Policy – Page 5

There must be a model here somewhere

I ran across a nice interpretation of Paul Krugman’s comments on China’s monetary policy. It’s also a great example of the limitations of verbal descriptions of complex feedbacks:

In order to invest in China you need state permission and the state limits how much money comes in. It essentially has an import quota on Yuan.

This means that while Yuan are loose in the international market and therefore cheap, they are actually tight at home and therefore expensive. Because China is controlling the flow on money across the border it can have a loose international monetary policy but a tight domestic monetary policy.

Indeed, it goes deeper than that. A loose international Yuan bids up foreign demand for Chinese goods. This in turn both increase the quantity of goods China produces and their domestic price. Essentially, foreign consumers are given a price advantage relative to domestic consumers.

However, China doesn’t want domestic consumers to face higher prices. So, it has to tighten the domestic Yuan even tighter. It has too push down domestic demand so that the sum of international demand plus domestic demand are not so high that they produce domestic inflation.

The tight domestic Yuan, therefore, is driving down Chinese consumption at precisely the time in which the world could use more consumption. The loose international Yuan also gives foreigners a price advantage when buying Chinese goods and so it is driving down inflation in the US at precisely the time the Fed is trying to dive it up.

However, the story still gets worse from there – I am really riffing here, half of this is just occurring to me as I type. The loose international Yuan can only be used to produce manufactured goods. Manufacturing requires commodities both as the feed stock for the actual goods and to be used in the construction of new manufacturing facilities.

What does that mean. It should mean that when the Fed loosens policy, that China responds by loosening the International Yuan which in turn gets shunted towards commodities. Thus rather than boosting the consumer price level as we hope, Fed easing actually winds up boosting commodities.

This is because China is offsetting the total increase in worldwide consumer demand by tightening the Yuan at home, and boosting the total increase in commodity demand by loosening the Yuan abroad.

If this is a bit baffling, it helps to get the context from the originals. Still, it begs for a model or at least a diagram. At least the punch line is simple:

Thus this Yuan policy does all the wrong things.

Meanwhile, in a bizarre parallel universe where climate policy exists in a vacuum, China calls the US a preening pig. Couldn’t they at least wait for Palin to be elected? Seriously, US climate policy is a joke, but Chinese monetary-industrial policy is just as destructive.

Climate CoLab Contest

The Climate CoLab is an interesting experiment that combines three features,

Collaborative simulation modeling (including several integrated assessment models and C-LEARN)
On-line debates
Collective decision-making

Together these create an infrastructure for collective intelligence that gets beyond the unreal rhetoric that pervades many policy debates.

The CoLab is launching its 2010 round of policy proposal contests:

To members of the Climate CoLab community,

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new Climate CoLab contest, as well as a major upgrade of our software platform.

The contest will address the question: What international climate agreements should the world community make?

The first round runs through October 31 and the final round through November 26.

In early December, the United Nations and U.S. Congress will be briefed on the winning entries.

We are raising funds in the hope of being able to pay travel expenses for one representative from each winning team to attend one or both of these briefings.

We invite you to form teams and enter the contest–learn more at http://climatecolab.org.

We also encourage you to fill out your profiles and add a picture, so that members of the community can get to know each other.

And please inform anyone you believe might be interested about the contest.

Best,

Rob Laubacher

The contest leads to real briefings on the hill, and there are prizes for winners. See details.

Technology first?

The idea of a technology-led solution to climate is gaining ground, most recently with a joint AEI-Brookings proposal. Kristen Sheeran has a nice commentary at RCE on the prospects. Go read it.

I’m definitely bearish on the technology-first idea. I agree that technology investment is a winner, with or without environmental externalities. But for high tech to solve the climate problem by itself, absent any emissions pricing, may require technical discontinuities that are less than likely. That makes technology-first the Hail-Mary pass of climate policy: something you do when you’re out of options.

The world isn’t out of options in a physical sense; it’s just that the public has convinced itself otherwise. That’s a pity.

The invisible hand works

… but not always with the intended outcome. This collapsed condo in China, built without significant rebar connecting building to footing, is a nice demonstration of the fact that markets are lousy at providing unobserved goods, like safety and quality.

