Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom

I found Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons0.3productChris Hibbert

to be quite readable and very enjoyable. This book was published in 1990; Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in 2009.

Governing the Commons presents several case studies, and a framework for analyzing situations in which people share access to what she calls a "Common Pool Resource", and find or don't find ways to share equitable access to the resource peacefully and over a long time period. One of her goals is to show that Garret Hardin's idea of the tragedy of the commons is not as ubiquitous as many have believed. Ostrom found and discussed cases where fishermen shared productive access to fisheries, farmers found ways to share access to irrigation water, and herders divided up access to unfenced grazing land. She then presents a framework to analyze what factors made it more or less likely that these cooperative arrangements would be stable over the long term.

The case studies include a few incidents where the arrangements failed or were never brought into existence. She analyzes these in order to trace the causes to lack of coordination, insufficient ability of the participants to monitor each other's behavior, or external interference from governmental bodies (either corrupt officials violating the norms that had been established, or a simple failure to provide sufficent facilities for negotiation.)

I like Ostrom's approach and her way of thinking about these situations. She studied cases where the allocation of resources among participants were mostly monitored and policed by the users of the resources themselves. In a few cases, the government facilitatated the creation of the agreements, or endorsed the approach, but mostly it was up to the users to maintain and evolve their institutions as conditions changed.

One of her strong conclusions is that governments are seldom willing to let a local group manage a local resource in an ideosyncratic way, but broad rules that are applied over varying terrain, social situations, and groups with differing abilities to monitor their neighbors' behavior are seldom workable and stable. General rules leave too much leeway for outsiders to exploit loopholes. Once use of a resource isn't limited to people who know each other, agree on the rules, and know that their grandparents followed the same rules, and expect their grandchildren to do the same, then the self-reinforcing incentive structure will often break down.

Ostrom presents detailed studies of shared access to grazing and timber land in Switzerland and Japan, communally maintained aquaducts in Spain and the Philippines, access to aquifers in the L.A. basin, and shared use of fishery resources in Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Nova Scotia. Based on these case studies, her framework proposes that in order to be successful, a multi-party agreement governing shared access to a renewable, but depletable resource must allow for clearly defined boundaries (in time or space), communal monitoring, graduated sanctions, and a transparent conflict resolution mechanism.

She gives examples of both fisheries and water distribution arrangements where participants had assigned timeslots. These don't require centralized monitoring, because at each transition, the following user ensures that the predecessor turns things over on time. Since there are sanctions and either self-enforced or socially-backed enforcement, people nearly always transition promptly, and accept the punishment if they are somewhat late. Since all the users of the resource know each other and share long-standing social bonds, occasional violations due to exigent circumstances can be overlooked or lightly punished. Everyone in the community finds out what happened, so repeat offenders can be punished more harshly and monitored more carefully.

In Nova Scotia, an arrangement that had worked solidly for generations fell due to the national government's insistence on a uniform solution that didn't account for local differences. The end result was that outside fishermen could encroach, and weren't subject to the local sanctions, so the feedback mechanisms that had reduced usage in the past didn't constrain the outsiders, with the result that even the locals stopped respecting the rules. The local fishery collapsed, and it took years to convince the national government to allow some local control, and more years before the fish recovered and could be productively fished again.

I also reviewed Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity, which is based on this and much of Ostrom's other work. It presents a general framework for analyzing the kind of institutions investigated in the fieldwork in Governing the Commons.

Robert Ellickson's Order without Law covers similar ground, but focuses on a situation where the rules about who is responsible for damage to neighbors' property varies from place to place. In that situation, Ellickson found that when people were part of a community, they could adapt their behavior to local conditions and not be bound by what the law prescribed. It's also a kind of spontaneous order, but the spontaneity is constrained by the governing context. It's also worth comparing Ostrom's work to James C. Scott's work (Seeing like a State, and The Art of Not Being Governed). Scott's focus is on ways that governments get in the way of local control and organization and how that iterferes with people's natural ability to organize and govern themselves.

