Reason‘s Ronald Bailey (CEI’s inaugural Warren Brookes Fellow; a position you can apply for here) reviewed Michael Shermer’s excellent The Believing Brain for The Wall Street Journal. If you don’t feel like reading all 340 pages, Bailey summarizes them well:
Superstitions arise as the result of the spurious identification of patterns. Even pigeons are superstitious. In an experiment where food is delivered randomly, pigeons will note what they were doing when the pellet arrived, such as twirling to the left and then pecking a button, and perform the maneuver over and over until the next pellet arrives. A pigeon rain dance. The behavior is not much different than in the case of a baseball player who forgets to shave one morning, hits a home run a few hours later and then makes it a policy never to shave on game days.
It’s surprising how much of human behavior can be explained by what Shermer calls patternicity and agenticity. Like pigeons, we seek patterns and therefore find them. But we also have the ingrained instinct to believe that some kind of agent has to be behind those patterns: god, a politician, somebody, anybody. Every design must have a designer.
No wonder Hayekian spontaneous order polls so poorly, despite having the benefit of being true. Lessons abound.
Hmm. A Papua New Guinea tribesman is suing the The New Yorker magazine over an article penned by MacArthur “Genius” and Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond. The $10-million suit claims that Diamond falsely accuses the tribesman and another colleague of criminal acts, including murder, in a bloody revenge tale.
While PNG tribesman Daniel Wemp admitted telling stories to Diamond and others, a friend of his said that it’s common practice:
When foreigners come to our culture, we tell stories as entertainment. Daniel’s stories were not serious narrative, and Daniel had no idea he was being interviewed for publication.
My brother-in-law and his wife spent eight years in PNG in isolated villages. They often recounted how the villagers would tell them stories they insisted were true – in most cases, for good-natured entertainment to see how gullible the Americans were. John and Kim soon learned to recognize and enjoy being the butt of the jokes.
I’m reminded of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s acclaimed work “Coming of Age in Samoa,” which celebrated sexual openness among Samoan adolescents. Some scholars have dismissed those claims as untrue, arguing that the 23-year-old Mead herself may have been told “stories” by the young people she interviewed.
Jared Diamond is celebrated for his “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” but I was appalled by the tunnel-vision approach in his more recent book “Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed,” in which he claims overuse of resources led to the collapse of several societies and should serve as a warning for our current societies. For an excellent critique of Diamond’s “Collapse,” read Ron Bailey’s article, “Under the spell of Malthus.”
Diamond is also celebrated for his ornithological studies in PNG. Maybe he needs to spend more time studying humans to recognize when he’s being gulled.
It’s not often I disagree with Ron Bailey, but his article about the “Smart Grid” today glosses over the main reason why electric companies aren’t investing in it now.
It’s not because they’ll be selling less electricity and that means reduced profits. One of the main points about a smart grid means that you can charge more when there is a strain on the system caused by peaking and less when there isn’t. So your income stream takes on a different character. Yes, people tend to use less electricity on the whole, but this is made up for by the fact that you don’t have to generate extra electricity to supply the concentrated demand, and you are getting more revenue for electricity you generated that would otherwise be wasted. Most companies would prefer this, but there’s a lot of regulation out there, aimed at keeping prices “fair,” that prevents it. Why build a grid if regulation prevents you from utilizing its main benefit?
Moreover, there are massive regulatory barriers to construction. The presence of NEPA requirements, for example, which provide a pretext for environmental organizations to bog new infrastructure projects down in court action as well as red tape. That is one reason why three former California governors just complained about environmental regulations stymieing infrastructure projects.
There are two ways for government to incentivize investment in a smart grid. One way is to pony up taxpayer cash, to cover the costs of the regulations it has imposed. The other is to suspend or get rid of those regulations – and then they won’t have to take money out of our pockets (and our children’s pockets). Liberate is the best way to stimulate.
Alex Tabarrok has more on the reasons why grid upgrades just aren’t happening. See also here (this is not an endorsement of all those policies).
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