My paper for the upcoming EAERE conference (PDF here) deals with certification of a fishery that is practically unmanaged. Usually you should steer clear of such fisheries as they tend to be heavily overfished, but what if a bit of consumer power can still nudge fishing effort from bad practices to slightly less bad practices?
This is a contentious issue. The Marine Stewardship Council simply does not certify a fishery if it has no plausible management plan. This is understandable, because before you label a fishery 'sustainable' you should check whether it has any mechanism to prevent future overfishing. It's the classical problem of open-access resources: if users cannot be excluded from harvesting, it will be a free-for-all, at the future's peril. So we need some institution that does the excluding.
But now take a look at the Western Pacific tuna fishery. It may not be completely open-access, but given the sheer size of the area (I'm talking half the largest ocean on the planet here) and the number of sovereign states involved, it comes pretty close to a free-for-all. Some of the tuna species (skipjack) are hardly affected, but they are caught in ways that affect other species (yellowfin) that are doing less well (although, admittedly, not as disastrously as some others). Some fishers use Fish Aggregation Devices (FADs), which attract schools of skipjack as well as juvenile yellowfin; their catch tends to end up in your sandwich as canned tuna. Other fishers do not use FADs but look for free-swimming schools of tuna. These fishers can select schools consisting purely of skipjack or yellowfin, which enables them to avoid catching juvenile yellowfin. There are good economic reasons to leave juvenile yellowfin in the sea: just compare the price of a tuna steak to that of canned tuna. So we want less tuna from FADs, and perhaps more from free-swimming schools.
But this is where it gets tricky. We could tell consumers to stop buying tuna from FADs, and lure them towards the tuna from free-swimming schools by using some sort of 'FAD-free tuna label' (if you can find the space besides MSC, dolphin-friendly, FOS, RFS, Grüne Punkt, Fair Trade, and all the other labels out there). But remember this is an open-access fishery, so the free-swimming schools are very likely to be as overfished as other schools. If we could simply shift consumer demand from FAD tuna to FAD-free tuna that would be good, but there is a risk that the FAD-free tuna label also boosts overall demand for tuna. After all, the label may attract tuna-conscious consumers who feel they can now finally buy tuna without feeling guilty. And enhancing overall demand may make matters worse rather than better. This is a major concern with certification in general, but so far I haven't come across anyone looking at this problem for tuna.
I wrote this paper with Martin Quaas of Kiel University. I'm very happy to work on this issue with him: he works on many fisheries problems, and he has ample experience in the type of microeconomic modelling that we apply here. It's a huge problem, with many facets, and I feel we have so far only scratched the surface of it. We (not Martin, but me and my colleagues at Wageningen University) further explore the issue in the BESTTuna project, but then in a much more applied and detailed manner. BESTTuna is huge, with partners all over the Western and Central Pacific and about 12 PhD students from the same region. This paper is just me and a German professor covering the same issue in a handful of equations. But such simplified analyses can yield insights that more detailed studies don't.
maandag 22 april 2013
woensdag 10 april 2013
Wise words from the Bird
Originally I planned to include in my PhD thesis the following quote:
But this quote - wow, I could tattoo it on my forehead if I were into that kind of thing (don't worry, I'm not). It defines how I view the theories I work with, as well as the musical traditions I play. I consider myself a mainstream economist, but I do have my question marks regarding the behavioral and ethical models applied in my field. I don't think there is any meaningful way of measuring existence value, if it exists at all. I don't believe economic valuation can capture moral or religious considerations. I appreciate the role that social norms, traditions, or downright stupidity can play in human behavior. But I also think that it is too easy to throw your hands in the air and declare the entire body of neoclassical economics as overly abstract nonsense, or worse, to refuse to learn microeconomics because economists did not predict the latest financial crisis.
The bottom line is that you can only criticize a theory if you fully understand it. By the same token, you can only renew a musical tradition if you master its techniques, its rhythms, its harmonies, and its social context. Miles and Bird could only invent and develop bebop because they understood what came before it. Likewise, if you want better economics, well, make sure that you first understand the orthodoxy.
On the other hand, there is also the "forget it" part. Don't let the tradition hinder your creativity. Dare to break its rules, to explore its boundaries. Dare to question a theory's hidden assumptions, don't accept such excuses as "this is how we have always done it." Know the rules, but don't obey them.
