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I don’t have strong views on who’s going to win the election.  Clinton seems more likely to win, but by how much?  Earlier today I defended 538, which gives Trump a (fairly good) 35% chance.  That’s more than the betting markets.  Now I’ll present the opposite argument, and then try to tie it in to monetary policy, which is what this stupid blog is supposed be about—right?

To see the argument for Trump having a good chance, check out this map, from RealClearPolitics.  It shows all states colored, based on poll averages, no matter how narrow the margin:

That seems like a pretty decent margin for Hillary–so why do I say it’s good news for Trump.  Because (blue) Florida is really close, has 29 electoral votes, and would put Trump up to 270 if it flipped.  That brings back memories of 2000, when a very close Florida put Bush up to 271.  And just as in that case, if Trump narrowly wins with 270 electoral votes, he’ll likely lose the popular vote—too many wasted Hillary votes in California and New York.  My hypothetical is identical to 2000, except Iowa, Virginia and Colorado flip.

I think this path to victory is semi-plausible, which is why Nate Silver’s 538 gives Trump a 35% chance.  But if he loses any of these states, no matter how small, then he falls short unless he can pick up another state.  And that’s where things get tougher. He’d need Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan or some place like that.  Those are tougher than Florida.  (I’m from Wisconsin, and have confidence in my fellow cheeseheads.)

To me, the most interesting event in the past 24 hours is the sharp fall in Trump contracts in the betting markets, to 22%.  AFAIK, that’s 10 points down from a couple days ago.  What’s going on?  The polls have not changed dramatically.  I’m not sure, but I suspect Nevada:

And now that Nevada early voting has come to a close, Ralston isn’t mincing words about how he sees Trump’s prospects. “Trump is dead,” Ralston tweeted Saturday. He elaborated on his blog that from the early voting numbers so far, the GOP nominee would need a “miracle” to win Nevada at this point.

The polls have tended to put Nevada as a pure toss-up state, and a few recent ones have even shown Trump ahead there. Accordingly, it hasn’t generally been considered part of Clinton’s swing state “firewall.”

But Nevada is a famously difficult state for national pollsters to get right. Its population is transient and many work at night. Furthermore, its population is over one-quarter Hispanic, and it’s often challenging for English-language polls to sample Hispanic voters accurately.

Does anyone know where Nevada was two days ago in the betting markets?

In the past, polls in Nevada have been less accurate than in other states:

So in previous years, analysts like Ralston have found success in reading tea leaves from Nevada’s early voting numbers instead. And all week, Ralston has been warning of danger signs for Trump. The partisan and geographic breakdown of early voting turnout has looked similar to 2012, when Barack Obama won the state by 6 and a half points. But the final day of early voting Friday was, Ralston writes, “cataclysmic” for Republicans.

.  .  .

Though the statewide early voting numbers aren’t yet finalized, Ralston estimates that registered Democrats will have a 6 point lead on registered Republicans among early voters. Since registered partisans tend to overwhelmingly vote for their own party, Trump probably either needs to dominate among early voters associated with neither party or else make up the gap on election day.

But how important is the early turnout?  This important:

But ballots equivalent to well over two-thirds of the total 2012 turnout in Nevada have already been cast. So if Trump has indeed fallen significantly behind in the early vote, it will be very challenging for him to catch up.

Experts warn that early vote totals can be misleading.  But they are not meaningless.  At a minimum, we actually have some HARD DATA.  We know that Dems in Nevada are turning out in large numbers.  That doesn’t mean Hillary will win the state; I could image Trump doing well among working class Dems.  But it tells us something–maybe that GOTV is working.  It’s no longer just polls.  My hunch is that 538 is ignoring this data, because early voting isn’t always reliable, but the betting markets are concluding that Hillary is very likely to win Nevada. Indeed while RCP (i.e. polls) give Nevada narrowly to Trump, the betting markets show a very strong 77% for Hillary.  I know of no other state with such a huge gap.

Rational expectations say that investors look at everything when making a forecast, including decisions on asset valuation.  Thus while experts might have said (in the weeks after Brexit) that “it’s too soon to say how it will impact the UK economy” the markets sniffed out that the UK was holding up better than expected, and UK stocks rallied quite a while ago.  Economists wait for data like GDP and employment, which comes out with a lag.  As another example, I think the markets sniffed out that slow RGDP growth and “lower for longer” interest rates were the new normal long before the Fed figured that out.  The Fed relies on models where 3% trend RGDP growth and 5% T-bill yields are “normal”, and it took them a long time before they downgraded those forecasts.

So while 538 is a great site, and I love their thoughtful statistical analysis, you could argue that it’s more driven by “models” than a pure rational expectations forecast would imply.  That is, it might not put enough weight on tea leaves like the Nevada early vote, because of its unreliability in other contexts.

I don’t want to make too much of this difference, as 22% isn’t that different from 35%.  Even after the election we won’t know for sure which approach was “right”, especially if Hillary wins.  I suppose if Trump wins then 538 will look good, as its numbers for Trump have been higher than elsewhere.  But even then it won’t be a crowning victory, after all, 538 is predicting a Hillary victory.  Michael Moore won’t be impressed.  You’d need lots of repeated tests to establish whether rational expectations beats really good models.

I believe it does, which is why I prefer NGDP futures markets to Lars Svensson’s suggestion that the Fed target its own internal forecast, based on structural models.  So there, a Trump Derangement Post that actually had implications for monetary policy!

PS.  Here is the betting market map:

Notice that they have Hillary winning New Hampshire and North Carolina too.

PPS.  Not enough derangement in this post?  I love this Matt Yglesias post on that disgusting illegal immigrant Melania:

So there’s really nothing so surprising about the Melania story. Trump doesn’t like immigrants who change the American cultural and ethnic mix in a way he finds threatening and neither do his fans. Europeans like Melania (or before her, Ivana) are fine. I get it, David Duke gets it, the frog meme people get it, everyone gets it.

But it does raise the question of why mainstream press coverage has spent so much time pretending not to get it. Why have we been treated to so many lectures about the “populist appeal” of a man running on regressive tax cuts and financial deregulation and the “economic anxiety” of his fans?

Slovenian models include anorexics, prima donnas, former porn stars, and some, I assume, are good people.

 

Or did a reshaped GOP create Trump?  Harry Enten had a post back in 2014 that now seems prophetic:

Something Funny Happened In Iowa, And It May Hurt Democrats In 2016

Republican Sen.-elect Joni Ernst easily won her race in Iowa last Tuesday, beating Democrat Bruce Braley by 8.5 percentage points. Her victory wasn’t shocking, but its size was (to everyone except pollster Ann Selzer, that is). The final FiveThirtyEight projection had Ernst winning by just 1.5 percentage points.

What the heck happened?

Here’s one explanation: White voters in Iowa without a college degree have shifted away from the Democratic Party. And if that shift persists, it could have a big effect on the presidential race in 2016, altering the White House math by eliminating the Democratic edge in the electoral college.

This is kind of complicated, so pay attention.  Back in 2012, the Electoral College favored the Dems:

In 2012, the states combining for 272 electoral votes were more Democratic than the nation. Using a uniform swing, Republicans would have needed to win the national popular vote that year by about 1.5 points to have won Colorado (the tipping-point state) and the electoral college.

This is why a 3% or 4% lead for Obama in 2012 was far more solid than the same lead for Clinton.  Romney would have had to win the popular vote by about 1.5% in order to win the electoral college, whereas Trump might lose by 1% and still win the Electoral College:

When we take Iowa and its six electoral votes out of the Democratic column, the math changes: The Democratic edge in the electoral college virtually disappears. . . .

That, of course, does not mean that Republicans are going to win Iowa in 2016, let alone the presidency. We don’t know whom the nominees for either party will be. And the shift in Iowa could reverse itself.

People often get confused by this issue, as they look at states that are close in the polls right now, whereas they should be looking at states that would be close if the popular vote were tied.  While the Electoral College clearly favors Trump right now, he’ll probably lose the election, as he’ll lose the popular vote by more than 1%. But if the popular vote is roughly a tie, Trump will likely win.

It turns out that not just in Iowa, but in many other states the GOP has been gaining ground among less educated white voters, for some period of time.  I think it’s a mistake to suggest that Trump is drawing disaffected whites into the GOP, rather disaffected whites have been moving that way for years (Romney won West Virginia by 27%) and instead candidates are now popping up to reflect the new reality of the GOP—a white nationalist populist party.  It’s not just Hillary who thinks that half the GOP are deplorable, I’m pretty sure Jeb and Mitt feel the same way.

This Will Jordan tweet is kind of interesting:

Whatever was driving working class whites toward the GOP in 2014-15 was also driving working class Hispanics towards the GOP.  But then something happened in 2016.  Maybe that something was that the GOP made it very clear that while they were the party of the working class, only white working class voters were welcome.

If the GOP had nominated someone that appealed to Hispanics, say someone with moderate views on immigration, who speaks Spanish and has a Mexican wife, just imagine how that candidate would be doing in Nevada and Florida, given Hillary’s extreme unpopularity.

PS.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if America’s first black president were followed by America’s first white president?

PPS.  I really hate the “shy Trump voter” label.  Trump does not appeal to shy people, he appeals to bullies.  The correct term is the “ashamed Trump voter.”  Ray Lopez explains why:

Another factor not much commented about: who will admit to a pollster that they are for Trump? It’s like admitting you’re a racist.

Here’s my question–why should anyone care what the intellectual elite thinks?  I favor near laissez-faire capitalism, which makes me a meanie in the eyes of most campus intellectuals.  Do you think I cared what they thought of me?  Why should I, as long as I stand up for what I think is right?  Trump supporters shouldn’t be so ashamed. If they really believe in him then say it loud and proud, and don’t worry what others think.

