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What discerns past from future?

Another difference between the past and the future is the existence of records of the past, like tracks left in mica by the charged particles emitted when radioactive nuclei disintegrated long ago. Similar records of future disintegrations are conspicuous by their absence. That asymmetry between past and future is so obvious that we tend to overlook it.

Effective complexity

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.

Six impossible things before breakfast

In my discussions with people who believe six impossible things before breakfast every day, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, I have found that their main characteristic is the dissociation of belief from evidence. Many of those people, in fact, freely confess that they believe what it makes them feel good to believe. Evidence doesn’t play much of a role. They are alleviating their fear of randomness by identifying regularieties that are not there.

The weight of qualitative values

Many economists and political scientists have recommended leaving fragile values to the political process. But if that is done, all the quantitative studies, with their careful calculations of what happens to easily quantified values, have to wieghed by decision makers against qualitative arguments that are not similarly bolstered by impressive numbers. Nowadays the idea is gaining ground of actually polling people to see what kind of value they would assign to such things as a given improvement in air quality or the preservation of a park or neighborhood. In economic theory, people’s preferences are often treated as well defined, fixed, and given. That is a point of view in harmony with democratic ideals. But is the fate of the planet just a matter of untutored opinion? Doesn’t science have some insights to offer?

Perfect markets and perfect information

In a story that has long circulated among economists, a neo-classical theorist and his well-behaved little granddaughter are walking along the street in a large American city. The girl spots a twenty-dollar bill on the pavement and, being very polite, asks her grandfather if it is all right to pick it up. “No, Dear”, he replies, “if it were real someone would already have picked it up.”

One of the principal challenges to the human race...

One of the principal challenges to the human race is to reconcile universalizing factors such as science, technology, rationality, and freedom of thought with particularizing factors such as local traditions and beliefs, as well as simple differences in temperament, occupation, and geography.

What is a meme?

In fact, the English biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to signify a unit of culturally transmitted information analogous to a gene in biological information.

Economic gain vs natural loss

Discussion of budgets leads directly to the question of whether national accouting procedures include the depletion on nature’s capital. Usually they do not. If the president of a tropical country contracts with a foreign lumber company to have a large chunk of the nation’s forests cut down for a low price and a bribe, the national accounts show the price as part of the national income, and maybe even the bribe as well if it is spent at home and not sent to a Swiss bank, but the disappearance of the forest, with all its benefits and potential, does not appear as a corresponding loss.[…] Our example also makes clear that the struggle against major corruption is a key element in achieving the economic transition.

Discounting natural's capital

Another indicator of the level of concern over living on nature’s capital is the discount rate. I understand that the World Bank, in financing projects with large environmental impacts, still applies a discount rate of 10 percent per year to the future. If that is true, it means that the loss of some great natural asset thirty years in the future is discounted by a factor of 20. The natural heritage of the next generation is valued at 5 percent of its assigned value today, if indeed it is counted at all.

The discount rate, used in this way, is a measure of what is called intergenerational equity, which is crucial to the notion of sustainable quality. Discounting the future too steeply amounts to robbing the future. If the notion of discount rate is generalized somewhat, it can be used to encapsulate much of what is meant by sustainability.

Cultural and biological evolution as additional stakes in conservation

The struggle for survival of organisms in tropical forests leads to chemical arms races and other processes that generate chemical substances with potent biological effects, many of them useful to human beings, especially in medicine. Such chemicals are being sought by two different means. One method, ethnobotany, exploits the knowledge of indigenous peoples, obtained by trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years, and thus makes use of cultural evolution as well as the biological evolution that produced the chemicals in the first place. The other method is direct chemical prospecting, in which specimens of plants and animals (insects, for example) are brought from the forest to the laboratory, where new chemicals are isolated using modern merthods of extraction. Here, the results of biological evolution are exploited without the helpful intervention of indigenous cultures. Both methods aim to find at least a few chemicals that will finally be utilized, say by drug manufacturers, often in developed countries. Even when such chemicals are used in modified or synthetic form, ways must be found for a significant fraction of the profits to be returned to the people of the forest or the surrounding areas. Only then can the process of exploration and utulization give those local people an additional stake in preserving the forest.

The same is true of the many schemes for maketing other nontimber forest products, such as nuts and succulent tropical fruits.’As usual, incentives create selection pressures on the schemata for human behavior.