Mind food that matters

The so-called "fall" season for non-fiction blockbusters is under way in the US and several look headed for immediate best-of-the-year status.

Daniel Yergin has followed up his classic history of the oil industry, The Prize (first published in 1992 and lated updated for a TV series), with The Quest.

The Economist reports it is a broader and more ambitious work that describes the many ways people have sought to produce energy. It also analyses the political dimension , especially the three big fears – energy scarcity, energy security and the environmental impact.

Unlike most commentators on the industry, Yergin is a realist and not an alarmist. He identifies at least five periods of “peak oil” – the fear that it is running out. The Economist notes:

Yet there is plenty of oil left, with perhaps only a fifth of the world’s endowment so far produced. Indeed estimates of the remaining reserves keep growing. This is proof of something the doomsayers routinely discount, the wonderful combination of human ingenuity and market forces.

Nevertheless, Yergin is worried about the impact of burning fossil fuel, which supplies 80% of the world’s energy, and he welcomes recent breakthroughs in alternative sources such as solar and wind power.

The Quest is due at the end of the month from Allen Lane at $55 (hardback), while Yergin’s views on "peak oil" are outlined in this essay (2100 words).

The decline of violence
Meanwhile, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Future (also Allen Lane but cheaper at $40 in paperback) is already out here and likely to become one of the best, if not chunkiest read for the holidays.

At 800 pages, it will test most readers and its thesis – that violence has declined over the course of human history – has already garnered a lot of comment. Pinker has also written an essay that summarises his findings.

He describes six major declines of violence, starting with initial pacification of tribal living and the civilising process of Europe during the Middle Ages.

The third transition, sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, took off with the Enlightenment. Governments and churches had long maintained order by punishing nonconformists with mutilation, torture and gruesome forms of execution, such as burning, breaking, disembowelment, impalement and sawing in half.

The remaining three periods are in the modern age – the end of World War II also brought most interstate wars to an end; the “new peace” has been interspersed with some civil wars; and the “rights revolutions” have protected minorities, women and children against violence.

Pinker advances a number of reasons, including the power of the state, the spread of commerce and human globalisation or what he calls “cosmopolitanism.”

Picking winners
The selection panel for the world’s richest award for economics, the Nobel prize (or more accurately the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), likes to keep up with the trends.

One Nobel-watcher, Amol Agrawal, expects debt will be the major topic when the winner or winners are announced next week. He predicts the prize will go to Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Carmen Reinhart of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Agrawal writes:

They have been talking about this rise in debt after the financial crisis in a series of papers since 2007 and in their amazing book This Time is Different. In fact, Rogoff points in this interview how little data was there on debt before he started the project:

Actually, a major discovery in the book is a huge new data set on domestic debt, which had never previously been used in this literature. It might surprise you, but it is hard to find domestic debt data for any emerging-market country before 1990.

Last year’s trio of winners were rewarded for their work on unemployment while the previous year recognised two from the behaviourist school for their study, as one commentator remarked, of “normal human foibles as irrationality, poor decision making, biases, non profit maximising behaviour.”

One of the them, Professor Oliver Williamson, was a major influence on the implementation of the radical New Zealand economic reforms of the 1980s.

UPDATE: Macro-economists share Nobel prize

Rooting for weed
Act leader Don Brash was given the bum’s rush a few weeks ago for his suggestion that spending $100 million on enforcing laws against the possession and use of cannabis was a waste of money.

He quoted figures, which I can’t verify, that there are some 400,000 users and some 6000 prosecutions each year. In support, he quoted such organisations as the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

But since he gave the speech,  for which he was ridiculed in the media without the content being analysed, evidence backing his argument has emerged from the Netherlands, where cannabis has been decriminalised.

Research published in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction studied the effects of “pot shops” as a way of moving marijuana away from a “gateway” to harder illegal drugs and toward the same tolerance as alcohol.

The article, quoted in this Wall Street Journal item, showed the intention was being fulfilled. Rates of amphetamines (including "P") and cocaine use in the Netherlands are below those of other nearby countries where marijuana use is just as prevalent though illegal – France, Italy Belgium and the UK.

Moves are being taken to restrict the pot shops only to Dutch citizens in the hope of reducing crimes related to the consumption or trafficking of drugs. Meanwhile, shop owners in Masstricht have already imposed a voluntary ban on all but a few tourists to show the restrictions are not necessary.