Inelastic Demand and the Extinction of Species

I thought I might describe an economic mechanism that works specifically toward species endangerment and extinction. That has to do with commodity price inelasticity.

Everyone remembers about price elasticity, right? Well, let’s review anyway.

The demand curve for a commodity is considered elastic if a certain differential percentage increase in supply results in a less than that differential decrease in price. Conversely, if a differential percentage increase in supply results in a greater than differential percentage decrease in price, the commodity is considered inelastic. These relationships also apply on the way down on the supply curve..

This relationship means that, for inelastic demand commodities, increases in total supply result in actual decreases in total income for all aggregated suppliers. For example, if a 1% increase in supply results in a 2% drop in price, all suppliers will receive only 1.01*0.98 income, i.e. slightly less than 99% of their original income. One frequently cited example is farm commodities. As food supplies grow, farmers as a whole receive less and less money. While this may be seen as bad by farmers, it positively benefits the nation as a whole, since less and less must be spent on food, which frees up resources for other things.

Now consider the converse case, where the supply of the commodity is decreasing. Under decreasing supply conditions, the share of gross national income that goes to the suppliers of that commodity increases, in both relative and absolute terms. Thus, it would pay suppliers as a whole to reduce the available supply.

This is the usual argument made against commodity monopoly: if a single (or small number) of suppliers can restrict supply sufficiently, it is possible to increase total income by producing fewer goods. Similarly, even if there are a large number of suppliers, a restriction in supply will actually benefit suppliers as a group. So, for example, minimum wage laws benefit low wage workers as a group, though it may penalize some low wage workers by reducing the number of jobs. The monetary loss from reduced jobs, however, will be less than the monetary increase due to increased wages. Similarly, farmers as a group are benefited by crop restrictions, such as tobacco and peanut allotments.

A naturally restricted commodity does not need a regulatory restriction to achieve monopolistic effects. In the case of a plant or animal species, especially one that is not domesticated, over-harvesting can reduce the future availability of that commodity to all suppliers. Thus, individual suppliers do not need to have price-setting power; all they need to do is to harvest as much as they are able. This results in a restriction of future supply, which leads to higher prices, which increases their own total income.

Presumably, at some point one reaches diminishing returns, where the commodity becomes a luxury good with a more elastic demand curve. However, by that time the species may be endangered, and any “fellow-traveler species” (think dolphins/tuna), may be extinct.

I am reasonably certain that this mechanism is at least as much responsible for the decline in world fish catches as the conventional “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon. In a “tragedy of the commons” scenario, privatizing the commons might have a useful effect. In an inelastic demand scenario, it would not help at all, unless there were a single private entity monopolizing all fisheries.

This, of course, is identical to the case of governments producing a regulatory agency, except that the benefits to private ownership accrue only to the owners of the resource.

TAWK

I've said before that I hate the word "meme," and viral isn't that far behind, but I wouldn't mind if this gets passed around.

I didn't have a favorite Beatle, so John Lennon wasn't my favorite. But I loved him in the way that one loves someone who gave so much to the world and, for that matter, me personally, if one's personal reaction to mass culture is personal, and I've lived my life as if it is. How different, and poorer, would the world have been without Lennon? We'll never know how much poorer the world is for our loss of him.

So I hated the guy, you know, the asshole who killed John Lennon. And one day, I realized that was the only way I was ever again going to refer to him: The Asshole Who Killed John Lennon. It is the only revenge I know how to take.

Part of the creepy little smile is the knowledge of the fame of notoriety. Kill someone famous and you become as famous as they are, if only for a moment, and you'll be famous forever, in some small way. Nobody plus Somebody equals…

Nobody.

The Oklahoma mall gunman is said to have wanted "to go out in style," and told someone that he'd soon be famous. Not from me, sport. Your name is now officially The Asshole Who Killed a bunch of people in Nebraska.

And hey, you, yes, you, 24 hour news cycle TV, print journalism, and every cash-in-on-the-carnage magazine and book publisher. You're just the gawkers at a car wreck. You slow down the traffic of important information to fill the channel with this crap, TAWK news items. People die every day, in all kinds of ways. Why is this kind of death news? Why are you feeding these assholes with exactly what they crave, attention?

