Sustainable economy
Tremendous! Your special issue on the root cause of our problems 鈥� the pursuit of unrestricted economic growth 鈥� brings together information and insight superbly (18 October, p 40). It’s something to read and digest again and again. Warm thanks and congratulations.
From Thomas Hogg
Arguments for a stationary no-growth economy, while well-intentioned, are somewhat naive and raise further unanswered problems. The western capitalist economies have had periods of near-zero or negative growth 鈥� they are called recessions or depressions, and we didn’t much like them. A political party espousing such policies is likely to get short shrift from the public.
The writers do not appear to understand the dynamics of the capitalist model they wish to control. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, it is driven by “creative destruction”. Existing industries are replaced by innovative ones, as the fax and then email replaced telegrams.
By what process will some all-knowing central agency decide which industries have to shed labour and capital to make way for new ones so that the overall steady state is maintained?
We might have received a more useful set of prescriptions if the various authors had discussed choices of techniques and the use of economic incentives to modify economic behaviour, rather than the authoritarian control systems they seem to favour. In short scientists are just as much out of their depth in prescribing economic and political systems as the much-criticised economists are in the physical world.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
From Andrew Clifton
In a sustainable economy, as Andrew Simms points out (18 October, p 49), poverty can only be reduced through redistribution of wealth 鈥� and yet you commend abolishing income tax (p 52). Quite right. There are better ways to deal with inequality.
One would be to introduce land-value taxation, rising gradually to 100 per cent of the rental value of land 鈥� with exemptions for wildlife conservation and so on. No one would then be able to extract an unearned profit from others’ labour simply by owning the land they live and work on or by speculating on rising land values.
In place of corporation tax, how about an inequity tax levied on all employers in proportion to the ratio of highest to lowest income of everyone connected with the company? Grossly inequitable organisations would pay more tax and hence have a smaller pie to divide. Thus, the greediest of bosses and shareholders will find it in their interest to be a tad less greedy 鈥� and give their humbler employees a more generous wage.
Edgware, Middlesex, UK
From Val Stevens,
You provide a much-overdue wake-up call to governments, opinion formers, scientists and citizens. It seems ironic that these articles coincided with a ferocious, unplanned downturn in the global economy and cries for a return to consumer confidence and spending sprees as the way out of recession.
The insanity of conventional economics is obvious. The combination of massive global population growth and ever-growing per-capita consumption has led to total consumption exceeding 鈥� maybe by 25 per cent 鈥� the capacity of the ecosystems of the Earth. That overshoot will get worse, yet I am not aware of any governments seriously addressing this crisis. The suddenness and the “house-of-cards” nature of the credit crunch could serve as a timely illustration of what Andrew Simms refers to as the coming “planet crunch”. Environment ministers seem as lackadaisical and powerless as financial regulators have apparently been.
Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK
Fantasy banking
Your questioning of the predictive ability of some financial models is too cautious (27 September, p 5). Financial systems are complex and highly non-linear (though probably not truly chaotic). This means that they are inherently unknowable and it is impossible 鈥� especially when national finance systems are linked together into a single meta-system 鈥� to understand or predict how they will work under all conditions.
Now, in the death throes of globalisation, is the time for scientists to explain to our rulers how the world really works and throw out disproved notions of economics, finance and trade, such as L茅on Walras’s general equilibrium theory, David Ricardo’s trade theory, and the Chicago School and neoconservative view of the free market as the final arbiter of all that is good and true.
From Roger Hill
Rob Jameson describes value-at-risk (VaR) calculations, used to assess the pros and cons of a financial decision (27 September, p 8). The mathematician Paul L茅vy showed in 1910 that market movements do not follow normal distributions, but instead distributions with infinite variance (19 April 1997, p 38). Therefore most VaR assessments are based on formulae which substantially underestimate the probability of extreme events.
I was once asked to check VaR calculations for trades on the energy market. On 15 per cent of days, prices moved outside the bounds they had been calculated with 95 per cent certainty to stay within. Why? The market had long periods of calm, followed by periods where it was very volatile, but the algorithms used by market analysts averaged out the peaks in volatility, so the risks were seriously underestimated for up to 10 days until the smoothing “wore off”.