PPPS.  Here’s one issue where Trump is right, and Slate.com won’t even give him credit:

So this is kind of cute. While most of us were tearing our hair out over the FBI and Hillary Clinton’s emails last weekend, Donald Trump’s campaign quietly released a plan to privatize new infrastructure development in the United States. I know, that’s not very sexy on the surface. But given that the man might be president come Tuesday, it seems worth remarking upon. Because it could mean we’ll all be paying to drive on more roads built for profit.

Apparently Slate doesn’t know that toll roads are now regarded as a good idea among smart progressives.  But then their smartest progressive moved to Vox.com.

PPPPS:  Trump finishes his campaign as classy as he staged it, with an alt-right ad targeting three people in an international conspiracy of financial-types, who all “just happen” to be Jewish:

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken on Sunday called a new advertisement for Donald Trump’s campaign “something of a German shepherd whistle” designed to appeal to his supporters in the so-called alt-right.

The TV spot warns of the influence of “those who control the levers of power in Washington” and “global special interests,” and it raised eyebrows among observers who said it contains anti-Semitic overtones. As CNN’s Jake Tapper noted to Franken on Sunday morning on “State of the Union,” commentators have pointed out that it targets three public figures who are Jewish — billionaire George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Maybe St. Bernard whistle would be more accurate.  Or Great Dane.  Or whistle best heard by people with tinfoil hat receptors.

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This Washington Post article caught my eye:

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND -- The party that could be on the cusp of winning Iceland's national elections on Saturday didn't exist four years ago.

Its members are a collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians and Web geeks. It sets policy through online polls -- and thinks the government should do the same. It wants to make Iceland "a Switzerland of bits," free of digital snooping. It has offered Edward Snowden a new place to call home.

And then there's the name: In this land of Vikings, the Pirate Party may soon be king.

The rise of the Pirates -- from radical fringe to focal point of Icelandic politics -- has astonished even the party's founder, a poet, Web programmer and former WikiLeaks activist.

And that's not the only new party in Iceland:

Outsiders may regard the idea of a government run by Pirates as a joke. But "the voters think a joke is better than what we have now," said Benedikt Jóhannesson, leader of another insurgent party that is even younger than the Pirates and has also earned substantial support.

Jóhannesson hastens to add that he doesn't see the Pirates as a joke. His buttoned-down party is made up of technocrats, academics and business executives, a far cry from the punk-rock, hacker spirit of the Pirates.

But the two may be in coalition talks after the election if, as expected, no party comes anywhere near the majority needed to govern. He may not agree with the Pirates on many issues, he said, but at least they share a belief in the need for fundamental change.

The article is a bit vague on their political views:

The Pirates have spelled out their positions on issues from fishing quotas to online pornography to Snowden. (Party leaders offered him Icelandic citizenship if he can find a way to get here.) But on some of the biggest questions facing the country, the official party position is to punt to the voters.

Whether Iceland should join the European Union, for instance, is a debate that has raged in the country for years. But the Pirates have not taken a stand, insisting instead that the matter should be decided in a national referendum.

Some of the party's signature proposals, meanwhile, are vaguely defined. The Pirates were born in Sweden as a movement to counter digital copyright laws. But the party's proposal to make Iceland "a digital safe haven," much like Switzerland is for banking, is hazy on the details.

To party devotees, that's fine. The Pirates, they say, are less about any specific ideology than they are about a belief that the West's creaking political systems can be hacked to give citizens a greater say in their democracy.

"We are not here to gain power," said Ásta Guthrún Helgadóttir, a 26-year-old Pirate member of Parliament. "We are here to distribute power."

But I do like that final sentence. Cool party symbol too:

Iceland was a pioneer of democratic governance; let's hope they can also pioneer decentralization.

It's also worth noting that there's a rapidly growing movement of young people in Brazil who favor libertarian policies.

And look who was just elected mayor of South Africa's largest city:

Herman Mashaba is a millionaire tycoon, an ideological libertarian and self-proclaimed "capitalist crusader" who lectures his listeners about the evils of big government and minimum wage.

He is also, shockingly, the newly elected mayor of South Africa's biggest city. That's a revolutionary phenomenon in a nation dominated for 22 years by a left-wing ruling party, whose cabinet ministers tend to be communists and union leaders.

Less than a month after winning office as Johannesburg's mayor, Mr. Mashaba is already energetically putting his free-market ideas into action. He is distributing thousands of title deeds to impoverished residents, trying to create a new class of landowners. He is plotting with private developers to turn the city into a vast construction site, and he is pledging to use small businesses to slash the unemployment rate.

(7 COMMENTS)

The most compelling objection to animal rights, to my mind, has long been... bugs.  Bugs are animals.  Every human being directly kills bugs just by walking - and indirectly kills bugs by renting and buying constructed housing.  Yet I've never heard even a strict vegan express a word of moral condemnation for this mass animal killing. 

So what?  I've previous defended what I call the Argument from Conscience.  The gist of it:

1. If even morally scrupulous advocates of view X don't live in accordance with X, the best explanation is that they don't really believe X. 

2. If even the dedicated advocates of X don't really believe X, X is probably false. 

By this logic: If even morally scrupulous animal rights activists don't sincerely believe that killing bugs is wrong, it's probably not wrong.  And once you proverbially throw bugs under the bus, why not other pests like mice and rats?  And once you abandon mammalian pests, why not cows and pigs? 

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.  What exactly do leading animal rights activists actually say about bugs?  Let's start with PETA, which endorses the following general principles:

PETA believes that animals have rights and deserve to have their best interests taken into consideration, regardless of whether they are useful to humans. Like you, they are capable of suffering and have an interest in leading their own lives.

The very heart of all of PETA's actions is the idea that it is the right of all beings--human and nonhuman alike--to be free from harm.

Now here's PETA on bugs:

All animals have feelings and have a right to live free from unnecessary suffering--regardless of whether they are considered "pests" or "ugly."

As with our dealings with our fellow humans, the determination of when lethal defense against insects and animals is acceptable must be judged on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the level of the threat and the alternatives that are available. As Albert Schweitzer once said "Each of us must live daily from judgment to judgment, deciding each case as it arises as wisely and mercifully as we can."

A bizarre juxtaposition.  No one would say that humans have a "right to live free from unnecessary suffering," then immediately talk about killing them on a "case-by-case basis."  And if someone killed hundreds of humans with his car on a cross-country trip, no one would accept the excuse, "It was necessary to cross the country."  If your only mode of transportation kills innocent human beings, you're obliged to stay put.  General principles notwithstanding, PETA clearly smuggles in the common-sense intuition that human lives are more morally important than insect lives.  Indeed, it smuggles in the assumption that human convenience is more morally important than insects' very lives.

To be fair, I've heard many animal activists hold PETA in low regard.  Here's what the Animal Rights FAQ tells us about bugs:

Singer quotes three criteria for deciding if an organism has the capacity to suffer from pain: 1) there are behavioral indications, 2) there is an appropriate nervous system, and 3) there is an evolutionary usefulness for the experience of pain. These criteria seem to satisfied for insects, if only in a primitive way.

Now we are equipped to tackle the issue of insect rights. First, one might argue that the issue is not so compelling as for other animals because industries are not built around the exploitation of insects. But this is untrue; large industries are built around honey production, silk production, and cochineal/carmine production, and, of course, mass insect death results from our use of insecticides. Even if the argument were true, it should not prevent us from attempting to be consistent in the application of our principles to all animals...

My Argument from Conscience, to repeat, objects: "But no one - even the author of this FAQ - does this.  Which strongly suggests even he finds his own position unconvincing."  But to his credit, the FAQ author discloses these complications:

Insects are a part of the Animal Kingdom and some special arguments would be required to exclude them from the general AR argument.

Some would draw a line at some level of complexity of the nervous system, e.g., only animals capable of operant conditioning need be enfranchised. Others may quarrel with this line and place it elsewhere. Some may postulate a scale of life with an ascending capacity to feel pain and suffer. They might also mark a cut-off on the scale, below which
rights are not actively asserted. Is the cut-off above insects and the lower invertebrates? Or should there be no cut-off? This is one of the issues still being actively debated in the AR community.

People who strive to live without cruelty will attempt to push the line back as far as possible, giving the benefit of the doubt where there is doubt.

The overarching problem with these "exclusion" arguments: They try to justify a massive difference in treatment with a totally debatable difference in capacity for pain.  It's easy to show that some creatures are much smarter than others; but how on earth could we ever convincingly show that some feel much less pain than others? 

This is especially pressing given the FAQ's closing proviso: If there's a real possibility that killing bugs is very wrong, we should refrain until we know better.  And per the Argument from Conscience, since even the author of the FAQ does not refrain, there probably isn't a real possibility that killing bugs is very wrong.

P.S. What about more academic sources?  I searched Google Scholar, but found nothing on the topic.  I'm open to reading suggestions in the comments.

(38 COMMENTS)

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I’ve written some mean things about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the years, and now that he’s in the national spotlight as the Republican vice presidential candidate, the time has come to tell the truth: I owe him an apology.

I spent years slagging Pence as stupid and moronic simply because he was a leading member of Congress participating in a major debate over a public policy issue that he didn’t understand at all. At the time, it struck me as genuinely shocking. And I responded in the way that a shocked person responds — emotionally, and with some overstatement.

Today, more than a decade removed from the first time I met Pence, I can say that it’s actually quite common for members of Congress to have no idea what they’re talking about.

