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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.

Why (not) price nature?

A few remarks on today's debate on economic valuation of ecosystem services, here in Wageningen:

• Having two non-economists as the only speakers in a debate on economic valuation of ecosystem services led to the usual misconceptions of economics, some if which I will explain below.
• I have written most of what I can say about the issue in this post.
• In my three-species typology in that post, Dolf de Groot is a typical pragmatic ecologist: he literally called valuation "a necessary evil."
• The same typology might label Bram Büscher (a sociologist) a hardcore ecologist, but actually his arguments were more of a Marxist critique of economics and capitalism than of a moral nature (intrinsic value 'n all). In short his argument is that ecosystem degradation is caused by the logic of capitalism; pricing nature perpetuates that logic rather than abolishing it.
• De Groot claimed that "conventional economists ignore most externalities, like ecosystem degradation." As a conventional environmental economist, who has been working on nothing else for the past ten years than externalities and other market failures, and who meets hundreds of similar economists every year at the meetings of EAERE, AERE, IIFET, BIOECON, and so on, I found this very strange to hear, to put it mildly.
• Another statement by De Groot was that unlike pricing, valuing "is not about substitution." Economic valuation is ALWAYS about substitution. If you don't like the idea that people can be compensated for ecological degradation, don't do valuation. De Groot wants to have his cake and eat it too.
• It is a more general problem I have with the so-called 'ecological economists': a lot of their valuation work is poorly thought through, poorly executed, and done from a political agenda rather than out of scientific curiosity.
• Common mistakes by ecological economists are (1) not properly defining what they measure (like doing a stated preference survey among tourists to measure indirect use values); (2) aggregating values to such a scale that prices are bound to change (the most fundamental critique of Costanza et al.'s 1997 paper); (3) treating economic values like they would treat biophysical variables such as temperature or density (which are not context-dependent while economic value depends on what question you are asking).
• Büscher repeated the Suzuki fallacy that "externality" means "not part of the economic system"
• Büscher "did not have time" to propose an alternative to the capitalist system. Perhaps he should have a look at the historical alternatives to capitalism and their wonderful impact on the environment.
• Büscher quoted a Chinese philosopher (probably Sun Tzu) that "if you can get your enemy to speak your language you have won the battle" or something in that spirit. I don't agree. Economists study the rules of market allocation (property rights, taxation, and so on) to understand where such rules work and where they don't. This would suggest that our advice would always favour big business. But being market-friendly is not the same as being business-friendly.
• I'm in favour of pricing ecosystem services, but only in the context of concrete policy decisions, in a proper cost-benefit analysis that is part of a wider policy-making process that also takes into account other considerations besides economic value (such as intrinsic value, distribution of effects, and so on). Don't try to estimate the total value of the planet, as Costanza did.

Programming languages compared, and why I'm sticking with Python until Julia grows up

Comparisons of programming languages abound, especially with regard to running speed. This paper in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control by Boragan Aruoba of the University of Maryland and Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania is yet another one, albeit in a peer-reviewed journal and with a procedure (value function iteration) that is common in my field. Main observations:

• When it comes to speed nothing beats C++ and FORTRAN.
• Julia performs really well: only 2.37 times the running time of C++.
• Python and R are slowpokes, at about 45 (Python with the Pypy interpreter) to 491 times (R without its Compiler package) times the running time of C++.
• Matlab is somewhat inbetween the slowpokes and the frontrunners, with about 9 times the running time of C++.
• R, Matlab and Python can get a boost from just-in-time-compilers and C compilers (like Rcpp for R; or Numba or Cython for Python) that make their running time comparable to that of Julia (although Rcpp is still a bit disappointing: 5.4 times the C++ running time).

Adding my own considerations:

• I tried C++ and gave up very quickly. I bloody hate it with a passion.
• I find R not much better: even though it is a scripted language it is clumsy, illogical, and makes for horrible code. Rcpp worked fine until I found out that it cannot handle matrices with more than 2 dimensions. Speeding up your R code with bigger matrices requires the use of full-blown C++. In other words, two languages that I bloody hate.
• I value my independence, so I prefer to work on my own laptop with my own licenses. That makes Matlab, with its steep license fee, a no-go.
• I've experimented with Cython and it seems to work quite well. I love the accessibility and clear layout of Python; moreover, my university teaches Python twice a year in an undergrad course. The only real problem with Python is that it is reputedly difficult to parallellize.
• One day I'll start using Julia. It's fast, accessible, and (so they say) easy to parallellize. But not until there is a stable version and a decent IDE.

