Diversification as insurance: bolthole edition

Idealog asked me last week whether it made sense for billionaires to see New Zealand as a bolt-hole against apocalypse. I had a lot of fun taking a punt at an answer.

New Zealand would do better than other places in some doomsday scenarios, but hardly in all of them.

But Dr Eric Crampton, an economist and the head of research at the New Zealand Initiative, says the billionaires prepping for doomsday may have it wrong.

“For many end-of-the-world scenarios, the best bolthole isn’t the most isolated place in the world, but the wealthiest place in the world,” Crampton says.

“Scenarios leading to collapse in international trade are worse for small countries that are trade dependent than for very large countries that have large internal free-trading areas.”

But he can understand why US citizens would prefer to seek refuge on the other side of the world, particularly in the current political climate.

Crampton is a Canadian that moved to New Zealand from the States in 2003 to take a job at Canterbury University, and he’s stuck around ever since.

“Arriving here, it felt like the outside of the asylum. America was growing increasingly mad. Airports were armed camps. The police seemed to have a very hostile relationship with the public and were heavily armed,” he says.

There's a lot more at the link, including zombies. Enjoy! Bottom line, best billionaire strategy likely has a portfolio of boltholes against a range of potential disasters, and New Zealand could be a nice part of that bundle.

Bollywood zombies revisited

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies had me wondering what else could be improved with judicious zombie additions.

The Bollywood dance numbers saved Bride and Prejudice from Austin tedium. But imagine how much better Bride and Prejudice and Zombies could be! Thriller-style dance numbers, modified to Bollywood. And if the movie were released in format allowing for continuously variable zombies* for the home audience....

Then I wondered why there were no Indian zombie movies. I had a few candidate hypotheses, but none were terribly satisfying; I think this was my best one:

Horror films as a genre seem very thin market in India. A Bollywood-style zombie movie would then be very thin market indeed. If it's tough to do a low budget Bollywood film - Baumol's cost disease on the troupes of singers and dancers - then those films will target mainstream Indian cinema, not niche products. And a Bollywood zombie movie would be a niche of a niche: you kinda need the mainstreamish version of zombie movies before you can do the Shawn of the Dead treatment. My ideal Bollywood zombie movie would be genuinely terrifying, with dance intervals to relieve tension rather than as comic relief, but the Shawn of the Dead version would be much easier to pull off.

So it's again the curse of high fixed costs mixed with idiosyncratic preferences. If there were a few million Erics around, we could have Bollywood zombie film festivals on Seasteads. But there would be other problems.

Susmita Das today points me to a new Indian zombie movie: Rise of the Zombie (IMDB).

Here's one review:

There can't be a more fresh start in Bollywood and Luke Kenny takes full advantage of it by promoting his film as a blood spewing gore horror fest. However, what he doesn't put in the promos is the endless romantic saga that keeps running in flashbacks every five minutes. The romance track overshadows even the main plot after a point what with all the flashbacks and love songs. How Neil turning into a zombie has anything to do with his heart being broken has no justification whatsoever.

So, our very first zombie appears more a heartbroken rockstar (courtesy all the rock music playing in the background and a love gone sour track running in parallel) than a scary and spooky monster. He starts off by preying on ants and lizards, not quite the goriness you expect. But as the film graduates from being boring to sleep inducing, even the tastes of the zombie rises from insects to people. But by then you are already bored of the monsters incessant hunger pangs.

On the up sides, the film is a mere 90 minutes so sitting through it does seem possible. Luke also tries making up for his bad script sense by raising the technical aspects. Full marks on the make-up department for the transformation of Luke's character into a zombie gets brilliantly handled. Even the sound work in the spooky portions deserves a mention. The cinematography too is impressive.

Here's the trailer: The review gave the film 2/5 stars. There's Bollywood singing, but not the big dance numbers that would have pushed up costs. Sadly, if the film is rather poor, it's less likely to build the kind of demand that could yield the Bollywood zombie film for which I've yearned lo these many years. Alack, alas...

* In the original post, I wondered whether e-book formats could incorporate continuously variable zombies. Set it to zero, for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and you're left with lousy Jane Austin. Set it to Maximum, and there isn't a page without some kind of zombie event. Do read the original post...

