The Difference Between US and UK Economists

Angus Deaton uses the Stern report to highlight the "enormous gulf" he sees between US and UK economists on questions of public policy:

On transatlantic vices, or Stern in America, by Angus Deaton, RES Letter from America: The Stern report on climate change (henceforth Stern) has sparked enormous debate in Britain and in much of the rest of the world, but has had a much smaller impact in the US. ...

The Bush administration’s hostility to discussion of climate issues is certainly part of the story. The White House wields a formidable publicity machine that deeply affects both the choice of current topics and the tone in which they are debated. But both houses of Congress are controlled by Democrats, not Republicans, and the Democrats have not highlighted climate change as an issue over which to attack the administration. The ... comparative lack of attention to Stern in the US remains something of a mystery. Perhaps the American public, like most American economists, think that Stern is wrong.

Constructing a discount rate
There is an enormous gulf between the American and British economics professions in the way that they analyze the central questions of public economics. Climate change raises issues of modelling, of cost-benefit analysis, and of ethics, all of which are typically treated differently by economists on each side of the ocean. These differences are of long standing and in part reflect the political structures of the two countries. But I also believe that recent developments in macroeconomics have also been important.

The Journal of Economic Literature has just published two exceptionally fine reviews of Stern by William Nordhaus of Yale and Martin Weitzman of Harvard. They focus, as have many other commentators, on the central role of discounting, and particularly on the claim that is it is Stern’s low discount rates that drive his recommendations for large, prompt, and painful action. With the Stern discount rates, the avoidance of future harm, even very far in the future, is worth a substantial sacrifice of consumption now. ... Stern constructs his discount rate from first principles, assuming a rate of time preference that is close to zero; indeed, apart from the possibility of planetary extinction, it is zero. ... According to much of the American discussion, Stern’s discount rates cannot be correct because market rates of return are much higher. Or in a related version of the same argument, the Stern configuration of discount rate and time preference cannot be right because we do not observe the rates of national saving that such rates would support, a point that has been made by several others, including Kenneth Arrow, perhaps the doyen of American public economics, who says that he was long ago persuaded on this issue by Tjalling Koopmans.

What do we owe to future generations?
Both Nordhaus and Weitzman express their discomfort with Stern’s taking an explicit ethical position on what the current generation owes to those yet unborn, on the grounds that Stern has no right to impose an ethical position on others. Both Arrow and Weitzman believe that a zero rate of pure time preference, while defensible in theory, is typically only so defended by British economists and philosophers, a comment that is clearly not meant to be taken as any recognition of the superiority of British thinking. The paternalism of any such ethical judgment is certainly a concern, and it seems right to want a more democratic discussion and determination of the ethics of climate policy. But a judgment needs to be made on some basis, and Arrow, Weitzman, and Nordhaus argue that we can find at least some of the relevant evidence in markets, revealed by, as Weitzman writes, ‘the preferences for present over future utility that people seem to exhibit in their everyday savings and investment behaviour.’ ... So Stern’s choices about the ethical parameters are wrong because market rates are higher than those with which he works. An even clearer statement is made by the mostly American (and all non-British) economists (Tom Schelling, Bob Fogel, Douglass North, Vernon Smith, Nancy Stokey, Jagdish Bhagwati, Justin Lin, and Bruno Frey) who signed on to the ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ statement that climate change was not worth addressing relative to the world’s other problems. At the interest rates commonly prevailing in the bond market — and the group used a rate of 5 percent ...— climate change is not a serious problem.

If zero discounting (with perhaps a touch of paternalism) is the British vice, the refusal to consider ethical questions explicitly but to leave them to the market is surely the American vice. How do the preferences of unborn generations get expressed in the bond market? Do we really want to discriminate across people by their date of birth? And do we really think that saving rates, whether by individuals or governments, are the results of optimal intertemporal planning by individuals, even over their own lives, let alone over those of their unknown descendents who will live as far in the future as King George III and George Washington lived in the past? Are we really entirely comfortable with the essentially arbitrary functional form assumptions that allow us to link risk aversion, intertemporal preferences, and the treatment of rich people versus poor people? The difficulties of matching market behaviour to any coherent normative model have only multiplied in recent years, as indeed is recognized by Weitzman. Whatever it is that is generating market behaviour, it is not the outcome of an infinitely lived and infinitely far-sighted representative agent whose market and moral behaviours are perfectly aligned, and who we can use as some sort of infallible guide to our own decisions and policies. The optimal savings and growth models that used to be taught in development courses as tools of central planning, along with careful explanations of why their solutions cannot not be decentralized by the market —remember the transversality conditions? — are now routinely taught in macroeconomics courses as descriptively accurate accounts of the economy. According to some stories, the government does better, correcting our collective missteps, but is it really possible to seriously imagine that an administration that dismissed global warming without economic analysis is nevertheless making optimal provision for future generations? Zero pure time preference, if it is a vice, is surely a minor one. Relying on markets to teach us ethics is very much worse.

Update: Dani Rodrik comments on the article.

Comments

[reason]

Surely 5% can't be a serious real (risk free) rate of discount?

But anyway my concerns are about the relevance of taking dollar amounts as the relevant measure and not some utilitarian concept. The values of people with money are given too much weight.

[Prasad Rao]

Our financial markets are 'incomplete' in the sense that they only operate in a limited segment of the 'universe' of inter-temporal transactions. Most market transactions concern investment of private or public funds in to activities that support future private consumption by the same generation that is investing. Investments are rarely priced or executed in the market if they involve an indivisible public good to be enjoyed by a future generation not yet born. The prospect of indivisibility and the free-rider problem imply altruism and passive values for the enjoyment of (a richer) future generation and future environment become important.

(I once advocated a 'hindsight' discount rate that we would have preferred our grandfathers and fathers to have used in economic and environmental investments)

I hope I have not misunderstood the statement questioning the 'gap' between the Stern discount rate and the market discount rate. One cannot have the 'Stern' discount rates converge with market discount rates. That would either bring about explosive economic growth or total disregard for environmental impacts of the future. Personally and professionally, I reject the use of a single discount rate for the complex, multi-dimensional problem that global warming is. I prefer a barbell strategy in which interest rates for economic investment are set at the high end of the observed range (environmental pricing of loans) while intertemporal environmental investments are loaned at rock bottom rates (with rates varying by the gestation period of the investment).