On interdisciplinarity

Check out the really cool cover of Nature's special feature on interdisciplinarity!

Of course, as an economist I especially like their inclusion of "Invisible Hand" as the sole superhero representing the social sciences in their scientific team of Avengers. But it is also symbolic for the fact that economists have, in my view, gone the furthest in integrating their discipline with the natural sciences. This holds particularly for environmental and resource economists, who by definition deal with problems of the natural environment like pollution and overfishing. The reason is pretty geeky: most economic research is quantitative, and quite a lot involves the development of mathematical models. And whaddayaknow: so do climate science, population biology, hydrology, and a host of other natural sciences. Give me your equations and I'll plug them into my CGE model.

It is actually much, much harder to truly integrate qualitative social sciences like sociology or anthropology with quantitative sciences - even with a social science like economics. Models like IMAGE and DICE describe the global climate as well as the economy; the Gordon-Schaefer fisheries model and Colin Clark's work on renewable resource use, which use basic models from population biology like logistic growth, are part of the standard canon of resource economics since decades; when Daniel Pauly criticizes the limited impact of the "social sciences" on fisheries research, he lumps together economics with biology, not sociology. Meanwhile, it has taken until 2009 that the Nobel committee finally recognized anthropologist Elinor Ostrom for her contributions to the economics of common pool resources, and economists and sociologists share little but contempt for each others' fields. The Indian economist Jagdish Bhagwati is said to have joked that good economists reincarnate as physicists; wicked economists reincarnate as sociologists. But Ostrom's Nobel also shows that things are changing, especially in the field of institutional economics. Let's have more of that in the future.

OMICS Publishing Group clogs my inbox

Just got the third invitation in a month to review a paper on marine microbiology. Looking up the publisher I found this. Little wonder my reply to them was a tad less polite than the previous two:

1. I'm a natural resource economist with no knowledge of biology.
2. This is the third such invitation. You're wasting your time and, worse, mine.
3. You're on a list of predatory publishers: http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/01/25/omics-predatory-meetings/ 

Stop wasting my time. I will now block your e-mails from my account.

Science on marine plastic debris

Science just published an excellent article on the problem of marine plastic debris. Its main conclusion is that

"275 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste was generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million MT entering the ocean."

The authors break this number down by country, and show that four Asian countries (China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam) contribute almost half the plastic waste going into the oceans. The US is 20^th in rank, contributing 0.9%; the authors also explain that the EU would be 18^th in rank if it were counted as one country, which implies that the EU also contributes about 1% to the total amount of plastic waste going into the oceans. A few more observations:

• The list is dominated by middle-income countries. The only low-income countries are Bangladesh, Burma, and North Korea. Is this the environmental Kuznets at work?
• There is a striking correlation between income and the quality of waste management. The countries with the highest percentage of mismanaged waste are low-income countries or lower-middle-income countries. Even upper-middle-income countries have rates between 50% and 80%.
• Brazil and Turkey are intriguing exceptions: despite being upper-middle-income countries their mismanagement rates are 11% and 18%, respectively. What are these countries doing differently than the rest?
• The US has a comparatively low mismanagement rate (2%), but compensates its effort by the sheer amount of plastics produced per capita: 2.58 kg, where most other countries range between 0.5 and 1.5 kg. EU figures are not given but I suspect the EU does worse on waste treatment than the US.
• A notable exception to that observation is Sri Lanka with a whopping 5.1 kg plastic waste produced per capita. What do they need all that plastic for?

Overall I can't help but thinking that the energy invested by well-meaning westerners to reduce their use of plastics is but a drop in the ocean as long as the emerging world does not clean up its act.

Associate professor

I just realised that I never announced on this blog that I presented my (new and improved) research vision to the assessment committee for a second time - and that the assessment committee agreed that I should be appointed associate professor as of 1 November 2014.

So there you go: as of 1 November 2014 I am in the position of associate professor.

(Fireworks, music, ticker tape.)

I would have liked to say that my trip to Australia inspired the main research focus I put into my research vision: to develop computational models of coastal and marine resource use, drawing on experiences from other economics subdisciplines such as macroeconomics. But honestly, it's the other way around: I went there to learn more about computational models because I believe they can be useful. But it was good to talk to my peers in the field and realise that it's actually not so bad an idea. You can find the vision document here, and the presentation here.