ChinaCondoCollapse

Markets are great at decentralizing decisions where there’s rapid outcome feedback, but lousy at dealing with delayed or temporally remote feedback: pollution, emergent disease resistance, risky lending. As long as markets are incomplete, the invisible hand can’t solve such problems on its own any more than the thermostat in a room can prevent it from getting too hot due to a building fire. In this case, the profit motive probably led to a cascade of bad decisions that actively contributed to the toppling of the building.

There are three possible solutions: 1. regulate the market (government building inspections), 2. create a market (label buildings for rebar content?), or 3. let a solution emerge (financiers and buyers learn their lesson). 3 is the preferred solution of small-government enthusiasts, but I don’t see any evidence that it actually works for nonlocal problems like pollution or low-probability/high-consequence events. That leaves society holding the bag for the fallout of individual decisions. Possibly that was a good deal for all concerned in the 19th century, but it seems like a dubious approach to the 21st.

Fuel economy makeover

The EPA is working on new fuel economy window stickers for cars (you can vote on alternatives). I like this one:

hoisted from the comments at jalopnik

There are some things to like about the possible new version. For example, it indicates fuel economy on an absolute scale, so that there’s no implicit allocation of pollution rights to bigger vehicles (unlike Energy Star and the CAFE standard):

Since the new stickers will indicate fueling costs, emissions taxes on fuels will be a nice complementary policy, as they’ll be more evident on the dealer lot.

Waiting for a miracle at Lake Mead

Lake Mead has dropped another ten feet since I wrote about its open-loop management,

My hypothesis is that the de facto policy for managing water levels is to wait for good years to restore the excess withdrawals of bad years, and that demand management measures in the interim are toothless. That worked back when river flows were not fully subscribed. The trouble is, supply isn’t stationary, and there’s no reason to assume that it will return to levels that prevailed in the early years of river compacts. At the same time, demand isn’t stationary either, as population growth in the west drives it up. To avoid Lake Mead drying up, the system is going to have to get a spine, i.e. there’s going to have to be some feedback between water availability and demand.

An article in the Arizona Republic confirms my thinking,

To slow the lake’s years-long decline, river users have built a reservoir west of Yuma to catch unused runoff, paid farmers to leave fields unplanted and are negotiating with Mexico to leave some of its allocation in Lake Mead while its farmers recover from an earthquake.

None of the steps will yield significant amounts of water, but together, they could keep Lake Mead from sinking below the drought triggers, buying time until a wet winter can replenish some of the water lost to drought.

“It’s time that we need,” said David Modeer, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which moves water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. “The reservoirs have shown they’re resilient. After a 12-year drought, they’re still half-full. What we do now will be worth it to stay out of a shortage.”

Managers are assuming that a return to historic rainfall patterns will save their bacon. But if climate models are right, and the Southwest will be on the losing end of trends in precipitation, that won’t happen. Even if they’re wrong, increasing demand can easily overwhelm restored rainfall. At some point, the loop will have to close – the question is how. Will property rights get reallocated and price signals aligned so that people live within the limits of supply? Or will the lake wind up permanently depleted? There are some signs of improved cooperation among states, but Nevada appears to be betting on failure:

if the reservoir fell below elevation 1,050 feet, one of the tunnels Nevada uses to draw water from the lake would sit above the waterline and would be useless. Nevada is working on a new, deeper tunnel

Gallatin County's Zoning Enforcement Trap

I’m playing a big role in a local effort to get the regulations of our zoning district enforced in the case of an egregious violation. Our planning and zoning commission’s habit, and apparent preference in this case, is not to enforce. Instead, it is proposed to enable the violation through a PUD amendment, and issue a trivial fine ($200, or 0.2% of the stated value of the structure).

Unfortunately, this proposal is illegal, because it contradicts existing covenants and a variety of goals and specific provisions of our General Plan and Zoning Regulation. This action might make sense if it were a naked political ploy to undermine the zoning through administrative rather than legislative means, which I hope is not the case. I think it is more likely an effort to “play nice” with violators and to avoid costly enforcement action.

If so, the resulting weak enforcement posture is a short-sighted avoidance of conflict, that encourages far more problems in the long run. As the diagram below illustrates, backing down on the case at hand solves the immediate problem, but has terrible consequences.

The precedent for non-enforcement and amendments to legalize violations erodes the legal basis for future enforcement actions.
Accommodation creates an expectation of forgiveness, encouraging owners and builders to violate in the future.
Exceptions created to accommodate violations make planning documents and title histories more complex, creating more opportunities for errors.