Order Without Law, Robert Ellickson

Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law is a study, as its sub-title says of "How Neighbors Settle Disputes". Ellickson starts with a deep dive into how ranchers and farmers in Shasta County, in the rural northern part of California actually deal with a problem that Richard Coase brought up in a classic paper on transactions costs. In "The Problem of Social Cost", Coase argued that if transaction costs were irrelevant, it wouldn't matter how property rights were allocated. Regardless of whether ranchers were responsible for keeping their cattle from straying or farmers were responsible for keeping unwelcome beasts out of their crops, the same solutions would be reached. If the law doesn't allocate responsibility to the low cost actor, then according to Coase the other party would find a way to pay the other party to do the cheaper thing. Of course, most of the argument since then has focused on the fact that transaction costs are seldom negligible.
Ellickson says that Shasta County is uniquely positioned for a study on this issue

Shasta County is "open range." In open range an owner of cattle is typically not legally liable for damages stemming from his cattle's accidental trespass upon unfenced land. Since 1945, however a special California statute has authorized the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, the county's elected governing body, to "close the range" in subareas of the county. A closed-range ordinance makes a cattleman strictly liable (that is liable even in the absence of negligence) for any damage his livestock might cause while trespassing within the territory described by the ordinance. The Shasta County Board of Supervisors has exercised its power to close the range on dozens of occasions since 1945, thus changing for selected territories the exact rule of liability that Coase used in his famous example.

This is the kind of change that economists love to study, because they can look at how behavior changes over time and treat the change of law as an independent variable. Any consistent changes in people's activity after the law changes can be treated as the result of the legal change.Ellickson focuses on how neighbors actually respond when trespasses occur. The book is filled with colorful stories giving details of what happened when particular responsible or irresponsible ranchers allowed their livestock to wander. The main observation is that while people were generally aware whether their property was in 'open' or 'closed' lands, their resolutions to incidents had little to do with what the law called for and more to do with a commonly accepted wisdom about that cattle owners are morally responsible for the damage. According to Ellickson, this fits Coase's model, since cattle owners are the low-cost provider. There are a variety of different types of pasture throughout Shasta County, and the cattle owners know more about how densely they are using any particular piece, and are more aware of which neighbors are most sensitive to their intrusions.
One of the most important enforcement mechanisms that Ellickson cites is plain simple gossip. Most of the people he talks about are eager to make things right, rather than be the subject of their neighbors' pointed comments. There is one member of the community who gets discussed a lot, but there are more extreme measures available when there are repeated run-ins, and one party is a consistent non-cooperator.
Ellickson is a good story teller and an astute observer. While the subjects of his study are less tight-knit than the farmers Ostrum described, there is enough social cohesion so that norms develop, and neighborliness is for the most part, a stronger limitation on people's interactions than actual laws.




0.3productChris Hibbert

Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott

I found a lot to like in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. It presents a way of thinking about the consequences of governments' interventions that makes a large category of unintended side effects appear coherent. Once you see this consistency, you can make predictions about other interventions and the ways they will turn out without needing to ascribe motivation to the planners behind them. In order to achieve their goals, bureaucrats and autocrats have to make the population they intend to help more surveyable, visible, and regular. That very act, independent of how much the rest of the change might be done with the best interests of the people in mind, reduces the relevance of the local knowledge and expertise that they have built up over time, making them more dependent on government, and less able to fill in the gaps in the ways that lead to smoothly functioning societies.

Scott describes several grand schemes, mostly done to help various populations, though often in ignorance of the ways of the people living in the affected area. He discusses state-sponsored forestry, Corbusier's city planning, government-sponsored (and private) experiments in industrial agriculture, China's Great Leap Forward, resettlements in Tanzania, as well as touching on other examples. In each case he shows how the (necessarily) high level plans of of the top officials were translated into concrete details for the convenience of those implementing the plan, in ignorance of the deleterious consequences for the affected villagers. The end result in each case conformed to the planners' specifications, but left an unlivable environment in which the inhabitants were more dependent on the government, and often much poorer than they started out.