There’s a real problem here, but it doesn’t relate to Pence personally. And it doesn’t particularly even relate to individual members of Congress personally. It’s a deep institutional problem that is both a cause and an effect of Americans’ entrenched cynicism about Congress, politics, and governing elites.

Mike Pence and the Social Security debate of 2005

I came to Washington to work at the American Prospect in the fall of 2003. I was still working there in the winter of 2004-’05 when the hot issue in Washington became George W. Bush’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security. I hadn’t covered congressional debates much before then, and the members I’d interacted with had mostly been Democrats with whom I had a lot in common ideologically, which made it easy to take a generous view of what they were saying.

At this time, the Bush administration was coalescing around the idea of allowing workers to divert some payroll tax money out of the Social Security trust fund and into private investment accounts.

Pence was, at the time, the head of the Republican Study Committee, which was an influential right-wing factional group inside the GOP caucus that sometimes rebelled from the right against Bush’s gestures at domestic policy moderation. So when I had the chance to hear Pence speak about Social Security privatization at a small think tank event, I was eager to see what he had to say. And what he said surprised me.

Mike Pence didn’t understand moral hazard

At the time, one of the big liberal objections to privatization was that private accounts were far riskier than conventional Social Security — and retirees could be left in the lurch if their investments went south.

In his talk, Pence had a strange answer to this: He argued that the average rate of return on investments in the stock market would be so much larger than the average Social Security benefit that it would be simple for the government to guarantee nobody would end up with less money in the new private system than they would have been entitled to under the old system. After all, most people would do so much better under the new system that the government would only need to pay up to make the guarantee work for a small number of people.

I raised what I thought was an obvious objection to this: moral hazard. If you promise people they’ll get a bailout if their private investments go south, you encourage excessive risk taking and bigger losses in the future.

My expectation was that Pence would have some kind of answer to this: a technical solution or a plan for a regulatory fix or a promise to think about it harder or something. But he had nothing. He seemed to just not understand at all what the problem was. The idea that a government guarantee could change behavior appeared to be totally unfamiliar to him, even though in most cases it’s a bedrock of conservative economic policy thinking.

Congress is terrible at policy — and there are structural reasons for that

In the decade after this encounter, I’ve had the opportunity to learn that the policy ignorance on Pence’s part that shocked me is actually rather typical.

What now surprises me is when I come across a member of Congress who really does understand a particular issue in detail. And this sometimes does happen. Little pockets of expertise are scattered hither and yon all throughout Capitol Hill — especially when members dig in to work on idiosyncratic pieces of legislation that are off the radar of big-time partisan conflict. But on most issues, most of the time, most members of Congress are more or less blindly following talking points that they got from somewhere else and that they don’t really understand.

Members form identities as a certain kind of politician — a New Democrat or a progressive, a leadership ally or a rock-ribbed true conservative — and then they take cues from how a politician like that ought to respond to the controversy of the day, and their staff hastily assembles some stuff to say about it.

And the problem here isn’t that the members are dumb, as I used to think. It’s that Congress hasn’t set itself up for individual members to be well-informed. Staff budgets are generally low, and a decent share of staff effort has to be put into constituent service and answering the mail. Senators, who have larger staffs, are generally competent to discuss a wider range of issues. And committee staffs have more policy expertise, so committee chairs and ranking members are often fairly knowledgeable about the subjects under their jurisdiction.

But typical members have little chance to build in-house knowledge on policy issues, and as matter of economic necessity skilled staffers have to be looking for their next job. Nor do the members themselves exactly have a ton of time to delve into issues and talk to policy experts. They’re expected to commute back and forth to their home districts, show up routinely at community events, and spend vast amounts of time raising money in small increments.

A consequence of this is that members become dependent on interest groups not just for money but for actual knowledge and information. The typical member of Congress, faced with some arbitrary policy issue, has neither the personal nor the staff capacity to actually research the issue and come up with a fair-minded and independent judgment about the merits of the issue.

This tends to leave Congress members dangerously dependent on lobbyists (or at times pure hucksters) for analysis, which fuels public contempt of Congress, which makes it all the more unthinkable for Congress to try to vote itself the extra money for staff and expertise building that could fix the problem.

The average member of Congress has little incentive to learn about policy

Last but by no means least, individual members face relatively little incentive to really understand policy matters. Presidents (like governors, mayors, and other executive branch officials) are sort of broadly accountable for results and know that if they loudly champion something that turns out to be a disaster, they will face political blowback as a result.

Legislators, by contrast, have a lot of opportunity to engage in cheap talk. You can say you’re for all kinds of blue sky ideas — a $15-an-hour minimum wage, eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the IRS, a moratorium on deportations, deporting everyone, banning fracking, drilling everywhere — secure in the knowledge that it’s not going to happen so it doesn’t really matter what the implementation details or specific consequences are. If it’s the kind of thing that fits the image you’re trying to project, that’s a good enough reason to come out in favor of it.

Congressional leaders are particularly uninformed

What really got me about Pence was that he wasn’t just a random backbencher. He was a significant factional leader — someone whom the more conservative House members were supposed to look to as a valued senior colleague.

What I now understand is that all the factors that push individual members of Congress toward ignorance push would-be congressional leaders even further in this direction. To become a congressional leader means, first and foremost, that you need to be really good at raising money. That’s a difficult and time-consuming task, and one for which detailed policy knowledge isn’t especially helpful.

The ultimate result is legitimately bad. Congress is the most important policymaking institution in the American constitutional system. But individual members of Congress are not knowledgeable about policy and are not equipped to become knowledgeable, and becoming knowledgeable is not a good way to shift into a leadership position.

Pence may well have been dumber or more ignorant than your average member of Congress, but most fundamentally he was an integral part of a larger institutional framework that cultivates and promotes ignorance. That system, more than anything about Pence himself, is what’s really scary.

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When I watched the video of Philando Castile die from gunshot wounds inflicted by a police officer in the course of a routine traffic stop, a deep sickness swept over me. Sadly, this feeling was not the result of a sudden realisation that police violence was a problem, particularly against black members of our communities. According to estimates, over 1,500 people were shot and killed by police officers last since the start of 2015 - inclusive of cases like Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Christian Taylor in Texas, Samuel Dubose in Cincinnati, Walter Scott in South Carolina, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

I learned of Castile's shooting on twitter. I saw #FalconHeights trending and clicked on the hash tag to find out what had happened. I immediately clicked through to video shot by Diamond Reynolds on Facebook live. When I started watching the video, I did not know whether Castile would survive or not. Horror came over me as I intimately watched the events unfold.

I give this account because amidst the more complex racial and social issues regarding the relationship between citizens and police, there is a lesson of media freedom. When Reynolds made the brave, flash decision to start recording what the police had done to Castile on Facebook live, she perhaps unknowingly made a choice that helped protect that content. By filming direct on Facebook, the video was immediately stored on Facebook's servers, which meant that the content was preserved even if her phone was confiscated or destroyed.

Just one day before, the video of police shooting Alton Sterling surfaced. In this case, the convenience store owner had filmed directly to his phone. According to the Guardian, Abdullah Muflahi said "As soon as I finished the video, I put my phone in my pocket. I knew they would take it from me, if they knew I had it. They took my security camera videos. They told me they had a warrant, but didn't show me one. So I kept this video for myself. Otherwise, what proof do I have?"

Academic work supports the anecdotal picture sketched above. Where the media is less regulated and there is greater private ownership in the media industry, citizens are more politically knowledgeable and active. This is the subject of Peter Leeson's paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives examining the issue across countries and using a variety of different indicators.

"In countries where government interferes with the media, individuals know less about basic political issues and are less politically involved. Politically ignorant and apathetic individuals do not know enough about political happenings or participate enough politically to monitor or punish effectively the activities of self-interested politicians. When politicians are free from accountability to voters, they are more likely to pursue privately beneficial policies."

Private ownership of media outlets like Facebook allow for people have access to information that would otherwise not be possible because of the ability to hide behind state power. Today police and politicians routinely attempt to shelter themselves from scrutiny and evade responsibility by denying access to information. Even in countries with almost full press freedom, new evidence suggests that journalists are killed for corrupt reasons.

The video of Castile's death has been viewed millions of times, placing people as close as possible to being in the moment of an experience that no one would wish on another human being. Such technology is made possible and protected by capitalism, however imperfectly. Personally, I was literally sickened by watching the video. But I chose to share it on my twitter feed because I felt an moral obligation to stand witness the reality of the situation. In a free society, it cannot be the role of the police to use deadly force even in the most tense moments.

Peter Boettke has a nice post discussing both the importance of expectations for political change and the role of political economy in arguing for the types of rule changes - demilitarising the police, ending the war on drugs, rethinking what community policing means in federalism - that can address the deep political, social, and racial issues America is wrestling with. The power of media will influence how expectations change from the bottom up, and less directly, the strategies our political leaders think viable.

In the 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers." Today an app can put the same event in real time before millions of viewers. The optimist in me thinks this technology can be a force for good by shifting public opinion to hold political actors to account, by cultivating mutual respect amongst diverse people, and discouraging recourse to violence. But it certainly is not inevitable or obvious that it will be used on net to foster more tolerance and better conventional understanding about the need for upholding the rule of law with limits on state power.

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» Over the decades, cities change size, but they gain and lose population in varying ways: Some in-town, some on greenfield land. How does that impact our understanding of population change?

Every few months, the U.S. Census releases new data on population change, chronicling the rise and fall of America’s cities, counties, and regions as they grow and shrink. The data are fascinating, bringing us useful insights about migration flows and economic shifts. They also point to fundamental changes in the places Americans live: Houston over Chicago, Phoenix over Philadelphia, and so on. And they produce breathless news reports that emphasize that the fastest-growing places are 15 cities you’ve never heard of.

