Links 2024-01-07 - Contra Common Sense
A few links offering views contradictory to the conventional wisdom.
As is the tradition around here, I have some links to recent articles to share each of which challenges conventionally held beliefs.
1.
The Antiplanner points out that despite huge government subsidies to European passenger trains, rail travel has a very small and shrinking share of European travel. As he points out in the brief post:
The pandemic drastically changed everything and not in favor of rail travel, which fell to 5.6 percent. Bus and air travel also shrank, while the big winner was auto travel, which grew to nearly 80 percent.
Time will tell for sure, but if the U.S. is any guide, auto travel has already fully recovered from the pandemic and air travel will recover soon. Intercity rail travel might recover, but with less certainty than air travel. Bus travel will lose no matter what else gains.
All the European spending on money-losing passenger trains has done little other than hurt money-making bus operations. Americans who want to spend more on Amtrak or high-speed rail will do little more than repeat Europe’s mistakes.
2.
The Endangered Species Act turned 50 last year. Despite good intentions and the social-desirability bias that perpetuates uncritical support for the ESA, Tate Watkins writing at Reason explores the fact that it has largely failed to achieve its goals. Additionally, its mix of bad incentives and lack of cost-benefit analysis has worked to thwart its supporters’ goals while doing real economic damage.
Perhaps we could learn something by second guessing our approach to conservation—maybe even looking to Mexico for answers. Watkins offers a concluding example:
South of the border, in northern Mexico, a group of ranchers has found a way to coexist with endangered jaguars. The nonprofit Northern Jaguar Project rewards ranchers who support recovery efforts: For every photo of a jaguar taken by remote trail cameras, ranchers receive a payment. As Hamilton dreamed, the approach transforms a protected species that would usually be a liability or even poaching target into an asset.
"At first, the attraction was the money," rancher Diego Ezrré told a local radio station a few years ago. "But most of the ranchers who are in the program, our perspective has changed. We realize that the jaguars aren't such a threat."
U.S. endangered species policy, on the other hand, remains as likely to hamstring as to encourage conservation. In Arizona, jaguars worry ranchers even though the species barely exists there. The big cat used to roam from Louisiana to California, but, like many large predators, it was exterminated over time. Jaguars are now largely confined to the territory stretching from Mexico south to the tropics, with only rare sightings north of the border. Yet the Fish and Wildlife Service designated critical habitat in Arizona and New Mexico for the species in 2014.
3.
One “animal” all parents might agree would be good to see go extinct is Baby Shark. But maybe that is just because these parents just don’t appreciate great art. Michael Huemer argues that what we think of as the best art lacks logical foundation.
Still, though “Baby Shark” is clearly a work of genius, some might be skeptical about the assertion that it is greater than Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. These are very different genres of music. Can they really be compared? And isn’t aesthetic value subjective anyway? Who is to say which of these is the greater artwork?
Well, me.
Later in conclusion:
What is the purpose of art? If the “best” art isn’t that which is most beautiful, and it isn’t that which produces the most pleasure, then why should we care about artistic value? In what sense is good art reliably better than bad art?
4.
Staying with the genre of music, my last link is to the provocative post by Joakim Book arguing that music lacks economic value. This is a new version of the diamond-water paradox worth reading.
Economically speaking, the pennies the musicians earn per stream land somewhere between donations and rent-seeking. Put in the language of a modern conversation about music, rights, and art, shouldn’t inventors be compensated for their work? Aren’t creators entitled to be paid for their work?
As a matter of economic fact, no, they’re not. Since the retirement of the labor theory of value, labor doesn’t have economic value simply because it was expensed. Economic transactions and the property rights we use to guide them are intrinsically related to scarcity. We don’t price or transact oxygen, words, or the recipe for your grandmother’s meat stew — not because they don’t have value (they’re immensely valuable!), but because they don’t have scarcity or rivalrousness. One person’s use of them doesn’t prevent another person from using them. No human was made worse off because I temporarily hogged the six-something liters of air currently in my lungs.
…
Technology has competed away most of the surplus rent that musicians (but let’s be honest, mostly record labels) could acquire from distributing their work in the twentieth century. Instead, musicians have turned to gigs, sponsorships, ads, merchandise, and more recently innovative features like value-for-value streaming.
From an economic perspective that comes as no surprise; if the marginal value of the music itself is rapidly approaching zero, the only way a creator of that music can earn an income is by selling ancillary goods and services. But those can only sell if you have the music in the first place. Music, much like books, are arduous and time-consuming business cards.
As with all four linked pieces, please go read the whole thing. The challenge to your own conventional misunderstandings or support to the case you can make against others holding these views will be rewarding.