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I moved this blog to Wordpress: http://growfins.blog. I had been pondering the move for a while, but the immediate reason was that Blogger has no decent iPad apps anymore since the great Blogsy app was removed.

See you at http://growfins.blog!

Secrets of a fiddle

Perhaps the old fiddle can teach the new mandolin a few tricks

No musical instrument evokes a sense of mystery like a fiddle does. (The difference between a fiddle and a violin? A violin is usually in tune.) For a guitar you can go to the nearest instrument shop to buy a Taylor or a Martin. For a bagpipe or a hurdy-gurdy you order one from a maker after shopping around at the Le Son Continu Festival. I recently bought a beautiful A-type mandolin from a maker in Breda, The Netherlands after trying it out at Gooikoorts. And all those instruments have proper brand labels on them that are protected by international law. You hardly find the kind of counterfeiting you see in the clothing industry.

Don't believe the label

I have no idea, however, where my fiddle comes from, who made it, who played on it, or how old it is. I bought it from a fiddler in the Irish music scene in The Netherlands who had bought it on a flee market - or so he said - but I have no idea where that was or from whom he bought it. There is a small label inside saying "Anno 17 [blank] Carlo Bergonzi fece in Cremona". Carlo Bergonzi was a world famous violin maker, famous for being the finest apprentice of the great Stradivarius. He is also famous for the numerous fake labels in violins with his name on them. So I'm not exactly inclined to take the label very seriously. Millions of violins were made in the region now known as Germany and the Czech Republic with such labels, apparently because they were modelled after Bergonzi's design. So I guess my fiddle is one of those.

Wait - that wasn't me

So how old is this fiddle then? I am no expert in this, and I know you should never trust the internet (at least that's what I tell my students), but a little browsing here and there brings me to a range between 1870 and 1940. That is a long time. Still, it's an intriguing idea that this fiddle of mine is probably at least 76 years old - older than both my parents. Who played it since? What did they play on it? Surely it was not all high-brow classical music, considering that it is not exactly a high-brow instrument. For folk music it's perfect: it is fairly loud, especially with the steel strings I usually put on it. But recently I changed strings (I am looking for a somewhat warmer tone), and while doing so I noticed the wear marks on the fingerboard under the D string (see picture). Note how they go all the way up to the body of the fiddle. This is where you get when you play third position or higher. I never play third position, especially not on the D string, so I'm sure it wasn't me! All music I play (Irish, Dutch, and French traditional music) is in first position. And I'm so bad at it I can't even play vibrato, let alone higher positions! Playing in the second or third position is more common in gypsy music though, as well as in some east European traditions. So perhaps a gypsy fiddler earned his daily bread with it, or it was a classical violin player after all.

MSEAS Brest: My impressions

Yes, I brought the fiddle, and
no, I did not play it.

Tonight is my last night in Brest after an intensive and massively enjoyable conference on Understanding marine socio-ecological systems: including the human dimension in Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (MSEAS). It's been one of those events where you soak up loads and loads of impressions, which take time to digest, which I just did today in the magnificent Océanopolis - I figured that would be an apt place to reflect on the human dimensions of marine management. So here are my thoughts.

MSEAS did much, much more than the average economics conference to stimulate debate and to provoke creative ideas. I much enjoyed the open and creative atmosphere that brought together people from fields as diverse as biology, economics, and anthropology. As far as I have seen in all discussions people were very open and respectful to each other's views. Which is different from what I have seen in some of the more disciplinary or conservation-oriented conferences. Oh, and getting a cartoonist capture the sessions was an excellent move. He was not just funny, he actually contributed to the debate and gave us fresh new insights. More input from artists next time please!

Beth Fulton on people's trust in models

Boy, do I envy this generation of young researchers working in this field. The Young Researchers Workshops gave them the chance to pose questions to more experienced researchers in the field on all kinds of issues. (I felt to old to ask a question and too young to answer one.) I wish EAERE had this when I did my PhD!