If geologists restricted themselves to data collected since digital seismic records began, they would seriously underestimate the risk posed by earthquakes and volcanoes such as Krakatoa. Modern financial risk calculations make exactly that mistake: electronic bank records do not go back as far as the 1929 crash.
Manchester, UK
Einstein's errors
I find Andrew Robinson’s list of Einstein’s scientific “errors” in his critique of Hans C. Ohanian’s book on the subject (27 September, p 48) rather odd, to say the least. One of them is apparently that Einstein “should have realised that the constancy of the speed of light had to be established by experiment, not by stipulation”. But if Einstein hadn’t stipulated it, and predicted such far-reaching consequences, experimenters would probably not have persisted with difficult and expensive experiments.
Science advances by vast, fruitful generalisations such as Galileo’s principle of relativity, unprovable at the time, or Newton’s theory of universal attraction, which only began to be established experimentally by Cavendish many years after Newton’s death.
And Einstein was certainly not wrong in being sceptical about the questionable philosophical assumptions underlying the orthodox version of quantum theory. There’s more to science than experiment plus advanced mathematics: we also need big, clear, synthetic ways of looking at the physical universe. Einstein provided one such view.
The root “error” of people like Einstein is that they aren’t content to sit on the fence. Physicists these days usually insist that their job is only to examine the “how” and to leave the “why” to philosophers or metaphysicians.
From Peter Duffell
Albert Einstein had a lifelong belief that there should be underlying (simple) principles that govern the universe. As a young man, this conviction led to the famous letters that laid the foundations for special relativity. Later, this conviction led him on his search for a unified theory.
Some may say that this was a mistake, as Robinson discusses. But Einstein’s countless challenges to quantum theory actually strengthened general belief in its validity, even though he himself was deeply troubled by the concept of randomness. This conviction was also what enabled him to understand the implications of the thinking of other intellectuals, such as Max Planck, and it gave their ideas real meaning in the theoretical world.
When discussing Einstein we should bear in mind that his theoretical thinking opened up a world of possibility that has given us lasers and the idea of black holes. While this contribution to science is awe-inspiring, he was also a human being. I think we should respect that and accept that even as the father of theoretical physics he cannot possibly have got all of special relativity in his head in 1905 without a few errors or omissions. We should cut him a bit of slack.
Aslockton, Nottinghamshire, UK
Brain scams
Doubts about the use of polygraphs have been around for much longer than you report (4 October, p 8). In G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story The Mistake of the Machine, published in 1914, a polygraph detects stress in a prisoner accused of murdering Lord Falconroy. The reason isn’t guilt: the prisoner is in fact Lord Falconroy, in disguise and anxious to stay undiscovered. Chesterton wrote that polygraph scientists “must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”
Albatross again
Katsufumi Sato’s observations of albatrosses lead him to conclude that the maximum weight of a soaring bird is 40 kilograms, casting doubt upon the abilities of a 250-kilogram pterosaur (4 October, p 10). If both albatrosses and pterosaurs of 200 million years ago flew using air currents, would this imply that the currents were much stronger at that time?
From Clive Semmens
Has Sato taken into account the possibility that the atmosphere was substantially denser in the days of the pterosaur?
Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK
All lads together
I have just noticed that Lawrence Krauss’s great programme on origins at Arizona State University (27 September, p 49), and the big public event to be held in Phoenix next April, have only chaps listed as speakers so far. Humph.
They'll never allow it
Thanks to David Burman for pointing out the dangers inherent in the use of lithium-ion cells in electric cars (11 October, p 20).
Thank goodness we do not have many vehicles using flammable, potentially explosive energy-storage systems on our roads today.
Think of the carnage if every vehicle carried fuel tanks which, if damaged in an accident, could release energy in a fire or even cause an explosion…
For the record
鈥� Several readers expressed surprise at our report of meteorologists at the University of Reading detecting gravity waves in the jet stream (11 October, p 23). To resolve any ambiguity: fluid dynamicists have been talking about “gravity waves” at the interface of air masses (or air and water) since the 1950s at least. These are quite distinct from the gravitational waves posited by cosmologists.
Sustainable economy
While I agree wholeheartedly that we are on the wrong path with regard to what we wish to bequeath to our descendants (18 October, p 40), you need to address responsibility and risk. Power needs to be mediated with unavoidable responsibility 鈥� as it is for engineers.