And don't give me any crap about how people should be aware of "the warning signs." The "warning signs" amount to being upset and looking peculiar. Yeah, it's really helping the cause to turn every citizen into a spy, ready to turn in anyone with a mental illness, or a perceived drug habit, or a brush with the law. Yeah, we've got enough resources to watch every one of them.

Crap, I'm just glad that no one has figured out a way to put up instant billboards next to traffic accidents, extra premium if it was an injury accident, because blood on the pavement draws more eyeballs.

So screw TAWK John Lennon, and TAWK@ Virginia Tech and TAWK@ the Texas Tower, and all the rest of those losers who have tried to make losers of the rest of us. I'm just trying to maneuver as quickly as I can through the mess of gawkers at the fatality accident.

The Nashville YMCA - Photo

In Jamais Vu, I did some memory recovery on the Downtown Nashville YMCA of my youth. I also spent some time trying to locate a photograph of the building. This is the best I could find:

The black cube was, as I recall, a bank building that went up in the mid-60s, still shorter than the L&C Tower, although there was a building behind the camera (possibly from which this photo was taken), that was taller by the time of this photo in 1972.

The small bit of building you can see in the lower right corner is the roof of the Downtown YMCA.

The photographer was Charles W. Warterfield, and this image is part of a special digital collection of the Nashville Public Library.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

I led a highly compartmentalized existence in high school. At the Downtown Nashville YMCA I was a lifeguard, swam and wrestled competitively, did gymnastics, ran the track, lifted weights, and played pickup basketball. At Donelson High School, I was a dweeby little nerd, or, since those terms were not in use, a brain. Brains were considered to be non-athletic, and I fulfilled that stereotype to the extent that I just didn’t care much for competitive team sports, especially spectator team sports. So I didn’t go out for varsity teams (which would have meant after school practice that would have interfered with my trips to the Y), didn’t attend football/baseball/basketball games or the pep rallies associated with them. In gym class, while I wasn’t the last guy chosen, I wasn’t the first either, and I didn’t really care all that much.

Nevertheless, I did play the games, to the best of my abilities, which may have been why I slipped on the gravel when running to first. Later, there were some jokes about how it’s not correct play to slide into first, but at the time I think that the sight of blood temporarily suppressed the jokes.

And there was blood. We were all dressed in the standard gym attire: tennis shoes, gym shorts and t-shirt. I’d made a three-point landing, both knees and an elbow and they were bad scrapes. The blood began to trickle down my legs pretty much as soon as I stood up. Coach Ellis cocked his head in the direction of the school and said, “Come with me.”

We went to the School Nurse’s office, but she wasn’t there. So I dabbed away the blood, whereupon Coach Ellis took a bottle of iodine and proceeded to pour it directly onto the raw injuries.

I don’t remember if I whined, yelped, said “Oww” or what, but Coach looked at me directly and said, “You’re not real good at handling pain, are you, Pete?” (Note: I was “Pete” until I left Nashville to go to RPI).

I developed some impressive scabs, and I had to curtail swimming for a couple of weeks, but the scrapes healed up without scars, so all turned out okay.

Some twenty-odd years later, I attended my twenty year high school reunion. Not everybody I wanted to see was there, so I made a point of going out to visit Jim and Betty in LaVerne. Jim had been on the football team, so he knew the coaching staff better than I. At one point, he mentioned that he’d seen Coach Ellis a few months back and they’d gone out to have a few beers after work.

“Yeah,” said Jim. “He gave up coaching and went to work for a bank. It’s a lot more money than coaching high school, and he told me that he really enjoys his work.”

“So what does he do there?” I asked.

“He’s the loan foreclosure officer.”

“Oh,” I said, because there really wasn’t anything else to say.

Deck Us All with Boston Charlie

To get us in the holiday spirit.

The song “Vamp in the Middle” (from whose title I take the title of my short story in Helix) come from the album Aereo-Plain by John Hartford. There also appears on that album, this seemingly cryptic spoken-word piece, entitled “Station Break:”

Bill Randall 650, Dorothy S. Ma'm, the Axlewide and Peppermint Endurance Company in Bashful Johnny C, Home of the Grand Ol' Conglomeration, Fannie Hill University and the Bathtub of the South. It's 7:30.