From the presentations and keynote lectures I got the overall impression that there is a particular need for social indicators (other than economic ones, and employment), analyses of governance and institutions, and further integration of the whole range of issues in analyses and assessments. The topics were clearly skewed towards fisheries, which is a shame given the growing importance of other sectors, but also understandable given that this was an initiative by people within the ICES network. I was somewhat surprised to notice that there was not a single cost-benefit analysis, especially considering that the OECD's Ocean Economy report explicitly calls for more cost-benefit analyses of ocean management.

Shame she wasn't there second
time I visited the Océanopolis

I was particularly enthusiastic about some of the qualitative research that shone a new light on economic analyses. Edwin van Helmond presented an analysis of Dutch fisher behaviour where interviews with fishers helped resolve a number of puzzles in the data that statistical analysis could never have solved. Matthias Kokorsch presented the results of a series of interviews he did with Icelandic fishers on the effects of the tradable quota system in that country.

Slow sessions are just not my thing. I went to the Sunday session in the Tara Inn: there were loads of people, the atmosphere was great, but the music just did not appeal to me. It's not the pace: there's nothing wrong with playing a bit slower if you can't keep up with the standard speed. In fact it's better than playing above your level! But the playing was sloppy. Luckily I did get the chance to see some of the local traditions at the very last evening:

Dutch biologists complain about publishing culture in academia

An interesting article on the current academic climate in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad: biologists complain about the pressure in the current academic climate not to try to replicate (let alone refute) other scientists' results, but to exaggerate the results of your own research.

"In my field there are articles in Nature, Cell or Science, of which all experienced people know: this can't be right," says Hans Clevers, director of the Hubrecht Instituut in Utrecht and former president of the Dutch Academy of Science, "but rarely does somebody write that explicitly in an article. So every now and again I am approached at a conference by a PhD researcher from a remote university who has been trying for years to replicate that publication. It is very inefficient." [...] Ecologist Raymond Klaassen of Groningen University blames the "short-winded academic climate, that focuses on scoring." "If you find a deviating pattern in one year, then the current practice is to publish that with a lot of ballyhoo in as high-ranking a journal as you can."

The Dutch word used in the original article (which I translated here as "short-winded") is "hijgerig": from hijgen, Dutch for "to pant". It evokes an image of heavy competition and short-termism. It reminds me of the atmosphere at a high-ranking Dutch university that has made quite a name in behavioural economics: scoring was the norm, in the best economics journals, but I saw little of a long-term research agenda. Nevertheless, I don't believe it got as bad there as the biologists describe in this article (knock on wood). I do see it in fisheries science: 2048, anyone?

Should we care about fisheries employment?

I'm in Malta now at a conference on economic advice to fisheries management, and one of the recurring themes is the loss of jobs when the same amount is caught by ever fewer, but bigger vessels. It is one of the major arguments against ITQs: when you make quota freely tradeable they end up in the hands of the firms that are willing to pay more for catch quota than other firms. That is because these firms expect to catch the same amount at lower prices, for example because they have economies of scale. So it is not surprising that these firms are usually bigger, and therefore ITQs tend to concentrate in the hands of a few large-scale firms and vessels, at the expense of small-scale ones. Should we care? Rögnvaldur Hannesson triggered a fair amount of debate stating that the best that governments can do is to set the Total Allowable Catch and let the industry figure out how to catch it, by whom, with what gear, and when. This was not exactly unexpected: Hannesson has written a book called "The Privatization of the Ocean" and I have heard him make similar arguments at other conferences. But I must say I'm undecided.

Hands off!
The main argument in favour of the hands-off approach is efficiency: we catch the same amount at lower costs. Moreover, no economy is set in stone: change happens (Chris Costello made a similar statement), and one of the drivers of that change is that some firms lose out to firms that do stuff better. The Netherlands had a thriving textile industry in towns like Tilburg and Enschede, but all of this has disappeared as most of the industry moved to low-wage countries in Asia. The same happened to our coal industry in the province of Limburg as coal could not compete to other energy sources. We have not protected those industries (we probably could not have done so anyway), but of course we do offer a social safety net to the people who lost their jobs. Farms are another example: they become bigger and bigger all the time, with only zoning and environmental regulations to stop them. Why should fisheries be any different? Moreover, arguments of employment are misleading. "Jobs are costs," economists like to say: employing many people in a fishery, when those same people could have been productive in other sectors like plumbing, farming, or baking bread, is a waste of human resources.