These side effects of lax enforcement accumulate. As violations mount, time that could be spent on productive activity (ensuring a thorough permitting process, or revising zoning regulations to clarify standards and streamline processes) gets squeezed out by time wasted on enforcement.

These reinforcing feedbacks create a deadly trap, into which the unsuspecting can easily step. Once triggered, the vicious cycle creates more pressure to relax enforcement standards, capturing the county in an undesirable equilibrium with many violations and no meaningful enforcement. Ultimately, the citizens (who initiated the zoning district) suffer from the side effects of density granted to violators, that is unavailable to those who comply with the law.

Fortunately, with a little fortitude, the process can be reversed. A single forceful enforcement action has a salutary effect on expectations, stemming the tide of violations and freeing up time for the improvement of regulations. There’s still the hangover of side effects of past accommodation to contend with, but surely the withdrawal is better than the addiction to accommodation.

Cap & trade is dead. Long live cap & trade?

Democrats have pulled the plug on a sweeping energy bill this year. There is no heir apparent. This is not cause for panic. In climate, as in education, there are no emergencies.

However, the underlying reasons may be cause for panic. It seems that voters are unwilling to accept any policy that will significantly raise the price of emissions. Given that price is a predominant information carrier in our economy, other polices are unlikely to work efficiently, absent a price signal. That leaves us in a bit of a pickle. What to do?

If you don’t want to buck public opinion, advise the people to invest in (then pray for) a technological miracle. Ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky?” It might even work.

Alternatively, you might conclude that the public hasn’t quite grasped the nature of the problem – that wait and see is not a good policy in systems with long delays. But then you’d be accused of scientism, for the equivalent of challenging the efficient market hypothesis or the notion that the customer is always right. That’s rather puzzling, given that there’s direct evidence that people don’t intuitively appreciate the dynamics of accumulation, and that snowstorms in the East cause half of Americans to question the reality of climate change.

The anti-scientism, pro-technology crowd takes opposition to meaningful mitigation policy as a sure sign that the public is on to something. The wisdom of crowds is powerful when there’s diverse information and rapid feedback, as in price discovery through a market. But it has a pretty disastrous history in the runup to bubbles and other catastrophes, as we’ve recently seen. Surely there are some legitimate worries about current climate proposals (I’ve expressed a number here), but it doesn’t follow that pricing emissions is a bad decision.

So, what’s a modeler to do? Opening up political debates is a good idea, though not quite in the way that I think proponents intend. We already have plenty of political debates. The problem is that they tend to lack ready access to scientific or other information that can be agreed upon or at least presented in a way that permits testing of hypotheses against data or evaluation of decisions against contingencies. That means that questions of values and distribution of benefits (which politics is rightfully about) get mixed up with muddled thinking about science, economics, and social system dynamics.

The solution typically proposed is to open up science and models to more public scrutiny. That’s a good idea for a variety of reasons, but by itself it’s a losing proposition for scientists- they get all the criticism, and the public process doesn’t assimilate much of their insights. What’s needed is a fair exchange, where everyone shows their hands. Scientists make their stuff accessible, and in return participants in policy debates actually use it, and additionally submit to formalization of their arguments to facilitate shared understanding and testing.

Coming back to cap & trade, I don’t see that the major political players are willing to do that. Following a successful round of multi-stakeholder workshops that brought a systems perspective to conversations about climate policy, funded by the petro industry in California, we spent a fair amount of time marketing the idea of a model-assisted deliberation process targeted at shared design of federal climate policy. Lobbyists at some of the big stakeholders told us very forthrightly that they were unwilling to engage in any process with an outcome that they couldn’t predict and control.

In an environment where everyone’s happy with their own entrenched position, their isn’t much hope for a good solution to emerge. The only solution I see is to make an end run around the big players, and go straight to the public with better information, in order to expand the set of things they’ll accept. I hope there’s time for that to work.