The quote, by the way, never made it into my thesis. My professor thought it cynical, as if I recommended the reader to forget all I wrote. I didn't agree, of course, but I also figured that if he interpreted the quote like that, so would many others. So I left it out. I still regret that decision.
Learn all that stuff and then forget it.At the time I thought it was Miles Davis who said that, but it might as well have been Charlie Parker (sorry Miles, Bird makes for a better blog post title). I'm not really into jazz: the quote tricked me into looking up some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on Spotify but after a few songs I always decide to turn on Pelican instead. The closest to jazz that I listen to frequently is the Tom Waits. I absolutely love Tom Waits. Oh, and Ethiopians like Mulatu Astatke or Getatchew Mekuria, but only when I'm in the mood.
But this quote - wow, I could tattoo it on my forehead if I were into that kind of thing (don't worry, I'm not). It defines how I view the theories I work with, as well as the musical traditions I play. I consider myself a mainstream economist, but I do have my question marks regarding the behavioral and ethical models applied in my field. I don't think there is any meaningful way of measuring existence value, if it exists at all. I don't believe economic valuation can capture moral or religious considerations. I appreciate the role that social norms, traditions, or downright stupidity can play in human behavior. But I also think that it is too easy to throw your hands in the air and declare the entire body of neoclassical economics as overly abstract nonsense, or worse, to refuse to learn microeconomics because economists did not predict the latest financial crisis.
The bottom line is that you can only criticize a theory if you fully understand it. By the same token, you can only renew a musical tradition if you master its techniques, its rhythms, its harmonies, and its social context. Miles and Bird could only invent and develop bebop because they understood what came before it. Likewise, if you want better economics, well, make sure that you first understand the orthodoxy.
On the other hand, there is also the "forget it" part. Don't let the tradition hinder your creativity. Dare to break its rules, to explore its boundaries. Dare to question a theory's hidden assumptions, don't accept such excuses as "this is how we have always done it." Know the rules, but don't obey them.
The quote, by the way, never made it into my thesis. My professor thought it cynical, as if I recommended the reader to forget all I wrote. I didn't agree, of course, but I also figured that if he interpreted the quote like that, so would many others. So I left it out. I still regret that decision.
zondag 24 maart 2013
I'm an economist, I know nothing
One of the most difficult things about working in resource economics is being supposed to say something about stuff you actually haven't a clue about. Does bottom trawling wreck the benthic ecosystem? How high are discard rates? Is the Plaice Box working? I don't know, but to make an economic analysis I should.
It's not like economics can't deal with uncertainty. Sure, in the ideal situation we know everything: if A causes B, and we know the costs and benefits of A and B, we can do a cost-benefit analysis to tell whether A is a good idea. This is when the relation between A and B is deterministic. But mostly the relation between A and B is not.
The natural scientists could say "well, we don't know for sure whether A leads to B, but what we can tell you is that the probability that A leads to B is 20%". Most of the environmental economics textbooks call this risk, as opposed to uncertainty, which I will explain below. Risk is something we can deal with. For example, if B costs €100 then the expected value of the "B costs" of doing A is €20. You can also take into account that people don't like risk, so perhaps they are willing to pay €25 to prevent B from happening if we do A. Note that this is €5 more than the expected value of the B costs; hence the costs of risk bearing are €5.
The natural scientists could also say "sorry, we have no idea. A could lead to B; it may also have no relation to B at all. We simply don't know, and we can't give you any probabilities either." This is what the textbooks call uncertainty. Uncertainty is nastier to deal with (and, unfortunately, also more widespread) than risk. Under uncertainty all we could say is something like "if you do A, the worst that can happen is B; the best that can happen is no B." There are strategies like maximin (choose the best of all worst outcomes), maximax (choose the best of all best outcomes), and minimax regret (choose the outcome that gives you, in the worst case, the least explaining to do), but that's about all you can do.
The natural scientists could also say "it depends on who you ask. Some scientists say A probably leads to B, but others are not so sure. This is an ongoing debate in our field." This is not so different from the previous case, and we could treat it similarly to uncertainty. Let's call it a case of competing hypotheses.