The critical question to me is whether agents and institutions that owe their existence and funding to the population at large, act sagaciously and with inter-generational foresight while determining strategies, policies and investments at various political levels or do they busy themselves with seeking campaign funding once the 'honeymoon' ends. (Incidentally, do international environmental organizations answerable to a larger population have a lower discount rate than national or local organizations?)

[evagrius]

Perhaps it's the fact that the U.K, as well as substantial areas of Europe, have already suffered some extreme weather conditions previously unknown?

[bakho]

The premise that the Democrats control Congress and therefore American policy is false. It assumes that Democrats are united on the issue and ignores the enormous power of the president in executing policy funded by Congress.

There are many activities that impose external costs on an individual. Some of those activities are more important and affect some individuals more than others. With any issue, the sum of the political will of individuals suffering from external costs has to exceed the political power of the special interests that benefit from externalizing their costs in order to drive political change.

For many issues, there are competing interests. Collectively individuals may favor addressing global warming, but disagree on policy because each policy will have a different economic effect on each individual. Win-win strategies such as those that promote conservation and longer term switch to "greener fuel" and an infrastructure that supports the alternative energy are necessary.

Right now in the US, the Big Oil Big Energy interests own this administration. Congress has no power to overcome administration resistance. That will change requires a new president that is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil.

[reason]

Besides which how are resources valued? Let us assume continuous technological improvement. Then non-renewable resources used now will have an ever increasing value in the future. Is this factored in cost/benefit evaluations (or do they ignore completely the possibility that resources are non-renewable?)

[anne]

[Please check and be careful of the link to the original letter, which froze my computer.]

[anne]

"The optimal savings and growth models that used to be taught in development courses as tools of central planning, along with careful explanations of why their solutions cannot not be decentralized by the market - remember the transversality conditions? — are now routinely taught in macroeconomics courses as descriptively accurate accounts of the economy. According to some stories, the government does better, correcting our collective missteps, but is it really possible to seriously imagine that an administration that dismissed global warming without economic analysis is nevertheless making optimal provision for future generations? Zero pure time preference, if it is a vice, is surely a minor one. Relying on markets to teach us ethics is very much worse."

An exceptional essay....

[robertdfeinman]

The issue is one of enforcement mechanisms. Reagan put it succinctly: "Posterity doesn't vote".

This means that people now living must make some sacrifice to benefit others that they will never meet. The degree to which they are willing to do this has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with ethics and morality. The triumph of consumerism in the US since the 1930's has removed consideration of future shortages from the mind of the public. Contrast this with the attitudes of those of the Indians who were the original inhabitants of the US. They could see quite clearly how the choices of their ancestors had benefited them and took steps to provide for the future.

That's why they had no concept of land ownership. Changing American attitudes may be possible, but where the leadership would come from is hard to discern. What was the biggest event of this week: the Superbowl, an orgy of consumerism.

As long as our economy is based upon more it is almost impossible to change perceptions. Even a modest drop in consumerism is seen as a serious threat to the economy and pols and economists are doing everything they can to minimize the fallout, rather than using the occasion as a way to discuss phasing in an alternative social model.

I don't know if there is a difference in the UK, or only that there is a small school of economists who are willing to discuss the issues. Judging by the scene in London, hedonism is doing fine.

[2slugbaits]

Most American views of the discount rate are forward looking only; but an exlusively forward looking approach to discount rates can lead to intertemporal inconsistency if you allow for the possibility of regret.

The empirical evidence that the market discount rate is too high can be found in the fact that people do not act as though they believed in Ricardian Equivalence. The not-so-hidden assumption behind Ricardian Equivalence is that parents give significant weight to the well-being of their children and therefore increase saving today in order to pay for future debt. Since the evidence for Ricardian Equivalence is underwhelming, this suggests that people give significantly more weight to their own consumption than they do the future consumption of others. SURPRISE! This is morally problematic in the case of global warming because the benefits and costs of consuming go to different generations. And when you look at the way the market has completely screwed up the intertemporal consumption decisions within the real estate market, then pretending that the market yields rational estimates of the social discount rate is downright laughable.

[quixote]

How to put this politely?

Economists need to get a grip. Even dumber than pretending markets can comment on ethics is imagining markets know about climatology and biology.

Markets don't operate in a vacuum. They depend on the life of the planet like we all depend on air. The markets' concepts of discount rates are what scientists (and I would have thought economists too!) call a dependent variable. I'm not sure in what universe it makes sense to decide on the dependent variable and then draw conclusions about the rest of the equation.

I'm boggling especially at the concept of deciding on that variable based on people's willingness to delay gratification. Last time I checked, global warming is brought on by geophysical processes exacerbated by biological ones. People's unwillingness to delay gratification can't actually alter the laws of physics.

And people who think it does are running the country.

God help us all.

[ScentOfViolets]

Really, all you've done is squeezed morality (well, at least a part of what might be termed morality) into a one-dimensional continuum of discount rates. So it is possible to disguise purely selfish interests as 'rational' just by applying different discount rates to different enterprises. For example, it's been argued that in the absence of a minimum wage, personal wealth and income at all levels would grow faster. So that over time, the grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of the initial poplulation would be better off than their alternates where a minimum wage remained the norm.

Fine.

But then to turn around and argue that the discount rate is too low for long-term actions intended to modify the environment seems . . . perverse. The only way to reconcile the two is to pick rates, apparently not too different, which do not conflict. For example, a rate associated with environmentalism might be .0057 might be 'too low' to act on, but the rate for dropping the minimum wage might be .0059, which is 'just right'.

[billyblog]

What a thoughtful discussion. A pleasure to read.

There is no unique or easily discoverable path in the practical order from Kant's categorical imperative to the social and political world in which we live. But there is the meta requirement to so act as if we think there might be -- and keep looking.

Small aside for robertdfeinman.

It was an exciting game, and worthwhile watching.

But wait, are you a Pats fan?

[anne]

Quixote:

"Last time I checked, global warming is brought on by geophysical processes exacerbated by biological ones. People's unwillingness to delay gratification can't actually alter the laws of physics.

"And people who think it does are running the country.

"God help us all."

Brilliant summary.

[robertdfeinman]

billyblog:
About your off topic aside. I was mostly referring to the commercials, the hype about the commercials, the gluttony associated with Superbowl parties and the like.