I still feel more or less the same about the tenure track system as I did last time: it's a good concept although its application in Wageningen University has its teething problems.

As for any advice I can give other people on the tenure track, I'm not sure whether my advice is worth anything but I can at least give you my opinion:

• Expose your ideas to your peers. We don't have a mentor system in Wageningen (we should!!), neither do we have many staff who have been through the tenure track themselves. So the next best thing is to go out, talk to other academic researchers, and try to learn from them as much as you can. Have a beer with them at a conference. Try to arrange a sabbatical at their university. Try to get them to your own university for a seminar or a PhD defence. Send them your written research vision and ask them what they think.
• Set your own goals. Yes I know you have 18 criteria to meet (I kid you not), but first and foremost you must decide which direction you want to go - and then go there within whatever limits are set by the official criteria.

For what it's worth.

Value Function Iteration in R, Python, GAMS

So I've spent a couple of evenings debugging my code, trying it in different languages to see whether it was me or the built-in functions I used (it was me), so I ended up with the same model in R, Python, and GAMS. I figured I might as well post the code on the web.

Yes, I found the problem, and no, I'm not going to tell what it was because I find it too embarrassing.

"I want a MOOC"

How many university boards are like this guy when you replace "iPad app" by "MOOC"?

Client: "I want an iPad app."
Designer: "For what purpose?"
Client: "I don't know, I just want an iPad app."
Source: Clients From Hell

Don't get me wrong here. Some MOOCs are great. I recently discovered two great online courses on Real Analysis, and I'm currently going through Tom Sargent's and John Stachurski's online course on Quantitative Economics in Python. But the question why you want a MOOC, for whom it should be made, and to what purpose, should always be asked.

Why are Dutch fish mongers so terrible?

For a country that controls a chunk of sea one and a half times its land mass, the Dutch are pathetic eaters of seafood. OK, granted - we're rightly proud of our slightly-cured herring (which is mostly caught by the Norwegians) and our kibbeling, fried chunks of cod (although many Dutch consumers think kibbeling is a fish species). But for the rest we export most of our mussels, sole, and oysters to people who know properly how to appreciate them, like the French and the Belgians. Instead, we import a tasteless excuse for a fish like tilapia.

But the fish mongers aren't helping either. Two weeks ago I was buying a tuna steak at the open market in Wageningen. (After my trip to The Philippines I had but one thing on my mind: I want to make that delicious ceviche with fresh ginger and coriander myself!) A youngish bloke for whom this must have been his way of earning his Saturday night drinks served me, and I asked him whether the tuna steak I was buying had been frozen. Silly question, I know - there is no way you can get tuna from its fishing grounds to a Wageningen market stall without freezing it somewhere along the way. "No, it's all fresh," he said. So where did it come from? That turned out to be a difficult question. "I don't know," he stumbled, looking at me as if I had just asked him about the sound of one hand clapping. "I should ask my boss." "Pacific ocean," said a colleague. OK, thanks. "Indian ocean," said another colleague who looked like she was in charge. "Is that OK with you?" Sure, I was only curious - I wasn't going to report you to Sea Shepherd or anything.

How can these people not know where their wares come from? I decided against asking the species, because I did not want to prolong their agony. I'm quite sure it was yellowfin anyway. But the limited information they had available was shocking. Even more shocking is the fact that they get away with it, because Dutch consumers just don't give a rodent's backside for quality when it comes to fish - let alone how it was caught, whether any other species had been caught in the process, and so on.

Last week I made this picture at the open market in Ede (just North of Wageningen):

This is what tong, or sole (solea solea) looks like; this is what schol, or plaice (pleuronectes platessa) looks like. You'd expect the orange spots should be a bit of a giveaway.

I guess every country gets the fish mongers it deserves.

Bumfights transactions

In 2002 a Las Vegas film maker came up with a hideous business model: pay homeless people a few dollars or a six pack of beer to conduct dangerous stunts, or to engage in fistfights with other homeless people, and film them. The movies, marketed under the insensitive brand name Bumfights, caused a storm of criticism, especially from advocacy organisations for homeless people, who argued the movies legitimized violence against homeless people, and were demeaning and dehumanizing to the people who participated.