The worst case, however, is where some scientists tell you "all the evidence suggests that A leads to B, and don't let those evil impostors from the A institute tell you otherwise. They are paid by the A industry to deny our science." No surprise that the A institute tells you that the idea that A could possibly lead to B is preposterous, and that anyone who claims that A leads to B is a leftist bureaucrat out to vilify the poor, hard-working entrepreneurs in the A industry, if not to establish an anti-A-ist communist state. Let's call it a case of polarised hypotheses. Examples abound: genetically modified organisms, climate change, bottom trawling, MPAs.
The problem with polarised hypotheses is that the moment you choose to include a hypothesis in your uncertainty analysis you imply it is something to be taken seriously. I have no idea of climate science, and I don't have the time to acquire all the knowledge that would enable me to distinguish the genuine scientists from the flat earthers. But I'm convinced that it is easy to take advantage of my ignorance, and that there are a lot of folks out there who try to do so. Is it a coincidence that one of the most prominent climate skeptics was once paid lavishly by the tobacco industry to deny the harmful effects of second-hand smoke? On the other hand, I've seen sufficient nonsense in the news (100 cod in the North Sea, all fish gone by 2048, dolphin meat in canned tuna) to be equally skeptical of the toxic combination of overzealous NGOs and lazy journalism.
So what do you do, as an ignorant economist who cannot fully judge the arguments? You check the messenger. Where does this person work? How much has he or she published, and in which journals? What is the disciplinary background of this person? (For example, one of the more prominent Dutch climate skeptics is an economist whose only peer-reviewed publications were in a journal specifically established to give climate skeptics the stage they can't get elsewhere.) How much of what this person does is science and how much is advocacy? (I'm allergic to the kind of advocacy dressed as science that was behind, for example, the nonsensical claim that the planet's ecosystem is worth $33 trillion every year. You can't estimate this value, period.) I tend to pay much attention to contradictions: The Economist, for example, is an economically liberal newspaper that used to play down the threat of climate change, but nowadays it argues in favour of limiting greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I know Richard Tol, who is often quoted by climate skeptics, does not deny that greenhouse gas emissions are a problem. Funnily the skeptics never quote him on that; they only do so when he bashes wind power.
Yes, I know science is not made by majority votes, but that doesn't mean that I should take into account every pseudoscientist with an opinion. And I know that reputation isn't everything, and that many revolutionary insights were first ridiculed, but I can't be a master of all. So I have little choice but to listen to the mainstream.
It's not like economics can't deal with uncertainty. Sure, in the ideal situation we know everything: if A causes B, and we know the costs and benefits of A and B, we can do a cost-benefit analysis to tell whether A is a good idea. This is when the relation between A and B is deterministic. But mostly the relation between A and B is not.
The natural scientists could say "well, we don't know for sure whether A leads to B, but what we can tell you is that the probability that A leads to B is 20%". Most of the environmental economics textbooks call this risk, as opposed to uncertainty, which I will explain below. Risk is something we can deal with. For example, if B costs €100 then the expected value of the "B costs" of doing A is €20. You can also take into account that people don't like risk, so perhaps they are willing to pay €25 to prevent B from happening if we do A. Note that this is €5 more than the expected value of the B costs; hence the costs of risk bearing are €5.
The natural scientists could also say "sorry, we have no idea. A could lead to B; it may also have no relation to B at all. We simply don't know, and we can't give you any probabilities either." This is what the textbooks call uncertainty. Uncertainty is nastier to deal with (and, unfortunately, also more widespread) than risk. Under uncertainty all we could say is something like "if you do A, the worst that can happen is B; the best that can happen is no B." There are strategies like maximin (choose the best of all worst outcomes), maximax (choose the best of all best outcomes), and minimax regret (choose the outcome that gives you, in the worst case, the least explaining to do), but that's about all you can do.
The natural scientists could also say "it depends on who you ask. Some scientists say A probably leads to B, but others are not so sure. This is an ongoing debate in our field." This is not so different from the previous case, and we could treat it similarly to uncertainty. Let's call it a case of competing hypotheses.
The worst case, however, is where some scientists tell you "all the evidence suggests that A leads to B, and don't let those evil impostors from the A institute tell you otherwise. They are paid by the A industry to deny our science." No surprise that the A institute tells you that the idea that A could possibly lead to B is preposterous, and that anyone who claims that A leads to B is a leftist bureaucrat out to vilify the poor, hard-working entrepreneurs in the A industry, if not to establish an anti-A-ist communist state. Let's call it a case of polarised hypotheses. Examples abound: genetically modified organisms, climate change, bottom trawling, MPAs.