I've been wondering about the "fan" phenomena for quite awhile. I'm sure there are some psychological studies, but to me it is a complete mystery why any one would get emotionally attached to a sports team. I've noticed that the supporters of Obama are taking on many of the aspects of fans as well, especially on sites like dailyKos. I don't understand this either. You prefer a candidate, fine, but why all the personal identification?

PS. I went to a mid-afternoon concert and then dinner while the game was on. We weren't the only people in the restaurant...

[ramster]

To crudely paraphrase John Stein:

The fact that people are stupid now means we should make stupid choices about the future. Choices that will screw over our descendants for generations to come.

When you put it that way, it seems particularly...stupid. Why do I feel like we're living in one of those Star Trek episodes where the Enterprise crew comes across some hapless planet where the local rubes went and offed themselves through some sort of short-sighted idiocy. I always hated those episodes for their tone of morally superior, paternalistic Malthusianism . Maybe they were on to something after all.

[Bruce Wilder]

The discussion of the appropriate discount rate is tied in Stern and in the bit of the "American" discussion that I have seen to some completely ungrounded assumptions about just how rich our descendants will be.

If our descendants in 200 years are 10x as rich and productive as we are, they have far greater power to deal with the problems of global warming as we do, even if the problems are more acute.

The balancing of the present with the future has to include some scenario for the future. Market rates of interest and the behaviors they induce reflect that. People borrow and save at the same time! When people are not feverishly imagining that house prices rise inexorably, they still buy a house and take out a mortgage -- borrowing and saving at the same time (aka leveraging). They do that, based, in part, on expectations that they will have a greater income in the future.

Social Security's more-or-less pay-as-you-go design is justified on the expectation that worker productivity will rise over time, and, when it does, the SS funding picture improves markedly.

Obsessively focusing on discount rates, while ignoring this business of outlining a scenario for the future course of economic growth kind of blinds us to the scary part of the analysis, the part of the analysis that really ought to be driving this.

I am going to refrain from getting on my production function soapbox, which I'm sure some here think is a typical nutty blog commenter's schtick. But, the fundamental analysis is as sound as the second law of thermodynamics: the explosive growth of human productions in the industrial revolution is owed to a combination of two things: 1.) increased use of energy, mostly fossil fuels, in production, which results in increased pollution of the environment, because pollution is a necessary co-product in any production function; 2.) improving technology and management organization, which may be abstractly regarded as a general improvement in control of production processes, that requires accumulation of sunk cost investments and reduces errors, which errors are a component of waste and pollution. (In some vague way, you can think the economic progress and growth of the industrial revolutions and economic development have "half-and-half", as reflected in a secular tendency for energy consumption per capita to rise at very roughly half the rate of output per capita.)

If you are Brad "can't find the mechanism" DeLong, you are inclined to think increasing productivity over the centuries is a magic process, and so the supposed wealth and productivity of a generation 200 years from now has nothing to do with what we do here and now. And, you wonder, if they are going to be so damn rich, how does it make sense that we should be sacrificing now, when they will have so much more power to cope then? If that's your frame for puzzling over discount rates, . . . well God help us all.

If, on the other hand, you think in terms of a realistic production model (encompassing energy consumption and pollution and sunk cost investments), everything generations hence have -- good, bad and indifferent -- is our legacy to them. The fact of generations hence is our legacy.

We need to think seriously about the scenario suggested by the combination of peak oil, climate change, overpopulation, increasing pollution and continuing economic growth. The proper discount rate should be an after-thought to getting this context right.

We cannot think that continuing economic growth is just an independent given, and global warming a tweak in the slope of that trend-line, or, perhaps, a risky tail in the distribution of outcomes.

I've noticed a number of economists discussing global warming as a case of a risk, of a bad outcome lurking in a thickening tail of the distribution of future outcomes. The imagined story might be something like: what if the West Antarctica ice shelf collapses and Florida and Bangladesh drown? How much is it worth to avoid that risk?

But, I don't think that's what is going on here. Global warming is not a case of a risk in the tail. Global warming is the main event, the central tendency. Underneath all of the modeling uncertainties about consequences, the trends in demographics and atmospheric chemistry that force the consequences are dead-certain.

We are having a lot of difficulty fore-seeing exactly what the consequences of the forcing will be. But, just because we have not been able to foresee what the consequences are, does not make the consequences less certain. The consequences are as absolutely certain as the forcing. And, there's very little uncertainty about the forcing. The economic analysis has to reflect that.

Whatever the consequences of climate change are imagined to be, we should not be imagining that they are in the tail of a distribution of future outcomes. They are the dead-center of the central tendency.

We need to start thinking in terms of a scenario, where a generation fifty years, 100 years, 200 years from now, will be poorer, and face an overwhelming challenge with less power to cope, because that's our legacy.

The world, and the world economy, in critically important ways, is on a downward slope. Economists still dazzled by, and committed to the optimism of the upward slope of the last 700 years of Western European civilization, need to open their eyes.

When economists can envision the economic future as a really scary toboggan run, then we can think about what price to pay for brakes.

[dissent]

Perhaps my (somewhat vague) impression is inaccurate. But I have absorbed, through media grazing, that the economists who rail about entitlements, lumping social security with medicare, are primarily of the conservative persuasion. Their argument is precisely that we are burdening future generations, and their solution is to slash entitlements now.

This position seems to contradict the one above on global warming.

Could it be that the true motivational issue is tax burden on the wealthy and business?

After all, slashing entitlements doesn't hurt the ability of the rich to do well. On the other hand, taking global warming seriously may impinge on that fundamental human activity. Eeek!

[lonesome_moderate]

[Please check and be careful of the link to the original letter, which froze my computer.]

Anne - if you are on an older 7.x release you may need to do a minor-version upgrade to your copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader. I had freezing problems before upgrading to 7.0.9, which has been quite stable for me. I would avoid version 8, though, and make sure not to install the extra junk which Adobe pushes onto your desktop by default.

[Barkley Rosser]

The real problem with Stern's discount rate is not the assumption of a near zero pure time discount factor, it is the ignoring of an assumed rate of growth as well as the problem of the marginal utility of income. Some time ago I heard Arrow give a lecture in which he assumed a 1% pure rate of time discount, with the other two factors amounting to another 3% together, for a suggested 4% as not unreasonable, although he said maybe 3-4%. If one pushes the pure rate to zero, that only reduces the rate that should be used according to him to 2-3%. Stern gets his strong numbers that have damages 300 years from now counting heavily in present value terms from a final rate that is barely above zero. Does he wish to assume that there will be zero growth (quite possible, of course, in the longer run)?