Whether the results of all these grand schemes ended up being helpful is questionable, and is certainly independent of what the original intent was, or how much effort was spent during the planning stage in considering ways to make the outcome closer to what the subjects would have asked for. Since plans and maps are necessarily abstractions from reality, and since the plans must be carried out by intermediaries whose interests are distinct from both the rulers and the people being 'helped', those doing the work will have to have to fill in details about how to get the work done. This will often be done in ignorance of the intent, and more usually without concern for the extended well-being of the future of the community.

As with Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, the point isn't to move towards a conclusion on how to do a better job of redesigning a society, so much as of having skepticism that it's possible to achieve humane objectives by trying. In most cases, hubris would lead to addressing problems by allowing people to adjust things in an incremental manner. Otherwise we risk replacing things that seems suboptimal to an outsider with situations that are truly dismal for those left behind. While discussing Soviet collective farms, Scott talks about some attempts by American industrial agricultural firms to do something similar in the midwest. Their grand plans for integrated industrial farms didn't succeed any better, but the difference was that when the outcome became clear, the companies involved backed off and the land reverted to more local, context-sensitive control.

0.3productChris Hibbert

Obviousness in Software

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Chris Hibbert

Bob Purvey (a friend who is both a software engineer and a registered Patent Agent) has written a fairly short paper to explain why the patent office doesn't do a good job screening out "obvious" software patents. He observes that the approach they use for patents on pharmaceuticals seems to do a much better job, and shows how it would apply in software.
One of the reasons this is relevant is that whenever the software industry tries to get the federal government to reform the patent laws (since they're so obviously broken as applied to software), congress is counter-lobbied by the drug companies who argue that patents are crucial to their business model, and without the present system, new drug discovery would whither away. Congress, of course, doesn't understand either industry, so they collect contributions from both sides and do nothing. If the software industry had a more focussed proposal, it would be more likely to get the kind of change that would be useful to it.
Purvey's argument is that when deciding whether an application for a patent on a new drug or medical technique is novel, the examiner is expected to consider whether a Person with Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would think of that solution, given a suitable description of the problem. If the approach described is one of a handful that the POSITA would think to try, ("obvious to try") then it's obvious enough to be ineligible for a patent. If it's one of a thousand approaches (in the drug business, this is now common in drug discovery) that you'd have to try, with an unknown likelihood of success then it doesn't count as obvious.
The patent office often grants patents on well-known software techniques applied in new contexts. Purvey argues that the "obvious to try" standard would invalidate those patents because software people are trained in abstraction, and it's obvious to all skilled practitioners that previously known techniques are likely to apply in the new context once you describe the problem correctly. The fact that the patent applicant described the problem with non-standard terminology doesn't invalidate the standard tools, and that should be an acceptable argument when suing to invalidate a patent.
As Purvey showed, that's an accepted standard in drug patent trials. A prominent (pharma) case he talked about in the paper hinged on showing that the patent application used non-standard terminology to describe something that was an obvious combination of published techniques. If lawyers attempting to invalidate a patent brought this standard into play more frequently, more patents would be invalidated quickly. And this is an approach that shouldn't have to wait for new action from legislators.

The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

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Chris Hibbert

David Deutsch's The Beginning of infinity was a fun and surprising read. Deutsch is well known as a theoretical physicist (having pioneered the idea of quantum computing), and has written very readable papers and books and given good talks at TED and elsewhere. In this book, he talks about a wide variety of systems that allow unlimited expression, growth, and progress. His goal is to show how DNA is a universal language for describing how to build varieties of living things in the same way that a Turing machine can express different kinds of computation. He talks about how the discovery of the scientific method put us on a path to learning an ever-growing set of facts about how the world works.

He comes across as very libertarian, (which Wikipedia presents matter-of-factly), though he's not strident about it at all.

His explanation of explanation is that good explanations capture details about something of interest in a way that is hard to vary; if you change any of the parts of a good explanation, you get a story that doesn't stick together, or that makes predictions that don't hold up. Bad explanations can be just-so stories, or "because the gods wanted it that way". Why did the gods want it that way? What if they change their mind or disagree? And a really good explanation adds details about facets of reality other than its primary aim.