The problem with polarised hypotheses is that the moment you choose to include a hypothesis in your uncertainty analysis you imply it is something to be taken seriously. I have no idea of climate science, and I don't have the time to acquire all the knowledge that would enable me to distinguish the genuine scientists from the flat earthers. But I'm convinced that it is easy to take advantage of my ignorance, and that there are a lot of folks out there who try to do so. Is it a coincidence that one of the most prominent climate skeptics was once paid lavishly by the tobacco industry to deny the harmful effects of second-hand smoke? On the other hand, I've seen sufficient nonsense in the news (100 cod in the North Sea, all fish gone by 2048, dolphin meat in canned tuna) to be equally skeptical of the toxic combination of overzealous NGOs and lazy journalism.
So what do you do, as an ignorant economist who cannot fully judge the arguments? You check the messenger. Where does this person work? How much has he or she published, and in which journals? What is the disciplinary background of this person? (For example, one of the more prominent Dutch climate skeptics is an economist whose only peer-reviewed publications were in a journal specifically established to give climate skeptics the stage they can't get elsewhere.) How much of what this person does is science and how much is advocacy? (I'm allergic to the kind of advocacy dressed as science that was behind, for example, the nonsensical claim that the planet's ecosystem is worth $33 trillion every year. You can't estimate this value, period.) I tend to pay much attention to contradictions: The Economist, for example, is an economically liberal newspaper that used to play down the threat of climate change, but nowadays it argues in favour of limiting greenhouse gas emissions. As far as I know Richard Tol, who is often quoted by climate skeptics, does not deny that greenhouse gas emissions are a problem. Funnily the skeptics never quote him on that; they only do so when he bashes wind power.
Yes, I know science is not made by majority votes, but that doesn't mean that I should take into account every pseudoscientist with an opinion. And I know that reputation isn't everything, and that many revolutionary insights were first ridiculed, but I can't be a master of all. So I have little choice but to listen to the mainstream.
woensdag 13 maart 2013
Overcoming cultural barriers
We got along quite well. Charlie had lived in The Netherlands for a few years, where he picked up some Dutch words and a love for Dutch spiced cakes. (He bought his cakes in the place where I replenished my stock of Indonesian bumbu - the Dutch have an exotic brand of homesickness.) We talked a lot about life in The Netherlands and in California, about politics (like many Californians, Charlie was a staunch Democrat), and other issues. In a place like California, where people are friendly but keep their distance, Charlie was the closest I had to a friend.
One morning I entered the living room and Charlie grinned at me sarcastically, asking: "have you been in the kitchen yet?" On the kitchen floor lay a paper waste bag, torn open where the paper was wet from the coffee grind I had put in it a few days before. Coffee grind spilled from the waste bag all over the kitchen floor. "You know," Charlie said grimly, "I have once thrown a tenant out because he did this repeatedly." No need to argue who cleaned up the mess and where wet waste like food and coffee grind went from that moment on. I had learned my lesson.
What went wrong here? Unlike European sinks, many American sinks are equipped with a disposal: an electric device that shreds kitchen waste into pieces small enough to pass through the plumbing system. Apparently, American plumbing systems are designed to deal with such solid waste without clogging. Charlie did tell me: don't throw wet waste (coffee grind, sauce, tomatoes) in the paper waste bags, because they will tear open. Turn on the disposal, and throw your waste in the sink. "It's not a sink, it's a disposal," he said. But when I had made coffee I just couldn't get myself to throw it in the sink. In Europe we learn never to throw such stuff in the sink: you may flush it down the toilet if you need to, but sinks get clogged if you throw all kinds of solid stuff in them. Surely he couldn't mean that I was to throw it in the sink? So I tried to press as much water as possible out of the coffee grind - and in the paper bag it went.
I was reminded of this episode when I thought about the issues in supervising students from cultures very different from my own. For example, I have found that some students from Southeast Asian countries are very reluctant to send their teacher or supervisor work in progress. For me as a supervisor this is a problem. I'd much rather be kept informed of a student's progress, or lack thereof, than to be kept in the dark for very long. The longer it takes, the more time is wasted if it is done the wrong way. But apparently it doesn't work like that in Southeast Asia. If you send something to your supervisor (a draft paper, say, or data analyses), you better make sure that it is perfect. Better to send a perfect document five minutes before the meeting than to send a rough draft two days earlier. With the result that neither I, nor our professor, have time to prepare for the meeting by reading the material.