An alternative view that has the "problem" of time inconsistency is to use "green golden rule" discounting, which applies different discount rates over different time horizons, with higher rates, closer to market ones, for the near term, on the grounds of allocating capital investment over the near term, with the rate declining as one goes into longer time horizons to overcome the intertemporal externality problem (future generations not getting to express their interests in current financial markets). This is an idea due to Graciela Chichelnisky and some of her coauthors in the early 90s. I have been told, although I do not know it for certain, that the UK Treasury uses such a scheme in its own internal cost-benefit studies, with the rate sliding from about 3% in the short term to about 1% for the longer term, after about a century or so. This seems not unreasonable to me. The label "green golden rule" comes from the argument that such a system does not allow the present to "do unto" the future, but also does not allow the future to "do unto" the present.

Regarding the Copenhagen Consensus, did they really use 5%? That is not even a real discount rate. Looks nominal. Also, the issue was use of public funds, and much of the expenditure for climate matters will ultimately not come from public funds.

[Darren]

Bruce Wilder: "I am going to refrain from getting on my production function soapbox, which I'm sure some here think is a typical nutty blog commenter's schtick."

Blasphemer! Y = A F(k, L) is Revealed Truth. There is no natural resource use in there, therefore natural resource consumption is irrelevant according to the One True Economics.
(/sarcasm)

[Alex Tolley]

BW:

Whatever the consequences of climate change are imagined to be, we should not be imagining that they are in the tail of a distribution of future outcomes. They are the dead-center of the central tendency.

I disagree. I think your vision of the distribution is the extreme tails. But in reality, the tail events eventually become the downside distribution. Perhaps you should think more in terms of option valuations. In your scenario, the put option is well "in the money". For a look at possible GW scenarios, I recommend "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet" by Mark Lynas.

We need to start thinking in terms of a scenario, where a generation fifty years, 100 years, 200 years from now, will be poorer, and face an overwhelming challenge with less power to cope, because that's our legacy.

That is rather pessimistic. You are assuming that fossil fuels cannot be easily replaced by renewables like solar, wind and biofuels. While I don't doubt the difficulties during the transition, I also do not doubt that we can do it, especially if we alter the economic mix to reduce highly energy intensive industrial processes.

The world, and the world economy, in critically important ways, is on a downward slope. Economists still dazzled by, and committed to the optimism of the upward slope of the last 700 years of Western European civilization, need to open their eyes.

You might want to expand on what ways the world is on a downward economic slope. Certainly a lot of "free" resources are being lost which, if accounted for, would be on the creditors side of the Gaian balance sheet. However, just as environmental awareness led to the national clean ups of the 70's and 80s, I see no reason to reject the notion that this is a [partly] reversible decline.

says...

Lonesome Moderate:

"Anne - if you are on an older 7.x release you may need to do a minor-version upgrade to your copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader."

That was kind of you, and done and successful. I had been ignoring all of Acrobat's demands for a long while. My policy is never ever change anything on my computers, or even let technology support change anything, but I did anyway. I still do not like using Acrobat, though.

[lonesome_moderate]

It is well known in the software biz that companies can get more traction with broken software that requires endless upgrades than with products that do what they're supposed to. There have to be some good economics theses waiting to be written about that fact.

[robertdfeinman]

One note about foresight and whether humans are able to protect themselves from possible future harm: Katrina.

The scenario for the destruction of New Orleans was well known, the local paper had done a multi-part series on just what would be lost in a flood. The Corp of Engineers had a levee reinforcement plan on the books for over a decade. There had been a prior calamity within the 20th Century.

The cost of the needed improvements was estimated at about about $170 million. I haven't seen the cost estimates of the actual damage, but I think it's on the order of $2-3 billion. This is a bit more than a stitch in time.

Now why weren't the necessary steps taken? Choose your factors: dismissal of the degree of risk, political, ethnic or social slighting of the region, ideology about the suitability of government spending on civil engineering projects, corruption, or stupidity.

Whatever the mix, it is easy to see that people are too dumb to come out of the rain. Why should we expect otherwise when the changes that may be needed are much more expensive and widespread. If we can't even be concerned with our own country how much are we going to do about issues in China or Bangladesh?

All I see is a live for today attitude. Arguing by historical analogy that science will find a way is not convincing when we are facing the unprecedented challenge of resource shortages.

As I keep saying, attitudes could be changed if there was strong political leadership. Al Gore is not a movement, and he's not in office. Those running are still still singing the rising tide song. This is not encouraging.

[James Killus]

Zero pure time preference, if it is a vice, is surely a minor one. Relying on markets to teach us ethics is very much worse.

That really says it all. Jabbering about the discount rate is a pure distraction, given the degree to which markets respond to the traders' belief that nothing is too idiotic or dangerous so long as they can be the first out the door with the boodle.

Markets are a communications and control device, not a moral force. People who believe that money is a moral force are merely demonstrating that they have selected money as their deity of choice.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the debate would have been about how the market value of slaves implies a particular value for labor. The morality of owning slaves would have been taken as a given. After all, there was a market for them.

[Bruce Wilder]

AT: "I think your vision of the distribution is the extreme tails."

People get confused, and conflate the Classical Probability metaphor with the Bayesian, and lose all touch with reality in the process.

If I have a test for pregnancy, which is not very accurate, it would be easy to read the ambiguous result of the test as an indication of, say, 60% pregnancy, if I did not know something about pregnancy.

Our models of future outcome -- our "tests" -- are not very good, have very large Type I and Type II errors, at the same time, which is another way of saying we don't know how to choose the baseline default state of nature, from which to derive a null hypothesis.

Only psychology and our own confusion leads us to think in terms of 60% pregnancy, or assign "bad" outcomes the status of extreme events in the tails of the distribution.

Just because imaginative scientists can come up with six or eight scary scenarios, and each is accompanied with very high model uncertainty, does not mean that economists should be treating the consequences of global warming as a "risk" with low probability.

The consequences of global warming are a near-certainty, because global warming is driven by near-certain processes and forcings. Our doubts are about the exact nature of the consequences. Having large doubts about which catastrophic scenarios on the menu are most realistic does not make a catastrophic outcome less likely.

