Tag Archives: Precautionary Principle

The Bad News Industrial Complex

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Big Government, Corruption, Risk Management

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Matt Ridley had an interesting piece on his blog last month entitled “Bad News Is Sudden, Good News Is Gradual“. It’s about the timing of news, as stated, and it’s about our bias toward bad news more generally. There is no question that bad news tends to be more dramatic than good news. But with steadily increasingly lifespans, growing prosperity, and world poverty at an all-time low, surely good news must come as much or more frequently than bad. But good news can be inconvenient to certain narratives. It is therefore often ignored, and some other purported disaster is found as a substitute:

“Poverty and hunger are the business Oxfam is in, but has it shouted the global poverty statistics from the rooftops? Hardly. It has switched its focus to inequality. When The Lancet published a study in 2010 showing global maternal mortality falling, advocates for women’s health tried to pressure it into delaying publication ‘fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause’, The New York Times reported. The announcement by Nasa in 2016 that plant life is covering more and more of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide emissions was handled like radioactivity by most environmental reporters.“

Tales of bad outcomes can be alluring, especially if they haven’t happened yet. In fact, bad things might even happen gradually, but dark visions of a world beyond the horizon impart a spooky sense of immediacy, and indeed, urgency. Ridley notes the tendency of people to regard pessimists as “wise”, while optimists are viewed as Pollyannas. And he recognizes that risk aversion plays an important role in this psychology. That brings me to the point I found most interesting in Ridley’s piece: the many vested interests in disasters, and disasters foretold.

Risk management is big business in an affluent society. There is a lot to lose, and a squeamish populace is easily cowed by good scare stories. The risk management and disaster-prevention narrative can be wrapped around any number of unlikely or exaggerated threats, serving the interests of the administrative state and private rent-seekers. One particular tool that has been most useful to this alliance is the precautionary principle. It is invoked to discourage or regulate activities presumed to pose risks to the public or to the environment. But there are three dimensions to the application of the precautionary principle: it provides a rationale for public funding of research into the risk-du-jour, for funding projects designed to mitigate its consequences, and for subsidizing development of alternative technologies that might help avoid or reduce the severity of the risk, often at great expense. The exaggeration of risk serves to legitimize these high costs. Of course, the entire enterprise would be impossible without the machinery of the state, in all its venality. Where money flows, graft is sure to follow.

Well-publicized disaster scenarios are helpful to statists in other ways. Risk, its causes, and its consequences are not distributed evenly across regions and populations. A risk thought to be anthropomorphic in nature implies that wealthier and more productive communities and nations must shoulder the bulk of the global costs of mitigation. Thus, the risk-management ethic requires redistribution. Furthermore, wealthier regions are better situated to insulate themselves locally against many risks. Impoverished areas, on the other hand, must be assisted. Finally, an incredible irony of our preoccupation with disaster scenarios is the simultaneous effort to subsidize those deemed most vulnerable even while executing other policies that harm them.

Media organizations and their newspeople obviously benefit greatly from the subtle sensationalism of creeping disaster. As Ridley noted, the gradualism of progress is no match for a scare story on the nightly news. There is real money at stake here, but the media is driven not only by economic incentives. In fact, the dominant leftist ideology in media organizations means that they are more than happy to spread alarm as part of a crusade for state solutions to presumed risks. There are even well-meaning users of social media who jump at the chance to signal their virtue by reposting memes and reports that are couched not merely in terms of risks, but as dire future realities.

Mitigating social risks is a legitimate function of government. Unfortunately, identifying and exaggerating risks, and suppressing contradictory evidence, is in the personal interest of politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and many members of the media. Everything seems to demand government intervention. Carbon concentration, global warming and sea level changes are glaring examples of exaggerated risks. As Ridley says,

“The supreme case of unfalsifiable pessimism is climate change. It has the advantage of decades of doom until the jury returns. People who think the science suggests it will not be as bad as all that, or that humanity is likely to mitigate or adapt to it in time, get less airtime and a lot more criticism than people who go beyond the science to exaggerate the potential risks. That lukewarmers have been proved right so far cuts no ice.”

Other examples include the “beepocalypse“, genetic modification, drug use, school shootings, and certain risks to national security. Ridley offers the consequences of Brexit as well. There, I’ve listed enough sacred cows to irritate just about everyone.