Economists, as far as I know, have little track record in devising, developing and testing systems. Are ecologists trained in system dynamics and control theory to the extent that they can describe how various resource cycles could be efficiently managed, without input from engineers?
It is, for example, a fact of life in food production that supply and demand are impossible to match precisely, so strategies to deal with both shortages and surpluses have to be agreed if the burden is not to be carried by the producers alone. Presently the market does some of the job of sorting out supply and demand, but is often skewed by the bargaining power, or lack of it, of those involved.
From Susan Parkinson
At last a blast of sanity arrives on the printed page! Thank you.
There are moments when I cannot help believing that there is nothing stronger than the human capacity to avoid looking at patently obvious facts that one does not wish to see. In the light of colossal environmental threats, if we can’t face the fact that we must change from an economic system based on growth to a one that is sustainable, then nature will force us to do so via mass starvation, pandemics, or other equally unpleasant means.
Please, please, please keep up the good work!
Wye, Kent, UK
Fantasy banking
Rob Jameson looks at how investment bankers, hedge funds, pension fund managers and their fellow institutional travellers employ a “value at risk” number to try to make a profit using the vehicle of derivatives (27 September, p 8).
Unfortunately, the theoretical aggregate value of these derivatives has grown to a monstrous, inconceivable $120 trillion, multiples of the total value of the real world economy. Meanwhile the aggregate value of US shares has fallen in one year from $18 trillion to $10 trillion, in large part attributable to the unregulated speculation in mortgage derivatives.
The routine use of derivatives would have never been permitted without the enormous lobbying power of the financial services industry, which even has the clout to place its point men in top level cabinet positions.
I believe derivatives should be seen for what they are: a vehicle for transfer of wealth from the producers of that wealth to individuals managing financial institutions. Derivative positions should be systematically wound down, true “mark to market” accounting be mandated, and no new derivatives should be permitted. The bankers, in particular, should relearn that they are not really masters of the universe, that they exist to serve the people and not the other way around.
Paper or plastic?
Feedback deplores a misleading argument in favour of plastic bags, in the claim that burying them in landfill is carbon sequestration (27 September). The issue is not as simple as Feedback makes it out to be.
Where I live, most garbage goes into a landfill. Our old landfill 鈥� on Staten Island, New York 鈥� is by reputation the largest man-made structure in the world. It seems to me to be a moot point whether something buried under millions of tons of garbage will decay in a hundred years or not, when we are running out of landfill right now. The relevant issue question is how much landfill space either paper and plastic bags take up: and plastic takes considerably less space than paper.
The other question is what actually happens to plastic buried for a long time. I submit that we don’t really know, since plastic bags have not been in use for very long. We do know that the decay rate of buried paper is discouragingly slow and it accounts for perhaps the largest proportion of our disposed waste.
In any case, the simplistic preference for paper over plastic needs to be examined.
Blind markspersonship
I was intrigued by Helen Phillips’s description of “athletic minds” (4 October, p 28). After I retired from the British army I started a business developing optical sights 鈥� which involved thinking about aiming.
It is clear to me that the brain can point a finger at a chosen point whether you are currently seeing it or you choose it from the picture in the brain. This means that you can shoot a hand-held weapon accurately, provided that it is aligned with the finger. Our sights enable you to check this without having to fire.
I was due to give a short talk on this in a military seminar. The evening before I was rung up by the chairman, who clearly thought I was a charlatan. So when I started my talk I pointed my finger at him while looking away. When I checked my aim my finger was pointing between his eyes. He led the applause when I finished.
Watching football on TV, I am amazed by the accuracy of passing the ball. Clearly the players have mental pictures of where their fellow players are and their brains commands their feet to do the necessary.
I have wondered if the same applies to hearing. Can you hit a target which you have only heard? Could this be an event in the Olympic Games? Maybe blind people would be better at this than those who can see.
For the record
鈥� We unaccountably passed through a misspelling of the classic heavy metal artist Ozzy Osbourne (Web letter, 18 October). Sorry. Johann Pachelbel, Bj枚rk Gu冒mundsd贸ttir and Einst眉rzende Neubauten, nae probs.