[anne]

I am reminded that John McCain has promised to actively work on climate change policy, which will mean a Presidential race in which candidates are similarly promised and can be pushed on policy definition. The promise of the Republican candidate is a fine advance that can meaningfully influence Republican attitudes from here.

[mrrunangun]

It's been 48 years since a president asked us to ask what we could do for our country instead of the inverse. Since then, our presidential votes have been bought with promises of what the candidate's goverment would do for us. The appetite of the electorate for self-sacrifice is believed by candidates to be low. The American form of government was designed so that nothing important can change much without a fairly broad agreement that such a change is desirable. No such broad agreement exists among the electorate at this time.

Skepticism of confident predictions based on data of questionable pertinence combined with arguable modeling assumptions is out of fashion, but as large sacrifices are being demanded on such bases it may well come into fashion again.

[Bruce Wilder]

AT: "That is rather pessimistic."

I am really not trying to argue optimism v. pessimism, per se.

Nor am I am interested in promoting catastrophism, a la Lynas. Hollywood screenwriting is not my purpose.

I feel this discount rate argument is abstracting away what ought to be the central analytical focus, which ought to be the scenario of economic development that incorporates global warming/resource depletion/ecological collapse/pollution/overpopulation in a model of economic productivity/development/growth, where energy and pollution and resource consumption and crowding-the-commons are parameters.

I've seen too much economic growth as a magically suspended linear trend -- an assumed can-opener. You can do linear for a decade and be reasonably accurate for some purposes. You cannot do linear for a century or two. Just asking for a comparison of the "value" of George Washington's dollar with Abraham Lincoln's dollar with John Kennedy's dollar with our (2008) dollar is comical. You cannot come up with a meaningful linear index estimate of a currency's value over the course of a century. And, these morons want to debate an interest rate? This is not a productive frontier.

[Bruce Wilder]

Over very long periods, economic growth and productivity increases means that products and services are getting cheaper, but resources are becoming more expensive. One has to take account of both implications of economic growth trends, making things inconveniently non-linear for simple-minded use of discount rates.

Say my parent's $10,000 (1970 $) house is now my $30,000 (1970 $) house. Am I three times as house-rich?

[Alex Tolley]

BW:

I feel this discount rate argument is abstracting away what ought to be the central analytical focus, which ought to be the scenario of economic development that incorporates global warming/resource depletion/ecological collapse/pollution/overpopulation in a model of economic productivity/development/growth, where energy and pollution and resource consumption and crowding-the-commons are parameters.

I agree.

However, as you have so cogently argued in other contexts, we have to deal with the real world of politics and motivations. We have already seen the US refuse to sign Kyoto (or do anything substantial at Bali) because of perceived free ridership of China and India.

What we spend, and on what projects, must be based at least partly on economic analysis, which will by default include some sort of discount rate, if only because that is how governments tend to work. E.g., we've just spent, and effectively abandoned, a pilot power station with carbon sequestration technology. Arguably that money might have been better spent on supporting other research at the DOE. But somewhere, someone justified the costs compared to the rewards of a successful implementation. (Cynically it may have been part of the cosy relations between the energy industry and DOE).

As RDF said, we just may be too dumb to come out of the rain, so we have to assume that our future will be full of missteps, but we still should take economically rational steps to we get there, without losing sight of the problems if we don't.

The fact is we do not know what GW will look like in 100 years. We can model some scenarios and put probabilities on them based on likelihood based on "business as usual". We can show what the costs of doing nothing are - as per Katrina, and also what it might cost if we can reduce GHG emissions to push the scenarios to lower probabilities. It may turn out that anything we do will have a net -ve return, but that doing a lot now might result in the least -ve return. However, we should not rule out serendipitous events. Science and technology grind on, and no one guessed that we might have solar PV panels cost competitive with coal plants ever a few years ago - it was a discontinuous change from the expected cost curve. We cannot count on them, but they will occur, and they might, in hindsight, make heroic and costly mitigation look foolish. BTW - I am not arguing about doing little or hoping for these events, just that we see the future as being an extrapolation of past without factoring in changes. When New York and London were getting to be knee-deep in horse s**t, little did the planners realize that automobiles would make that particular problem disappear.

[Bruce Wilder]

AT: ". . . because of perceived free ridership . . ."

Oh, please. Let's not distort political causation with euphemism. The U.S. refused because George W. Bush and his Administration are [expletive deleted].

[Alex Tolley]

"Oh, please. Let's not distort political causation with euphemism. "

OK, but that was a public justification by the administration. Which is part of the real-politik. This country has a fear of losing its super-power status to other nations, especially China. That status is based on economic growth. The vested energy interests argue that if the US mitigates GHG emissions, this will result in costlier energy, reducing our international competitiveness...blah, blah, blah.

Counter arguments will have to deal with that, otherwise FUD tactics will continue to work, destroying our ability to make good decisions.

[anne]

"I feel this discount rate argument is abstracting away what ought to be the central analytical focus, which ought to be the scenario of economic development that incorporates global warming/resource depletion/ecological collapse/pollution/overpopulation in a model of economic productivity/development/growth, where energy and pollution and resource consumption and crowding-the-commons are parameters."

Agreed; supposedly valueless development as American economists have often conceived is inherently self-defeating as development. A century of international development experience, so often unsuccessful before the apparent success of China, should have taught us this.

[robertdfeinman]

Alex and Bruce:
The issue seems to be how to determine the right amount to spend now on projects which may turn out to be suboptimal, inefficient or better left for the future. The coal plant is an example, as are the first generation of ethanol plants.

This is a risk/reward calculation where both the future risks and rewards can't even be estimated. So it would seem that, at least on a personal level, people chose based upon their own level of optimism/pessimism.

Complicating this is the distortion of present priorities. A poorly designed coal plant is treated as a wasteful expenditure, but several trillion spent on unnecessary wars isn't considered at all.

I tried to show this with my example of Katrina. Current concerns tend to minimize the seriousness of future risks. Add to this the condition that the beneficiaries will be the unborn and you have a hard case to make to a public which is fearful of both economic and security concerns.

I've proposed before spending over $100 billion a year (internationally) on fusion research, especially on basic phenomenological projects. If we fund 100 projects and 99 fail we still come out a winner. We only need one to work.

The number of important discoveries over time is quite small. The transistor was 60 years ago and the laser 40+. We have not had any other breakthroughs in applied physics since. Those who want to pin their hopes on technological breakthroughs should at least be consistent and fund them. We don't need a new generation of anti-missile missiles. We do need a new non-polluting energy source.

