It’s easy to hate the NRA if you come from certain parts. But the NRA is not very unusual in this respect. Interest groups, by their nature are unable to have the overview to know when to throw their cause under the bus for the “greater good.” This is a general problem for all interest groups, regardless of whether their cause is noble or not.
The real question is how do we fight Moloch by a different method than competing interest groups (which will follow the usual “behavior physics” of interest groups, which feminism is not exempt from, regardless of how noble its goal is).
Like Lumifer, I think the NRA is doing the right thing here—even strictly from a conservationist perspective. If we all stopped eating eggs, would there be more chickens? Of course not. When I mentioned similar logic here at least the vegetarians were honest that they wanted to drastically reduce the chicken population. But if using fewer chicken products leads to fewer chickens, how will using fewer elephant products lead to more elephants? And note that these two contradictory answers are frequently pushed by the very same people.
If you really wanted to preserve elephant populations, you’d make it easier for people to farm them for their ivory, which would go, in part, into making gun handles. But because the NRA are culturally alien to you, you’d like to throw their cause under the bus “for the greater good,” for the very slightest reason.
So yeah, we all want causes we don’t care about to shut up and get out of our way. It’s a good thing that we can’t make them. After all, NRA members aren’t just gun enthusiasts, they are also citizens in every other way. If NRA policy interferes too much with (say) economic wellbeing in the eyes of its members, then the NRA will lose force as an interest group.
I think the NRA is doing the right thing here—even strictly from a conservationist perspective
I think maybe you do not realize how poor the institutions are here. There isn’t some actor with long term overview maximizing ivory profits (and incidentally ensuring elephants continue as a species). Commercial overexploitation of resources in the biosphere is extremely common, and requires coordination to solve properly (see for example cod stocks collapse in the Atlantic for one example historically important for Europe). Collapse (the book) gave some examples where coordinating a long term exploitation of the environment was solved properly and examples where it wasn’t.
But my point isn’t about the NRA, or environmentalists specifically, I just used them as an example. My point is about a general problem with interest group ecosystems. If an interest group advocates a bridge to nowhere it is not going to lose force, it is doing precisely what it is meant to do.
But because the NRA are culturally alien to you
I would like to add here that I have been very very careful not to discuss my actual politics. Most of your assumptions about my culture or my politics are false. (So I guess I passed the ideological Turing test?)
Back when I had long hair, I was once accosted by a dude trolling for Obama votes who said: “you have long hair, you must be an Obama supporter!” What you are doing is basically this. Filling a hole with a pigeon is going to be very frustrating for you in this case.
Not necessarily. An effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is property rights. While at the moment there may not be an actor with a long-term commercial interest in elephants, this kind of legislation is making sure that there never will be one.
Property rights do not magically enforce themselves, you need a government to enforce it for you. Everyone agreeing to a government’s monopoly on force is yet another coordination problem. This is not so easy in places where elephant poaching happens. That aside, Collapse had examples where property rights were not sufficient in themselves. You should read it, I enjoyed it a lot!
Property rights do not magically enforce themselves, you need a government to enforce it for you.
Again, not necessarily. A private security force works fine—especially in places where the government isn’t… particularly effective. Such governments aren’t all that good at coordination, either, by the way.
But the argument boiled down to its core is just incentives. It’s much better to have incentives for private people to have herds of elephants roam on their ranches than depend on government bureaucrats who, frankly, don’t care that much.
An international ban on ivory trading by itself wont’ save the elephants—the locals will just hunt them down for meat and because they destroy crops.
I think you just chose a bad example. Your underlying point that special-interest groups have tunnel vision and are constitutionally incapable of deviating from their charter is certainly valid.
I don’t understand what this is about anymore (I think you just like to argue?)
(a) There aren’t “private security forces” replacing governments making Africa a kind of modern day Snowcrash universe. Governments are mostly weak and corrupt, and there are warlords running around killing folks and each other, and taking their loot.