Yet as data are released and evaluated, the trends as described by the levels of information presented by the Census often fail to directly represent underlying facts about how cities are changing–or they at least do not do so adequately. Comparing the changes in population size in the Birmingham and Buffalo regions, for example, explains very little about the health of their respective center cities. Comparing how the cities of Houston and New York have grown overall tells us little about how their in-town neighborhoods have held up over time.

This post delves into the question of how to measure population growth in urban environments by examining frequently used measures of demographic change and comparing them to alternatives. It is geared toward a discussion of demography rather than transportation, but its implications are important for how we think about cities and their component parts, including transportation. Indeed, as I’ll delve into in this article, the question of what cities are growing and what cities aren’t is at the core of some of the most pressing debates in today’s urban planning–so understanding how a place’s population change is occurring is essential.

Levels of data reporting

The U.S. Census collects data about people, either as a full sample (on decennial years) or using sample-based estimates (through the American Community Survey). These data are aggregated by the Bureau to different geographical levels. Depending on the sample used and the year collected, they are aggregated to the block, block group, tract, place (city), county, metropolitan statistical area (region), and other geographies, which are then used by analysts to make conclusions about the way in which the country’s population is changing.

The typical way for demographers to make comparisons between centers of population is to use regional (MSA) data and to track their changes, as MSAs provide a broad view of a place’s demographics and offer insight into how that place is evolving, regardless of political boundaries. The justification for this approach is based on the fact that boundaries in different places work differently.

For example, the city of Philadelphia is the major center city of its region (and jobs center), and it happens to share borders with Philadelphia County, the major county in the region. On the other hand, while Boston is the largest city in its region, the city of Cambridge next door has a large share of the region’s jobs and many of its dense, urban neighborhoods. Meanwhile, while Boston is in Suffolk County, there are other municipalities also in Suffolk County, and Cambridge is not in Suffolk County. As a result, comparing trends in Philadelphia with Boston as cities or Philadelphia with Suffolk as counties with one another at the national level could result in inappropriate conclusions.

Yet there are significant tradeoffs in using a regional level of analysis, as well. Indeed, every level of analysis has advantages and disadvantages, as summarized by the following table.

Level	Advantages	Disadvantages
Region (MSA)	Represents broader economic and commuting geography. Does not require abiding by “arbitrary” political boundaries. Allows reasonable region-to-region comparisons.	Fails to account for differences in politics between jurisdictions, which may influence growth. MSAs are not political entities. Masks issues occurring at the local level and fails to compare suburb to suburb or inner city to inner city.
County	Usually has fixed boundaries. Counties at the center of a metro area often represent the “inner city” dynamics of a place.	Counties typically have minimal political power compared to states and cities. Counties are rarely “understandable” for lay people. A county in some cases can be regional in scope (Bexar, TX) or just be a part of a city (New York, NY).
City (“place”)	Cities are the base level of local jurisdiction most people understand, so they are relatable. Cities often have strong political environments that likely influence growth significantly.	Boundaries change over time, especially in Sunbelt cities with annexation powers. City trends do not necessarily represent the region as a whole, and suburbs are usually cities in their own right, confusing matters.
Tract, block group, block	Represent local-level trends most effectively.	Do not represent broader trends. May not accurately represent “neighborhoods” because of arbitrary boundaries.

How, then, can we compare cities across the country with one another? If no Census geography is problem-free, are cross-regional comparisons useless?

The answer is to first determine what it is, exactly, that we are trying to ask. If the question is, for example, which areas of the country are growing most quickly, looking at regional demographics make sense (rather than, say, emphasizing large percentage growth in tiny cities). If the question is whether different political approaches are affecting growth differently, then examining population in cities may be effective.

But if the question is something more complicated, such as how similar neighborhoods in different places around the country are acting, these Census geographies often cease to be relevant. This is particularly important for understanding transportation trends, since the way people move around is often directly related to the physical characteristics of the places people live and work. But cities or regions as a whole rarely respond to this issue because cities are often too big and inadequately uniform.

Components of urban population change

More than just pondering the rather simple (but important!) question of what metropolitan regions are growing or declining most quickly, I wanted to get a better sense of how specific parts of regions changed over time. I wanted to be able to answer questions more relevant to urban transportation patterns, like how downtowns in various cities grow or shrink over time. Downtowns are almost uniformly the places in urban regions with the highest transit, walking, and biking mode shares; their health is indicative of whether a region is moving in the right direction on that front. Similarly, how much are already-developed areas of cities changing over time? This is particularly relevant for understanding the pace of infill development, to determine whether cities are adapting to become denser places, or whether they are focusing on suburban growth instead.

To conduct this analysis, I moved beyond the standard Census geographies and to create more appropriate and nationally comparable methods. Taking as a base the 100 largest U.S. cities in 1960 (many of which, though not all of which, are the same as today’s 100 largest cities), I compared changes in not only (a) the overall population within city boundaries, but also (b) the areas of those cities that were already built up in 1960 (with a density of at least 4,000 people per square mile*), and (c) the areas within 1.5 and 3 miles of city hall, irrespective of whether those areas are within the relevant city or not.

The following four maps illustrate how these geographies look for four representative cities–Las Vegas, Indianapolis, Houston, and New York City. The cities have changed dramatically between 1960 and 2014. Las Vegas, Indianapolis, and Houston increased the area within their city boundaries dramatically through annexation or, in the case of Indianapolis, a merger with the surrounding county. New York City, on the other hand, has the same boundaries, with the exception of some landfill such as at Battery Park City.

The areas that were built up in 1960 also differ considerably between the cities. Whereas most of 1960 Indianapolis had neighborhoods of densities of more than 4,000 people per square mile, less than half of Las Vegas did and Houston’s density was arrayed along corridors emanating from downtown. Finally, while the areas within 3 miles of Houston city hall are entirely within the city, those within 3 miles of Las Vegas and New York city halls include suburban jurisdictions (including parts of New Jersey, in the case of New York City).

When examining just a comparison between changes in population in the city as a whole and those in the neighborhoods that were already built up in 1960, some remarkable trends become apparent.

As the following interactive graph shows (mouse over the graph to get more information; not all cities are shown in the X-axis), very few cities saw significant overall growth between 1960 and 2014 in neighborhoods that were already built up. Houston and San Antonio, which each gained hundreds of thousands of people overall during that period, also each lost more than 100,000 people in their already-built up areas. So did Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, and Memphis. What’s surprising is that these are cities often acclaimed for their dramatic growth over the past few decades. Yet their growth has been premised largely on annexation–suburbanization–even as their already-built up cores have declined.

In fact, the average of the 100 largest cities grew by 48 percent overall. Yet the average city also lost 28 percent of its residents within its neighborhoods that were built up in 1960.

Some cities did expand through infill quite dramatically, and Los Angeles is a true outlier on this front, gaining almost 1,000,000 people in areas that were already at least partially built up. Other coastal cities had similar but less dramatic trends, like San Diego, San Jose, Long Beach, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Arlington (VA) and Oakland. San Francisco is often singled out as a place where growth is not moving fast enough, yet this chart illustrates that the city is at least as willing to accept infill growth as most others.

Of course, change from 1960 is just one criterion to measure change in urban environment. The following graph illustrates how the built-up neighborhoods in 1960 fared over the next few decades. In some cases, they rebounded from significant declines in the 60s and 70s; in others, their populations have continued to fall. (Note: this paragraph and the following graph added in a post-publishing update.)

Looking at areas within 1.5 and 3 miles of city halls produces equally interesting results. While these areas often overlap with the areas that were built up in 1960, they do not match directly as many downtowns had few residents in 1960 (look at the map of downtown Manhattan above, for example), and they often include communities outside of the city itself.

When looking at these neighborhoods, as shown in the following chart, the overall trend is negative: The preponderance of U.S. cities has lost a significant number of people within 1.5 miles of city hall and between 1.5 and 3 miles of city hall, with Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis leading the way.

There are some clear exceptions, however: San Jose, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, Long Beach, Honolulu, Arlington, and Austin each grew dramatically within these core areas. New York City and Chicago grew dramatically (in fact, more than any other cities) very close to their city halls–but they also lost a significant number of people between 1.5 miles and 3 miles of downtown.

It is worth pointing out that these trends have changed over time and that choosing a starting point in 1960 was an arbitrary choice based on the availability of Census tract-level data for that year.

As the following graph illustrates, the population of the neighborhoods within 1.5 miles of city hall in the 100 largest cities has changed dramatically over time, and while the change from 1960 to 2014 is a key indicator, it is not all meaningful. Indeed, it is interesting to point out that of the areas within 1.5 miles of city hall of the 100 largest cities, only 5 grew between 1960 and 1970, but 6 grew between 1970 and 1980, 35 between 1980 and 1990, 51 between 1990 and 2000, and 53 between 2000 and 2014. In other words, while the central areas of most large cities are still less populated than they were in 1960, many have recovered a significant share of their population in the intervening years.

Diverging paths to growth

Of the 15 largest U.S. cities in 2014, 13 grew between 1960 and 2014. Yet of those 15, only 7 grew in the areas within 1.5 miles of city hall, and only 5 grew in their respective neighborhoods that were already built up in 1960. Even New York City, whose growth has been outpaced by just a few cities, has increased in population only in areas that were underdeveloped before from the perspective of residential occupancy, such as on Staten Island, in the financial district, and on land that was reclaimed from the rivers.

Los Angeles is an outlier, seeing stellar growth both overall and through infill development during this period.

