Crowdfunding for feel-good public goods

I endorse much of what Mike Dickison says in the Wanganui Chronicle:

ONE way for us to preserve the natural heritage of our country is to put our money where our mouth is and buy it.

This is done all the time privately by landowners setting aside parts of their own property as a QEII covenant, protected against future development.

The public version of this was the Givealittle campaign to purchase Awaroa Beach for over $2 million and add it to Abel Tasman National Park. Overseas, rainforests in developing countries have been saved by paying locals to not cut it down, or buying them and turning them into reserves. Perhaps, rather than use legislation or treaties to preserve nature, we could harness the free market.

I'd caveat the rainforests one with that payment for the preservation should go to the forests' proper owners, which isn't necessarily the government that auctions them out to the rich folks who want to help.

Currently there is a thriving trade in moa bones in New Zealand; because of a legal loophole, remains of extinct species collected on private land aren't protected by the Wildlife Act. One response would be to shame Trade Me into no longer listing moa remains. Another would be to lobby to change the legislation. But a third option, if we truly care about fossil bones, is to buy them ourselves.

The worst offenders are looters who pull moa skeletons out of caves and sell them piecemeal. Economist Eric Crampton suggested we set up a PledgeMe account for buying "intact, at-site, and undisturbed" moa remains on private land. This would encourage people to locate the bones and landowners to preserve them undisturbed. The skeleton would become the property of whichever museum the PledgeMe campaign nominated, and could be put on display or stay safe in a cave. It's a fascinating idea, and one applicable to other valuable goods on private land that the public have an interest in preserving.

I think I'd suggested it on Twitter.

He moves from there to suggesting we not use the mechanism for longfin eel protection. Long story short, New Zealand has a bizarre system where introduced trout are protected under all kinds of rules to make sure that recreational fishers on the rivers have a good time for a long time, but native and threatened eels are fished for what's often pretty low valued uses. He suggests instead that the government just put an end to that fishery:

But there's another counter-argument. The longfin eel fishery is public property, but it's exploited for private profit: a few dozen eel fishers making a trivial $500,000 a year. Rather than crowdfund to buy back something we already own, we could simply tell the eel fishers to go catch something else.

Despite the potential of crowdfunding as a conservation tool it's perfectly okay for democracy to overrule the free market. Just as it's no longer acceptable to hunt whales and seals, future generations will be aghast that we exported longfin eels.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the total allowable catch for longfin eels to be set to sustainable levels, then open a crowdfunding market up for conservationists to buy back quota beyond that?

I totally applaud moves to use crowdfunding to let people coordinate around these things. It forms an assurance contract: the campaign only activates if you've raised enough money to do the job, so your $5 only goes into the pot when there's enough money collected that your $5 will make a difference.

Death Bias

Siouxie Wiles asks an interesting question: do Kiwis' expectations of what they'll die from, and expectations of current death rates, match up with aggregate death rates?

If people overestimate the risks of some kinds of death, this could lead policy to be biased towards spending too much trying to avoid that kind of death and too little on other risks.

Mike Dickison produced this infographic on actual causes of death in 2009.

They then contrast this with the survey findings:

The full set of slides is here.

I love this initiative. But there's a pretty big problem. If I expected to die of a heart attack, emphysema, or cancer in my 90s, I'd probably say "Old Age" rather than any of those specific disorders on a survey. I might even fail to think about "people in their 90s dying of cancer" when answering how many Kiwis I think die of cancer every year. Somebody in his 50s, that's dying from cancer; somebody in her 90s... I might just not think of it that way. Maybe I should think of it that way, but it's also pretty plausible that somebody dying of cancer in their 90s would have died of something else a few weeks later but for the cancer.

So I'm not sure we can say people are underestimating their risk of dying from diseases associated with old age, like cancer, circulatory disease, or respiratory disease, when "old age" is a survey response. Similarly, I can imagine answering "suicide" to that questionnaire even though I have absolutely no intention of killing myself except in old age if my expected future utility stream is sufficiently low.* Those expecting law changes around euthanasia and thinking that a reasonable end may well answer "suicide".

I'm not sure what the best way of fixing this might be. You could go back to the MoH data and restrict the actual death sample to deaths among those under a plausible "old age" cutoff line - say 70 - and see whether survey expectations among those providing an answer other than "Old Age" matched those expectations. You could re-run the survey, noting explicitly and up-front that the New Zealand death statistics do not consider "Death by Old Age" to be a category, and that respondents thinking about people dying in old age should think of the proximate cause of that death.

This is important. In the slides, when asked whether suicide, melanoma, or road accidents were associated with the most deaths, melanoma got the most votes despite being responsible for the fewest deaths. By survey response, respondents thought that melanoma was the worst, followed by suicide followed by road accidents. In reality, the rank order is suicide, road accidents, then melanoma. This could very plausibly lead to underinvestment in initiatives that prevent suicide relative to investments targeting melanoma. Note also that the "old age" confound is likely to attenuate the degree of measured public bias here if some people would count melanoma deaths as just being old age if the death were experienced by an older person - real numbers could be worse.

I look forward to seeing where Siouxie's team goes with this. It's worth their following up.

* Does "Voluntarily going in for brain plastination or cryonics in old age in hopes of later uploading if the singularity hasn't happened yet" count as suicide, or does failing to do so count as suicide? I'd lean towards the latter.