Month: July 2000

Whaling Ban Likely to Fall

The latest meeting of the International Whaling Commission all but turned into a rout for anti-whaling forces and likely presages the sort of battles that will be fought around the world in coming decades over the best way to preserve endangered species.

It’s only slightly oversimplifying to say that the fight over whaling boils down to two incompatible positions — on the one side are countries and activists who maintain that whaling is simply wrong regardless of whether or not whales are endangered. On the other side are nations that advocate hunting whales as part of long term plans to sustainably maintain whale populations.

For those opposed to whaling under any circumstance, the main problem is that the IWC has been too successful. In 1986 it imposed a worldwide ban on whaling, although the ability of the IWC to enforce that ban is pretty much non-existent. Japan has in fact resumed hunting small numbers of whales on the pretense of doing so for purely scientific purposes and Norway opposed the moratorium in the first place and largely ignored it. Despite this, in large measure the conservation effort worked and many endangered species of whales have come back with a vengeance.

Now Japan, Norway and other nations say that the science is on their side — whale populations have recovered to a point to sustainably allow a resumption in commercial hunting. But many of the nations on the IWC oppose whaling because, as the BBC summed it up, “they regard whaling as inhumane, unnecessary, and deeply unpopular with their electorates.”

The Japanese representative to the IWC blasted this “no whaling at any costs” view, pointing out the hypocrisy of the Australian position given that Australia opposes any resumption of whaling but on the other hand slaughters millions of kangaroos each year. “Perhaps if we renamed minke whales the ‘kangaroos of the sea,’ the Australian public would support” a resumption in whaling.

Ultimately regardless of who is right about the scientific case, the IWC’s steadfast insistence on no whaling ultimately may backfire and result in less protections for whaling. As the even the IWC secretary, Dr. Ray Gabmell, told BBC News, the pro-whaling nations are likely to leave the IWC if it maintains its ideological opposition to the resumption of whaling. Whaling outside the purvey of the IWC would almost certainly be worse for the whales than hunting under the aegis of the IWC.

“I would think it much better that it was brought within international regulations and oversight,” Gambell said. “I think the commission will need to move forward on measures which would allowed controlled whaling, otherwise it will lose credibility. If the commission cannot set its house in order, people will start to ask: ‘Why do we need it at all?'”

This is not dissimilar to the issue currently facing species preservation plans in the United States, such as for wolves, where activists fight to bring a species back but then fight tooth and nail any attempt to control their population through hunting. Unfortunately, if political communities know that once an endangered species recovers that they will have no means to control its numbers, this creates an enormous disincentive to preserve endangered species, as well as leaving the impression that preserving endangered species is not about science but about Green sentimentality.

Around the world the self-interest of communities is being used to spur efforts to save endangered species, but the irrational attempt to ban culling and hunting of species once they have recovered threatens to reverse that progress.

Sources:

Australia accused of whaling hypocrisy. The BBC, July 2, 2000.

Whaling ban stans – for now. The BBC, July 6, 2000.

Whaling commission struggles to survive. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Whale sanctuary rejected. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Controversy swells around whaling commission meeting. ENN. June 29, 2000.

Cloned Cow Gives Birth

    In an interesting development in cloning, a cloned cow in Japan gave birth naturally to a healthy calf. The researchers responsible for Dolly the sheep managed to get her to give birth, but this appears to be the first confirmed incident of a cloned cow giving birth.

    “There have been arguments over the fertility of cloned cattle but the birth can be seen as a convincing answer,” Koichi Yamamoto, deputy director of the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center where the cow gave birth, told the BBC. “Kaga No 2 is feeding its calf and it shows that cloned cows can recognise their own babies and may have maternal instincts.”

Source:

Cow clone gives birth. The BBC. July 11, 2000.

You Suck as a Writer

    Occasionally I get e-mails that don’t criticize the content of my web pages, but instead focus on my perceived failings as a writer. On the one hand, I’m never too sure how much credence to put into criticism that rarely goes deeper than “you suck,” but on the other hand I have spent a lot of time thinking about writing and the web, especially when it comes to issues of quantity vs. quality of writing.

    In that debate I definitely come down on the quantity side. I worry a lot about any possible errors in logic or facts, but typographical errors or sentences that could be constructed better don’t really worry me very much. For awhile, I sent freelance op-ed columns to the Detroit News. They published the columns, sent me a check, and the editor I dealt with said very kind things about the quality of my writing. But behind the scenes, each of the columns I submitted to him went through 8 to 9 drafts minimum before I dared send them to him. I’d easily spend 10 to 15 hours over a weekend on a single 500 word article, making sure each word did exactly what was needed — no more and no less.