Seen alternatively, examine the following chart illustrating how the 100 largest cities in 1960 have changed over time when separated by region (by chance, 1960’s 100 largest cities are roughly evenly distributed between the Midwest, Northeast, South, and West).

What’s intriguing is that though large cities in the South and West grew spectacularly over this period (the median city grew by more than 50 percent overall even as the median cities in the Midwest and Northeast lost people during that period), their infill development–particularly in the South–stalled out. Indeed, the median city in the South, much as in the Midwest, saw its 1960 developed areas decline in population by more than 40 percent; the median city in those two regions also experienced a decline in population in the 1.5 miles closest to city hall of more than 50 percent.

From the perspective of these alternative measurements, cities in the Northeast actually appear closer in trends to those in the West than those in the Midwest and South.

Implications for discussing population data

The U.S. has gained more than 140 million people since 1960, and the growth of its largest cities has at least to some degree corresponded to that; the total population of the 100 largest cities in 1960 grew from 47.5 million then to 57.4 million in 2014. Yet this growth has come largely through annexation and not through infill development or construction downtown, as I’ve noted above. This gives some clue as to why the country’s residents continue to rely on personal automobiles to get around. Overall, this paints a worrying picture about the renaissance that many cities appear to be going through; is it simply a blip on the overall continued suburbanization of the country?

Yet by evaluating growth from a different perspective using the indicators I presented above (surely there are other measures that would also be helpful) suggests that we need a more nuanced look at population growth. It is simultaneously true that Chicago lost the country’s second-largest number of inhabitants between 1960 and 2014 and that the same city gained the second-largest number of inhabitants living within 1.5 miles of city hall. It is simultaneously true that San Antonio gained almost 800,000 people in the city as a whole even as it lost more than 100,000 people in the areas that were already developed in 1960.

Why take these alternative measures of city growth so seriously? They should help us question whether the cities that grew fastest from 1960 to 2014 were Las Vegas, San Jose, and Austin or, alternatively, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Miami or perhaps New York City, Chicago, and Honolulu. Each tells a different but useful tale about demographic change.

These measures might help us to understand, for example, how it is possible for half-vacant neighborhoods to exist just blocks from central Houston, which is otherwise booming. Or it may help us to understand why that city’s transit ridership has increased by just 5 percent since 1996 even though the city has grown by more than 25 percent since then. And they might help us get a better idea of what cities are truly regenerating their inner-city neighborhoods versus those that are simply gobbling up suburban growth to feed into their growing population counts.

Much of the rhetoric in the urban planning discourse over the past few years has focused on the lack of adequate housing construction in many of our cities’ most-desired communities. This is, no doubt, one of the most pressing issues facing places where supply has not kept up with demand and, as a result, rents have risen out of control.

Cities like San Francisco, notably, are frequently cited for inappropriately preventing growth, whereas places like Houston have been lauded for their unbelievable growth. Yet the data presented above should make us question this argument, or at least make us evaluate whether it conclusions correspond to actual demographic change. How is it that “growing” Houston lost almost 120,000 people in its neighborhoods that were already developed in 1960, while “growth-inhibiting” San Francisco gained more than 70,000 in its similar communities? Context matters.

* I used this density measure because it approximates mid-level suburban density levels.

Image at top: Construction in Los Angeles, from Flickr user fliegender (cc)

A friend sends along this summary:

Greg Schoen

Glass Gem corn, a unique variety of rainbow-colored corn, became an Internet sensation in 2012 when a photo of the sparkling cob was posted to Facebook.

Shortly after, the company that sells the rare seeds, Native Seeds/SEARCH, began ramping up production to meet the high demand. The Arizona-based company still sells Glass Gem seeds on its website.

Meanwhile, a Facebook page devoted to Glass Gem allows growers to share pictures of the vibrant corn variety.

But the story behind Glass Gem is just as remarkable. It begins with one man, Carl Barnes, who set out to explore his Native American roots.

The history was largely retold by Barnes' protegee, Greg Schoen, in 2012, when the corn gained national attention. We've broken out the highlights.

The story of Glass Gem corn begins with an Oklahoma farmer named Carl Barnes. Barnes, now in his 80s, is half-Cherokee. He began growing older corn varieties in his adult years (no one is exactly sure when this began) as a way to reconnect with his heritage.

Greg Schoen

In growing these older corn varieties, Barnes was able to isolate ancestral types that had been lost to Native American tribes when they were relocated in the 1800s to what is now Oklahoma. This led to an exchange of ancient corn seed with people he had met and made friends with all over the country.

Greg Schoen

At the same time, Barnes began selecting, saving, and replanting seeds from particularly colorful cobs.

Greg Schoen

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The price of solar has plummeted since the late 1970s. Back then you’d pay $77.67 per watt for solar cells, and you still wouldn’t be able to produce electricity—not until you connected a bunch of cells together to form a solar panel.

Last year, the price for a fully made solar panel—including the glass cover, aluminum frame, and electrical wiring—reached 57 cents a watt.

Lower prices combined with financing options, which enable homeowners to put solar panels on their homes with no money down, have led to explosive growth of residential solar in the United States. In 2006, only 30,000 homes had solar panels. But by February 2016, there were over one million homes with solar. Some experts expect that over two million homes will have solar by 2018.

Residential solar is growing, and growing fast. But what type of homeowners put solar on their homes? Is it only the wealthy and environmentally conscious? Or have solar panels become a mass market product?

We explored these questions using data from Priceonomics customer SolarPulse, which maintains a data set on 11,000+ California residential households that bought solar panels from 2000 to 2015. We compared these homes and their owners to the average homes and homeowners in the same geographic areas. As solar energy has become cheaper, has it become mainstream? Or is it still a "luxury" item?

Our analysis shows that expensive homes and wealthy homeowners are still much more likely to have solar panels. But this is becoming less true over time. Since 2012, the incomes and home values of people going solar have decreased dramatically. 

The adoption of solar seems to have democratized.

Solar has been for the wealthy

We began by comparing the value of homes that have installed solar to the average home price in the same area. The following chart looks at twenty California zip codes. All estimated household values are based on 2015 data.

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

 

At more than $630,000, the value of homes with solar are 80% higher than that of the average household in the same areas.

We also examined the difference in household incomes between owners of solar homes and the average household. Our data shows that households with solar have much higher incomes on average.

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

The average household income of solar households is about $117,000, compared to $87,000 for the average household in the same zip code. 

The people investing in solar still tend to be high income. But with prices dropping, this looks to be changing.

Solar growth accelerates

The growth of the residential solar market accelerated tremendously in the 2010s. In the 20 California zip codes that we analyzed, new solar household growth was slow—until it shot up in 2010. 

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

Solar adoption rises, accessibility increases

So has the growth of the market increased accessibility?

To explore whether the demographics of people with solar changed, we analyzed the 11,000+ households in our data set by time period: 2000 to 2005, 2006 to 2011, and 2012 to March 31, 2016.

Looking at average estimated household income by time period, we find that household incomes decrease over time. In particular, households that adopted solar from 2012 onwards possess markedly lower average estimated household incomes.

In short, less wealthy people are increasingly investing in solar. 

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

The reduction is even more dramatic when we look at house values. The average house value of homeowners with solar in 2012-2016 was $200,000 less than for the 2006-2011 group. 

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

As more households adopt residential solar, the demographics of solar households also change. Household incomes and house values are lowering, and solar seems to be reaching more of the middle class.

Residential solar is becoming a financial decision

Skeptics of green energy have often doubted whether certain technologies could ever reach more than a niche of wealthy, environmentally-conscious consumers. To reach a mass market, a technology needs to be cost-effective. 

Our dataset includes a measure of the “environmental orientation” of households based on their purchasing behavior, so we tested whether homeowners are making a financial or environmental choice. 

We found that, over time, investing in solar is becoming less of an environmental choice. Comparing the solar households from 2000-2005 to the 2012-2016 solar households, we see that environmental orientation has decreased 13%. “Environmental orientation” is measured on a 0 to 40 scale.

REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

With the price of residential solar decreasing, adopting solar has become more of a financial decision. 

New technology, whether it's a phone, computer or solar panel, often starts off as a luxury purchase for the wealthy. As the technology gets cheaper, however, access can become much more democratic.

Lower solar prices have helped make residential solar more accessible, as evidenced by this data. The average homeowner with solar still tends to be wealthy. But the incomes of individuals going solar—and their home values—have decreased markedly since 2012. What's more, installing solar panels appears to be evolving from an environmental decision to a financial one as solar energy gets cheaper.

NOW WATCH: An exercise scientist reveals exactly how long you need to work out to get in great shape

Labyrinth, a dark children's movie about a baby-stealing Goblin King and the teenage girl who outwits him, turns 30 on June 27. That's three decades of wondering how a film that combined Jim Henson and David Bowie (plus some truly terrible CGI) not only got made but went on to become one of both men's most memorable projects.

In honor of this bizarre film, and Bowie, who passed away in January at the age of 69, let's look back at the glorious weirdness that began its life as box office flop and has since become a beloved cult classic.

Labyrinth is a mashup of so many genres

The movie is a dark, semi-musical, glam-rock children's movie that seems to combine The Wizard of Oz and a Maurice Sendak story and stars David Bowie plus a cavalcade of puppets. None of it should make a scrap of sense — yet somehow it works within its own strange, singular genre.

Let's recap the plot: Petulant teenager Sarah (a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly, in her fourth film role) lives in a fantasy world but is constantly being dragged back to earth by the dreary realities of her life — including her perpetually wailing baby half-brother, Toby. One night while babysitting, Sarah wishes to the "goblin king" that Toby would disappear — and he does, earning Sarah a visit from the actual Goblin King (Bowie, resplendent in a feathered mullet wig and frosted eye shadow).