Hartford was a Nashville disk jockey before he found fame and fortune as a singer song-writer, then respect as a flame keeper of “old timey” music, and finally death from non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma at 63, in 2001. The words to “Station Break” decoded:

Clear Channel 650, WSM, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, in Nashville, Tennessee, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry, Vanderbuilt University, and the Athens of the South. It’s 7:30.

We geezers, of course, all know the Pogo example, sung by Albert Alligator, from which the title of this essay is taken:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

The alternate version, somewhat rarer, was performed by Beauregard Chaulmoogra Frontenac de Montmingle Bugleboy, the dog/cop:

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Finally, I was recently moved to recover a memory of this pre-school version of The Pledge:

I pledge our Legions to the Flag, of the United Stakes of America. And Toothery Public for Richard Stands, one Nation, Undergod, Indy visible, with liver tea and just us, for all.

The name for this sort of thing is Mondegreen. Mondegreen's are usually supposed to be accidental, and the intentional versions above don't really pass the "sounds like" test of a true Mondegreen. I just wanted the Johnny Hartford thing to be documented, because apparently the CD/LP is rare, the lyrics hard to locate, and nobody else seems to know what they mean.

A Jack Bauer Moment

I don't watch 24. In fact, I cannot watch 24; I find it offensive beyond measure. It feeds into the idea of finding terrorists under every bed, and into the idea that just a little torture from the right man can make it all turn out okay.

As I note in the Author's Introduction, I wrote Dark Underbelly well before 9/11. It contained some of my notions about authoritarian states and what it can do to people, especially the best people. And, deep in the background, is a vision of an authoritarian state that is necessary, as necessary as the authority of a captain at sea, in vessel that has taken on water, and which only harsh and decisive leadership has a hope of saving the ship and those aboard her.

All this is through the opposite end of the telescope, of course. All you get to really see at first is the wreckage of one human life, someone permanently damaged and trying to act as if his every moment, waking or sleeping, is something other than a fight with himself and his own desire to end it all.

I'm pimping a little for the story at this point because there is now enough of it to grasp, and because the protagonist, Ed Honlin, has just maimed three men (who, at least, did not fail to deserve what was done to them), and has interrogated someone using methods that are, by any reasonable meaning, torture. He has threatened a man's life in order to obtain information.

Is this a paradox? Is this a "Jack Bauer Moment" and have I created just an SF version of 24?"

I do not think so, and I do not think that my reasons are rationalizations, but I recognize that this sort of scene might appeal to those who also find 24 appealing. Still, I know where my own inspiration came from, and a lot of it was Mickey Spillane, whom I have lauded before, and who was more sophisticated than usually given credit for.

Part of the distinction is pretty obvious: Mike Hammer and Ed Honlin (and Dave Robichaux and Matthew Scudder, to name others) are both in the "fallen knight" tradition. They are not government operatives—although Hammer gets what is basically a CIA ticket at one point, and Honlin is operating as a "special consultant" to the police. But no one is really fooled here. They are rogues.

But so was Dirty Harry, and you can still make that case for Jack Bauer. Sure. So the distance isn't that large, still, is it?

However, I will point to the important thing about Chapter 13 in Dark Underbelly, and that is this: very little information is gained in the interrogation. Honlin, the protagonist, is primarily verifying information that he already knew was there, and getting answers to questions that could have been answered by more conventional means. In short, he is terrorizing someone because he wants to, in fact, because he needs to, just as he needed to go out and find a fight in the previous chapter, entitled I'm from the Goddam Planet Krypton.

As I note in the Introduction, Something Very Bad happened to the protagonist before the book begins. It takes rather a long time to find out what happened, and for very good reasons. But there are other questions and other mysteries and other things to discover along the way. And because this is science fiction, rather retro science fiction at that, the protagonist is a wish fulfillment fantasy of a sort, but it is not a "happily ever after" fantasy, because that is not the kind I write. And anyone who thinks that Ed Honlin (or Mike Hammer, or—especially—Jack Bauer), is someone they'd like to be, or even emulate, is mistaking fantasy for reality, and I write the kind of fantasy that tries to make its position very clear, even when it is morally ambiguous.