Policy Resistance – Immigration & Prohibition

Complex systems find many ways of resisting or evading pressures, resulting in policy failure, backlashes, whack-a-mole games and other unintended consequences. Some great examples just wandered by my desk:

Via Economist’s View:

Immigration reform has a long history of unintended consequences: More than two decades of increased enforcement since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has done little to reduce the number of illegal immigrants. In fact, it seems to have increased their numbers. …

Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey pointed out … that measures to secure the border seemed to produce almost the opposite of what was intended. … With increasing border enforcement, workers who used to shuttle between jobs in California or Texas and home in Zacatecas or Michoacán simply began to stay put and sent for their families, becoming permanent, if sometimes reluctant, residents. According to Massey, post-IRCA border enforcement may have increased the size of the permanent Mexican population in the United States by a factor of nearly four.

From a great article on Wayne Wheeler, The Man Who Turned Off the Taps, in Smithsonian:

But for all his political might, Wheeler could not do what he and all the other Prohibitionists had set out to do: they could not purge alcoholic beverages from American life. Drinking did decline at first, but a combination of legal loopholes, personal tastes and political expediency conspired against a dry regime.

As declarative as the 18th Amendment was—forbidding “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”—the Volstead Act allowed exceptions. You were allowed to keep (and drink) liquor you had in your possession as of January 16, 1920; this enabled the Yale Club in New York, for instance, to stockpile a supply large enough to last the full 14 years that Prohibition was in force. Farmers and others were allowed to “preserve” their fruit through fermentation, which placed hard cider in cupboards across the countryside and homemade wine in urban basements. “Medicinal liquor” was still allowed, enriching physicians (who generally charged by the prescription) and pharmacists (who sold such “medicinal” brands as Old Grand-Dad and Johnnie Walker). A religious exception created a boom in sacramental wines, leading one California vintner to sell communion wine—legally—in 14 different varieties, including port, sherry, tokay and cabernet sauvignon.

By the mid-’20s, those with a taste for alcohol had no trouble finding it, especially in the cities of the East and West coasts and along the Canadian border. At one point the New York police commissioner estimated there were 32,000 illegal establishments selling liquor in his city. In Detroit, a newsman said, “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink…unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.” Washington’s best-known bootlegger, George L. Cassiday (known to most people as “the man in the green hat”), insisted that “a majority of both houses” of Congress bought from him, and few thought he was bragging.

Worst of all, the nation’s vast thirst gave rise to a new phenomenon—organized crime, in the form of transnational syndicates that controlled everything from manufacture to pricing to distribution. A corrupt and underfunded Prohibition Bureau couldn’t begin to stop the spread of the syndicates, which considered the politicians who kept Prohibition in place their greatest allies. Not only did Prohibition create their market, it enhanced their profit margins: from all the billions of gallons of liquor that changed hands illegally during Prohibition, the bootleggers did not pay, nor did the government collect, a single penny of tax.

The prohibition article also poses an interesting puzzle. If prohibition was more or less quickly and broadly unpopular, how did it get passed by such landslide margins in the first place? I can’t believe that ignorance of the possible outcome was universal, so there must have been some powerful positive feedback behind the initial passage of the policy. Perhaps it was a tipping point effect: once a vote becomes sufficiently lopsided, fewer and fewer politicians want to be on the losing side of a landslide vote, so they join the herd. A modern analogy might be the post-9/11 authorization of the Iraq war.

Will the real emissions target please stand up?

The post-Copenhagen climate negotiations seem to be diverging, at least on the question of targets. Brackets, denoting disagreement, have if anything proliferated in the draft texts. The latest from Bonn:

AD HOC WORKING GROUP ON LONG-TERM COOPERATIVE ACTION UNDER THE CONVENTION

Eleventh session Bonn, 2–6 August 2010

Item 3 of the provisional agenda Preparation of an outcome to be presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its sixteenth session to enable full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention through long-term cooperative action now, up to and beyond 2012

Text to facilitate negotiations among Parties

…

4. Parties should collectively reduce global emissions by [50][85][95] per cent from 1990 levels by 2050 and should ensure that global emissions continue to decline thereafter. Developed country Parties as a group should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by [[75-85][at least 80-95][more than 95] per cent from 1990 levels by 2050] [more than 100 per cent from 1990 levels by 2040].

…

18. These commitments are made with a view to reducing the aggregate greenhouse gas emissions of developed country Parties by [at least] [25–40] [in the order of 30] [40] [45] [50] [X* per cent from [1990] [or 2005] levels by [2017][2020] [and by [at least] [YY] per cent by 2050 from the [1990] [ZZ] level].

Hat tip: Travis Franck.