In many cases, the real crises have more to do with government activism than the original issue with which they were meant to reckon. Which brings me to a discomfiting vision of my own: having allowed the administrative state to metastasize across almost every social organ and every aspect of our lives, a huge risk to our future well-being is continuing erosion of personal and economic liberties and our ability to prosper as a society. Here’s Ridley’s close:

“Activists sometimes justify the focus on the worst-case scenario as a means of raising consciousness. But while the public may be susceptible to bad news they are not stupid, and boys who cry ‘wolf!’ are eventually ignored. As the journalist John Horgan recently argued in Scientific American: ‘These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism.'”

Precaution Forbids Your Rewards

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in Regulation

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The precautionary principle (PP) is often used to justify actions that radically infringe on liberty, but it is an unreliable guide to managing risk, both for society and for individuals. Warren Meyer makes this point forcefully in a recent post entitled “A Unified Theory of Poor Risk Management“. The whole post is worth reading, but PP is the focus of second section. Meyer offers the following definition of the PP from Wikipedia:

“The precautionary principle or precautionary approach to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action.”

He goes on to explain several problems with PP, the most important of which is its one-sided emphasis on the risks of an activity while dismissing prospective benefits of any kind. Enough said! That shortcoming immediately disqualifies PP as a guide to action. Rather, it justifies  compulsion to not act, which is usually the desired outcome when PP is invoked. We are told to stop burning fossil fuels because CO2 emissions might lead to catastrophic global warming. Yet burning fossil fuels brings enormous benefits to humanity, including real environmental benefits. We are told to stop the cultivation of GMOs because of perceived risks, yet the potential benefits of GMOs are routinely ignored, such as higher yields, improved nutrition, drought resistance and reduced environmental damage. Meyer asks whether there is an irony in ignoring these potential gains, as it entails an acceptance of certain risks. Forced energy shortages would bring widespread economic decline. Less-developed countries face risks of continuing poverty and malnutrition that could otherwise be mitigated.

The terrifying risks cited by PP adherents are generally not well-founded. For example, climate models based on CO2 forcings have extremely poor track records. And whether such hypothetical warming would be costly or beneficial, on balance, is open to debate. The supposed risks of GMOs are largely based on pseudoscience and ignore a vast body of evidence of their safety. As Meyer says:

“… the principle is inherently anti-progress. The proposition requires that folks who want to introduce new innovations must prove a negative, and it is very hard to prove a negative — how do I prove there are no invisible aliens in my closet who may come out and eat me someday, and how can I possibly get a scientific consensus to this fact? As a result, by merely expressing that one ‘suspects’ a risk (note there is no need listed for proof or justification of this suspicion), any advance may be stopped cold. Had we followed such a principle consistently, we would still all be subsistence farmers, vassals to our feudal lord.”

The PP has obvious appeal to statists and fits comfortably into the philosophy of the regulatory state. But it’s a reasonable conjecture that widespread application of the PP exposes the world to greater natural and economic risks than without the PP. Under laissez-faire capitalism, human action is guided by the rational balancing of benefits against costs and risks, which has brought prosperity everywhere it’s been practiced.

The Bee Population Is Stable

29 Saturday Nov 2014

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Larson-TheresABeeInTheCar

The extinction of the bees has been greatly exaggerated. I have questioned this from my own local perspective: despite a stream of ominous reports regarding colony collapse disorder (CCD), their numbers always seem robust in my neighborhood. While local is not global, fear not for the bees and the fulfillment of their important role in agriculture. The bee population in various parts of the world has been steady. There have been occasional bouts of decline (and later recovery) precipitated by various causes, and winter die-offs can magnify losses. And CCD is a real phenomenon, but it is not the end of the bees. Here is a link to Part I of a two-part series on the “bee death mystery.” Part II is here. Recently, the great bee bruhaha has been inflamed by: “…two controversial studies, both authored by the same researcher, that have become the linchpin for those who argue that bees and potentially the planet are facing a Beemageddon. It addresses:

  • Who is Chensheng Lu, the nutritionist who has become the face of the movement claiming that Big Ag is threatening bees, humans and our food supply?
  • What are neonicotinoids, the supposed time bomb at the center of the controversy?What role have journalists played in mis-reporting the bee death story.
  • Do prominent entomologists and beekeepers endorse Lu’s belief that the world faces a “bee crisis” as Lu’s research, held up by activists as seminal and groundbreaking, contends?
  • Will—or should—’neonics’ be banned as a precautionary measure?“

The findings of the nutritionist-cum-bee expert Lu are hyperbolic in light of the bee population numbers, and they receive little support from entomologists. Part II demonstrates that the evidence against the supposed culprit for CCD, neonicotinoids, is rather weak:

“… Lu’s data suggests the opposite of his stated conclusion—bees appear to do fine when exposed to field realistic doses and even increasingly higher amounts of neonics, but ultimately succumb to astronomical levels.”