(b) The way the NRA makes its decisions has nothing to do with the political situation in Africa, the state of elephant herds in Africa, the long term fate of the African elephant species, or anything like that. They consult relevant gun makers, and decide based on that. This is contrary to the original claim that the NRA was making the correct decision even from a conservational point of view. They aren’t in this case, but if we did the math and found out they did, it would certainly be by accident, because they surely didn’t do the math.
(c) Do you actually know how many elephants are killed in Africa for non-ivory reasons?
The way the NRA makes its decisions has nothing to do with the political situation in Africa, the state of elephant herds in Africa, the long term fate of the African elephant species, or anything like that… This is contrary to the original claim the NRA was making the correct decision even from a conservational point of view. They aren’t in this case, but if we did the math and found out they did, it would certainly be by accident, because they surely didn’t do the math.
I didn’t claim that they made the correct decision for the right reasons. Of course it’s (in a sense) a felicitous coincidence that the NRA is in the right here from a conservationist point of view. But if environmental groups are helping the environment, I’d view that as even more of a felicitous coincidence, given their methods of making decisions.
It’s remarkable, but not hugely so, that the policies of a group who care about the property rights of American gun owners should align with strong property rights worldwide, and hence a flourishing environment. It would be far more remarkable if the policies of a group who care about purity rituals should lead to a flourishing environment.
Only as long as interesting things are being said :-)
There aren’t “private security forces” replacing governments
And nobody said that. But hiring guards for your farm/ranch/pasture is quite common and does happen to be private enforcement of property rights.
They consult relevant gun makers
I can’t imagine why contemporary gun makers would care about decades-old ivory. If anything, they’d prefer more constraints on sales of old guns as that enlarges the market for new guns.
And I don’t think anyone made a claim that NRA’s decision was correct from a conservationist point of view. The claim is that the law fails the cost-benefit analysis for certain (implied widespread) sets of values. I am sure ardent environmentalists are happy with it, but not everyone is an ardent environmentalist.
Do you actually know how many elephants are killed in Africa for non-ivory reasons?
Ah, good question. My pre-Google answer would be “some” and if pressed for numbers I’d say 10-20% at the moment, but with not much conviction. Accio Google!
Hmm… Lots of data but all of it is on “illegally killed” elephants which isn’t particularly useful in this context, as killing elephants is mostly illegal everywhere and so the meaning is just “human-killed”. My impression is that in areas with LOTS of poaching the great majority of elephants are killed for the ivory, but in areas with few “illegal kills” situation may differ. No data to support this impression, though. It also seems that there is a lot variability in the numbers killed year-to-year.
Do you see a problem with the dwindling elephant population too? If so, are you able to judge which is the greater problem? If so, what is your judgement?
Lots of existing ivory becomes illegal, leading to a local drop in value, leading to lots of US ivory being traded to countries where it isn’t illegal. Right?
So that first of all that sets up excellent opportunities for police sting operations. But it also drives down prices (at least for a few years), making elephant poaching less lucrative.
In parallel to that, the US is setting an example. A lot of countries copy US criminal laws rather than thinking them up from scratch (the War on Drugs being the textbook example), and since almost everyone loves elephants and the ivory trade is a huge and growing threat to them, there’ll be a particularly low threshold to copying this one.
Lots of existing ivory becomes illegal, leading to a local drop in value, leading to lots of US ivory being traded to countries where it isn’t illegal. Right?
Sigh. Wrong. Why don’t you at least look at the original link to the article about the ban? Notably, it says (emphasis mine):
Last month, the White House announced a ban on the commercial trade of elephant ivory, placing a total embargo on the new import of items containing elephant ivory, prohibiting its export except in the case of bona fide antiques, and clarified that “antiques” only refers to items more than 100 years old when it comes to ivory.
I neither said nor meant it was going to be exported legally. It’ll be black market trade, but it’ll still respond to market forces, just like drug trafficking does.
Hold on. No new ivory products can (legally) be imported or exported from the US, but ivory products already in the US can still be bought and sold, albeit subject to restrictions. Providing demand for ivory remains roughly constant, and the US continues not to be an ivory producer, we would expect that to lead to a rise in ivory prices in the US market, and almost no ivory being exported (but some being imported on the black market).