    Eventually, if my sites continue to be successful, I’ll get to quit my day job and devote more time to quality control, but for the moment I’m more interested in getting my ideas out there rather than making sure everything is picture perfect. The one thing I do to compensate for this is on a monthly basis I go back and re-read what I’ve written that month, editing it for punctuation, grammar, spelling, and sentence construction. I think that’s a pretty good compromise.

Does Study Really Mean Women Approve of Domestic Violence?

A British study recently suggested that a rather large minority of women approve of domestic violence, but unfortunately it’s hard to tell exactly what the study means.

According to a report in the Sunday Times (UK) on the study,

…[500] women taking part were asked to comment on a situation where a man argued with his wife about her long working hours. At the end of the row he slapped her face and locked her in the bathroom.

About 25 percent of the women said they sympathized with the man, and 30 percent said they didn’t believe he should be arrested. Caroline Healy, who conducted the study, interpreted this result as evidence of the failure to communicate the anti-domestic violence message:

Although the Government is spending a lot on publicity to say that violence shouldn’t be dealt with in the home, that message isn’t always getting through. This research shows a clear need for more public awareness and public education work, particularly in primary schools. More needs to be spent on teaching people about it and more research needs to be done.

But the results are ambiguous at best even taking them at their face value. The first result is hardly even interesting — it is possible for men and women to feel sympathy for someone without approving of his or her actions.

Much the same problem occurs with whether or not the husband should be arrested for assaulting his wife. Some studies tend to show that legal intervention in low level acts of violence tends to worsen rather than improve the situation. Those who don’t think the husband should be arrested might think that some form of family counseling might be more likely to change his behavior than arrest.

It’s a shame that studies like this usually only ask the 500 women to react to scenarios where men assault women. It would be interesting to have asked the same people about a situation where a woman slaps her husband after a verbal argument. Would they have felt any sympathy for the woman? Would they have thought the woman should have been arrested?

I know personally my wife and I have never committed acts of violence against each other (and I really can’t imagine this happening), but if my wife should slap me after a heated argument calling the police as the first strategy would be counter-productive over the long term. Does it follow then that, as Healy puts it, I am “implicitly condon[ing] the use of force in intimate relationships”? No, of course not, but neither does every relationship fit into the same cookie cutter mode that requires legal intervention for resolving incidents of low level violence.

Source:

Not all women condemn wife beaters. Gillian Harris, The Sunday Times, July 11, 2000.

High Gas Prices: Are Price Controls and Antitrust Lawsuits the Answer?

    Over the past 20 years, gasoline prices have tended to follow the typical pattern for a mature commodity — prices have tended to oscillate in a 3-4 year cycle between high and low prices. Every time gas prices hit their highest levels, people and politicians whine about price gouging and lack of competition in the oil industry, and those complaints are forgotten after gasoline prices inevitably start their downward movement.

    The July issue of Mother Jones includes an article by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman (The Solution to Rising Gas Prices: Antitrust Action)arguing that this latest spike in gasoline prices is due entirely to consolidation and mergers within the oil industry. According to Mokhiber and Weissman, such consolidation inevitably leads to higher prices and the only way to achieve lower gas prices over the long haul is for the government to initiate antitrust actions against oil companies. Unfortunately there view of increased gas prices is extremely superficial.

    As Mokhiber and Weissman point out, 18 months ago the two largest suppliers of gasoline, Mobil and Exxon merged. At that time industry analysts claimed that the merger would have no effect on gas prices. Now the duo say such consolidation is behind rising gas prices.

    If true, it’s kind of odd that Mobil and Exxon waited until now. After all prior to the recent dramatic increase of gas prices, U.S. consumers enjoyed gas prices that reach record low levels, which certainly didn’t help the profits of companies involved in the gasoline industry. Mokhiber and Weissman don’t use the figure, but others have went around claiming the oil industry must be price gouging because their profits jumped 500 percent in the first quarter of 2000, but that only looks astonishing precisely because first quarter 2000 profits are being compared to previous quarters when the price of gasoline was selling at record or near-record lows throughout most of the country.

    Like other observers, Mokhiber and Weissman are especially concerned about the sudden spike in costs in Midwest gasoline, dismissing the oil industry’s claim that the cleaner fuel mandated for cities such as Chicago is responsible for much of the increase. According to Mokhiber and Weissman, “That’s also true, but the Environmental Protection Agency — noting that the oil industry has had six years to prepare itself for the implementation of cleaner fuel standards that the industry helped negotiate — says the cleaner-burning gas should only cost 4 to 7 cents more per gallon.”