The so-called “bee crisis” thus appears to be a fraud, and the campaign against a whole class of pesticides is without merit and a tremendous waste of resources. This is another misapplications of the precautionary principle by well-meaning advocates of naturalism (who happen to be enemies of agricultural productivity). Just wash your produce, especially if it’s composted organic!

Taleb’s Crock Pot: Whip Statistical Theory and Rhetoric To a Fine Agitprop

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Nassim Taleb, a well-known statistical theorist, and two coauthors (a physicist and a philosopher) have written a working paper in which they purport to show that GMO’s should be banned worldwide lest we flirt with complete ruination, quite possibly the end of humanity. The paper may come to represent sacred writ to anti-GMO activists, as it seems to imply that their position is supported by statistical theory. Ultimately, the paper merely uses statistical theory in the service of rhetoric. It relies on a series of ill-defined dichotomies that the authors use to classify genetic plant engineering into the most “ruinous” category of processes. Among other things, GE is categorized by the authors as a “top-down” technology, it creates global risks and systemic risks, it involves interconnected factors, it is irreversible, its outcomes can be characterized by a probability distribution with “fat tails,” its true risks are “unknowable,” and (worst of all?) it is “human-made,” as opposed to a natural process devoid of human intervention. Perhaps the last condition is meant only to classify processes into the so-called “precautionary approach” to policy assessment, rather than “standard risk management,” but it may reveal something significant about the predisposition of the authors toward human technological endeavors.

The statistical theory presented by the authors is fine, as far as it goes. I have admired some of Taleb’s earlier work, such as Fooled By Randomness, which sought to demonstrate the irrationality of assigning likelihood or even meaning to chance events. Taleb achieved real stardom following the publication of The Black Swan, which warned of severe “outlier” events so rare that they cannot be predicted or even assigned probabilities by humans. The true risks are “unknowable.” Applied work involving “fat-tailed” distributions of possible outcomes, which characterize a wide range of phenomena, is typically supported by prior experience or data, but that is not possible with “ruinous” black swans. Perhaps “extremely long- and fat-tailed” is more descriptive of distributions giving rise to black swans, but of course the extreme outcomes might not be observable ex post.

Taleb, et al, contend that development and cultivation of GMOs carry risks of a black swan ecocide. “Significant” risks? Wait, that involves statistical precision… and data! “Excessive” risks? That implies measurability of one sort or another, not to mention a coherent tradeoff of some kind. “Any” risk of a certain qualitative nature (as defined by the “precautionary approach,” with possible ruin on any time scale)? Of course, the authors are not biologists, agronomists, or geneticists (neither am I), but they claim to have sufficient knowledge to make this judgment:

“Ecologically, in addition to intentional cultivation, GMOs have the propensity to spread uncontrollably, and thus their risks cannot be localized. The cross-breeding of wild-type plants with genetically modified ones prevents their disentangling, leading to irreversible system-wide effects with unknown downsides.” [emphasis added]

The article contains a comparison of GMOs to nuclear energy risks, which seems intended to defuse criticism that the authors are simply Luddites. They express guarded optimism that nuclear power-generating risks are “local” in nature, and that problems associated with long-term storage of nuclear wastes are manageable. Clearly, however, those risks are just as “unknowable” as those associated with GMOs. We might add to the list of dangerous human endeavors all research and development of artificial intelligence. After all, a complete ban on AI research would prevent the coming singularity, when we’ll otherwise be lorded over by ruthless, self-serving machines! On a less sarcastic note, I do not discount the possibility of a singularity, but we have the luxury of some time to develop AI in a cautious way, just as we have time to minimize risks in the continuing development and application of GE.

Here is a subset of the many assertions made by Taleb, et al in support of their view:

  • GMOs have the propensity to spread uncontrollably.
  • Healthwise, the modification of crops “impacts” everyone.
  • GMO risks are associated with “fragility” (essentially increasing costs).
  • GMOs imply monocultures.
  • GMOs are qualitatively dissimilar to selectively-bred crop varieties.
  • Selective breeding does not remove crops from their evolutionary context.
  • GMOs remove crops from their evolutionary context.
  • The ecological implications of releasing modified organisms into the wild are not tested empirically before release.
  • The health effects of GMOs have not been tested sufficiently.
  • Incremental varieties of GMOs cause the risk of ecocide to increase.

All of these points are debatable to one extent or another. For example, the common assertion that GMOs promote monocultures reflects a common confusion over GMOs versus adequate crop rotation in mechanized farming. The authors exploit this confusion by linking monocultures and GMOs to reduced genetic diversity (apparently within single crops) and assert that this makes crops more vulnerable to blight, though it is hard to see why this is a foregone conclusion regarding the effects of introducing desirable traits.