So how much ivory do you expect to be illegally exported out of the US as a result of that law?
And if you don’t care about legality, why would you export ivory, anyway? The prohibition destroys legal markets, but tends to raise prices in the black markets.
The prohibition destroys legal markets, but tends to raise prices in the black markets.
False. Scarcity raises prices, and black market goods are often scarce, but where illegal goods are not scarce (say street quality heroin) the profit margins are fairly low because illegality makes it hard to compete on brand so everyone competes on price.
So how much ivory do you expect to be illegally exported out of the US as a result of that law?
I don’t see how my estimate would matter in the slightest.
I don’t see how my estimate would matter in the slightest.
It would because your argument is that US exports will depress prices in the rest of the world. If the US exports amount to half a tusk, it’s not going to depress world prices much :-/
In any case, this seems to be descending into bickering. Agree to disagree?
No, I’m saying this law makes it less scarce, because it makes buyers leave the market.
I can’t make an informed prediction of how much ivory is going to leave the US because I know nothing about future rates of persecution or the effectiveness of the ivory trade. I imagine that a few people will “help” ivory owners avoid law enforcement by buying their illegal ivory at a sharp discount, then trading them for drugs and letting the drug traffickers get the stuff out of the country. Other, still legal ivory is going to be traded off too, since it is obvious the legal trend is going only one way. The economic incentives are pretty obvious, it’d be really weird if this didn’t happen at least a little. But I can’t know how much. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say 15% of ivory inside US borders is leaving it in the next ten years.
Agree to disagree?
No. On what do we still disagree? Much of my argument on the likely effect on the ivory market is prediction descending into outright speculation—but this is all a sub-point answering your refusal to judge whether this or the survival of the elephant species is more important. You disputed neither of my other points on why these are causally linked (ease of sting operations and the prediction other countries would copy this law). So this does not appear to be a false dilemma. Which is why I’d like to return to my main point: Isn’t helping the elephant species worth this law?
Even ignoring the common good: Why do interest groups so often impede the long-term progress of their own goals?
Why, when X is simple, strong, and sufficient to advance the group purpose, will a group instead focus on advancing some complicated and contentious Y?
Many groups, (including some I support), appear genuinely unable to do any long-term strategic thinking at all, or powerless to control their internal social forces.
Here is a problem with an interest group:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/03/05/3362801/nra-ivory-elephants-guns/
It’s easy to hate the NRA if you come from certain parts. But the NRA is not very unusual in this respect. Interest groups, by their nature are unable to have the overview to know when to throw their cause under the bus for the “greater good.” This is a general problem for all interest groups, regardless of whether their cause is noble or not.
The real question is how do we fight Moloch by a different method than competing interest groups (which will follow the usual “behavior physics” of interest groups, which feminism is not exempt from, regardless of how noble its goal is).
Like Lumifer, I think the NRA is doing the right thing here—even strictly from a conservationist perspective. If we all stopped eating eggs, would there be more chickens? Of course not. When I mentioned similar logic here at least the vegetarians were honest that they wanted to drastically reduce the chicken population. But if using fewer chicken products leads to fewer chickens, how will using fewer elephant products lead to more elephants? And note that these two contradictory answers are frequently pushed by the very same people.
If you really wanted to preserve elephant populations, you’d make it easier for people to farm them for their ivory, which would go, in part, into making gun handles. But because the NRA are culturally alien to you, you’d like to throw their cause under the bus “for the greater good,” for the very slightest reason.
So yeah, we all want causes we don’t care about to shut up and get out of our way. It’s a good thing that we can’t make them. After all, NRA members aren’t just gun enthusiasts, they are also citizens in every other way. If NRA policy interferes too much with (say) economic wellbeing in the eyes of its members, then the NRA will lose force as an interest group.