Arguing over economic projections seems a nice parlor game when what is needed is some political will.

[anne]

"If zero discounting (with perhaps a touch of paternalism) is the British vice, the refusal to consider ethical questions explicitly but to leave them to the market is surely the American vice."

I just love this paper; but notice the word "explicitly." American economists are so often unaware of making implicit value judgements in analysis.

[im1dc]

"2slugbaits says..."

"Most American views of the discount rate are forward looking only; but an exlusively forward looking approach to discount rates can lead to intertemporal inconsistency if you allow for the possibility of regret."

Wow, geeky and snarky at the same time.

Not to mention 'economically speaking' impenetrable.

Hey, 2slugsbaits, care to say that again but in English please?

BTW, I picked up Ronald Brownstein's book today as you suggested. Hoping for a good read.

[piglet]

Alex: "That is rather pessimistic. You are assuming that fossil fuels cannot be easily replaced by renewables like solar, wind and biofuels. While I don't doubt the difficulties during the transition, I also do not doubt that we can do it, especially if we alter the economic mix to reduce highly energy intensive industrial processes."

Maybe Bruce is pessimistic, but then why should his pessimism be in more need of justification than your optimism? Frankly I don't see you offering any plausible arguments that future humans will be better off than us today. There are several problems with your trust in technological solutions. One is that you ignore the fact that powerful interests are working against the technological transition you are advocating. Incidentally, those are the same people who scoff at environmentalists' warnings and insist that nothing needs be done about Global Warming. Second, your focus is overtly narrow. Living without fossil fuels isn't the only problem we are facing. There is also the prospect of significant water shortage, which has already become obvious in the Western US. Then there are problems with loss of biodiversity, loss of arable land, loss of whole ecosystems like the tropical forests. If these tendencies cannot be stopped in time, it is hard to escape the conclusion that future generations will be poorer, way poorer, than us. No rate of economic growth can make up for the loss of clean drinking water, you know. And no booming software or communications industry or whatever can substitute for the loss of agricultural output due to desertification, which is projected to aggravate due to Global Warming. For example.

The core of the issue really is that economists have learned to abstract from the fact that we are dependent on material reality, that we need water and food and air supplied by our planet, the only we have. If we destroy it, our descendants won't be able to invent a substitute however advanced their technology and however productive their economy may be.

The problem really is that we even have to have a discussion about whether it is okay or not to continue on a path of development that we know damned well is undermining the whole basis of human life on earth.

[piglet]

rdf: I'm afraid your hope in nuclear fusion is misplaced. Eeven if it could be made to work, it would NOT be a non-polluting energy source (the amount of radioactive waste is quite considerable).

The bad news is, however, that there is not the slightest indication that it might ever be made to work. Physicists have been trying hard for a long time. Optimists have been hoping for a breakthrough just round the corner for half a century now. Don't make delusion the basis of your policy. There are many other technological options worth pursuing. This is not one of them.

[Alex Tolley]

piglet:

Maybe Bruce is pessimistic, but then why should his pessimism be in more need of justification than your optimism? Frankly I don't see you offering any plausible arguments that future humans will be better off than us today. There are several problems with your trust in technological solutions. One is that you ignore the fact that powerful interests are working against the technological transition you are advocating. Incidentally, those are the same people who scoff at environmentalists' warnings and insist that nothing needs be done about Global Warming.

Economic growth can continue just on productivity gains alone, thus we don't actually need new technology to drive this. Thus I offer this as a baseline case for growth.

My optimnism may in part be where I am situated - Silicon valley. Just in the last year we have had a huge expansion of solar PV funded by VCs that would be countering the fossil fuel interests. Nanosolar - is also local - this is the company just about to start producing cheap PVs by print technology. OK, so they are not going to change the energy mix of my local power company tomorrow, but the path is clear. I really do believe that VC funded energy technologies will be disruptive. Secondly
technology has been invented and I see no reason to suspect that there will be a break in this patter. If anything, it is speeding up. So although we don't have to count on it, we should expect that we will see new technologies as an aid to growth and even a few highly disruptive technologies may emerge.

There is also the prospect of significant water shortage, which has already become obvious in the Western US. Then there are problems with loss of biodiversity, loss of arable land, loss of whole ecosystems like the tropical forests. If these tendencies cannot be stopped in time, it is hard to escape the conclusion that future generations will be poorer, way poorer, than us. No rate of economic growth can make up for the loss of clean drinking water, you know. And no booming software or communications industry or whatever can substitute for the loss of agricultural output due to desertification

Let me address each of these problems:

1. Water. GW is going to affect the west coast particularly badly. However, we use water very inefficiently - from watering lawns to lack of recycling gray water. Santa Barbara already uses sea water desalinization (expensive). While I see it as a problem especially in the central valley for farming, I do think that reducing waste and recycling could make a major difference in water availability. If however we develop very cheap energy - then we solve that problem anyway.

2. biodiversity. While the world would most definitely be a less desirable place to live, lack of biodiversity is not obviously an economy killer. We could make a growing economy on a spaceship, the moon and Mars, all places with zero biodiversity except for humans, food plants and animals and a large dollop of bacteria.

3. arable land. Loss due to salinization is seriously problematic. Loss due to wind erosion can be repaired by changing farming methods. Worst case - we grow crops hydroponically and give up bovines. I'm far more concerned that climate change and even loss of insect pollinators may make farming very difficult to achieve reliably. I don't fancy eating mostly rice.

4. ecosystems like the tropical forests. As per biodiversity. I've already watched the loss of good reefs off Hawaii and Mexico. It deeply saddens me how easily we ruin ecosystems. But arguably cities are extremely ruinous of the local ecosystem, yet their economies are huge compared to their rural predecessors.

Thus I do not think you can make the claim than declining pristine natural resources a priori will make us poorer in the future. Europeans pretty much eliminated all the non-domestic mega fauna by the C19th, and very quickly the remaining mature forest ecosystems. Nevertheless, Europe's economy continues to grow and develop.

[futurehah]

Making predictions is very difficult, particularly about the future. We do however plan to live for a certain amount of time longer, and consequently have to make financial plans over a span of years. As a consequence of not being able to spend all we have today, there is significant damping on change. This works in favor of younger individuals. I am not worried about their future. I am worried about mine.

