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.

Judd and Guu's stochastic perturbation model in Python

I just uploaded a Python version of Judd and Guu's perturbation code to my website (code; notes).

If you happen to be a Python programmer, or a computational economist (even better: both!), then any feedback you can give on the code is highly appreciated. I'm fairly new to Python, so I'm sure I could have programmed some parts more efficiently.

Oh, and here is a picture of a bunch of Canberran kangaroos:

I thought you'd like to know.

In case you were wondering what I'm doing in the Australian winter

I'm here for two very interrelated goals.

I'm having another assessment meeting in September 2014; this time it's about a possible promotion to associate professor. So Goal #1 is to take a good look again at my research and education vision, and discuss it with whoever I can discuss it with. I got quite some inspiration from the keynotes and discussions at IIFET2014. Not that I went there with a blank slate, but it was good to see my ideas confirmed, in a way, and complemented by other people's ideas.

I have decided long ago that I will focus on the economics of coastal and marine ecosystems. My background is mainly in bioeconomic modelling, so it is logical to focus my research on the kind of questions that require such modelling. But then the question arises: aren't many other people doing that already? People have been doing theoretical fisheries economics since the 1950s (or longer, if you consider Jens Warming's work). And there are gigabytes of applied bioeconomic fisheries models like FishRent and Mefisto, and wholesale ecosystem models like Atlantis, where fishers are included as some sort of predators.

But that's it, actually: either the models are very abstract and qualitative, so that they can be analysed on paper, or they are very detailed and quantitative, so that they can be used for policy assessment or scenario analysis. The problem with the first is that they lack realism; the problem with the second is that they lack transparency. Either you can explain what drives your results, but then your results are close to useless for policy makers, or you can advise policy makers but you cannot explain where your advice comes from.

What has not yet happened much (I know there are people doing it, but not many), is to take the theoretical models, and make them more realistic to the point where you can maintain some intuition as to what drives your results, even though you cannot prove fancy theorems anymore. Macroeconomists and financial economists have reached that stage long ago: where their models get too complicated to be solved by some math magic, they use computation. This way you can add more realism, while maintaining a fair amount of insight into the mechanisms at work. My intention is to apply such computational methods to problems with coastal and marine ecosystems. This includes a lot of fisheries, but also other ecosystem uses, goods, and services.

Which brings me to Goal #2. The Crawford School of Public Policy of Australian National University has among its staff a number of people who have applied computational economic tools to fisheries problems, like Tom Kompas, Hoang Long Chu, and Quentin Grafton. I'm here to learn at least some of the methods they use. Originally I wanted to stay about two months, but for several reasons I only have about two weeks. But in the short time frame I have I'm trying to get the most out of it.

And lo and behold, I have a first result to show you. My first hurdle was writing a perturbation model in a program I can work with. Their models run in a combination of Matlab and Maple, but I don't have a license for either of them, and I'm not well-versed in Maple. Hoang Long Chu was so kind to give me a paper by Kenneth Judd and Sy-Ming Guu on writing perturbation models in Mathematica - another program I don't use, but luckily the paper explains the method well and it presents the entire Mathematica code for a simple optimal growth model. So I decided to write the same method in Python - my language of choice for its elegance, simplicity, and speed (ok, compared with R, which is neither elegant, nor simple, nor speedy). It took me a few days but here it is: the Python code and a pdf with some notes on the paper and the model.

Just a short note

I was going to write a long post about IIFET 2014, and how great a city Brisbane is, and how cold Canberra is. But honestly, now with the MH17 crash, I feel this is just inappropriate. But neither can I not write - I can't pretend it didn't happen. So just a short note for those who were wondering where I am.

