All's Well that's Gladwell
Looking for something cool to read? Try this article by Malcolm Gladwell in this week's New Yorker. Gladwell discusses an unusual intersection of policy, politics, and mathematics--namely, social ills that follow the "power law," in which a relative handful of bad actors are responsible for the bulk of a problem. Take, for example, pollution from cars:
Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that's just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason--age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner--a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution. [Emphasis added.]
The problem, according to Gladwell, is that even if the lion's share of problem is caused by the statistical outliers, our solutions tend to treat everyone the same -- as if we're all equally responsible. The patina of fairness may be reassuring to politicians. But substantively, fairness doesn't always lead to the best outcomes.
Accounting for Endangered Species
In the Washington Post today, an ominous headline for endangered species: "The True Cost of Protection?"
Dust off your sense of outrage, fellow taxpaying Americans, because as the article informs us, protecting endangered species cost $1.4 billion in 2004. So magnificent is that figure that the writer sneeringly suggests that king salmon are so called because recovering them cost the princely sum of $160 million in '04. By the tenor of the piece we are supposed to feel that spending $5 million on gray wolves is magnanimous, while spending $11,000 on a rare species of beetle is the height of absurdity.
What's truly outrageous is the intimation that somehow the species themselves are to blame for their costly predicament. Like lazy welfare queens, these imperiled animals should pony up. Never mind that wild Columbia River king salmon are perhaps 1 percent of historical abundance because a welter of industries were given free rein to destroy them. Clearcuts, dams, voracious fisheries, nuclear plants, pesticides... the list of culprits is long and it is to them that the $160 million bill should be assessed. The cost is not of "protection" as the writer asserts, it is instead the cost of heedlessly trampling ecosystems.
It's apropos that the headline editor added a question mark because, in truth, none of the dollar figures cited in the article actually amount to the "true cost" of protection. Like a blinkered accountant tallying only expenses but not revenues, the article utterly fails to mention any of the monetary benefits of species recovery. (And I won't even mention the inestimable non-monetary ones). Study the "costs" of protection for a moment and you'll see that the figures just don't add.