More fundamentally, Taleb, et al give short shrift to the idea that there is a risk-reward tradeoff in the use of GMOs, that there are potential benefits and risks of GMO alternatives, and the fact that GMOs do not, in fact, suspend evolutionary processes. If a mutation embodied in a GMO also confers an evolutionary advantage, chances are the mutation will be propagated. If not, the mutation will tend to vanish. This is a safety mechanism provided by nature. Of course, anti-GMO activists seek to conjure images of mad geneticists whipping up monster “Audrey” GMOs with evolutionary advantages, but that is not the character of biotechnology.

Taleb, et al, also wish to equate GMOs with Monsanto. The fact that they are so eager to invoke the company’s name in a negative context within an ostensibly academic paper is a giveaway that the paper is agenda-driven. Monsanto and GMOs are not synonymous, and it is highly misleading to conflate the technology with a single company.

The authors attempt to upstage critics with the choice of the adjective “non-naive” to describe their use of the precautionary principle to guide their policy prescription:

“… it is essential to distinguish the PP so that it is neither used naively to justify any act of caution, nor dismissed by those who wish to court risks for themselves or others. The PP is intended to make decisions that ensure survival when statistical evidence is limited—because it has not had time to show up —by focusing on the adverse effects of ‘absence of evidence.’”

So, they excuse themselves from bringing anything empirical to bear on the issue of GMO risks because, they contend, “unknowability” is the very nature of the risk/ruin problem, despite the fact that evidence supporting GMO safety does exist, in scads!

Here are a few other sources who have commented on the article:

This post on the NeuroLogica blog questions Taleb’s understanding of biology and genetic engineering. The author, Steven Novella, also notes that Taleb, et al, do not assess the risk of alternatives:

“Growing enough food for 7 billion people has consequences, in terms of land use, fertilizer, pesticides, and displacing natural ecosystems. GMO as a technology can potentially add to our efficiency. Banning GMO means relying more heavily on other technologies that may have even more risks.”

In addition, Novella says:

“… Taleb’s arguments to still come down to hyping the risk of unforeseen consequences due to the inherent limits of scientific knowledge. I don’t agree, however, that GMOs have the potential for global ruin. This is still largely based on a naive belief that transgenes are inherently risky, when there is no scientific reason to believe that they are. …  He failed to make a compelling argument that his principle of zero risk should apply to GMO.”

The Motley Fool, generally an admirer of Taleb’s previous work, also believes that he is off-base in the case of GMOs.

David Tribe at the GMO Pundit refutes a couple of assertions made by Taleb, et al. about natural variation and the “track record” of nature as an evaluator of risk.

And at DebunkingDenialism, Emil Karlsson is particularly galled, as he should be, by the comparison the paper makes of the risks of Russian Roulette to GMOs. He writes that Taleb and his coauthors fail to understand basic biology:

“In the end, the authors have clearly demonstrated that they do not care about biology, medicine or rational risk analysis. They have negligible knowledge of molecular biology, plant breeding and genetic engineering. It does not matter how much knowledge they have of statistics. If your model is based on flawed premises, then the application and conclusion of that model is going to be flawed. Garage in, garbage out.”

Taleb, et al have adorned their paper with statistical theory, and they are certainly correct that “unknowable” risks may be ruinous. But their case against GMOs ignores the substantial body of known evidence on GMO safety. They bring absolutely no evidence to bear to the contrary. Their arguments mislead by relying on false premises and arbitrary classifications. Unfortunately, that won’t stop reverent anti-GE crusaders from heralding Taleb’s “proof” that GMOs are ruinous and must be banned.

Precautionary Genocide

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

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The claims of radical food purists, promoters of natural healing, medical skeptics and conspiracy theorists carry a high cost. For an articulate delineation of some major varieties of this sort of hogwash, take a look at “‘What’s The Harm’: The Body Count of Pseudoscience” at The Skeptical Libertarian blog:

“The answer is that the cost of misinformation is too large to ignore. It is real. It is devastating. It is counted in billions of dollars wasted on junk cures, in billions spent on treating preventable diseases. It is measured in lifetimes shortened, bodies crippled, eyes blinded, and children lost.

The costs of medical conspiracy theories and baseless fear-mongering are immense and ghastly. Millions upon millions of people are hurt and killed because [of] them every year. It is a veritable holocaust of ignorance. But it is a holocaust that is still happening, year after year, extinguishing countless of lives that could have been saved by good science, free markets, and sound policy.”

