regulation is so pernicious. This dogma dictates that it’s always better to be safe than to ever be sorry. The approach is politically effective not only because it’s something your mother says, but because it’s easier to envision potential dangers, remote as they may be, than potential benefits. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a powerful tool for those who seek to live in a world without risk.
But what happens when regulators can get a reasonably good handle on benefits and risks? Some potential risks have been eliminated simply because the basis for the concern has proven to be unwarranted. For more than two decades, the artificial sweetener, saccharin, came with a cancer warning label in the U.S.But it turned out that the animal experiment which led to the warning was later found to be irrelevant to humans, and the warning was eventually removed.
Warning about a product when risks are not well-understood is prudent. But it would be absurd to continue to warn after the science tells us there’s nothing to worry about.
Today, an analogous situation is playing out in the EU, where activists are using outmoded tests not just to place warning labels on silicones, a building block of our technological world, but to ban them outright.
The playbook is predictable: as the scientific basis for a product’s safety grows, opponents go to increasingly great lengths to manufacture uncertainty, move the goalposts and capitalize on scientific illiteracy to gain the political upper-hand.
We’ve seen these tactics employed in opposition to everything from growing human tissue in a lab, to harm-reducing alternatives to smoking, such as e-cigarettes. Now, the effort to manufacture uncertainty is playing out in the debate over the environmental impact of silicones, which are used to in a wide range of consumer, medical, and industrial products.
Fortunately, in the case of silicones, regulators in a number of countries, including Australia, have put politics aside and adhere to appropriate scientific methods to inform their decision-making.
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Men of Harlech
Mark Mains
Published on 16 Apr 2011This stirring music first appeared as “March of the Men of Harlech” in Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards (Edward Jones, London 1784). The song was also used in the movie Zulu (1964). To learn more visit: http://www.rorkesdriftvc.com/myths/my… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_H…
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QotD: Measuring consumer surplus
Consumer surplus is one of those things which is really, really, difficult to measure. This paper is one of the few that’s able to give us a hard number. But what it is is, really, “how much I would have been willing to pay but didn’t have to?” Say that we’re out and you’re thirsty and I’m not very. You suggest we have a Coke. You’re really interested in this, you’d pay $2 for one, I’m, well, meh, I’d only pay $1 for one. Obviously, the Coke seller (no, not the coke one, that’s different) doesn’t know this so he charges us the same price – $1 each. I’ve gained no consumer surplus I paid a buck for something I value at a buck, you gain $1 of surplus because you would have paid $2 but only paid that buck.
In one manner the consumer surplus is a result of mass manufacturing and marketing. We’re pumping out millions of whatever it is, we’ve got to have a “market price” and some people will value it, whatever it is, at more than that. That greater valuation is that consumer surplus. Without a producer knowing what your individual demand curve is they cannot charge you the full value you ascribe to it.
Of course, they try as hard as they can to do so. This is what brands and product differentiation are all about. VW and car brands for example – there’re SUV models built on roughly the same platform in the Skoda, VW, Audi and Bentley ranges. Oh yes, they’re different cars alright. But perhaps not $300,000 different, which is the price gap between the top and bottom there. Some of this (but please note, only some of this) is because there are people who will pay a fortune to swank around in a Bentley and there are many more who will not, thinking a Skoda is just fine (I do a little work for the company and the new Skoda SUV is indeed very fine but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?). That’s product differentiation.
Another example is what used to happen in old fashioned English pubs – in the public bar and the saloon. The latter had carpets and comfy chairs, the former very definitely not. Beer was 10% more expensive if you wanted the comfy chair experience – very simple and remarkably successful product differentiation. Being able to charge different prices to different groups for much the same thing. Or as it often used to work out, different prices to the same person on different occasions. Dates were in the saloon bar….
Tim Worstall, “Freakonomics’ Steven Levitt On How Inefficient Uber Really Is”, Forbes, 2016-09-20.
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