We have tried several ways to convince these students that it is okay to send work in progress. Asking politely. Threatening to cancel the meeting if I don't get the stuff on time. Explaining patiently why it is better to send incomplete material early than to send complete material late. Getting angry when I receive the material late. But just like I had to overcome a cultural barrier to throw my coffee grind in the
zaterdag 2 maart 2013
A year of Grow Fins
I started this blog a year ago today. I didn't have any expectations when I started it (I still don't), so it's difficult to say whether I'm satisfied with the frequency and the quality of my posts, the reactions, and the readership. But let me try to say a few things.
First of all, I have noticed that blogging forces me to think about the relevance of the work I do. If I go to a conference, what do I learn that I can explain to a lay person? If I publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, how does it relate to a non-academic reader? Another thing is that it forces me to follow not just the scientific literature, but also the public debate. Shortly after starting this blog I opened a Twitter account, and this is a great way to keep track of the debate if you manage to sift through the non-news from some users (look everyone, new boots!) and feel-good tweets from others (did you hug a tree today?). I follow the online news of some Dutch and UK newspapers but I don't have a high esteem of most of them, except for The Economist, which is the only newspaper I actually pay for. But most news on fishing and other marine issues is too obscure to be published in any of these newspapers anyway, so that most of what you do read is based on press releases from environmental NGOs, or from scientific journals (Nature and Science, basically) that like to publish oversimplified and overgeneralised research (2048, anyone?). Twitter fills this gap nicely.
Second, I try to write one post per week but that's more difficult than I thought. I cannot begin to grasp how David Zetland writes about 4-5 posts per week. (Perhaps I should write shorter posts, I know.) Sometimes I publish more, sometimes I write more but I save the posts for later. During my Vietnam trip I did this on purpose in order to publish them after my return. (Burglars have internet access, you know.)
Third, Blogger keeps the stats of its blogs so I can get some idea of what has been read and what has not been. In the past year I posted 78 posts, which altogether were read 3196 times. That may seem like a lot (almost 40 reads per post) but the numbers include a bot attack that generated a lot of artificial traffic. Keeping that in mind, the top 5 of most frequently read posts is:
One thing to mind, of course, is that older posts have had more time to be read, and hence get more reads, than newer posts. Here are the most used search terms that led readers to my blog:
I'm honoured people actually searched for my blog, although I wonder why you would search for a url rather than type it into the address bar of your browser. The two scientific fraud affairs (Diederik Stapel and Dirk Smeesters) were a lot in the news last year, which explains why people search for them, which explains the number of reads for my posts on this topic. Lots of scientists must also be wondering who is Laura Dean, and I'm happy that at least some people found my post where I referred to another blog that explains why this name is associated with one of countless predatory publishers.
But what I like most is that people searched for information on choke species, differences between economists and ecologists, and ecological footprint (not shown here), and found my blog. I know, if all those people were in one class room and I would be teaching them I'd call it a very small class. But it's enough for me to keep on blogging.
First of all, I have noticed that blogging forces me to think about the relevance of the work I do. If I go to a conference, what do I learn that I can explain to a lay person? If I publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, how does it relate to a non-academic reader? Another thing is that it forces me to follow not just the scientific literature, but also the public debate. Shortly after starting this blog I opened a Twitter account, and this is a great way to keep track of the debate if you manage to sift through the non-news from some users (look everyone, new boots!) and feel-good tweets from others (did you hug a tree today?). I follow the online news of some Dutch and UK newspapers but I don't have a high esteem of most of them, except for The Economist, which is the only newspaper I actually pay for. But most news on fishing and other marine issues is too obscure to be published in any of these newspapers anyway, so that most of what you do read is based on press releases from environmental NGOs, or from scientific journals (Nature and Science, basically) that like to publish oversimplified and overgeneralised research (2048, anyone?). Twitter fills this gap nicely.
Second, I try to write one post per week but that's more difficult than I thought. I cannot begin to grasp how David Zetland writes about 4-5 posts per week. (Perhaps I should write shorter posts, I know.) Sometimes I publish more, sometimes I write more but I save the posts for later. During my Vietnam trip I did this on purpose in order to publish them after my return. (Burglars have internet access, you know.)