When talking about the foundations for reasoning about morality, Deutsch demolishes the old maxim that "you can't derive an ought from an is" as a basis for rejecting facts as evidence in discussions of morality. He points out that while it's literally true, it's also the case that you don't derive physical laws from single facts. Instead facts fuel intuitions that lead to proposals for theories, and can count as evidence against particular proposed theories. If a theory runs counter to an observed fact, the theory loses. Similarly, "observed facts can be useful in criticizing moral explanations." In order to persuade people of a moral theory, proponents have to offer explanations, and when those explanations are refuted by observation, the listeners will often be skeptical.

I found this passage, on the evolutionary origins of DNA as a universal language to be incisive enough that I posted it to Google+:

Initially, the genetic code and the mechanism that interpreted it were both evolving along with everything else in the organisms. But there came a moment when the code stopped evolving yet the organisms continued to do so. At that moment the system was coding for nothing more complex than primitive, single celled creatures. Yet virtually all subsequent organisms on Earth, to this day, have not only been based on DNA replicators but have used exactly the same alpahabet of bases, grouped into three-base 'words', with only small variations in the meanings of those 'words'.

That means that, considered as a language for specifying organisms, the genetic code has displayed phenomenal reach. It evolved only to specify organisms with no nervous systems, no ability to move or exert forces, no internal organs and no sense organs, whose lifestyle consisted of little more than synthesizing their own structural constituents and then dividing in two. An yet the same language today specifies the hardware and software for countless multicellular behaviours that had no close analogue in those organisms, such as running and flying and breathing and mating and recognizing predators and prey. It also specifies engineering structures such as wings and teeth, and nanotechnology such as immune systems, and even a brain that is capable of explaining quasars, designing other organisms from scratch, and wondering why it exists.

In discussing the nature of representative democracy, Deutsch reveals his libertarianism. He starts with a very clear explanation of Arrow's impossibility theorem, (which shows that there are no possible voting systems that satisfy four simple, obvious criteriaf). Deutsch shows how that applies not only to individuals voting, but also to parliaments and legislatures, how it shows that simple math makes it irrational for voting to solve our problems. He sides with Popper in saying htat we'd be better off looking for possible consistent systems that do a good job of getting rid of bad policies and bad governments without requiring violence. He doesn't hope to find a system that wouldn't occasionally make mistakes; instead he wants a system that is willing to identify errors after the fact and backtrack.

The essence of democratic decision-making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections.

What we should be looking for is ways of organizing society that keep options open, allow invention and discovery, and are willing to backtrack. What we have now is a system that institutionalizes stasis, and makes it hard to revisit choices once made. We'd be better off with a system that allowed exploration of many alternatives to compare them, and only made binding choices once it became clear that one approach produces better outcomes in a variety of situations over the long term.

Deutsch also comes out strongly against compromise. He doesn't like proportional representation and parliamentary systems, since they enforce compromise. This has the consequence that no one's ideas are tried out in the way they intended, so everyone can continue to maintain that things would have worked out better if they hadn't had to compromise. In the long term, world was able to learn something from the failed socialist experiments in the Soviet Union, China, and several smaller countries. While some people continue to promote those ideas, most others can see that when they are tried on a large scale, they lead to bad outcomes.

Overall, I found it an engrossing, enjoyable read. Deutsch had some great explanations for some important phenomena, and pulled together commonalities between some widely disparate ideas.

Fear of Flying

I'm a skeptic when the flight attendants ask passengers to turn off their electronic devices. Years ago, I saw a reference to an IEEE Spectrum article that apparently provided the justification for the airlines' paranoia on the subject, and so I tracked down and read the article. My recollection of the article is that it contained only a hypothetical mechanism by which electronic devices inside the airplane could radiate through the skin, and resonate depending on the specific surface geometry of the airframe. In some cases, the signal might be picked up by external antennas serving the plane's navigation systems. The article (as I remember it) didn't mention any concrete cases, so I discounted it.