[Bruce Wilder]

AT: "Economic growth can continue just on productivity gains alone . . ."

I understand what you are saying, and I am not unsympathetic to that point of view, but I'd like to see it developed rigorously.

People like the catastrophe so much, that I fear the real catastrophe of the next 50 years will be that there won't be a catastrophe, as least not the telegenic kind, compressed in time type, that motivates people.

[robertdfeinman]

Piglet, do you have any expertise on nuclear fusion or are you just repeating what you read in the popular press?

I do happen to have a bit of expertise on how scientific investigation works and I can tell you that breakthroughs only happen when people are conducting research. We in the US spend $10 billion a year on bottled water alone, so if we can afford frills like this I think the planet can afford to gamble on some basic research.

We have three coupled challenges facing us - the need for more electricity, the demand for liquid fuels and the need to dispose of pollutants. Fusion could fix the electricity supply problem, room temperature superconductivity could increase electrical transmission efficiency by about 40% and both together could provide the power to change solids feeds into liquid fuels.

When you tell me how the $2-3 trillion spent on militarism is working to solve these problems I'll start worrying about "wasting" money on fundamental R&D.

[Alex Tolley]

RDF is correct about the paltry spending on fusion < $1bn/yr

source: http://www.iea.org/textbase/techno/
technologies/fusion/fusion.pdf

This is very low and is focused on a few projects, such as ITER. While it is not certain that more spending would advance the science and technology more quickly, the low budget for such a breakthrough technology does imply that R&D priorities are elsewhere. The same data source shows how little spending is on renewables and how much on nuclear fission. Makes one wonder if we couldn't shift priorities.

However, piglet does make a valid point about how clean fusion is. Current approaches assume generating lots of free neutrons. Some of this flux is anticipated to leave the containers radioactive and in need of disposal. I recall back in the 1980s, Robert Bussard (of interstellar ramjet fame) proposed making cheap "disposable" fusion plants that would run, burn out and be disposed of down mine shafts.

[reason]

AT
But we already have access to a huge already existing fusion reactor. We just need to learn to use it better.

[reason]

AT
People are inclined to look at global warming as a technical problem. I think it is more likely to be a huge political problem. It will create lots of local catastrophes and flood of refugees. The world has not shown that it is good at handling such problems.

[hari]

Inspite of technicalities this is a serious and useful dialogue and AT and RDF are bringing some technical know-how to the subject of R&D. Right now EU Commission is debating the same (political) q' of what percentage to allocate to R&D. Fusion technology is on-going but breakthrough point is still missing.

On climate change and Stern, I think we shld know Whitehall and Downing Street had a hand in final draft of that (original) White Paper.

So, YES, it is political and will remain part of our global political problem, as China and India climb the ladder of industrial development.

The bottomline is R&D and scientific progress is not a
paradigm incaserated by so-called "discount" rate! The introduction of the concept is not only political but extraneous to R&D and VC type of investment into the future. Having worked on OECDs initial ethanol project (1974-1977) from renewable resources, I can vouch the assessment above by RDF and AT and even BW.

[piglet]

RDF: "Piglet, do you have any expertise on nuclear fusion"

I do have some expertise. There is of course no way to tell for certain whether a future breakthrough is in the realm of the possible. But the physical problems to overcome are so huge that expecting such a breakthrough is clutching at straws. Even if it happened, its technological implementation will take decades, on this everybody agrees. And while fusion proponents tend to paint fusion (if it only worked) as a panacea that will solve all our energy problems instantly without significant cost (ecological or social), there are reasons to be very skeptical. The same promises were made before, with regard to fission. There is no free lunch in physics. History should teach us that technological fixes always come at a price. I already mentioned the problem of radioactive waste. Another problem is that fusion reactors will probably rely on certain very rare materials (they are still trying to find materials that can withstand the unimaginable forces and strains inside a fusion reactor), which may result in new resource wars etc.

What damage would be done by investing more heavily in fusion research? This is a complex question. We all know that so much money is wasted these days that could be invested in promising research and useful infrastructure. I expect that fusion research may lead to some new scientific insights but not to a technological breakthrough. I would have no problem with that as long as the resources invested in fusion research wouldn't be taken away from other, more urgent endeavors.

My main concern is the false hope created by betting on this technology. The belief that technology will always somehow come to the rescue - an irrational fairy-tale belief - is a major obstacle in dealing with the environmental problems we have created. You ask above, rhetorically, whether some of the trillions spent on war couldn't be invested in fusion research. Sure they could, if politics weren't the way they are in this country. But that question is missing the deeper issue. We are spending trillions on war in the Middle East in order to "defend our life style", as Bush I think has explicitly put it. As a society, "we" have chosen to spend trillions on war because it allows us to imagine that we can continue our unsustainable consumption habits. And in a sense, diverting some of this money into fusion research would change exactly nothing. It would still allow us to uphold the illusion that we can go on, ignore the looming environmental desaster, ignore future generations (they will have awesome fusion reactors so what do they need biodiversity for (I'm paraphrasing Alex Tolley)). I may sound like a preacher by now but what this is all about is this: no solution is possible as long as we refuse to acknowledge the problem.

[Patricia Shannon]

If we don't try to leave future generations with a decent world, our species doesn't deserve to exist.

[robertdfeinman]

Piglet:
First, of all you are confusing engineering with basic research. What I'm proposing is increasing funding for basic research into fundamental processes. In the past few years there have been various claims for table top fusion. It appears that many of these were a bit premature (if not fraudulent), but suppose something like sono-fusion actually gets discovered.

Then all the current problems with magnetic confinement, etc. cease to be of concern. There are new fundamental physical phenomena being discovered on a regular basis, where they will lead nobody knows.

Second, your other argument makes even less sense. We should avoid doing basic research because it might give false hope to people and therefore they will be less inclined to work on things like conservation. That's like saying we should stop research on diabetes because it encourages people to get fat since there might be a "cure" sometime in the future. Not a strong argument.

Third, I keep emphasizing that fusion research needs international funding. There is more to the world of R&D than the US. If the US wants to build bombs instead of doing fundamental research that its problem, not the world's. We can be self-destructive and no one else will suffer.

I'll give you a simple hypothetical example. Suppose some Chinese researchers discover a cure for cancer. The effect on their society is that it lowers the cost of production since health care costs go down. They consider this knowledge a vital national resource and refuse to share it with the rest of the world. This is not far fetched, we refuse to share some of our sensitive technology with them. This makes them more competitive than us since we have to continue to pay for cancer treatment. Which society comes out ahead?