Third, Blogger keeps the stats of its blogs so I can get some idea of what has been read and what has not been. In the past year I posted 78 posts, which altogether were read 3196 times. That may seem like a lot (almost 40 reads per post) but the numbers include a bot attack that generated a lot of artificial traffic. Keeping that in mind, the top 5 of most frequently read posts is:
One thing to mind, of course, is that older posts have had more time to be read, and hence get more reads, than newer posts. Here are the most used search terms that led readers to my blog:
| grow-fins.blogspot.com dirk smeesters, dirk smeesters fraud, stapel smeesters, dirk smeesters cv | 25 |
| choke species, "choke species" | 18 |
| blog "marine economics" | 10 |
| laura dean acquisition editor why economists argue with ecologists | 5 |
I'm honoured people actually searched for my blog, although I wonder why you would search for a url rather than type it into the address bar of your browser. The two scientific fraud affairs (Diederik Stapel and Dirk Smeesters) were a lot in the news last year, which explains why people search for them, which explains the number of reads for my posts on this topic. Lots of scientists must also be wondering who is Laura Dean, and I'm happy that at least some people found my post where I referred to another blog that explains why this name is associated with one of countless predatory publishers.
But what I like most is that people searched for information on choke species, differences between economists and ecologists, and ecological footprint (not shown here), and found my blog. I know, if all those people were in one class room and I would be teaching them I'd call it a very small class. But it's enough for me to keep on blogging.
donderdag 28 februari 2013
Tenure, sort of
OK, it's official now: after a working life of about 15 years I will finally have my indefinite contract at Wageningen University. So while teaching (a lot), publishing (less than I should/want to), attracting research funding (more than I dared dream of), and presenting and writing my research vision to the advisory committee, I must have done enough right to convince the committee that the university should keep me. The committee will reconvene in about a year, however, to decide whether I'm good enough to be appointed associate professor.
So yes, I'm happy that I can continue with what I am doing, and that I can further develop my line of research here. I like Wageningen University, although I admit that the only other universities I have ever worked at were Tilburg University, where I did a post-doc from 2006 to 2008, and UC Santa Barbara, where I have spent a sabbatical in 2010. The environmental economics tradition in Tilburg is much more theoretical and monodisciplinary than the one in Wageningen. Admittedly, they publish more in the top journals like JEEM, ERE, or REE than we do, and I think we should have the same ambition. On the other hand, the tradition in Wageningen is more problem-oriented, more involved in developing countries, and more interdisciplinary. I feel the Wageningen approach suits me better.
How do I feel about the whole tenure track system? A lot of people complained before, during, and after its introduction. And yes, I'm one of them, but I'm convinced it's better than my university's old system. The elementary particle of Wageningen University's institutional structure is the chair group, which comprises a scientific discipline or subdiscipline such as aquatic ecology, environmental systems analysis, or environmental and resource economics. The head of a chair group is the chair holder, and in the old days the chair holder was mostly the professor of the chair group. There were some personal professors, but mostly these positions were created by the management, after which a suitable person was recruited. In other words, staff smart and ambitious enough to become a professor had to wait for the chair holder to leave, and hence mostly left before the chair holder did. I'm sure there was a way of getting rid of truly disastrous professors, but mediocre professors could remain unchallenged for their entire career because the smarter staff went elsewhere. The old system was a recipe for stagnation and intellectual laziness.
At least tenure track offers the staff that would have left under the old system a path towards professorship inside Wageningen University. This raises the question how many professors a university can pay, and this question has been asked repeatedly. I don't know how the university expects to pay for all these people, but my experience in Tilburg, which at the time employed about three professors in environmental and resource economics (besides a host of others in microeconomics, experimental economics, and what not), is that tenure track can develop the organisation into a healthy market for ideas. As far as I could see the professors in Tilburg seemed colleagues rather than rivals, although I guess there must have been some form of competition for funding and the brightest students. They exchanged ideas, read and commented on each other's papers, and wrote papers together. (The Dutch language has a great word for this: conculega, a portmanteau of the Dutch words for competitor and colleague.) I think that is a much healthier situation than the little monarchies we have had so far in Wageningen.