Post-apocalyptic bureaucracies

You've gotta have goals. And @Keith_Ng has a new one. Not content with being a data visualization wizard, here's what he wants to tackle next. Well, conditional on there being a zombie apocalypse.

New life goal: Become ED of Post-Zombie-Apocalypse policy thinktank. Influence policy, debate about market solutions to zombies.
— keith_ng (@keith_ng) June 21, 2012

I suggested a better, more feasible goal:

@keith_ng Better goal: develop TV series around that concept. Ep1: you try to ease regs to let people kill zombies without DoC concession.
— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) June 21, 2012

We settled on a Zombie version of The Wire as being pretty fun. You follow the free-market think-tank types, the bureaucracy, a vigilante crew, and the zombies at the start of the zombie apocalypse. A few story ideas:

• The City mandates expensive burial methods to protect against zombies but doesn't do anything to help low-income families cover those costs. Poorer families then move to more "informal" burial techniques, with predictably bad results.
• The crematorium is over-capacity and belching out more smoke than its consent allows; the local Environmental Authority debates shutting it down entirely until they're able to bring PM10 concentrations back down to acceptable levels, but settles on barring cremation during the hours when people have their washing out, at least until more powerful scrubbers arrive from overseas by ship. The over-capacity problem worsens, with predictably bad results.
• A private charity's attempt to set up extra crematoriums to handle the load, and especially for poorer families, run up against the local Environment Authority's mandate to reduce the number of non-compliant PM10 nights. While people with existing crematoriums are allowed to keep using them and can replace them (subject to the time-of-day regulations above), you can't build any new ones, even if they would have very low emissions. The Government doesn't consider changing the Environment Authority's targets in light of the problem, noting that the zombies are likely temporary.
• Council declares a "Red Zone" for the worst zombie-affected areas of town. Residents have to evacuate their (still very defensible) homes. But they make no provision for alternative housing arrangements while insisting on strict enforcement of all the pre-zombie regulations that kept housing in short supply. Higher income people leave town; lower income people start living in far less defensible cars, tents, and garages, with predictably bad results.
• Local hoteliers complain of lost custom from the zombie outbreak. Council sends the Mayor out on a tourism promotion campaign to encourage more people to come to the infected city. The results are, well, you guessed it.
• Government bars schools from excluding zombie-infected-but-still-living-and-certainly-contagious children. Local teachers' unions rally not against the regulation but instead against the publication of league-tables that would tell parents which schools had the worst infection rates. 
• The vigilante crews that kill zombies are brought up on charges because the zombies still count as people under the law. The Government passes legislation under urgency allowing zombie-killing, but only under fairly stringent licensing guidelines demanded by a coalition partner ensuring that tapu is respected. Anybody who wants to kill a zombie has to get a certificate that they've completed relevant tikanga training. You have to fly to another city for training because the normal Council training facility is overrun by zombies.
• The Department of Conservation modifies their 1080 poison traps with "extra brain flavouring" to knock out the zombies. Environmental campaigners lobby to stop them because the new traps also attract endangered snails; the government proposes partial privatization of DoC. The lobby group opposes the latter part because it doesn't go far enough, and opposes the former part because it crowds out private zombie-eradication service providers.
• The government sets up a Super-Ministry with powers plenipotentiary to stop the zombies. The Super-Ministry spends most of its time trying to figure out how we can still have a full rugby season despite the outbreak. Ignoring the mess of regulations stopping people from dealing to the zombies on their own, or that make things worse, the Minister says we should leave it to the market to sort out.
• Keith would likely insist on an episode where we find out that smoking makes you more likely to be infected by zombies, with the lobby group then opposing more tobacco regs. I dispute the science on that one. Either way, the Ministry of Health is very happy that none of the zombies seem to be smokers.
• Overseas scientists come up with a virus that kills only zombies. As it was constructed using genetic modification techniques, the Greens oppose its use in New Zealand. Eventually, some farmers get fed up with the bureaucracy and import it on their own. But because they don't do a great job in dispersing it, it only knocks the zombies back for a few weeks before new and resistant zombies lurch forward.
• Despite signs that the zombie outbreak will almost certainly spread to other towns, other towns' councils insist on sticking with current consenting processes that require notified consent and RMA approval for adding defensive features to your home. Owners of heritage buildings are prohibited from replacing zombie-prone stained glass windows with steel-mesh reinforced versions.
• Paul Krugman writes a tasteless op-ed about the benefits of zombie outbreaks when we're in a liquidity trap.
• In most episodes, the think-tank plays a Cassandra role (or at least in my version). In Keith's, they'd probably be more malevolent. Either way, it's key that even if policy were set properly, good outcomes are far from guaranteed. 

