Yes, People Are Bad. They Should Become Less Bad.

So apparently there's some group trying to argue that the rise of humanity is somehow good for the rest of the planet. Or at least they're saying stuff like that (under the hashtag #GoodAnthropocene, apparently) in the context of a political document seemingly arguing in favor of increased reliance on natural gas and nuclear power (and maybe also solar), and also some stuff about using urbanization and various other supposedly modern/postmodern trends to keep human civilization thriving while reducing the "footprint" of said civilization on the environment. The headline of the Slate article in the link above describes the group as being against "people are bad" environmentalism; certainly their hashtag supports that description. But, like, if they think they're arguing that people haven't been bad, they don't really seem to be. According to the Slate article, they trumpet, basically, the awesomeness of human civilization in itself (for humans that is): "[l]ife expectancy is on the rise, infectious disease risk has plummeted, natural disasters kill fewer people, and abject poverty is on the decline." But they also acknowledge that "those gains have not come without sacrifice: We’re losing species at an incredible rate, and climate change could add ever more stress on human and natural systems." Which sounds like it adds up to, human civilization has been pretty sweet for the humans and pretty terrible for everyone else. Which is about my view, and also sounds exactly like the "people are bad" view. I mean I guess you could distinguish between people who think it was worth it and people who think it wasn't, but that's kind of a boring issue, being just about how we characterize the past rather than what we do going forward.

And on that front, isn't the answer obvious? We're not going to tear down human civilization. Maybe that's regrettable, maybe it's not, but there's nothing to be done about it. So all we can do is our level best to mitigate the damage that human civilization inflicts upon the rest of the world. Or, to put it another way, people should become less bad, as much less bad as they can manage. Maybe as these people seem to suggest, we'll be able to make human civilization genuinely harmonious with nature, or maybe we'll only be able to make it very slightly less bad. Maybe, that is to say, people are incurably bad, or maybe they're not. But surely we must try, whether or not we will eventually fail, and whether or not at the outset of the attempt we think we will fail. What's the alternative? Throw up our hands in despair? Abandon caring about the non-human part of the world, and the horrors inflicted upon it by human civilization? Abandon human civilization, which, as noted above, ain't gonna happen? There is no alternative. If we're doomed to be bad for the world, we must at the very least struggle against that doom to the utmost.

Oh, and if we're gonna try to make human civilization more harmoniously compatible with nature and our fellow species, maaybe we should stop torturing and slaughtering billions upon billions of animals per year just because we think their flesh tastes nice? Just a thought.

Don't Take Anything From Republicans

So, the Republicans just spent a couple of weeks frenetically devoted to their strategy of forcing Obama and the Democrats to give them everything they've ever wanted through hostage-taking. It didn't go so well. They were never actually prepared to kill their hostage, Obama knew it, and when they could no longer maintain their willingness to do the deed without actually pulling the trigger, they caved. Completely and utterly. They got nothing. Well, they got something, extra "income verification" for the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out this just says that HHS needs to issue a couple of reports assuring people that there isn't much fraud going on. So, nothing. Republicans lose. It was a lot of fun, and it crushed the Republicans in the polls, though not far enough that they can't recover. In any event, we're back to more or less normal politics at this point, which means budget negotiations between the House Republicans and Obama.

And the Republican stance on how these negotiations should go is the same as it's ever been: Obama should just give them stuff in exchange for nothing. Not in exchange for not blowing up the economy, or for not shutting down the government; no, for now they've given up those bits of "leverage." Just for nothing. If Democrats want to get rid of the sequester, at least partially, they should replace it with... more spending cuts! Like, more in the sense of more new cuts than the sequester cuts being replaced. This, well, isn't going to work. They couldn't get concessions for nothing from Obama back when they had hostages. If this is their offer, it's really not hard for Obama to just say, um, no. And on we go, with our government so divided that nothing ever gets done except when there's a manufactured crisis. Or, as Matt Yglesias suggests, the Republicans could give the Democrats something, something other than tax increases on rich people, to sweeten the deal. Nah, that won't happen.