The film makers responded that all homeless featured in the movies participated voluntarily. Surely they can make their own decisions? To which a professor responded

“Even if the homeless aren’t forced to perform, it’s inaccurate to describe people without adequate shelter, food or clothing as having choices.”

I hear the same argument in debates on international trade, Payments for Environmental Services, and other transactions between highly unequal parties: once an African lady reacted angrily to the concept of REDD+, arguing "it's not a free choice!" I believe it points towards a moral flaw in economic theory that many of my colleagues either do not see, do not want to see, or just don't care about. I call these transactions Bumfights transactions, after the movie series.

Forgive me for getting a bit theoretical here. Consider Rufus, the homeless man who featured prominently in Bumfights. Back then, Rufus had no home, no job, and he lived by what little he could earn by collecting empty cans. Let's call the situation he lived in A. Say the film maker offered Rufus $5 if he would ride a shopping cart down a flight of steps. In other words, the film maker offered Rufus a new situation B, which you could define as A + $5 + S, where S is the humiliation and risk of serious injury that goes with the stunt. If Rufus preferred B to A (A ≺ B in mathematical notation), he would participate in the movie; if A ≻ B he would not. Obviously the film maker preferred A ≺ B: for only $5 he would have a lot of fun filming Rufus putting his life at risk, and he would make a big buck selling the video. So they could move from A (no transaction) to B (after the transaction), which they both preferred to A. What's not to like? In economic terms this is called a Pareto improvement: a change that makes at least one person better off, and none worse off.

The objection to this logic is that Rufus "had no choice", but an economist would point out that he did: he could choose to refuse participation and stick with collecting cans for a living. No matter how bad this situation was (I surely don't envy him), obviously participating in Bumfights was better than not participating: after all, he participated, right? Not offering the choice would have left him in A, which is worse than B. The problem is not the transaction; the problem is poverty.

The flaw in this logic is that this may work in the sterile, utilitarian world of microeconomics, but in the real world the film maker also had a choice. He could have paid Rufus $100; he could have offered orange juice instead of alcohol (offering alcohol to somebody with a drinking problem is particularly nasty); he could have refrained from the transaction altogether and donate his $5 to the Salvation Army.

Another issue is that this line of reasoning only works if you care only about the consequences of an act: in other words, it follows a consequentialist ethic, where one could also follow a deontological ethic, or a virtues ethic. Many people consider making money in this way unethical, regardless of the consequences, just for its abusive nature.

Collecting up to 80 kg of sulphur in
a cloud of toxic volcanic fumes and
carrying it down the slope of
Mount Ijen, East Java: hey, it beats
starving to death!

Nevertheless, the line between an "equitable" transaction and a Bumfights transaction is blurry. To take the example of REDD+ again, many developing countries have come round to this idea, after initial opposition; it seems Costa Rica and Indonesia are quite keen on it. And how many people have jobs that are dangerous, or just mind-numbingly boring, just because the only alternative is starvation?

So next time you buy your clothes in a cheap clothes store, ask yourself: am I helping a poor Bangladeshi earn an income or am I taking advantage of his poverty? The question is more difficult than you might think.

Trash fishing in Pangandaran, Java

I visited the fishing village of Pangandaran, Java, during my holiday in Indonesia. It's a beautiful place, delicious fresh grilled fish (ikan bakar), and you can watch the local fishing traditions:

I was shocked, however, by the sheer amount of litter in the sea, especially plastics. The problem is, apparently, that a nearby river discharges a lot of litter from upriver villages and towns, and the shape of the coast makes it a natural garbage collector. The result is heartbreaking:

Memories of Holland, and Indonesia

It was Saturday and I felt a craving for nasi goreng, perhaps with some tempeh goreng or beef rendang. Luckily, Saturday is market day in Wageningen, and I had noticed earlier a small stall selling Indonesian food at the open market on the church square. I decided to check it out. There is something strange with Indonesian food in The Netherlands: the Dutch eat a lot of it (nasi goreng, babi panggang, krupuk, sambal, acam campur), but because the trade is dominated by Chinese restaurants selling their own poor imitation of it, a lot of people think they are eating Chinese food.

A Dutch man so tall he barely fitted in the small cramped minivan took my order. I thought he looked a bit silly in his traditional Indonesian batik shirt, but when I learned his wife was from Indonesia I could forgive him. I asked who his costumers usually were. Do many Indonesian students buy his food? Or perhaps residents of the home for Dutch-Indonesian elderly people, here in Wageningen? Yes, every now and again, but not many, he said.