Tell me there's a single implausible bullet point above. Other than the existence of zombies.

I'm very glad we don't have zombies.

Update: Hit #ZombieNZ

Bollywood Zombies

A Bollywood zombie movie would be awesome. I'd suggested it here, though I'm sure the idea has occurred to others (see below). Since then, nobody's been able to find me an Indian zombie movie - the genre seems not to exist.

My first hypothesis: cremation. High cremation rates mean few cemeteries and few fears of zombies. But Japan has even higher cremation rates and does have a few zombie movies.

My second hypothesis: religious politics in India. Islam forbids cremation, or at least that's what's suggested by a quick web search. So the potential pool of Indian zombies is going to be heavily Muslim. If there are already reasonable religious tensions between the two groups, a zombie Bollywood movie where presumably Hindu heroes would go around being menaced by, and killing, predominantly Muslim zombies might not be the best idea.

But that hypothesis fails too. Somehow India has managed to produce the local public good of not making a zombie movie? Yeah right. It might explain why a big studio with political connections wouldn't have put out a zombie movie, but it doesn't explain why one doesn't get financed by some Hindu nationalist organization. In fact, we might expect a low budget zombie movie then to be more rather than less likely.

I hope it's nothing as ploddingly dull as different local mythologies meaning different superstitions and a non-universalisation of the Frankenstein fear. But be careful::

Western horror films happily mine religious imagery in the knowledge that the audience will be largely secular; in India and Pakistan it would be dangerous to make such an assumption, and so film-makers are prone to borrow western myths rather than explore their own.

My read of the linked article is that successful Indian horror movies have been those that have played with those Western horror myths that are consonant with Indian myths: ghost and vampire stories.

Horror films as a genre seem very thin market in India. A Bollywood-style zombie movie would then be very thin market indeed. If it's tough to do a low budget Bollywood film - Baumol's cost disease on the troupes of singers and dancers - then those films will target mainstream Indian cinema, not niche products. And a Bollywood zombie movie would be a niche of a niche: you kinda need the mainstreamish version of zombie movies before you can do the Shawn of the Dead treatment. My ideal Bollywood zombie movie would be genuinely terrifying, with dance intervals to relieve tension rather than as comic relief, but the Shawn of the Dead version would be much easier to pull off.

So it's again the curse of high fixed costs mixed with idiosyncratic preferences. If there were a few million Erics around, we could have Bollywood zombie film festivals on Seasteads. But there would be other problems.

Some also-rans:

• A Pakistani zombie movie (sorry, I want big choreographed zombie dance numbers, like Thriller)
• A Bollywood zombie movie that's been stuck in pre-production for ages
• Hindi horror films available for viewing on Hulu, but not from New Zealand! (but thanks for the link, Susmita!)

Somebody will let me know when and if a Bollywood version of a zombie movie manages to be produced, right?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [updated]

