Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"The Way We Live Now

Natural Happiness

By PAUL BLOOM

Why should we care about nature? Should we care about it for its own sake — or for our sake, because it happens to make us happy or healthy? These might not seem like the brightest questions. Few people need convincing that the destruction of rain forests, the mass extinction of species and the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland would all be very bad things. Do we really need to list the reasons?

We do. After all, in many regards our species has already kissed nature goodbye, and we are better off for it. Technology has come to be more diverse than the biosphere. In 1867, Karl Marx observed that there were 500 types of hammer made in Birmingham, England. In 1988, Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, suggested that the average American encounters 20,000 different kinds of artifacts in everyday life, which would be more than the number of animals and plants that we can distinguish. And right now, there are about 1.5 million identified species on Earth — impressive, but nothing compared to the more than 7 million United States patents.

This is mostly good news. No sane person would give up antibi­otics and anesthesia, farming and the written word. Our constructed environments shield us from heat and cold and protect us from predators. We have access to food and drink and drugs that have been devised to stimulate our nervous systems in magnificent ways. We sleep in soft beds and have immediate access to virtual experiences from pornography to classical symphonies. If a family of hunter-gatherers were dropped into this life, they would think of it as a literal heaven.

Or maybe not. There is a considerable mismatch between the world in which our minds evolved and our current existence. Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna. While there is debate over the details, we know for sure that our minds were not adapted to cope with a world of billions of people. The life of a modern city dweller, surrounded by strangers, is an evolutionary novelty. Thousands of years ago, there was no television or Internet, no McDonald’s, birth-control pills, Viagra, plastic surgery, alarm clocks, artificial lighting or paternity tests. Instead, there was plenty of nature. We lived surrounded by trees and water and animals and sky.

This history has left its mark on our minds. Children are irrepressible taxonomizers, placing the world of distinct individuals into categories based on their appearance, their patterns of movement and their presumed deeper natures, and some psychologists have argued that the hard-wired capacity to organize and structure the world is specially adapted to nature: we are natural-born zoologists and botanists. We may also have evolved to get pleasure from certain aspects of the natural world. About 25 years ago, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson popularized the “biophilia” hypothesis: the idea that our evolutionary history has blessed us with an innate affinity for living things. We thrive in the presence of nature and suffer in its absence.

Our hunger for the natural is everywhere. It is reflected in art: the philosopher Denis Dutton, in his book “The Art Instinct,” suggests that popular taste in landscape painting has been shaped by preferences that evolved for the African savanna. The appeal of the natural is also reflected in where we most want to live. People like to be close to oceans, mountains and trees. Even in the most urban environments, it is reflected in real estate prices: if you want a view of the trees of Central Park, it’ll cost you. Office buildings have atriums and plants; we give flowers to the sick and the beloved and return home to watch Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel. We keep pets, which are a weird combination of constructed things (cats and dogs were bred for human companionship), surrogate people and conduits to the natural world. And many of us seek to escape our manufactured environments whenever we can — to hike, camp, canoe or hunt.

Wilson emphasizes the spiritual and moral benefits of an attachment to nature, warning that we “descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us.” But there are more tangible benefits as well. Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild re­duces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients. The author Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” because they have been shut out from the physical and psychic benefits of unstructured physical contact with the natural world.

So the preservation of the natural world should be important to us. But how important? The psycholo­gist Philip Tetlock has pointed out that many people talk about the environment as a “sacred value,” protected from utilitarian trade-offs — when the Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil, 80 percent of the respondents in one poll said that we should pursue greater environmental protection “regardless of cost.” But he also points to the need to balance environmental concerns with social and political and personal priorities. (Few of these respondents would be willing to hand over their pensions for a more efficient cleanup of the Alaskan shoreline.) And even if we did value nature above everything else, we would still have to decide which aspects of nature we care about the most. You can see this in the debate over the creation of giant wind farms in the ocean or on hillsides. Proponents are enthusiastic about the cheap, green energy; critics worry about the loss of natural beauty and the yearly filleting of thousands of songbirds and ducks.

In the end, an indiscriminate biophilia makes little sense. Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus. Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don’t want to be dropped naked into a swamp. We want to tour Yosemite with our water bottles and G.P.S. devices. The natural world is a source of happiness and fulfillment, but only when prescribed in the right doses.

You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures. There is a fortune to be made, for instance, by building a robot that children would respond to as if it were an animal. There have been many attempts, but they don’t evoke anywhere near the same responses as puppies, kittens or even hamsters. They are toys, not companions. Or consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery.