The Goblin King (whose name, by the way, is Jareth) transports Sarah to his labyrinth and gives her 13 hours to find her way to his castle and rescue her brother; if she fails, he threatens, Toby will become a goblin forever. Sarah must make her way through the maze with the help of the weirdo residents she encounters within it, and along the way learns important lessons about friendship, independence, and the misfortune of being attracted to a man whose pants are tighter than yours.

This movie raises so many questions: How did David Bowie become the supreme ruler of a goblin kingdom? Why can he transform into an owl? Isn't there an easier way to grow the goblin population than stealing human babies? Why can't Sarah remember a line as simple as, "You have no power over me"?

These are all valid questions, but they vanish in the face of Bowie's be-mulleted, spandex-wrapped perfection. He sings, he dances, he throws fake babies in the air and juggles crystal balls and mostly interacts with puppets. In the face of such unabashed '80s excess, it's hard to care so much about the details of the plot.

The film's bizarre, hyper-detailed visuals are a testament to Henson's skill

Much of Labyrinth has the vibe of a particularly vivid dream; the slow-motion falls and ouroboric logic evoke that sludgy, slow-dawning realization that you're asleep and can't quite control what's happening.

Henson creates an expansive world full of odd, disquieting beings — moss adorned with eyeballs, beautiful fairies with a vicious bite, beaky swamp dwellers that pluck out their own eyeballs and swallow them. Unseen creatures slink through the periphery of Sarah's vision, and vast, unfamiliar landscapes stretch endlessly into the distance, adding to the alien atmosphere. Labyrinth is definitely more Dark Crystal than Sesame Street.

Yet it's also ostensibly a children's movie, and Henson tempers the story's darker elements with plenty of silly humor. The Left and Right Door Knockers squabble like an old married couple, and everyone's inability to pronounce Hoggle's name correctly is a running joke that includes even Jareth. Plus, the Bog of Eternal Stench is pure 12-year-old-boy humor, complete with fart noises.

And at the time of its release, Labyrinth was a technical marvel. Henson relied almost entirely on practical effects, building the creatures and sets and including almost no computer animation. Even Jareth's wacko crystal ball moves were real — performed by magician Michael Moschen as he stood behind Bowie. As Richard Lawson wrote for the Atlantic Wire:

One of the peculiar joys of Henson's very strange movie is how tactile it is. He built most of the film's supporting cast, creating goblins and worms and dogs and knights and all manner of other creatures out of, y'know, puppet stuff. Actual stuff. Tangible materials. The sets too were all built and weathered and decidedly real. There is a big bit of computer animation in the beginning, involving an owl, but beyond that? Somewhere (maybe?) all the things on screen are sitting in a dusty warehouse somewhere, not archived on a harddrive. The illusion takes place out here in the world of the touchable, of the built and extant.

The Hoggle puppet alone involved 18 motors and a four-person team. That reliance on physical materials rather than computers means that while many things about Labyrinth are dated (especially the fashion), the world inside its maze has aged surprisingly well.

David Bowie was a big force in shaping in the movie

Labyrinth was the last feature film Henson directed before he died. It was also a commercial failure, recouping just half of its $25 million budget. But despite its initial poor reception, it eventually became a beloved cult favorite, and Bowie's scenery-crunching performance is at least partially to thank for that.

The Goblin King was originally going to be another puppet, until Henson decided he needed a big, charismatic star to anchor the movie. He considered other musicians — including Sting, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Mick Jagger — before landing on Bowie.

Acting in a children's movie with puppets as co-stars seemed perhaps an odd move for the rock star, but Henson eventually won him over to the idea. In the following MTV clip, filmed backstage at Live Aid in 1985, Bowie describes the project, which elicits laughter from someone off camera before the interviewer moves on to other questions with zero comment.

But Bowie's larger-than-life presence and particular aesthetic are the centerpiece of the film. Conceptual designer Brian Froud imbued Jareth with Bowie's gender-bending glam-rock vibe, even giving him a "swagger stick" shaped like a microphone. And, yes, those jaw-droppingly tight pants were a deliberate choice, as Froud explains in the video below:

Though the movie initially flopped, critics praised Bowie's performance. The New York Times wrote that Bowie was "perfectly cast as the teasing, tempting seducer whom Sarah must both want and reject in order to learn the labyrinth's lessons, and his songs add a driving, sensual appeal."

The Montreal Gazette bestowed him with even higher praise:

The casting of Bowie can't be faulted on any count. He has just the right look for a creature who's the object of both loathing and secret desire. And this is one rock star who can deliver his lines with a combination of menace and playfulness that few seasoned actors could even begin to match.

Bowie's sexuality, which was always rather fluid, was somewhat jarringly on display, considering that Labyrinth was marketed toward children and co-starred an actual teenager (Bowie was 39 when the movie came out; Connelly was 16). But his presence also gives the coming-of-age story an added tension and weight; think pieces galore have been written about the symbolism of Jareth as a father figure, lover, and abuser all in one.

And some people just found Jareth sexy, as various BuzzFeed posts and Tumblrs will attest.

The musical numbers are ridiculous (and awesome)

Bowie sang four of the five musical numbers in the film (the exception being "Chilly Down," which is sung by the puppeteers that voiced the orange Firey gang). The best known, by far, is "Magic Dance," in which Jareth entertains baby Toby with a song, with backup vocals by his legions of goblins.

The clip below goes behind the scenes of the number with Bowie and puppeteer Brian Henson (Jim's son). Bowie explains that he ended up voicing the gurgling baby heard on the track, because the kid he'd picked for the song — the child of one of his backup dancers — refused to make a sound on tape. (The actual baby in the video is Froud's son Toby, who's now a puppeteer; the fake baby I assume belongs to the props department.)

And then there's "As the World Falls Down," which plays as Jareth and Sarah dance during the glittery fever dream of a ball that's reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut by way of Jem and the Holograms.

Bowie's presence was such that even as he's nearly hidden among ballroom dancers or surrounded by foot-tall puppets, his talent cuts through all the clutter. That magnetism is part of why he is so revered as an artist — and why the strange little tale of Labyrinth is such an enduring favorite.

Labyrinth is available to rent on Amazon and to buy on iTunes.

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Watch: David Bowie, in 9 songs that sampled him

The Brexit results are in: The British people have voted to leave the European Union in a historic referendum.

This doesn’t mean Britain has actually left the European Union, but it does mean that they will leave soon. Unlike a typical nation-state the EU does have an exit procedure that’s laid out in law. It’s not an exit procedure that’s ever been actually put to the test, so we don’t have a great sense of how it will work in practice. But the broad outline is that the referendum sets into motion a two-year period for a negotiated divorce during which time the British government and the EU are supposed to unwind their fiscal ties and lay out a new framework for how the country will relate to the trading bloc.

This could, in practice, mean almost anything ranging from something like Norway’s extreme close relationship to the EU to something like the arms’ length relationship that Australia or the United States has.

Here’s who won and who lost.

Winner: Southern European Eurozone members

An intriguing contrarian case for Brexit was British economist Andrew Lilico’s argument that Leave should win precisely in order to make it easier for the rest of the EU to integrate more deeply.

The Eurozone, after all, is a bit of an odd beast. Having a bunch of countries that share a currency but don’t share a tax system or a welfare state mean that when particular places fall on economic hard times, they have no escape.

A truly independent country facing the kind of loss of external investment funds that struck Spain during the financial crisis would experience rapid depreciation of its currency. The suddenly much cheaper country would become a more attractive tourist destination, more attractive maker of export goods, and more attractive magnet for a new round of foreign investment, thus helping it recover from the financial crisis.

Conversely, a member of an integrated welfare state facing a rapid collapse of its local housing market (think Florida in 2008) would be stabilized by continued federal inflow of dollars to its healthcare, retirement, and unemployment insurance systems. Not a bailout of debts incurred by the local government authority, but assistance to hard-hit citizens that helps them get back on their feet and keeps local businesses afloat.

Eurozone member states, however, are stuck in a strange limbo between these two poles, neither fully independent nor integrated into a common welfare state. Which means that when disaster strikes, their means of promoting economic recovery are limited.

Moving to that kind of integrated welfare state is a big project and it clearly isn’t going to happen any time soon. But with Britain set to leave the EU and become unable to block new measures in Brussels, it’s substantially more likely to happen.

Britain, after all, is richer than the average EU member state meaning most of its citizens would probably end up paying slightly higher taxes for slightly fewer services under such an arrangement. Britain is also temperamentally skeptical of the case for deeper European integration — and, crucially, not a member of the euro, and thus not particularly desperate to make the euro work. A Europe without Britain will be one that’s set on a more rapid course to even deeper forms of fiscal integration.

Loser: The British economy

In the short term, the vote to Leave the European Union is going to commence a period of disruption and uncertainty in which foreign direct investment in the UK takes a temporary pause while investors wait to find out what the long-term situation will look like.

That, in turn, will cause the value of the pound to fall and likely prompt a recession whose severity and duration will have a lot to do with the short-term policy choices made by the UK government and the Bank of England.

This possibility was discussed extensively during the campaign and evidently Britain’s voters decided that a little short-term gain was worth the possible long-term upside of getting out of the EU. The real risks to the British economy, however, concern something else entirely — the long run.

