Today I went to a conference, and as usual was given 200 pages of printouts (some in colour) of people’s slides and papers. Say 7 US cents a page, that’s $14 per person. For less than that, you could supply each person with a USB stick with all the documents on it. That would also save me the trouble of lugging the paper home, and eventually disposing of it a couple of years later when it’s out of date. Or just put it on a website. For those people who want to make notes or whatever at the conference, couldn’t the files be magically beamed to their laptop via wireless?

I don’t really care about the trees (they were planted to make paper in the first place), but these paper handouts don’t seem to be the most cost-effective way to disseminate conference materials. Reallocate the scarce resources!

According to this news report, 60% of the world’s reserves of indium, 22% of silver and 16% of gold are sitting in Japan’s “urban mines”, aka landfills. Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science reckons that Japan could become a leading source of natural resources, despite having had almost no natural resources in the first place, if and when it becomes economic to mine the rubbish dumps.

Paul Krugman has an interesting graph on his blog of carbon dioxide emissions for the US, China and Europe from 1980 to 2005. The data are from the US Energy Information Administration (xls data file). Here’s a reproduction of Krugman’s graph, with the rest of the world added in:

Obviously there’s been a big increase in emissions by China in the past few years. The other thing that stood out to me from my version of the graph was how big the ‘everybody else’ category is — in 2005 it’s about 43% of total emissions. Of the everybody else category, the top five by 2005 emissions are Russia, Japan, India, Canada and South Korea:

Here’s another version of the first graph with emissions in 1980 indexed to 100 for all countries. This makes China look scarier:

Just for fun, I calculated each country’s emissions in 2005 relative to 1980. Who’s been the baddest in terms of increased total emissions over this time? You’ll never guess … it’s Greenland. They’re really gonna have to rename their country. Greenland’s emissions increased by a factor of about 120 according to this dataset, from about 0.0049 million metric tons in 1980 to about 0.59 million metric tons in 2005.

Ok, I admit that some of the data for small countries back in 1980 might be unreliable … actually Greenland has ‘NA’ values for 1985 - 1991 and then there’s a massive jump in 1995, but I really had to laugh, I mean Greenland. To be fair, let’s take the 10 years from 1995 to 2005 instead. Over this period, the number one increase in emissions is by Equatorial Guinea, which increased its emissions by 4.6 times. The biggest decrease was Guam, with a 40% reduction.

Some of the comments on Krugman’s blog insisted that the graphs should be done on a per-capita basis. I don’t really know why, since it’s total emissions that matter for the climate. Anyway, here’s total emissions per capita based on some other data on the EIS website (xls data source). It’s hard to do an ‘everybody else’ category for this one so I put the total world average instead:

Those damn Americans and their SUVs. Again we can make China look scary by indexing 1980 to 100:

Not being an environmental economist, I don’t have a lot more to add to these, but it was an interesting exercise just to make the graphs.

I do not like to write about macroeconomics and related issues, because they’re not my areas of expertise, and I honestly know very little about them. However, let me indulge just once. Recently I’ve been reading Memories of Silk and Straw by Dr. Junichi Saga (the English translation). Dr. Saga was a medical doctor in rural Japan, and the book is based on his interviews with his elderly patients about their lives around 1900 - 1925. We do not often think of Japan as a poor country, but 100 years ago it was. The book is very well written and describes in detail the poverty in which many rural Japanese lived at that time.

As a person who’s spent his entire working life in front of a computer earning an above-average income, it’s hard to comprehend the lives that these people lived. Imagine working all day doing physical labour, six or seven days a week, in all seasons, just to earn enough money to feed your family rice and maybe a few vegetables. Not owning any property, and no insurance to cover you against sickness or injury. Imagine living with the stress of knowing that injuring yourself at work could mean starvation for your family. Of course, it wasn’t all misery; people have an amazing way of finding happiness even in the worst of situations. Still, I have no data to back this up, but I’m guessing that the poorest person in Japan today has a quality of life that’s better in every measure than the average rural peasant of 100 years ago.

Now, I’m speculating again, but I guess that the life of a Japanese peasant a century ago is not too different from that of many Chinese, Indians and Africans today. Reading these stories made me really appreciate what a tremendous difference economic growth can make to people’s lives. If I were to start my training as an economist over again, I’d think seriously about studying growth and development. I think the potential for economics to improve people’s lives by helping to raise productivity and living standards is equal to or greater than the potential of medicine or any other field to do the same.

Since I’m speculating a lot here, let me do a little bit more. I’m not an environmental economist either, but it seems that the growth paths that Japan and the other first-world countries have taken over the past 100 years are not sustainable from an environmental point of view. However, to deny economic growth to those currently living in poverty seems, to me, to be immoral and unconscionable. The challenge, therefore, is to figure out how to achieve sustainable growth. And now I started to sound like a politician, so I’d better stop.

Memories of Silk and Straw is a very interesting book for many reasons. On growth and development issues, I enjoy Dani Rodrik’s blog. On environmental issues, the Environmental Economics blog is awesome.

So the New Zealand (where I’m from) government is thinking about banning big-screen TVs, because they use ‘too much’ electricity. Hmm, in that case maybe they should close down all factories and especially the aluminium smelter, because they use a lot of electricity too. Yes, a big-screen TV uses a lot of electricity, because it is big. Same for lots of other things, and I fail to see why banning big-screen TVs is a sensible thing to do. People buy big TVs for the same reason that they buy anything else — it makes them happy (gives them ‘utility’ in economics terms). Ban something, and you reduce people’s happiness.

You’d only want to do that if consumption of the banned thing was making other people unhappy. That is, if consumption of it causes negative spillover or ‘externality’ effects that harm others. Obviously, buying a TV doesn’t harm anyone, and the NZ government isn’t saying that. But they are saying that consuming the electricity that the TV uses harms others. This is probably true, since although most electricity generation in New Zealand is from ‘renewable’ sources, there are some coal and gas power plants, which create greenhouse gasses.

However, the best way to solve this problem is not to ban big-screen TVs, but to attack the problem directly by recognising that the price of electricity is too low. Increase the price to account for the negative externalities, and the problem is solved without imposing any arbitrary restrictions on people’s consumption behaviour. People who really really enjoy watching big screen TVs can continue to do so, as long as they’re willing to pay a price for electricity that represents the full cost of their actions.

Yes, more expensive electricity might hurt poorer people, who can’t afford big-screen TVs anyway. But again, the best way to solve a poverty problem is not to set the price of electricity artificially low and then ban consumption of certain goods by people who can afford them. This is a very inefficient way of dealing with poverty. Instead, a correct electricity price direct transfers of money to the poor people to supplement their income will work more efficiently. In other words, the country as a whole will be able to make better use of its scarce resources under that policy than a policy of an artificially low electricity price plus a ban on big-screen TVs.

Environmental economist Tim Haab blogs on the same topic and calls for a ban on bans. I wholeheartedly agree.