All of this provides a different sort of argument for the preservation of nature. Put aside for the moment practical considerations like the need for clean air and water, and ignore as well spiritual worries about the sanctity of Mother Earth or religious claims that we are the stewards of creation. Look at it from the coldblooded standpoint of the enhancement of the happiness of our everyday lives. Real natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans. We intuitively grasp this, and this knowledge underlies the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss. It might be that one day we will be able to replace the experience of nature with “Star Trek” holodecks and robotic animals. But until then, this basic fact about human pleasure is an excellent argument for keeping the real thing.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale and the author of “Descartes’ Baby.” He is currently writing a book about pleasure."

April 19, 2009

This big spike in uncertainty in the fall of 2008 was a major factor behind the recent rapid slowdown

TO BE NOTED: From Vox:

Halfway to recovery

Nicholas Bloom 17 April 2009

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This column says that the policy response to the financial crisis seems to have been adequate – we will not slip into another Great Depression. It argues that growth will resume by late 2009, as uncertainty is subsiding due to global cooperation.

Last year I wrote a piece forecasting a severe recession in 2009. Based on my analysis of 16 previous economic shocks, I predicted a 3% drop in GDP and a 3 million increase in unemployment in Europe and the US. Unfortunately, this looks to have been reasonably accurate. But I also worried about a far worse outcome – the world slipping into another Great Depression due to a damaging policy response to the crisis. Fortunately, that has not come to pass.

I now think that the broadly pro-market consensus of the G20 governments means that this worst case scenario has been avoided. Tariffs are not going to be dramatically raised in global trade wars. Governments are not regulating away free markets, and wholesale nationalisations of banks seem to have been avoided as well.
Avoiding the terrible policy mistakes of the 1930s that led to the Great Depression has averted fears of economic armageddon. As a result, uncertainty measured by implied volatility on the S&P 100 – commonly known at the financial “fear factor” – has fallen back by 50%, and the stock market has begun to rise. I believe growth will resume by late 2009, and the halfway point of the credit crunch may have passed.

Another Great Depression has been avoided

Much like today, the Great Depression began with a stock market crash and a meltdown of the financial system. Banks withdrew credit lines and the interbank lending market froze up. What transformed the financial crisis into an economic disaster, however, was the compounding effect of terrible policy. The infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was introduced by desperate US policymakers as a way of blocking imports to protect domestic jobs. Instead of helping workers, this worsened the situation by freezing world trade. At the same time, policymakers were encouraging firms to collude to keep prices up and encouraging workers to unionise to protect wages, exacerbating the situation by strangling free markets.

Uncertainty is now falling

Figure 1 shows the implied volatility on the S&P 100 as a measure of uncertainty. This jumped over threefold after the dramatic collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. But it has fallen back by half as political uncertainty has receded. Events like the G20 meetings showed how international leaders have agreed to maintain free markets, albeit with sensible increases in financial regulation. But this agreement on a common global policy response is radical stuff. Having the Americans and the British agree with the French on anything is an achievement, and an agreement on a global plan for economic growth is more or less unprecedented.

Figure 1 The financial 'fear factor': daily US implied stock market volatility on the S&P 100 (%)

But we are only halfway there, as the extent of the damage to the economy is still very much uncertain. There is a sea of toxic assets whose value is unknown and whose eventual victims remain unclear. As a result uncertainty has fallen, but to a level that before the Credit Crunch occurred only after extreme events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The fall in uncertainty will help spur the recovery

The heightened uncertainty after the credit crunch led firms to postpone investment and hiring decisions. Mistakes can be costly, so if conditions are unpredictable, the best course of action is often to wait. Of course, if every firm in the economy waits, economic activity slows down (Bloom, Floetotto and Jaimovich 2009). This big spike in uncertainty in the fall of 2008 was a major factor behind the recent rapid slowdown. But now that uncertainty is falling back, growth should start to rebound. Firms will start to invest and hire again to make up for lost time.

So the good news is that no government is advocating abandoning capitalism altogether. Instead, they are applying the short-run therapy of massive tax and interest rate cuts and the long-run therapy of stricter financial regulation. The patient sitting in the recovery ward now just has to pray that this treatment has no nasty side effects.

References

Nicholas Bloom, Max Floetotto and Nir Jaimovich (2009) “Really Uncertain Business Cycles” Stanford University mimeograph.

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1 The predictions are made from VAR forecasts. This VAR methodology is described in “The impact of uncertainty shocks”, forthcoming in Econometrica, My predictions use this methodology with a 3x uncertainty shock and a 30% stock-market fall."