Hands on!
The argument against the hands-off approach is that many local economies depend on fishing for employment and income. Jobs do have opportunity costs, but when the alternative is that former fishers sit idle on the shore, collecting welfare payments and getting quite frustrated with writing yet another pointless application letter, you can wonder whether the cost savings justify that sort of misery. Jobs are more than a way of earning an income: people derive their self-worth from them, they are people's way to meet other people, to be not only economically, but also socially active. Closing the coal mines has been disastrous for mining towns in Limburg, and even more so in England (most of the celebrations of Margaret Thatcher's demise were in former mining towns). As farms become bigger and fewer, villages are losing inhabitants, as well as shops, in an ever more miserable downward spiral. This process can be stopped or slowed by regulating ITQ trade, for example to make sure that quota remain in a particular region, or that some of them are owned by local small-scale fishers.

But then again, where does it stop? Should governments decide what a fisheries sector should look like? But if we do so for fishers, why not for farmers? Aquaculture? Shops? Shoemakers? Should we have protected telegraph operators from the pernicious impact of telephone?

What Back To The Future Day says about scenario development

As many, many websites show, Back To The Future II got a few things right - and many things wrong. What I find most intriguing is not so much the stuff the movie projected into 2015 but failed to materialize (hoverboards, flying cars), as what the movie did not see coming (notably, the replacement of fax machines by the Internet). But it's easy to ridicule such projections with what we know now - and let's not forget it was an entertainment movie, not an academic study in futurology.

What's more, if only Elsevier had waited one day, our VECTORS scenario paper would have been made available online exactly on the day Marty McFly arrives in the future! Actually, Back To The Future II is a perfect illustration of the merits and limits of scenario studies. When we developed the VECTORS scenarios I heard many responses like "it's science fiction", "we don't know what the future will be like", and so on. And it's true: we don't know what the future will be like, which is why you want to develop several scenarios in order to explore the bandwidth of possible outcomes. The variation in scenarios is more important than any (misguided) notion of accuracy or likelihood. In fact, it is better to ditch likelihood altogether and settle for 'plausibility'. As we describe in the paper, this turned out to be a difficult thing for academics as you need to get out of your ivory comfort zone and speculate.

The reason I find the fax machines in the movie intriguing is that it shows how we tend to extrapolate current trends into the future: fax machines were becoming ubiquitous around 1980, just when the movie was made. So we can't blame the movie makers for extrapolating that trend into a future where just about every street corner would have a fax machine. But then, what else can we do? Of course there are dangers to extrapolation, especially if you have good reasons to assume that a given trend will not hold outside your range of observations. Nevertheless, no matter how plausible (and probable) your extrapolation, the probability that it comes true exactly as you estimated is precisely zero. Again: it is the variation around that extrapolation that is much more interesting than the extrapolation itself.

Meet my new band

I've joined a new band: we're called Tobermore, we're mostly Dutch (our uillean piper is half Irish, half Flemish, and makes great chocolates), and we play Irish traditional music with the occasional Americana song.

Although I joined them only a few months ago, this actually started somewhere in 2009-2010 when I stood in for the guitarist of another group, Harmony Glen. I got along quite well with their then box player, Vincent, and Vincent and I formed a duo playing Dutch music, Hete Bliksem (yes I know the link is broken - the website is still under construction - as is the band). After a couple of years, Vincent left Harmony Glen, and joined Tobermore; when they asked me to join them as fiddler I did not need long to consider their invitation. They're great musicians and, most importantly, great company.

My interest in folk music started with, as for so many people, The Pogues. There was a time when I would go to Ireland every year, first with my guitar, then with my bódhran, then with my mandolin. Visiting the Saint Chartier Festival in 2000 changed many things in my life, not least of all my musical focus: I bought a fiddle and immersed myself in bal folk music. I still play bal folk, mostly with old Dutch tunes, but I'm also happy to be back in Irish music again.