Three Jokes

#1
Rene Descartes went out for a walk on a fine Parisian spring day. The air was sweet and warm, perfumed with flowering plants and the smells of baking along the boulevards. His stroll went on for some time, and he realized that he was beginning to feel the first pangs of hunger.

But Paris in spring is bountiful, and Descartes stopped into a sidewalk café. Again, the perfection of the day asserted itself. The bread was fresh and tasty, the wine was full-bodied without impertinence, and the pate seemed to melt into his hunger with barely any need for the rigors of digestion.

His appetite nearly sated, Descartes watched the crowd passing on the boulevard, his thoughts turning to philosophy and the graphical mathematics. So lost in thought was he that he almost did not notice the waiter’s return, and he had to ask the man to repeat the question. The waiter again asked if he wished to have dessert, there was a custard of which the chef was particularly proud.

“Yes, yes,” said Descartes. “That sounds excellent.”

“And will monsieur be having coffee with that?” inquired the waiter.

“I think not,” said Rene Descartes, who then disappeared.

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This is a fairly mild example of an elitist joke, an in-joke that can be told to strangers. If you don’t know that Rene Descartes famously wrote “Cogito Ergo Sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” the joke goes right over your head.

I once told this joke at a gathering of nurses at my in-laws' house; about a third of them laughed, and when I realized the exclusionary nature of the joke, I figured that I’d been ever-so-slightly rude. But I did notice that the laughter tended to be in two parts, the first part when the person laughed, and the second part being when they realized that not everyone had laughed, and what that meant.

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#2
An airplane leaving from Poland wound up in a storm over the North Atlantic. Everyone was terrified, as the plane was pitching and yawing, and the crew feared that it would break up at any moment. But one young student stood up and called to the passengers, on the right aisle to move across the aisle. The passengers were dubious but the student insisted. “Hurry,” he said. “Our lives depend upon it.”

The passengers complied and the shaking stopped. The plane righted itself, and made its way safely to its destination. Why do you think the student’s plan worked?

Because you need all the Poles on the left side of the plane for stability.

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That’s an engineering joke. If you’ve never worked with Laplace Transforms, it is almost completely unintelligible. If you’ve sweated through control theory, it can be hilarious. Really.

I was once at a small gathering of fans at the house of a well-known fanzine Editor, and he told that joke. There were no other engineers there, and he didn’t know I was an engineer until I stepped on the punch line. I more or less blurted it out; I hadn’t meant to ruin the joke, and, for that matter I didn’t, not exactly. Because no one else laughed, and no one else was going to laugh, no matter how well the joke was told, because no one else had the background, just me and him. He’d told the joke with every expectation that it would meet with blank stares.

He and I never got along. I have no idea if that incident had anything to do with it.
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Paul Zuber was a professor of urban studies at RPI, and a little googling finds that he now has an RPI scholarship named after him (he died in 1986). I had a course from him; I think it was Urban Engineering.

One class he reminisced a little about what it was like in the early days of desegregation at the college level and he told a story about it that wasn’t a joke, because he stepped on the punch line.

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#3
Two of the first southern collegiate athletics departments that were desegregated had a long standing football rivalry. One of them had a single black running back, while the other had two defensive tackles. During the big, annual matchup game, one play had the running back going straight down the middle, where he was cut down by the two tackles.

A loud voice went up from the stands, yelling…

______________________________

Paul then threw the joke away, saying that the voice yelled something to the effect of “get your blacks off of our black.”

I muttered, not quite under my breath, “That isn’t the way I heard it.”

The actual punch line is “Get those n-----s off our colored boy!”

Paul glanced over at me with a little smile and winked.

This joke isn’t a racist joke, of course; it’s a joke about racists. Wanda Sykes has a routine where she notes that the more championships Tiger Woods wins, the less black he is. My father-in-law tells a similar joke about a black college football star, who wins so much that by the end of the season it’s “Go, Dutch, go!”

One of the things I got to think about during my Urban Engineering course was the ways in which jokes can be a means of hidden communication, and how place of origin and shared witness can sometimes trump race in making, as opposed to breaking, connections.