The bogus scientific claims are often simply examples of the precautionary principle gone berserk. Medical and biotechnology that has been proven safe and effective is rejected at the urging of activists whose goals are political, or snake oil salesmen whose goals are pecuniary, while innocents are put at risk. The author(s) of the post linked above cover several areas of pseudoscience worthy of condemnation. Read the whole thing, as they say.

One special topic mentioned in the post is scaremongering related to GMOs, which have demonstrated potential to enhance agricultural productivity and nutrition. That such anti-GMO nonsense can gain any traction with the public and policymakers is a tribute to effective promotion of bad science disguised as legitimate research. The Farmer’s Daughter USA blog has a couple of recent posts on GMO safety worth reading: “Just Ignore Those 2,000+ Studies Showing GMOs are Safe!” and “1 Trillion Meals Later: The GMO Safety Debate Is Over“. From the latter:

“Anti-GMO activists always refer to “scientific” studies done on animals eating genetically modified food with horrid results as proof that biotech isn’t safe. Yet, we have never encountered similar side effects or results in animal agriculture. Unlike the claims of tumors in rats, inflamed pig stomachs, or infertile sheep, animal agriculture has not encountered these problems while feeding their animals GMO feed.

Never.“

Can White Elephants Cheer the Public?

12 Sunday Oct 2014

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Has the American public’s sense of progress been diminished by the lack of “big projects” in recent memory? No moon shots or space elevators, no Hoover dams, no ubiquitous high-speed rail? Would these types of massive projects bring with them a new sense of optimism? Virginia Postrel doubts it, quite aside from whether such efforts would be successful in technical or economic terms. In her critique of business icon Peter Theil and science fiction writer Neal Stephenson on this point, Postrel says they confuse satisfaction from an improved quality of life in the mid-twentieth century with optimism about the future impact of iconic public investments in infrastructure and technology:

“People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories — not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories — that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips.”

Postrel also points out that technology has always provoked some anxiety about the future, just as it does today. In addition, Theil and Stephenson under-appreciate noteworthy projects of the not so distant past, both public and private. That’s not to say that all of those projects were well-executed (the Big Dig?) or economically successful.

Postrel’s argument suggests that the current sense of malaise has more to do with weak economic growth and its causes. She emphasizes an excessive application of the precautionary principle. The growth of the regulatory state and arbitrary, czarist rule-making is an outgrowth of this phenomenon. As I said earlier this week, “Life’s Bleak When Your Goal Is Compliance.” Poor results of most public initiatives (e.g., public education, student loans, the war on poverty) do nothing to inspire confidence, with an increasing proportion of the population dependent on public support. Meanwhile, rewards seem to flow to well-connected cronies, a result that seems assured when resources are allocated to big public projects. There is a growing sense that not much can be accomplished without privilege or luck.

Above all, let’s hope we never take to evaluating massive projects based on their potential to foster a renewed sense of public optimism.

Aside

Can the Carbon Tax

22 Thursday May 2014

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carbon tax footprint

Economists often fall victim to the naive view that government technocrats can measure the external costs or benefits of an activity accurately. Having performed the necessary calculations, the idea is that optimal taxes or subsidies can be promulgated through the political process and applied to an activity in order to correct or “internalize” these kinds of social effluents. In their focus on private market failure, many economists fail to appreciate the extent to which governments usually “fail” in these and many other efforts. At best, one might hope that such intrusions are directionally correct, but even that is fraught with risk.

A particularly good example involves the presumed social costs of carbon emissions. Carbon tax proposals are very much in vogue, but they are not without controversy. The well-meaning assertions of climate alarmists rely on rather fatuous claims about anthropomorphic warming and an overly broad and unwise application of the precautionary principle. There is a vocal minority of climate researchers who do not believe we have sufficient knowledge about climate sensitivities to make judgements about the true social costs and even some likely benefits of a warmer climate, should that be an ultimate consequence. Moreover, accurately measuring the presumed costs is out of the question. Meanwhile, carbon taxes impose costly burdens in the here and now that are difficult to justify.

This response to Irwin Selzer on carbon taxes is worth reading (with a link to Selzer’s article).

Here is a review and further links regarding the disastrous Australian carbon tax.

And here is Robert Murphy on carbon taxes, in which he discusses some prominent estimates of costs and benefits which show the sometimes enormous danger of setting non-optimal carbon taxes (granting the conceit that an optimal tax is positive).

FYI, the unfortunate Julia in the cartoon above refers to Julia Gillard, the former PM of Australia who pushed for the country’s ill-fated carbon tax.