The elderly home is called Rumah Kita: Indonesian for "our house." There is a small catch here, because in Indonesian the word for "us", "we", or "our" can be inclusive or exclusive. Kita is the inclusive form: it includes the person spoken to. The exclusive form is kami. If it were called "Rumah Kami" it would have sounded a bit like "You! Cheeseheads! Sod off, this is our house." But the name Rumah Kita sends a welcoming message to all elderly members of the Dutch-Indonesian community: come and join us, we have nasi campur on the menu today.

These are the people who were born in places that at the time were called Batavia, Buitenzorg, Weltevreden, Bandoeng, or Soerabaja. Their father might have been a Dutch clerk for the colonial government, who started a family with a Javanese woman and decided to stay in The Emerald Belt. Or perhaps their grandfather was a planter who went to the Dutch Indies to put his study at the Landbouwhogeschool Wageningen to practice on a plantation near Malabar or Kalibaru. Overwhelmed by the Japanese invasion in the Second World War, they would have gone through unspeakable hardships in Japanese concentration camps. After the war they would have sought refuge in those same camps during the Indonesian uprising, when many Dutch, Dutch-Indonesians and ethnic Chinese were killed by the insurgents. Eventually they would have migrated with their parents to The Netherlands, most of them after Indonesia became independent. A lifetime in a cold country they only knew from their schoolbooks awaited.

As a folk musician and traveller, I have been searching for songs in the Dutch musical tradition about homesickness. The only songs I found so far are written in the 1950s, by Dutch-Indonesian artists, about their homesickness for the Indies. I admit I have mixed emotions about these songs. We were never supposed to be there. The Dutch have been terrible overlords to the Indonesians: when the Brits handed back the Indies to the Dutch after Napoleon was defeated, the Javanese revolted because they would rather live under British rule than under the Dutch. But the emotions expressed in these songs are genuine, and intense. Whatever you think of the geopolitics, you can't deny their longing for the place that features in their earliest memories.

A small, fragile elderly lady with a walking stick came up to the stall with a long list of orders. Rendang, ketopak, some pisang goreng, and did you still have that delicious chicken curry with sereh? Yes, all frozen please, it's for the week. For now I would just like one lemper please. When she sat down next to me with her snack I noticed a slight trace of Asia in her features. I asked whether she was from the Indies. Yes, she said, born and raised in Surabaya. We munched away on our food and chatted a little with the batik-clad man's Indonesian wife. I watched as a group of Dutch students walked past on brightly painted wooden shoes - an initiation tradition of one of the local student societies. A group of Chinese students stared at them, giggling and taking pictures.

"I always get tears in my eyes when I eat this," the elderly lady said. The Indonesian woman replied by asking "Are those tears of joy or sorrow?" The elderly lady looked at her with a thoughtful smile and said "I think it's because of the tastiness."

10 Good things about Canberra

When I told the lady of my B&B in Brisbane that I was going to Canberra, she looked puzzled: why do you want to go there? I'm in Sydney now, and when I told the bloke at my hotel's reception that I had just come in from Canberra and all he said was: "I'm sorry." Today somebody even apologised for Canberra!
Come on guys, it's not that bad! Here is a list of good things about Canberra.

1. No Few distractions. It is the perfect place to work on your research vision and your Python modelling skills.
2. It's supposedly one of the best places to spot kangaroos. There are so many of them that there are culling programs in place.
3. It has four seasons, so you can enjoy Winter in July.
4. There is no Starbucks. The Evil Mermaid has laid her greedy claws on places as beautiful as Ubud on Bali, the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, and just about every street corner in downtown Santa Barbara, California, but so far Canberra has remained untainted by her presence.
5. When you feel homesick, the shops have kale and the pubs serve bangers & mash, which is a little bit like a Dutch stamppot met worst. (Why aren't Dutch pubs serving boerenkool met worst? It's the perfect pub food!)
6. There are a couple of decent Asian restaurants around, among which a vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant with delicious banh xeo.
7. It has the Wig & Pen: a traditional brewpub with some delicious homebrewn beers.
8. It might be just about the greenest city of Australia, with lots and lots of parks.
9. It's a good place to cycle: many bike paths, and reasonably good traffic. Sometimes it's difficult to see where you're supposed to cycle though.
10. Sydney is not that far either, and it's a beautiful train ride.