Right now, many large multinational companies like to put their European headquarters in London. London is a great city to live in, and its English-speaking population and low-by-european-standards taxes make it an attractive base of operations since the European Union’s single market means you can do business throughout the continent from anywhere. Leading Leave campaigners say that post-Brexit they will negotiate a trade pact with the EU that lets them retain that kind of access, but there’s no guarantee they will succeed. The French government might deliberately try to block them, figuring that if executives can’t station themselves in London they’ll fall back on Paris. The Irish government might see enormous upside for English-speaking London.

Similarly, the UK’s major export industry is the financial services cluster in London. Thanks to the EU, London-based banks currently serve a continent-sized market just like New York-based ones. If the post-Brexit UK can negotiate deep market access with the EU, that will stay the same. But if it can’t, European banking will likely migrate to Frankfurt and Amsterdam. And the governments of Germany and the Netherlands may want to make sure that happens.

Loser: David Cameron

If you’re wondering how this entire referendum business came about, the answer is that British Prime Minister David Cameron had a problem heading into the UK’s 2015 general election. He and most of the other Conservative Party leaders, reflecting the preferences of the British business class, wanted to stay in the EU. But a growing number of Conservative Party voters, driven largely by anti-immigration sentiment, wanted to leave and were tempted to vote for the anti-European, anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP).

Cameron’s solution was to promise a referendum on EU membership if the Conservatives won the election — something the opposition Labour Party wasn’t promising.

Vote UKIP, Cameron argued, and you’d get Labour — and no referendum. The best way to get the UK out of the EU would be to vote Conservative, even though the Conservatives weren’t promising to leave.

This was a neat trick, but one that was stunningly short-sighted. Because though it succeeded in delivering an election victory for the Tories, the referendum campaign itself badly split the Conservative Party between Cameron’s Remain faction and a substantial chorus of pro-Leave politicians lead by former London Mayor Boris Johnson, cabinet minister Michael Gove, and former minister Ian Duncan Smith.

Cameron remains Prime Minister despite his side’s defeat in the vote and says he intends to stay in place. But his position now looks, in many ways, untenable. He’s just been humiliated, and the ambitious pro-Brexit politicians who won the referendum will seek to overthrow him with the support of Tory backbenchers. The argument that leaving the EU ought to be conducted and negotiated by people who actually believe in the policy seems pretty compelling, after all.

Loser: George Osborne

Even more clearly than his boss David Cameron, it’s George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose personal political career was on the line in this vote.

Osborne is essentially Britain’s Treasury Secretary, except that because Britain isn’t a military superpower, his stature vis-à-vis the Foreign and Defense ministers is higher. Even more than that, Osborne is effectively Cameron’s number two (the UK only sometimes has a formally designated Deputy Prime Minister and now is not one of those times) as well as his intended successor as leader of the Conservative Party.

Losing the vote badly jeopardizes the ability of the pro-EU faction of the party to retain control. The win sets the party up for a lot more trouble and infighting, but Osborne is likely to come out ahead.

Loser: Nordics and Eastern Europe

The EU is divided along a number of different lines. But one tension is between the countries whose political classes are deeply enthusiastic about European integration — primarily the six founding members, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, joined by countries like Spain and Greece that see the EU as guaranteeing the stability of their political systems — and a more diffuse set of countries that prefer a looser union.

The latter group includes Denmark and Sweden, both of which (like the UK) opted out of membership in the Eurozone common currency union, as well as many eastern and central European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, whose experience of Communist rule and non-experience of the three-decade social democratic growth miracle in the aftermath of World War II have bequeathed a more right-wing political culture.

The UK is the most significant country in this loose-union bloc, and their departure will significantly weaken its presence in Brussels and ensure that the "ever closer union" school of thought would win future policy battles.

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How the euro caused the Greek crisis

A few years ago I would have thought the question posed above was absurd. Of course if operated safely, nuclear power can actually be good for the environment. And yet despite the fact that it is an almost carbon free form of energy, nuclear power is opposed by most environmental groups. Apparently the consequences of a catastrophic nuclear accident are so dire that it's not worth the risk, despite the lack of carbon emissions from nuclear power plants.

But what if it were the case the nuclear power were good for the environment when operated safely, and even better for the environment when subject to catastrophic accidents emitting large quantities of radiation. Preposterous? Not according to the BBC, the Independent, the National Geographic, The Guardian, Reuters, and other news sources.

Just to be clear, the radiation from Chernobyl has caused some damage to wildlife. But it's also created Europe's largest nature reserve, of over 1600 sq. miles. The bottom line seems to be that radiation does far less damage than humans, and thus a nuclear accident that forces humans out of an area is actually good for the environment. Here is The Guardian:

Wildlife is abundant around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, despite the presence of radiation released by the world's most catastrophic nuclear explosion nearly three decades ago, researchers have found.

The number of elk, deer and wild boar within the Belarusian half of the Chernobyl exclusion zone today are around the same as those in four nearby uncontaminated nature reserves.

Wolves, which are commonly hunted in the region because of their impact on livestock, were seven times as abundant with the zone, according to a study published on Monday.

The findings run counter to previous hypotheses that chronic long-term exposure to radiation would hit animal populations.

"What we do, our everyday habitation of an area - agriculture, forestry - they've damaged wildlife more than the world's worst nuclear accident," said Prof Jim Smith, professor of environmental science, University of Portsmouth, and one of the paper's authors.

"It doesn't say that nuclear accidents aren't bad, of course they are. But it illustrates that the things we do everyday, the human population pressure, damages the environment. It's kind of obvious but it's an amazing illustration of it."

I'm no expert on the environment, so I'd appreciate if someone would fill me in on where I've gone wrong. I do understand that there are lots of good arguments against nuclear power. It's very expensive. It's a danger to humans if there is an accident (although I suspect the risk is less than many people assume.) I'm not advocating the construction of nuclear power plants.

But none of that explains the opposition of environmentalists. Nuclear power is one proven way of addressing global warming (it partly explains France's low carbon emissions, for instance). So if a catastrophic nuclear disaster actually helps the environment, then why is the environmental movement opposed? I don't get it.

PS. A quick follow-up to my previous post. In fairness to the Modi government, they did announce a liberalization of foreign investment yesterday---something I was unaware of when I wrote the post. Let's hope I was wrong.

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Originally published on Grist.

Climate change is one strange matchmaker. Warmer temperatures have led to shifting habitats and shifting mating habits. And occasionally, when two bears collide, the result is neither grizzly nor polar, but pizzly.

Or should I say grolar? In the coming years, we’ll face more naming conundrums like this one. A 2015 Nature study found that by the end of the century, 6 percent of species worldwide are likely to come into contact with new species to potentially reproduce with. Hybrids are an ordinary part of the evolutionary process (even some humans are part Neanderthal), but interbreeding isn’t always advantageous. Washington Post reports that as grizzlies and grolars encroach on dwindling polar territory, they may accelerate the decline of their purebred cousins.

In the Arctic, where icy habitats are melting together, even more weird stuff is going down. Introducing some hybrids brought to life by the Cupid’s arrow of climate change — and some speculation as to what we’ll end up calling these critters.

Grolar vs. pizzly bear

Grist/Amelia Bates

Grizzly-polar bear hybrids, the existence of which was confirmed 10 years ago, are once again in the news after one was shot by a hunter in a remote territory of Canada. The bear has white fur, brown paws, and a grizzly-shaped head. Climate change has encouraged the two species to mingle more often recently, prodding polar bears to roam farther from their shrinking Arctic territory while grizzlies in Canada and Alaska move north.

Many names have cropped up over the years: pizzly-grizzly, polargrizz, and nanulak (a combination of the Inuit nanuk, polar bear, and aklak, grizzly bear). But recent headlines show pizzly versus grolar is where the debate lies today. Though pizzly is pretty fun, Google Trends shows grolar is currently winning the popularity prize.

Rotted vs. spinged seal

Grist/Amelia Bates

As sea ice habitats shift, the chance of ringed seals, uh, "sealing the deal" with spotted seals increases, according to a 2010 study from Nature. Other seal species are beginning to blend, too, like bearded, ribbon, and harp seals (now there’s a combo). No word yet as to whether a spotted-ringed seal has been seen in the wild, but we’re guessing it would look something like the drawing above.

The question of rotted vs. spinged is a tough one. "Rotted" is unnervingly close to rotten (not a thing we want for these li’l guys!), whereas "spinged" has the danger of being pronounced with the soft g of sponged. In this case, we may have to settle for spotted-ringed seal unless someone has a better suggestion.

Narluga vs. belwhal

Grist/Amelia Bates

In the 1980s, researchers discovered a whale skull in West Greenland that looked suspiciously like a beluga-narwhal mashup. Since then, hunters have spotted the hybrid creatures in chilly Arctic waters. Apparently beluga whales and narwhals produce offspring with big, burly heads — but, sadly, no tusks. (We drew one in anyway.)

While belwhal is a worthwhile contender, narluga is hard to beat. It captures the distinctive sounds of both animals’ names — the nar- of narwhal and the -luga of beluga — and sounds pretty mellifluous, to boot. Try it yourself: Narluuuuuuuuga!

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Whatever else happens to the climate, one thing’s for sure: We’re bearing witness to a future that looks and sounds pretty weird. What’s next? A bottlenose-orca (bottlenorca)? Perhaps a caribou-moose (carimoose or moosibou)?

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

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Originally published on Ensia.

In the rugged Sahtú region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, a district so remote that in winter only a single treacherous ice road connects it to the outside world, life revolves around caribou. For millennia, the Dene people lived as nomads, tracking vast herds across the Sahtú and harvesting the itinerant animals for their meat, skin, and bones.

Although the region’s indigenous people today reside in villages, subsistence hunting remains central to diet and culture. The Dene language contains phrases for such concepts as "we grew up with caribou blood" and "we are people with caribou."