But is there anything that Democrats should take, if Republicans were to offer it? Specifically if Republicans offered it as part of a deal the other side of which was entitlement cuts. And entitlement cuts, mind you, suck. They're long-term, and they're deeply regressive distributionally. The basic Republican long-term agenda is that they want to keep rich people from having to pay taxes, and in order to do that they need to slash safety net spending. But that's wildly unpopular (oh, did I mention it's wildly unpopular?), and it would play right into people's entirely-accurate stereotypes of Republicans as heartless pro-rich-people bastards, so they can't do it unless they get Democratic support to cover themselves with. That's their core political goal. We should be extremely hesitant to give it to them. The thing on the other side would have to be extremely important, and it would have to be something we won't really be able to get any other way. Is there anything like that?

My Problem with Land Taxes

From time to time, as for instance earlier today, Matt Yglesias likes to write about the many supposed virtues of land taxes. The idea is that property taxes as implemented in this country are proportional to the value of the developed human-built structures on the land, not solely to the intrinsic value of the land itself. And that has an unfortunate incentive effect: it's a tax on development. Now, lots of taxes have unfortunate incentive effects. Income taxes discourage earning income, in theory. Capital gains taxes discourage investment. Estate taxes discourage leaving enormous estates to your heirs. The idea is that when you tax some asset or activity, you set up an incentive for there to be less of that asset or activity, which is generally a bad thing. Discouraging people from doing things they would otherwise do of their own accord is bad, all else being equal. Of course, all else isn't equal, and we need money, and by now we need a lot of money, to fund the government. So we've got to tax something, which means we've got to discourage something. Except there's one thing we can't create any more of, and that's land. Not the stuff above the land, not the stuff we put on land, but the land itself. The surface area of planet earth. We have a certain amount of it, and we're never going to get any more or any less. So taxing land has no distortionary incentive effect. It can't induce people in the aggregate to have less land, because, well, land sales are zero-sum.

But I have a problem, and it relates to a point about land taxes that Yglesias mentions in his post. Land taxes encourage, pretty strongly, intense development of land. If you're going to be paying the same penalty for owning a certain square foot of the earth no matter what you do with it, you need to make sure that you get as much money out of it as possible. And that means, as a general rule, destroying whatever of the natural world existed on the land. Nature is incredibly valuable; in my AP Environmental Sciences class I recall seeing a figure that the ecosystem produces as much economic value each year as humans, i.e. as world GDP, and presumably that's the high point of the human/natural GDP ratio. But it isn't very profitable. The vast majority of the benefits of the natural world, there's simply no way for the guy who owns a given plot of land to capture. Processing carbon dioxide into oxygen, for instance. Now, plenty of natural benefits can be harvested by land owners, but plenty can't, giving land owners faced with land taxes a particularly strong incentive to destroy the environment of the land they own. Which is, of course, a recipe for global disaster.

Now in principle, this is something that a tax policy could well account for while also getting the efficiency gains of land taxes. Economics isn't hostile to the idea that environmental concerns have both merit and economic value, at least not in principle. Land owners always have an incentive to convert the global-scale environmental benefits being created by their land into private benefits they can more easily monetize, even if the conversion is a huge net loss for society as a whole. Land taxes make this incentive a problem of actual rather than simply opportunity costs, and given human psychology that means it throws this unfortunate incentive into sharper relief. But, viewed properly, this kind of over-development is not efficient for society as a whole, and economics has a well-developed solution for what to do in these cases: tax them! Specifically, tax any negative "externalities" of individual private action. So, in this case, you'd want a tax on environmental degradation as such. Say, a fine whenever you cut down a tree, or for every square foot of earth you cover in pavement rather than dirt and plants. In principle a comprehensive tax on environmental degradation would eliminate the private motive to gain immediate personal profit at a global long-term expense by destroying any vestiges of nature within private possession. And if we had that kind of tax in place, land taxes wouldn't really be problematic. Developing your land to eke every last drop of money out of it and damn the environmental consequences would stop being a viable strategy to deal with the costs of paying the land tax.