I think maybe you do not realize how poor the institutions are here. There isn’t some actor with long term overview maximizing ivory profits (and incidentally ensuring elephants continue as a species). Commercial overexploitation of resources in the biosphere is extremely common, and requires coordination to solve properly (see for example cod stocks collapse in the Atlantic for one example historically important for Europe). Collapse (the book) gave some examples where coordinating a long term exploitation of the environment was solved properly and examples where it wasn’t.
But my point isn’t about the NRA, or environmentalists specifically, I just used them as an example. My point is about a general problem with interest group ecosystems. If an interest group advocates a bridge to nowhere it is not going to lose force, it is doing precisely what it is meant to do.
I would like to add here that I have been very very careful not to discuss my actual politics. Most of your assumptions about my culture or my politics are false. (So I guess I passed the ideological Turing test?)
Back when I had long hair, I was once accosted by a dude trolling for Obama votes who said: “you have long hair, you must be an Obama supporter!” What you are doing is basically this. Filling a hole with a pigeon is going to be very frustrating for you in this case.
Not necessarily. An effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is property rights. While at the moment there may not be an actor with a long-term commercial interest in elephants, this kind of legislation is making sure that there never will be one.
Property rights do not magically enforce themselves, you need a government to enforce it for you. Everyone agreeing to a government’s monopoly on force is yet another coordination problem. This is not so easy in places where elephant poaching happens. That aside, Collapse had examples where property rights were not sufficient in themselves. You should read it, I enjoyed it a lot!
Again, not necessarily. A private security force works fine—especially in places where the government isn’t… particularly effective. Such governments aren’t all that good at coordination, either, by the way.
But the argument boiled down to its core is just incentives. It’s much better to have incentives for private people to have herds of elephants roam on their ranches than depend on government bureaucrats who, frankly, don’t care that much.
An international ban on ivory trading by itself wont’ save the elephants—the locals will just hunt them down for meat and because they destroy crops.
I think you just chose a bad example. Your underlying point that special-interest groups have tunnel vision and are constitutionally incapable of deviating from their charter is certainly valid.
I don’t understand what this is about anymore (I think you just like to argue?)
(a) There aren’t “private security forces” replacing governments making Africa a kind of modern day Snowcrash universe. Governments are mostly weak and corrupt, and there are warlords running around killing folks and each other, and taking their loot.
(b) The way the NRA makes its decisions has nothing to do with the political situation in Africa, the state of elephant herds in Africa, the long term fate of the African elephant species, or anything like that. They consult relevant gun makers, and decide based on that. This is contrary to the original claim that the NRA was making the correct decision even from a conservational point of view. They aren’t in this case, but if we did the math and found out they did, it would certainly be by accident, because they surely didn’t do the math.
(c) Do you actually know how many elephants are killed in Africa for non-ivory reasons?
I didn’t claim that they made the correct decision for the right reasons. Of course it’s (in a sense) a felicitous coincidence that the NRA is in the right here from a conservationist point of view. But if environmental groups are helping the environment, I’d view that as even more of a felicitous coincidence, given their methods of making decisions.
It’s remarkable, but not hugely so, that the policies of a group who care about the property rights of American gun owners should align with strong property rights worldwide, and hence a flourishing environment. It would be far more remarkable if the policies of a group who care about purity rituals should lead to a flourishing environment.
Only as long as interesting things are being said :-)
And nobody said that. But hiring guards for your farm/ranch/pasture is quite common and does happen to be private enforcement of property rights.
I can’t imagine why contemporary gun makers would care about decades-old ivory. If anything, they’d prefer more constraints on sales of old guns as that enlarges the market for new guns.
And I don’t think anyone made a claim that NRA’s decision was correct from a conservationist point of view. The claim is that the law fails the cost-benefit analysis for certain (implied widespread) sets of values. I am sure ardent environmentalists are happy with it, but not everyone is an ardent environmentalist.
Ah, good question. My pre-Google answer would be “some” and if pressed for numbers I’d say 10-20% at the moment, but with not much conviction. Accio Google!