The US is already losing it place in the forefront of research. Much recombinant DNA work is being done in the UK and Korea. The blue laser was invented in Japan. I could cite other examples. We do have the world best fighter planes and smartest bombs, however.

[piglet]

Alex: "While the world would most definitely be a less desirable place to live, lack of biodiversity is not obviously an economy killer. We could make a growing economy on a spaceship, the moon and Mars, all places with zero biodiversity except for humans, food plants and animals and a large dollop of bacteria."

That quote could almost stand without comment to highlight our fundamental difference.

Recall that we are discussing whether it is morally acceptable to degrade the environment for the sake of economic growth. My argument is that economic growth cannot compensate future generations for resource depletion and environmental degradation. Maybe I haven't been clear enough but when I predicted that "future generations will be poorer, way poorer, than us", I didn't mean this merely in the monetary sense. In Alex Tolley's example, in what sense would you consider somebody forced to live on a space ship (because their planet is not liveable any more) "rich"? Maybe if they had lots of gold and jewellry on their space ship, that would make them "rich"? This doesn't make sense. Maybe the problem is that we allow economists to force their conceptual framework - which mainly consists in the slogan "economic growth good" - on the discussion about sustainability and Global Warming. You have to think about this for a few moments to realize how repugnant this is.

No, growth isn't good per se. No, our grandchildren won't thank us for leaving them a booming economy on a destroyed planet.

[piglet]

rdf: "suppose something like sono-fusion actually gets discovered"

I'm sorry but miracles don't happen and I personally have no time for suggestions that we base policy decisions on the hope that "something like X actually gets discovered". Remember it must be out there in the first place before it can get discovered.

And no, I have no bones with basic research in principle. I just think this is a different issue. As soon as you start saying, "let's try find a miracle solution to all our problems", you have lost me because this kind of expectation, clearly implicit in your argument, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

[Alex Tolley]

piglet:

Recall that we are discussing whether it is morally acceptable to degrade the environment for the sake of economic growth. My argument is that economic growth cannot compensate future generations for resource depletion and environmental degradation.

I wasn't aware that this was a moral discussion at all, but rather one of future conditions and how well civilizations can continue if we significantly alter the planet. My arguments were purely on economic terms, tempered only with hints that economics was not the complete picture.

piglet:

in what sense would you consider somebody forced to live on a space ship (because their planet is not liveable any more) "rich"?

Let's think this through. The planet has just crossed the threshold where the majority of people live in cities. Most of these people will never leave the city, even for short trips. Somehow they have been persuaded that city life, even living in slums, is preferable to living in a biodiverse rural setting. One can still read stories about inner city, US kids being taken on school trips to the country for the first time in their lives. So even in the rich US, people voluntarily live in artificial steel and concrete environments.

I think your plea for protecting the environment has less to do with what the population wants and more to do with your personal esthetics.

rdf: "suppose something like sono-fusion actually gets discovered"

Pity that one wasn't real, as was cold fusion. However, your main point is taken - we won't know what we will find if we don't fund research, especially really crazy-sounding, wild-assed stuff.

I also wanted to correct my earlier statements on the radioactive nature of fusion. If He3 is substituted, then the amount of neutrons produced is very much lower, primarily from side reactions. He3 is believed to be prevalent on the moon and is a target resource of lunar commercialization. Of course the whole radioactive issue goes away if the power stations can be sited off-planet and the energy beamed down to collectors. The US military is reviving the beamed solar power approach that was first suggested in the 1960s. So whilst fusion is still a ways off, it may yet prove to be a viable energy source. Not to be counted on, but worth researching and perhaps with more urgency that we give it today.

[reason]

AT
P.S. Mostly I think your comments are intelligent and thought provoking
BUT

Most of these people will never leave the city, even for short trips.

Can you back this up with data? I don't believe it! (P.S. I'm an Australian native and like most Australians grew up in a mega-city. But I don't think I ever met ANYONE who never left the city.)

[Alex Tolley]

reason: "Can you back this up with data?". Unfortunately it is only anecdotal. However as a Brit living in California I am amazed at the number of people I meet who neither own a passport nor have even left the state - and that is hard if you just drive up to Lake Tahoe for skiing or gambling as it sits on the California-Nevada border. I can also say that when I grew up in Britain, I discovered that many people had not left the city at all except for a brief week at the popular coastal towns for a vacation. Visits to what was left of the "natural countryside" didn't really register. Now think about the millions of poor who live in the real mega-cities, who have little time or money to travel even to the edge of the city and where it is dangerous if they do.

Despite all the talk about pristine wilderness, most city/suburb dwellers don't actually like to be in it for long unless they can sanitize it or make it more comfortable. Biting insects are a huge turn-off, and at my age, a clean bed and daily hot shower are "necessities". I was recently talking to a friend who had gone on an eco-tourism trip to Costa Rica to see the forests and there was no "roughing it" and plenty of travel by air-conditioned coach. While that is not incompatible with maintaining an untouched environment, it must be managed by keeping the volume low and thus remain a minority destination. Contrast that with the numbers of people who lay on beaches in the South of France where the suntan lotion can make the surface of the Mediterranean slick.

[gordon]

Reason: ”…my concerns are about the relevance of taking dollar amounts as the relevant measure and not some utilitarian concept”.

Bruce Wilder: ”I've seen too much economic growth as a magically suspended linear trend…”.

Alex Tolley: ”…most city/suburb dwellers don't actually like to be in [wilderness] for long unless they can sanitize it or make it more comfortable”.

How many economists like to go bushwalking (hiking/camping)? How many biologists/geologists/agronomists/hydrologists/climatologists/oceanographers have economists as close friends? Is ecological economics a respectable major in a “good” economics course? Why have transdisciplinary attempts to reconcile planetary ecology with economics attracted so little attention?

Not only do many people not know much about wilderness ecology or the major material cycles of the planet, many economists don’t know much about earth sciences, many earth scientists don’t know much about economics, and (so it seems) no politicians know much about anything. One could be forgiven for thinking that the whole enterprise of trying to save the planet is doomed to founder on the mutual ignorance and suspicions of different disciplines which are really separated by no more than the ingrained habits and usages of University faculties. A thin barrier, when attacked with determination (and maybe a 5-lb. maul hammer).