So if I think tenure track is an improvement, what do I complain about? Partly the way it is implemented; partly the typical problems you always run into when you introduce a new system; partly the logical disadvantages of tenure track. Wageningen University tenure track staff is expected to meet 18 different benchmarks, including teaching load, teaching evaluation scores, funding, publications, and PhD supervision. Originally these benchmarks were set by natural scientists and applied to social science, but this has been corrected, up to a point. A lot of criteria are unclear; some information we get is self-contradictory. This all shows that the organisation is still learning from its experiences, and I'm sure they'll get it right someday. Nevertheless, it makes you feel like a cross between a front soldier and a guinea pig. More fundamentally, publish-or-perish has enhanced the risk of academic fraud and created a boom in predatory open-access publishers. We will have to be more vigilant with respect to plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication of data. (I'm tempted to refer again to Tilburg here, but I won't: first, Diederik Stapel wasn't at the Economics Department; second, his fraud has taken place on such a massive scale and over such a long time that I don't believe publish-or-perish was the main reason.)
So yes, I'm happy that I can continue with what I am doing, and that I can further develop my line of research here. I like Wageningen University, although I admit that the only other universities I have ever worked at were Tilburg University, where I did a post-doc from 2006 to 2008, and UC Santa Barbara, where I have spent a sabbatical in 2010. The environmental economics tradition in Tilburg is much more theoretical and monodisciplinary than the one in Wageningen. Admittedly, they publish more in the top journals like JEEM, ERE, or REE than we do, and I think we should have the same ambition. On the other hand, the tradition in Wageningen is more problem-oriented, more involved in developing countries, and more interdisciplinary. I feel the Wageningen approach suits me better.
How do I feel about the whole tenure track system? A lot of people complained before, during, and after its introduction. And yes, I'm one of them, but I'm convinced it's better than my university's old system. The elementary particle of Wageningen University's institutional structure is the chair group, which comprises a scientific discipline or subdiscipline such as aquatic ecology, environmental systems analysis, or environmental and resource economics. The head of a chair group is the chair holder, and in the old days the chair holder was mostly the professor of the chair group. There were some personal professors, but mostly these positions were created by the management, after which a suitable person was recruited. In other words, staff smart and ambitious enough to become a professor had to wait for the chair holder to leave, and hence mostly left before the chair holder did. I'm sure there was a way of getting rid of truly disastrous professors, but mediocre professors could remain unchallenged for their entire career because the smarter staff went elsewhere. The old system was a recipe for stagnation and intellectual laziness.
At least tenure track offers the staff that would have left under the old system a path towards professorship inside Wageningen University. This raises the question how many professors a university can pay, and this question has been asked repeatedly. I don't know how the university expects to pay for all these people, but my experience in Tilburg, which at the time employed about three professors in environmental and resource economics (besides a host of others in microeconomics, experimental economics, and what not), is that tenure track can develop the organisation into a healthy market for ideas. As far as I could see the professors in Tilburg seemed colleagues rather than rivals, although I guess there must have been some form of competition for funding and the brightest students. They exchanged ideas, read and commented on each other's papers, and wrote papers together. (The Dutch language has a great word for this: conculega, a portmanteau of the Dutch words for competitor and colleague.) I think that is a much healthier situation than the little monarchies we have had so far in Wageningen.
So if I think tenure track is an improvement, what do I complain about? Partly the way it is implemented; partly the typical problems you always run into when you introduce a new system; partly the logical disadvantages of tenure track. Wageningen University tenure track staff is expected to meet 18 different benchmarks, including teaching load, teaching evaluation scores, funding, publications, and PhD supervision. Originally these benchmarks were set by natural scientists and applied to social science, but this has been corrected, up to a point. A lot of criteria are unclear; some information we get is self-contradictory. This all shows that the organisation is still learning from its experiences, and I'm sure they'll get it right someday. Nevertheless, it makes you feel like a cross between a front soldier and a guinea pig. More fundamentally, publish-or-perish has enhanced the risk of academic fraud and created a boom in predatory open-access publishers. We will have to be more vigilant with respect to plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication of data. (I'm tempted to refer again to Tilburg here, but I won't: first, Diederik Stapel wasn't at the Economics Department; second, his fraud has taken place on such a massive scale and over such a long time that I don't believe publish-or-perish was the main reason.)
maandag 25 februari 2013
Going deep south
As far as I could see, all of the seafood served came from aquaculture - not a big surprise in a country that ranks third in global aquaculture production. Tu works at the Vietnamese Research Institute for Aquaculture as a fisheries economist, and he does his PhD research at our group on how the shrimp farmers in the Mekong delta adapt to climate change. Expectations are that as sea levels rise, and average temperatures increase, shrimp farmers will increasingly have to deal with disease outbreaks and salt water intrusion (black tiger shrimp are a bit like Goldilocks, preferring their water not fresh, not salty, but brackish). How will these farmers deal with these problems? In other words, what kind of autonomous adaptation will they implement, and what kind of planned adaptation can or should the government implement?