Hmm… Lots of data but all of it is on “illegally killed” elephants which isn’t particularly useful in this context, as killing elephants is mostly illegal everywhere and so the meaning is just “human-killed”. My impression is that in areas with LOTS of poaching the great majority of elephants are killed for the ivory, but in areas with few “illegal kills” situation may differ. No data to support this impression, though. It also seems that there is a lot variability in the numbers killed year-to-year.
I don’t see a problem. Or, rather, I see a problem with the blanket prohibition on the sale of <100-year-old ivory as it looks unreasonable to me.
Do you see a problem with the dwindling elephant population too? If so, are you able to judge which is the greater problem? If so, what is your judgement?
Yes, of course.
You are engaging in a classic false dilemma fallacy.
Do tell, how the prohibition on selling 50-year-old ivory helps the dwindling elephant population?
Lots of existing ivory becomes illegal, leading to a local drop in value, leading to lots of US ivory being traded to countries where it isn’t illegal. Right?
So that first of all that sets up excellent opportunities for police sting operations. But it also drives down prices (at least for a few years), making elephant poaching less lucrative.
In parallel to that, the US is setting an example. A lot of countries copy US criminal laws rather than thinking them up from scratch (the War on Drugs being the textbook example), and since almost everyone loves elephants and the ivory trade is a huge and growing threat to them, there’ll be a particularly low threshold to copying this one.
Sigh. Wrong. Why don’t you at least look at the original link to the article about the ban? Notably, it says (emphasis mine):
I neither said nor meant it was going to be exported legally. It’ll be black market trade, but it’ll still respond to market forces, just like drug trafficking does.
Hold on. No new ivory products can (legally) be imported or exported from the US, but ivory products already in the US can still be bought and sold, albeit subject to restrictions. Providing demand for ivory remains roughly constant, and the US continues not to be an ivory producer, we would expect that to lead to a rise in ivory prices in the US market, and almost no ivory being exported (but some being imported on the black market).
So how much ivory do you expect to be illegally exported out of the US as a result of that law?
And if you don’t care about legality, why would you export ivory, anyway? The prohibition destroys legal markets, but tends to raise prices in the black markets.
False. Scarcity raises prices, and black market goods are often scarce, but where illegal goods are not scarce (say street quality heroin) the profit margins are fairly low because illegality makes it hard to compete on brand so everyone competes on price.
I don’t see how my estimate would matter in the slightest.
And you don’t think ivory is scarce in the US..?
It would because your argument is that US exports will depress prices in the rest of the world. If the US exports amount to half a tusk, it’s not going to depress world prices much :-/
In any case, this seems to be descending into bickering. Agree to disagree?
No, I’m saying this law makes it less scarce, because it makes buyers leave the market.
I can’t make an informed prediction of how much ivory is going to leave the US because I know nothing about future rates of persecution or the effectiveness of the ivory trade. I imagine that a few people will “help” ivory owners avoid law enforcement by buying their illegal ivory at a sharp discount, then trading them for drugs and letting the drug traffickers get the stuff out of the country. Other, still legal ivory is going to be traded off too, since it is obvious the legal trend is going only one way. The economic incentives are pretty obvious, it’d be really weird if this didn’t happen at least a little. But I can’t know how much. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say 15% of ivory inside US borders is leaving it in the next ten years.
No. On what do we still disagree? Much of my argument on the likely effect on the ivory market is prediction descending into outright speculation—but this is all a sub-point answering your refusal to judge whether this or the survival of the elephant species is more important. You disputed neither of my other points on why these are causally linked (ease of sting operations and the prediction other countries would copy this law). So this does not appear to be a false dilemma. Which is why I’d like to return to my main point: Isn’t helping the elephant species worth this law?
Suit yourself.
Even ignoring the common good: Why do interest groups so often impede the long-term progress of their own goals?
Why, when X is simple, strong, and sufficient to advance the group purpose, will a group instead focus on advancing some complicated and contentious Y?
Many groups, (including some I support), appear genuinely unable to do any long-term strategic thinking at all, or powerless to control their internal social forces.