For many years, my practice has been to turn on my iPod (previously the CD Player) once I was settled in my seat, and not turn it off unless an attendant noticed that I had it on and directly told me to turn it off. If the pilot noticed interference, I reasoned, she could ask the passengers to turn stuff off, and I'd happily comply. (I can see why cell phones and wireless devices would be a problem, but why would a CD Player be radiating significant amounts of RF interference?) If they couldn't tell that anything was happening, I believed, it must have been all superstition on the part of the airline industry. After all, they've given us plenty of reason to believe that if they can blame the rules on someone else, they are completely unconcerned about inconveniencing us, and little reason to believe that the safety rules are updated when conditions change. (Have you noticed that they're still explaining how seat belts work? How long has it been since you could assume that 99.99% of potential passengers were familiar with seat belts?)

The Mercury News had an article a few days ago saying that there was a new study showing that Cell Phones are causing interference. As usual, there's not enough information in the article to tell what the study looked at or how significant the results were, so I googled for the new article. The authors are mostly worried about the proposals that cell phone use be allowed in flight, but they also mentioned a telling incident involving a DVD player. The most alarming fact in the article, though is that the Aviation Safety Reporting System database that used to track anonymous reports of safety problems reported by crew members or the public has discontinued some services due to budget cuts.

I'm not particularly a fan off more government reporting and regulation, but when they've crowded out private alternatives, it can be dangerous to drop the government funded programs.

Back to the errant DVD player. The new article reported:

In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error re-occurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again. Game electronics and laptops were the culprits in other reports in which the crew verified in the same way that a particular PED caused erratic navigation indications.

This was the kind of specific detail that I've been claiming for a while was missing in the previous article, and which would have been convincing. So I went back to look at the older article. This looks like the article I found back then, but it does report specific incidents quite similar to this one:

A report selected from the ASRS database illustrates this type of incident. In March 1993, a large passenger aircraft was at cruise altitude just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport when the No. 1 compass suddenly precessed IO degrees to the right. The first flight attendant was asked to check whether any passengers were operating electronic devices. She said that a passenger in seat X had just turned on his laptop computer.

The report continues: "I asked that the passenger turn off his laptop computer for a period of 10 minutes, which he did. I then slaved the No. 1 compass, and it returned to normal operation for the 10 minute period. I then asked that the passenger tum on his computer once again. The No. 1 compass immediately precessed 8 degrees to the right. The computer was then turned off for a 30-minute period during which the No. 1 compass operation was verified as normal.

Whoops. Well, nowadays, I use an iPod, and it's hard for me to imagine that they radiate as much RF as a PC or even a DVD player. But I may start turning it off for landings, which is what the experts seem most concerned about.

Here are some more excerpts from Spectrum:

All in all, we found 125 entries in the ASRS database that reported PED interference. Of these, 77 were considered highly correlated, based on the description of observed PED use and interference occurrence. The reports included cases of critical aircraft systems such as navigation and throttle settings being affected. Based on the random sample entries from 1995 to 2001, we estimate that the average number of reported interference events might be as high as 23 per year. There is considerable uncertainty about how many incidents actually occur in a year; a number of factors could make the number higher-or even lower-than the estimate of 23. Some reported incidents have not been entered into the database, and some of the reported incidents may not be interference events (that is, they might be false positives). But the data certainly suggest that PED interference events occur a few times each month.

At present, we believe that passenger use of electronics on board commercial aircraft should continue to be limited and that passengers should not be allowed to operate intentionally radiating devices such as cellphones and wireless computer equipment during critical stages of flight.

The practice of including an identifiable random sample of incidents was dropped (because of budget cuts), the ASRS can no longer be used to do statistically valid studies of all types of incidents, including those involving PED interference. Congress should provide budgetary support to reinstate the random sample entries or, better yet, to enter all the received reports.

Isn't this something the airline industry should fund privately if the government is letting the ball drop?