I had discussed these issues at length with Tu over the last twelve months or so, but it is difficult to discuss these issues if you have never seen these farms in reality. So Monique and I reserved a few days to travel to Soc Trang, Bac Lieu, and perhaps Ca Mau, where most of the Mekong Delta's shrimp come from. We were joined by Tu, Le Xuan Sinh (an aquaculture expert from Can Tho University) and Nguyen Trang (a master student at Wageningen University who does her thesis work in the Mekong Delta). Sinh suggested to drive along the coast road between Soc Trang town and Bac Lieu town the first day, and stay the night in Ca Mau town. The day after we went deep south: by car to Nam Can (the most southern town of Vietnam that can be reached by car), and then the boat all the way to Mui Ca Mau (the southern cape of mainland Vietnam).
No matter how much I had read about Vietnamese shrimp farming before I came, it still struck me how different the shrimp farms in different regions are, and how strongly these differences depend on their natural environment. The relatively fresh waters of Soc Trang allow for intensive shrimp farming, in many cases even with systems where the pond is perfectly separated from the water or canal. These are fairly capital-intensive systems, with neatly dug ponds, aeration devices, and much use of shrimp feed and other inputs. These farmers have the system quite under control.
How different are the farms you find deeper south, in the vast mangrove forests of Ca Mau province. The water is much more brackish here, so that the ponds are more strongly connected to the rivers and canals. Farmers let water in or out to control the salinity of the water, and in some cases to take in shrimp seed and fish. In the center of the pond you find planted mangrove trees that provide food and shelter to the shrimp, and that are usually sold after about 15 years for firewood or charcoal. The farmers use little feed because the shrimp can feed on algae growing on the mangrove trees.
Apparently our visit was quite an event for this farmer. He invited us for a meal of cooked crab and some sort of Vietnamese jenever. Even though it was 11am we bravely jugged the stuff down because it would have been impolite to refuse. So here you have another problem of doing field work in Vietnam: you need to be able to drink. Heavily. All the more reason to let the respondents come to some central place instead of going from door to door yourself.
Although it is hardly featured in tourist guidebooks, I consider Ca Mau one of the highlights of my trip to Vietnam. Of course for being invited to food and drink with some shrimp farmer, and for the thrilling boat trip through the mangrove forests to Mui Ca Mau, but also for the mangrove forests themselves. I just love mangrove forests. The sheer fact of having a forest in such a salty, tidal area, with stilt-roots sticking in the mud. And when you look closely, at any square meter of the mud between the trees, you see the forest is teeming with life. Different species of crabs crawl over the bottom. A snake slithers by. Mud skippers skid over the puddles of brown water at the edge of the forest.
So what have I learned from this trip? First of all, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for Vietnamese shrimp farms to deal with medium-term or long-term changes in their natural environment. Adopting a closed system, or cultivating white leg shrimp (a hardy species from South America) instead of black tiger shrimp, may work for the intensive farmers in Soc Trang but not for the extensive farmers in Ca Mau. Second, there is a looming problem in almost all shrimp farms: the waste coming from the pond. Farmers regularly clean the ponds, and then a muddy mixture of shrimp faeces and salt comes out. It may have been a good fertilizer if it weren't for its salinity. So far no solution has been found for it yet, so all farms have a load of salty mud piling up. The farmers are not allowed to dump the mud in the river, but monitoring and enforcement is weak and the farmers have little alternative. Third, another problem is that the stock of wild shrimp is declining as more and more farmers catch wild shrimp seed in order to cultivate it in their ponds. Wild shrimp tend to be more disease resistant, but there is of course only so much that the local ecosystem can provide. Fourth, conducting a survey in areas like Ca Mau is going to be a daunting task: getting there over water, identifying and randomly selecting respondents, and last but not least staying sober.
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