    First, the notion that bureaucrats are experts on just how much it costs to put their regulations in place is laughably absurd. The EPA and other agencies have a long history of telling the American people that this or that regulation or change will only cost a tiny amount of money, only to see the actual cost skyrocket.

    Second, both the EPA and Mother Jones article ignore the larger infrastructure issues facing the gasoline industry. Gasoline prices in the Midwest shot up, for example, after two breakdowns in the supply line occurred. First, problems emerged at one of the few refineries that produces the clean burning fuel, and then a major gas pipeline for the Midwest broke in Michigan. The result was that the amount of gasoline the industry could get into Midwest gas stations fell very quickly, and as a result gas prices shot up very quickly, especially for the clean fuel mandated by the EPA. Add rising oil prices to that mix and the result is very predictable — a temporary surge in gas prices.

    It is ironic that Mokhiber and Weissman call for further government regulation when existing regulation is largely responsible for the brief increase in prices. Regulations that require different formulations of gasoline to be sent to different parts of the country, along with regulations that have stopped construction of new refineries cold and diminished investment in pipeline capacity and other infrastructure (much the same thing has happened in a related industry, power generation, where the every changing regulatory landscape has diminished investments in adding power generating infrastructure).

    Mokhiber and Weissman’s “solutions” are downright bizarre. Basically they want a windfall profits tax “to put an end to the industry’s gain from consumer’s pain due to OPEC and other input costs increases.” This is an odd thing. One of the few valid insights of what I’ll loosely call the environmental left is that in many instances consumers don’t pay the real cost of the resources they use which tends to create wasteful use patterns. Mokhiber and Weissman, on the other hand, want consumers to be shielded from the costs of inputs such as oil.

    Furthermore, they advocate a return to price controls on gasoline which are even worse. First, they don’t work as anyone who remembers the huge gas lines of the 1970s knows. Second, they go even further toward shielding consumers from the real costs of the goods they consume. Mokhiber and Weissman ask, “why should industry regulate the market instead of democratic government authorities?” Precisely because democratic government authorities have every incentive to please one group of economic actors over the other (whether it is consumers or gasoline companies), and ignore the many varied problems of supplying gasoline. Across the board, government control of prices results in goods being priced either too expensively (for example, the price control-like power exercised over sugar) or too low (for example, government pricing of water far below market prices in the western United States).

    The reality is that basing regulations and price control schemes based on gasoline prices over the past 6 to 8 months is a ridiculous way to conduct business. If instead we look at the average price for gasoline in the United States over the past 5 or 10 years, the story is completely different — even with the regulations on oil and gas companies, a gallon of gasoline can be bought in the United States more cheaply than almost anywhere else in the world. The temporary pain caused by brief fluctuations in the market price of gasoline is more than offset by the long term trend of lower gas prices. Further regulation or price controls in the gasoline market would effectively end the cheap energy ride that Americans have been enjoying for almost two decades now.

The Wage Gap Continues to Vanish

The latest annual salary survey by Working Women magazine pretty much confirms the trend over the last decade — on average women’s earnings are only 76.5% that of men’s, but the difference disappears when comparing men and women in the same field with similar characteristics. In fact in some fields, women earn significantly more than men.

The current figure is an improvement of 14% since 1979, when women made on average only 62.5 cents for every dollar a man made.

Comparing men as a whole to women as a whole is deceptive, however, since the two groups are not homogenous in the work force. Men, for example, tend to work many more hours than women. Many women also tend to take extended breaks from the work force to have children during the twenties, which sets them back in the race for promotions.

“It’s extremely hard to make comparisons, but when you are better able to compare employees of equivalent aspirations and equivalent commitment, the closer the salaries are,” economist June O’Neill told the Associated Press.

Ironically there are now some fields where men out-earn women.In advertising, women CEO’s earn an average of $275,000 compared to men who make $253,100. The most startling example is occupational therapy where women earn an average of about $39,000 compared to men who make an average of about $32,000. Typically many feminists have argued that the mere existence of discrepancies in average salaries is prima facie evidence of sexual discrimination. It will be interesting to see how they shift their position once the salary advantage shifts in other occupations.

It is also interesting to consider how the closing wage gap will affect support among men and women for affirmative action programs. As Working Woman editor Lisa Freeman pointed out, the reason for the shift is largely because most business today care little about the sex of a worker, but rather the quality of a worker. “They’re looking for good employees, regardless of color, regardless of sex,” Freeman told the Associated Press.

Contrary to the assertions of radical feminists, women don’t need any special privileges to succeed economically, just a fair shot based on their merit.

Source:

Study: women’s salaries lag behind men’s pay. The Associated press, July 4, 2000.