Assorted thoughts on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

• I cannot imagine reading the book without zombies. It's obvious from the beginning that Elizabeth will marry Darcy. The rest of the story is the dancing around social conventions of the early 1800s that delay the inevitable. Tedious, at least for me. Maybe it's only that way because so many plots since then have followed the drill set down here and contemporaneous readers found it surprising that she wound up with Darcy. But that's not good enough reason to read it today, without zombies.
• The revised edition tails off in the latter third, with insufficient zombie-related events. Instead of a zombie attack every other chapter, we can go fifty pages without Elizabeth doing away with a ghastly unmentionable. The occasional reference to zombies just reminds you how much they're missed. They come back a bit at the very end, but it's a long wait.
• There really ought to be an adjustable Kindle version of the book where you can dial up or down the number of zombie incidents. Turned down to zero, the book will reduce to the Jane Austen original. Turned up to ZOMBIE MAX PLUS MORE ZOMBIES TO THE POWER OF ZOMBIE TIMES INFINITY, there'd be zombie attacks on every page and reference to zombies in every paragraph. The neutral setting would be the author's default - the book as currently published. I'd stick with the neutral setting for the first half of the book, then start dialing things up. Why can't a book of this sort have a continuously variable number of zombies? We've already achieved variable cowbells for MP3. This would be the killer app for e-readers, or at least the one that would prompt me to buy a reader.
• The Bollywood dance numbers saved Bride and Prejudice from Austin tedium. But imagine how much better Bride and Prejudice and Zombies could be! Thriller-style dance numbers, modified to Bollywood. And if the movie were released in format allowing for continuously variable zombies for the home audience....

Update: Other potential "& Zombies":

• Atlas Shrugged, letting Hordes of Ravenous Undead Eat the Looters and Parasites. Premise: Hank Rearden's metal is used in zombie-killing devices; Francisco D'Anconia's mine is instead a "Zombie Free Paradise" that, when nationalized by the looters, turns out to be full of extra ravenous zombies (which they find when the first bus-load of new looter residents is brought there); Dagny Taggert is the world's greatest zombie-killer, until John Galt convinces her to stop trying to protect folks who've given the zombies their sanction. Galt invents a machine that uses static electricity to kill zombies, but won't turn it on until Americans turn out their zombie-influenced politicians and zombie-sympathetic ethics. The book's a thousand pages long and could reasonably by condensed by at least a third, leaving room for lots of zombie exploits.
• The Big Short (and Zombies). The financial crisis was actually due to zombies.
• An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and Zombies. A warmer climate facilitates the spread of the zombie infection; there's a conspiracy of Big Oil, the Trilateral Commission, the Rand Corporation, the Reverse Vampyres and the Zombies to ensure that we don't get a carbon tax. Some musing about whether a rapid increase in zombie infections could reduce aggregate carbon emission.

Sciency

Best line in the new Gelman article on zombies:

We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science.

As I aim for science rather than sciency, I stick to Word.

Zombies and Epiphenomenalism

NCIB ROFL gives a nice daily roundup of amusing articles published in the PubMed database. Highlights include medical articles on optimal methods for extracting the zipper-entrapped penis an ergonomics article on the force required to drag sheep over various surfaces.

Perhaps there's no equivalent in the humanities because it would be too easy. Here's the latest from Dialogue, a Canadian philosophy journal. Andrew Bailey's work on Zombies and Epiphenomenalism. doi:10.1017/S0012217309090076

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the relationship between the claim that zombies are logically/metaphysically possible and the position that phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal. It is often taken that the former entails the latter, and that therefore any implausibility in the notion of conscious epiphenomenalism calls into question the genuine possibility of zombies. Four ways in which the zombist might respond are examined, and I argue that two — those most commonly encountered — are inadequate, but the others — one of which is rarely formulated and the other new — are more forceful. The upshot, nevertheless, is that the zombist may indeed face an unwelcome commitment to conscious epiphenomenalism.

If there actually are zombies, an unwelcome commitment to conscious epiphenomenalism is the least of our worries.

I had a look because of the intriguing title, but the article goes into some interesting work on theory of mind. I was unaware that the metaphysical possibility of zombies had been raised as a counterexample against physicalist theories of mind. Bailey concludes:

Finally, however, to the degree that the notion of causal gaps (or causal agents that are neither physical nor phenomenal) can be made plausible, it might be possible for the zombist to evade even this commitment and sever the link between the zombie hypothesis and phenomenal epiphenomenalism entirely.

This last move will be attractive to — perhaps even necessary for — the zombist, given the widespread wariness that exists, among physicalists and anti-physicalists alike, about phenomenal epiphenomenalism. Yet it has as yet been little explored, and remains highly speculative. Perhaps this is the front on which the next battle of the “zombie wars” is to be fought.

I'll have to ask the philosophers at the staff club to fill me in on the zombie wars.