Our Word is Our Weapon

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From the BBC:

So there you are, the boxes are unpacked and you’re settling in nicely to your new house.

The sunlight dapples through the majestic plane trees, a bird cheeps from its perch on a Victorian lamppost, a bicycle jiggles over the picturesque cobbles.

It all seems worth the stress and the mortgage. But what’s this coming into view? A cavalcade of fluorescent-jacketed workmen is marching up the street.

A chainsaw is applied to a trunk, spades flick cobbles out of the ground, and there’s a mournful screech as your lamp-posts are uprooted. The council has come to nick your street furniture.

Of course, as far as the law is concerned, this isn’t “nicking” at all. Cobbles and lamp-posts do not belong to the street. They’re items the council can take away whenever it wants.

And yet these removals are enough to provoke rage among otherwise calm and unflustered folk.

When Bristol council removed the antique lamp-posts from David Cemlyn’s street in the St Andrews area of the city, it did not realise the volcano of anger they were about to unleash. By the time it came to uproot those in the next street, he was resorting to direct action, chaining himself to a threatened post and going on hunger strike.

Put yourself in David Cemlyn’s shoes. Of course you don’t actually own the streetlights. But if you’re like many people, you do feel some sense of ownership over them. This is understandable - when you bought your house you did not make your decision only on the basis of the building and the land it stands on - you also took into the account a much larger ‘bundle’ of characteristics, including the surrounding area and the amenities, geographical features and built environment therein. When the value of that bundle (of your investment, in other words) are threatened it is natural to feel aggrieved, and if the only means to affect the outcome is to protest than you might choose to do so.

This boils down to an idea of property rights which is somewhat murky and inchoate but no less significant for all that. Neighbourhood ‘quality of life’ issues are the bread and butter of local government precisely because of the difficulty of resolving many of the conflicts that arise. These issues run the gamut from what kind of lights you have on your street to what kind of people get to live in your neighbourhood, or in other words where you get to live. Of all forms of state intervention the regulation of human activity and interaction through the regulation of land use is probably the most supported, being as far as I can see more or less universally popular among those with the voice or influence to affect it. Even separatist communities or others (such as private homeowner associations) that ostensibly reject aspects of state authority are typically fiercely protective of the right to regulate what may be done with land within the designated community boundary, often with the implicit or explicit aim of keeping out certain kinds of people. To take another example, the Conservative Party is currently in the firm grip of the belief that there is no greater threat to the comforts and joys of life in South East England than the construction of housing on back gardens and are seeking to ban the practice everywhere they can.

This is just ‘big government’ on a small scale, and it puts a big question mark over the efficiency and distributional consequences of decentralised / fragmented government, as it is typically smaller jurisdictions that are the most ‘protectionist’ because their populations are the most homogenous. And if you believe that local governments shouldn’t be allowed exclude undesirables through land use regulation, then you have to answer the question - who’s going to stop them?

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Looks like the Globalization Institute, which once upon a time styled itself “Europe’s Favourite Think-Tank blog”, is no more. I guess employing Paul Staines and Tim Worstall will do that for you. Fortunately Alex Singleton, ex of the GI, has not deprived us of his wisdom forever and blogs for the Telegraph here. Good luck to him.

Arctic Economics, courtesy of long-time economics blogger Ben Muse. It’s pretty good, too - I particularly like the post about a company called Skyhook International promoting dirigibles as the Arctic transportation mode of the future.

Dell, Jones and Olken say we can already see that higher temperatures reduce growth by more in poorer countries:

This paper uses annual variation in temperature and precipitation over the past 50 years to examine the impact of climatic changes on economic activity throughout the world. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries but have little effect in rich countries. Second, higher temperatures appear to reduce growth rates in poor countries, rather than just the level of output. Third, higher temperatures have wide-ranging effects in poor nations, reducing agricultural output, industrial output, and aggregate investment, and increasing political instability. Analysis of decade or longer climate shifts also shows substantial negative effects on growth in poor countries. Should future impacts of climate change mirror these historical effects, the negative impact on poor countries may be substantial.

And it’s going to get worse. William Cline:

Globally, the overall impact of baseline global warming by the 2080s is a reduction in agricultural productivity (output per hectare) of 16 percent without carbon fertilization, and a reduction of 3 percent should carbon fertilization benefits actually materialize—when results are weighted by output (see Table 1, bottom panel). The losses are greater when weighted by population or country.

The sharp concentration of losses is in the developing countries. Whereas the industrial countries experience outcomes ranging from 6 percent losses without carbon fertilization to 8 percent gains with it, developing country regions suffer losses of about 25 percent without carbon fertilization and 10–15 percent if carbon fertilization is included. For developing countries, the median loss would be 15–26 percent, and the output-weighted average loss, 9–21 percent. Losses could reach devastating levels in some of the poorest countries (greater than 50 percent in Senegal and Sudan)…

Moreover, it is likely that actual global losses will be worse than those portrayed here. Neither crop nor Ricardian models can account for the influence of what are likely to be increases in extreme weather, such as droughts and floods, and insect pests. Nor do the estimates take account of agricultural losses associated with rising sea levels, a major consideration in countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt.

A couple of points: First, Anyone who thinks the recent global food prices run-up was bad is invited to consider the impact of such huge losses to agricultural productivity combined with rising global demand. Second, it can’t be repeated often enough that the distributional consequences of climate change could hardly be worse, with very poor areas hit much more hard than the rich, some of which may actually gain from the effects of increased carbon fertilisation outweighing those of increased evapotranspiration. Third, maybe it’s time to buy property in Scandinavia.