I flew to Brisbane via Singapore on 4 July 2014 for the IIFET conference. I remember looking at the map (you know how they like to show you where the air plane is) thinking: "whoa, we're above Ukraine." I just assumed it was safe - they wouldn't fly over the place if it weren't, right? Anyway, I enjoyed Brisbane, gave my presentation, met a lot of friendly and interesting people, had a great dive on Stradbroke Island, flew to Canberra, checked into an Airbnb place, set my iPhone at air plane mode so that I wouldn't be woken up by any e-mails or text messages in the Australian night, woke up again, switched off air plane mode, and immediately I got a message from a friend asking whether I was safe and sound, what with the plane crash and all.

I think all that must be said has been said in the news media and I have little to add to it. Of course I'm shocked, but anything I can say would just repeat what others have said already. It's a weird feeling that both my country of origin and the country I'm visiting are in mourning. Flags will be half mast in The Netherlands and Australia tomorrow.

My condolences to the families and friends of the victims.

Burn the schools down

I guess it's a tradition that every once in a while students revolt against the economics they are being taught. When I was doing my PhD it was a movement calling itself "post-autistic economics", which was mainly active in France, but also got support elsewhere. I agreed with some of their complaints, although the argumentation was not always that strong and sometimes outright politically motivated ("Capitalism boo! Neo-feminist post-constructionalism yay!"). Later on they changed the name to "Real-World Economics", perhaps not to offend people suffering from autism. Looking at their review I still don't get the impression that they're making much of a dent in the economics debate. Neither am I convinced by what they write, to put it politely.

But now a new revolt has emerged in Manchester. As far as I can see it is more constructive, and more well-argued than the post-autist movement. I agree with some of their points, but not all.

I agree with their proposition that economics teaching should take heed of insights from such fields as psychology, law, and policy science. I don't know the Manchester program, but I find it curious that such subjects receive as little attention as the Manchester economics students claim. Besides microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics, students in our BSc Economics and Governance program take courses and lectures on history, policy science, institutional economics, and behavioral economics. I guess it's a question of discussing one particular model or theory very thoroughly, or discussing several different models or theories in a more shallow manner. Our Economics and Governance BSc chooses to be broad, and I agree with that, especially for a problem-oriented university as Wageningen.

I also agree with the Manchester students' call for a more evidence-based economics, and more attention for the conditions under which different theories and models have more explanatory power than others.

But that's also where my main objection lies: the call for "pluralism" is translated into more attention to other "schools of thought" than just neoclassical economics. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a school of thought is

a group sharing a common point of view in respect to some matter (e.g. "she belongs to the liberal school of thought"); also: a point of view recognized as held but not necessarily accepted (e.g. "there are two schools of thought about this question")

An economist can be "of" a particular school of thought: for example, Paul Krugman is generally considered a Keynesian; Milton Friedman was a monetarist; Herman Daly is an ecological economist; John Kenneth Galbraith was an institutional economist. The natural scientists I work with can only shake their heads when I tell them this. In their fields, there are different theories that compete or need to be reconciled (e.g. general relativity versus quantum mechanics). Or there are different models for different situations, based on simplifying assumptions, and usually developed for a selection of cases but not for all (e.g. metapopulation theory, or the Beverton-Holt stock recruitment model). In that sense, economics is close to ecology: both deal with complex systems that cannot always be experimented on to test competing hypotheses, so we use models that describe a subset of the mechanisms at work. The difference, however, is that whereas even Ilkka Hanski will acknowledge that not all populations can be approached as metapopulations, economists argue as if either Krugman or Friedman is right. On the other hand, schools of thought also have a danger of being politically motivated: if schools of thought are just "points of view", then you can pick and choose whichever one fits your political preferences. So if you like bow ties, become a Hayekian; if you want to keep your really cool Che Guevara t-shirt, declare yourself a Marxist. (If you're looking for a steady job in economic policy, follow Keynes.)

In my humble opinion economists must get rid of schools. We should treat our theories like ecologists treat their models: to paraphrase George Box, our models are always wrong in some respect, but they may be useful in some cases. The challenge is to identify the conditions under which they can be useful.