Now, one wrinkle in this analysis is that the places on planet earth that are subject to the most intense development are immensely important for the broad task of allowing seven-plus billion humans to life on this earth without doing too much damage to it. I speak, of course, of cities, which are on the one hand massive acts of environmental degradation and on the other hand are well-known to have much, much lower per capita environmental costs than suburban living. So the appropriate regulatory tax regime might be different in a big city, and it might make more sense to encourage the "go for the biggest possible development" strategy. I'm not sold that there aren't any other concerns not captured by the short-term profit motive that deserve some consideration in urban life, but I could well believe that there's no real point trying to preserve the local environment, not when development would so efficiently preserve the environment of other localities. But in general, my basic point stands: I get the economic logic behind a land tax, but unless implemented alongside a systemic effort to internalize the problems of ecological degradation I would much fear their actual consequences.

The MPDC's Homicide Clearance Rate and What To Do About a Crime Wave

Matt Yglesias recently tweeted a link to this data from the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, showing the city's number of homicides and the clearance rate of those homicides for every year from 2002 through 2011. The really striking part, of course, is the 95.4% closure rate in 2011. That's insane! At the beginning of the period the rate was just 55%. The percent of murders that go unsolved has, in other words, been divided by nine over the last decade in D.C. How did that happen? Did the police get nine times as effective? Or twice as effective, if we look at the yes-solved percentage? Well, that's a somewhat complicated question, and it's tough to know which of the effects at play here are to the credit of the police. But it's clear what is going on here: the MPDC has a certain murder-investigating capacity. Based on these numbers it's somewhere between 110 and 140 cases per year. But the murder rate has been falling like a stone, from 262 homicides in 2002 to just 108 in 2011. The result is that the same total amount of murder-clearing represented a much lower percentage in 2002 than it did in 2011.

Or to put it another way, I had Microsoft Excel calculate trend lines for the plot of both solved and unsolved homicides against total homicides. There's a positive correlation in both cases, of course, but the comparison between the two is an interesting one. Every extra homicide, according to these data, will on average correspond to an extra 0.325 cleared homicides. And the total homicide rate explains 79% of the variance in number of cleared homicides. But every extra homicide, of course, leads to .674 uncleared homicides (after all, it must be one or the other, so the two slopes add up to 1). In this case, though, the R-squared value is 94%. That is to say, based on the data the total murder rate provides an explanation for the changes in the number of unsolved murders which is very nearly complete. We need look basically no further to find out what determines the number of murders which go unsolved in D.C. every year. Oh, and these simple linear trend lines suggest that, if no murders were committed, 63 of them would be solved anyway. That's sixty-three out of zero murders.

Why Keystone XL's Blockage is Good

Matt Yglesias points out, regarding the Republican-grandstanding-inspired decision by the Obama State Department to deny a permit to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, that simply blocking infrastructure for the existing fossil fuel-based economic structure is not a very effective way to fight global climate change. He may very well be right about this, although as he admits that doesn't mean by itself that the pipeline should've been built, just that it's not a major win for environmentalists. But even granting that there's not a huge connection between blocking Keystone and blocking global warming, I'm exceedingly happy that the pipeline will be blocked, on environmental grounds. Global climate change is, quite importantly in my opinion, not a standard environmental issue. It concerns pollution truly global in origin (i.e., it doesn't matter where the pollution comes from), global in action, global in consequence, long-term. Most environmental issues are much more localized in both time and space. Keystone, in addition to whatever relationship it may have to the global greenhouse gas thing, would involve seriously contaminating one particular aquifer in the Nebraska region. A rather important aquifer, I hear. That's enough for me, as an environmentalist, to oppose the pipeline, and to celebrate the fact that the idiot Republicans maneuvered the Obama people into blocking it.