That intimate relationship did not always coexist comfortably with empirical science. Wildlife biologists had long studied caribou by swooping down in helicopters, netting them, and affixing them with radio collars, a process that some Dene saw as disrespectful to creatures they considered kin. In September 2012, the Sahtú Renewable Resources Council passed resolutions recommending that all wildlife research involve local people and respect indigenous values. Biologists could still collar the caribou, but they now had a directive to pursue more respectful, non-invasive methods as well.

The task of developing new techniques fell to a team of scientists that included Jean Polfus, a natural resources PhD student at the University of Manitoba. Polfus’s introduction to the Northwest Territories wasn’t an easy one — "it was completely dark, it was cold and a lot of the meetings happened in Dene language," she recalls — but over the course of many conversations with community leaders, she and her local collaborators concocted a visionary project: They would study caribou populations using DNA extracted from scat.

Dene hunters and trappers, who regularly cross paths with the herds during their travels on snowmobile, would collect droppings — with each sample that Polfus received earning its finder a C$25 gasoline gift card. "It’s a lot cheaper per sample than collaring caribou," Polfus says.

Newfound respect

Luciana Whitaker/Getty Images

Although biologists and indigenous people have worked together for centuries, the relationship has tended toward friction. Scientists often looked askance at traditional knowledge, sometimes with harmful consequences for both science and indigenous livelihoods.

In the 1970s, for instance, US federal researchers concluded the Bering Sea’s bowhead whale population was shrinking, prompting the International Whaling Commission, a global organization that manages whale conservation and whaling, to impose drastic hunting restrictions on indigenous communities that depended on the cetaceans for sustenance. Alaska Natives objected, pointing out that while government scientists only counted whales in open water, bowheads also passed through heavy ice, deploying their massive skulls to crack open breathing holes. When the National Marine Fisheries Service finally used native feedback to guide its surveys in the 1980s, it nearly quadrupled its whale estimate.

"The hardest thing is to sit in a room with scientists who think they’ve discovered something, but their scientific discovery just confirms what our oral histories have talked about forever," says William Housty, a member of British Columbia’s Heiltsuk First Nation and director of Coastwatch, a science and conservation program. "That’s been the biggest hump for us to overcome, to get people to think about our culture on the same level as Western science."

Rocky though the transition has been, wildlife biologists like Polfus are today pursuing more respectful and participatory relationships with indigenous people. Scientists have partnered with aboriginal Australians to study sea turtle populations; relied on Kaxinawá hunters in the Amazon to investigate the abundance of game species like monkeys and deer; and solicited information from Alaskan Yupiks about walrus migrations.

Renata Leite Pitman, a Brazilian wildlife veterinarian who’s studied Central and South American fauna for 25 years, has leaned on local expertise to learn the calls, scats, and tracks of the elusive forest animals she studies. "I think it’s intuitive — you just learn from what the native people have always been doing," she says.

Pitman’s latest collaboration involves the Waorani tribe, Ecuadorian natives whose young men catch and release green anacondas, the world’s heaviest snake, as ritual tests of manhood. Since 2014, Pitman has inserted radio transmitters in six anacondas in Ecuador and Peru to study the species’ movements in the Amazon.

She also trained Waorani tribe members to tag and track the snakes; indigenous technicians provide her daily updates via Skype. Pitman and her Waorani partners extracted samples from both anacondas and bushmeat, which the scientist tests for contaminants stemming from upstream oil exploration. The giant reptiles have effectively become ecological indicators whose own flesh reflects the health of the Waorani homeland.

Pitman’s tracking has not only revealed secrets of anacondas’ wanderings — the snakes appear more territorial than she’d realized, for instance — it also stands to provide valuable knowledge for the Waorani, who draw considerable income from ecotourism. "They want to get benefits from taking people to see the anacondas," she says. "This could be a long-term help for the economy."

Collaborative research can yield even more surprising gains. Marco Hatch, a member of the Samish Indian Nation and a marine ecologist at Northwest Indian College in Washington state, studies the Canadian Pacific Coast’s clam gardens — well-groomed intertidal terraces, surrounded by rock walls, in which coastal people have dug shellfish for thousands of years. Hatch’s research, conducted in partnership with the gardens’ native owners, suggests that clams grow larger and more abundant in gardens than in the wild and that other edible species, like crabs and snails, thrive on rock walls. "Non-native beach owners can manage their beach more effectively using tools and technologies that First Nations people have developed," Hatch says.

His findings also challenge the long-held notion that the Northwest’s indigenous people were strict hunters and gatherers. "Clam gardens give us these very large and undeniable modifications of the intertidal," he says. "They show the complexity of indigenous food and knowledge systems."

Look to the North

Shutterstock

Hatch and Polfus aren’t the only scientists to pursue collaborative research in Canada, where a slew of court cases have acknowledged native authority in natural resource management. That’s set the stage for programs like the Heiltsuk’s Coastwatch, an initiative rooted along British Columbia’s Koeye River, where grizzly bears fish for migrating salmon in dense coastal rainforest.

In 2007, Housty and other Heiltsuk, with help from conservation groups and scientists at the University of Victoria, set up a network of barbed wire snares, baited with salmon scent, that snagged clumps of bear hair for DNA analysis. The monitoring program revealed the presence of a grizzly "highway" along the Koeye, and helped the Heiltsuk better manage their own relationship with the bruins — for instance, by moving their youth camps away from the most heavily trafficked areas.

Just as significant as the study’s results were its guiding principles: the Heiltsuk’s Gvi’ilas, a body of traditional laws that shape the First Nation’s relationship with the natural world. Just as the Dene’s cultural values led them to insist upon noninvasive caribou research, so did the Gvi’ilas call for unobtrusive hair monitoring. "Those very fundamental ideas formed the base of everything we did," Housty says. "One of the biggest ones was respect. If you treat bears respectfully, they’ll treat you the same way."

Yet that respect isn’t always reciprocated by the powers that be. According to Housty, when the Heiltsuk presented the provincial government with their map of grizzly habitat, officials shrugged off data that clashed with the province’s existing maps. "So we said, to heck with the government — we’ll just go right to industry," Houst recalls. The Heiltsuk presented their habitat maps to local logging companies, which proved to be more interested than was the province. "They gave a little, we gave a little, and we could show them where it was appropriate to log," Housty says.

If the Heiltsuk can’t make headway with the BC government using hair snares and DNA analysis — tools of Western scientific research — it shouldn’t come as a surprise that native knowledge still receives short shrift in many quarters. Elsewhere in British Columbia, First Nations reports of grizzly bears inhabiting coastal islands were dismissed by the government because the observer "was not a biologist"; subsequent DNA analysis showed that 10 islands hosted resident grizzlies.

According to one 2008 caribou study, some scientists remain guilty of using traditional knowledge "only when it fits within current resource management models of thinking." There’s a fine line between collaborating with indigenous people and exploiting their labor and knowledge.

The technical language of resource management can also thwart authentic cooperation. In a 2004 essay, anthropologist Marc Stevenson detailed how seemingly innocuous words like "harvest" and "quota" can dominate co-management discussions and exclude native people from decision-making. When Stevenson sat on a whale management board in eastern Canada, he observed that Inuit hunters refused to use the word "stock" to refer to belugas — the concept didn’t exist in Inuktitut language. Such utilitarian terminology, warns Stevenson, may be "not only foreign, but antithetical to aboriginal values, concepts, and understandings."

Tales from Poop Lady

Shutterstock

Cautionary tales notwithstanding, collaborative research is on the upswing, and Polfus’s caribou scat project offers an encouraging example. Though the effort was slow to catch on — as Polfus points out, "When it’s minus 40 out and you’re on your Ski-Doo, who wants to stop to pick up caribou poop?" — word gradually spread. Over two years, Polfus, known locally as Poop Lady, received more than a thousand scat-filled plastic bags; her army of bounty hunters included everyone from elders to 12-year-old girls.

Polfus’s DNA tests revealed three genetically distinct forms of caribou — boreal woodland caribou, barren-ground caribou, and mountain caribou. Although the three types generally occupy distinct habitat, they often overlap in the boreal forest, bewildering wildlife biologists who aren’t sure where one subspecies’ range ends and others’ begin.

No such confusion exists among the Dene, whose language includes separate words for all three types. Dene hunters can distinguish between caribou varieties on the basis of morphology, tracks, and even behavior; woodland caribou, for instance, will loop back around on their own path to throw off predators.

That the Dene have developed different terms and hunting tactics for each type, says Polfus, suggests that the caribou diverged in the distant past. Paying heed to indigenous language, in other words, advances science’s grasp of evolutionary history and helps researchers identify subtle but crucial differences between subspecies. Authorities are already taking note: As a result of Polfus’s research, the Sahtú Renewable Resources Board has pledged to use the Dene word for boreal woodland caribou, tǫdzı, in all official correspondence.

In the far north, studying caribou population ecology is anything but academic. Shale oil development is inexorably coming to the Northwest Territories, and a better understanding of caribou ecology and population dynamics should help biologists and indigenous hunters manage both industry and wildlife.

"When you support the knowledge of people who have a lot of incentive to keep caribou around for their children," says Polfus, "that’s when real conservation success can happen."

Hovertext: I'm just realizing the Venn diagram for people who know the reference and people who like the joke is a null set.

New comic!
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Some people had hoped, after months of hype and the pedigree of director Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code), that Warcraft might break the long and storied Curse Of Bad Video Game Movies. I have some sad news for those people. Maybe video game adaptations were just never meant to be.

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Even a demagogue can't rule without (part of) the establishment behind him.