What's the Deal with Peak Oil?

Having come across the term "peak oil" quite a bit in recent months, I've decided to poke around the internet a little in an attempt to reduce my ignorance about what's behind the phrase. The denotation of the term is clear enough, of course: It refers to that moment in history at which the extraction of oil from the earth is at its maximum. But there's more to it. That is, there is a noteworthy number of individuals and organizations that think this is a problem that should be a focus of everyone's awareness and of politics. Insofar as it is legitimate to summarize the standpoint of various individuals and groups based on limited research, the peak oil activists' position seems to boil down to the following:

1. We are at or near peak oil, which means that in the near future the same amount of oil will not be available at the same prices, and sooner or later it's going to be used up.

2. Therefore, we must change our way of living now: sustanable cities, less use of cars, local production, etc.

But there seems to be a huge disconnect there. If it is indeed true that in the near future the same amount of oil will not be available at the same prices, then the problem solves itself: Raising prices will cause changes in lifestyles. For example, the more expensive petrol is, the more motivated you are to take the bike rather than the car. Also, the higher the price of petrol, the more companies are motivated to offer machinery that uses alternative sources of energy.

As a consequence, if the empirical assumption is true, then there is no need whatsoever to campaign for lifestyle changes, because they will be brought about automatically, via the price mechanism. If you see these lifestyle changes as desirable anyway, you should be quite happy about peak oil, no need to panic.

So, what am I missing?

People Should Know When They're Conquered [Updated Six Times]

Or so says the Russel Crowe character in Gladiator after taking a look at the German opposition who appear to think they're still going strong. Had to think of it when I read Bryan Caplan's last post. A few days ago, he had a post comparing US women's liberties ca. 1880 and ca. 2010, for which he got torn to pieces by his commenters, many of which share his general outlook. By "torn to pieces" I don't just mean that they criticized him in no uncertain terms; it was a bit like watching Grün-Weiß Gelmer under-11s take on FC Barcelona. (You may not have heard of the former outfit. I used to play for them.)

This was the most impressive example I had ever seen of an obviously intelligent person (in the sense of "does well on an IQ test") make a complete ass of himself. Until, that is, I read his "Reply to My Critics".

As someone with an interest in psychology, I seriously wonder how such a thing can happen. All I can think of is a love of contrarianism and an infatuation with counter-intuitive claims. But surely that doesn't explain all of the mystery? Suggestions are welcome.

Added: John Holbo's reaction. The comments thread, inlcuding links to Caplan's homepage, is pretty funny.

Added (2/4): Caplan's "Further Replies" and the "Postcard Version" of his argument.

Added (3/5): Will Wilkinson's comment. And another.

Added (6): And her's Tyler Cowen.

Everybody's Theory of Journalism: An Anomaly

When you ask journalists what they do, they'll say that they report things that are out of the ordinary. When you ask media researchers what journalists do they'll say they report things that are out of the ordinary. This theory is so popular because it's largely correct. But.

The other day a paper informed me that the actress Megan Fox doesn't think she's particularly similar to Angelica Jolie. This is a recurring motive in journalism: Journalists describe X as the new Y, then journalists asks X whether s/he agrees, and Y says, nonono, I'm myself. As far as I can see, nobody ever says, "Yup, I'm the new Maradona" or, "Indeed, I think I'm the Marilyn Monroe for the Twitter generation." I can see why journalists might want to ask that question, because if someone actually agreed this would make reasonably interesting copy. But why do they report someone's totally ordinary response that she prefers to see herself as an individual?

This is not explained by the subject matter: Writers covering celebrities or football, too, usually report things that are out of the ordinary: There being no transfer talk about Lionel Messi or Jessica Alba not being pregnant is no news.

It's a mystery.

Is It Just Me? The Design of Newspapers' Webpages

There is a reason I have a tag called "Things I Don't Understand". One of them is the design of the Guardian's home page:


Let's count: There are one, two, three columns of new items to pick from, plus one on the right hand side with permanent items that someone who comes looking for news will disregard. This page asks your eyes to scroll in two dimensions, more or less simultaneously: Top-bottom and left-right. I don't know about your eyes, but mine don't want to.

This task would be made a little easier if the various columns were horizontally aligned, but they're not. To see what I mean, consider this example from the Guardian football main page:


Here, the pictures towards the right hand side of the screen (e.g., "Friday's quiz") and the green lines to their left are aligned, so jumping back and forth between the columns is made a little easier. (By the way, I think that the alignment is purely by coincidence, but that doesn't matter for the sake of illustration.)

Can you do worse than that? Certainly! Here's how the world's leading newspaper presents itself on the web:


The first thing to notice is that this just looks plain shite in a cheap way. More importantly, this page gives us one column of permanent categories on the left and then four columns of regularly updated stuff: two columns of news and two "opinion" columns in the top right corner. What's more, the rightmost column is broken up into three subcolumns (if that's the right word) in the "Markets" box (below the picture of the watch). Pictures are sprayed across the screen in a chaotic fashion. Is it too much to say that this is an assault on the human brain?

When we scroll down, the New York Times treats us to this:


Almost incredibly, it seems nobody had the good sense to at least have the columns at the top of the screenshot (the ones with the photos) align with the ones at the bottom. And in those sections, it would have been easy, for example, to let the "Technology" and "U.S." columns start at the same height. Either you could simply (shock, horror!) leave some blank space or you could restrict the length of the various headlines/links (e.g., three headlines in each section, each of which is two rows long). Also note that the three icons in the left hand column all advertise services by the NYT itself, but the designs are pretty different, which adds to the nervousness of the page.

It's fitting that this is at the bottom of the page: It reminds me of people's basements.

Does it have to be that way? Nope. Here's Germany's most popular webpage, Spiegel Online:


First off, it must be noted that this page looks even a little less nervous than usual because most days there is large-scale (and usually very colourful) advertising in the right-hand space which is white in this screenshot. Even so, there is the exactly right number of columns presenting the major news which most visitors are interested in: one. This means that your eyes only have to navigate in the top-bottom direction. As an aside, it's another nice feature of this site that under the main news items (displayed at the top of the page, which this screenshot shows) there are links to a number of recent related articles for those looking for a little more depth on the issue. This changes further down when you simply get lists of news items in categories - in this shot gossip ("Panorama"), politics ("Politik") and sports (you've guessed it: "Sport"):


Almost a model of clarity, no?

As you may have guessed by now, I prefer Spiegel online's design to the NYT's. A more interesting question, though, is why the NYT presents such a chaotic page. Here are two interesting numbers: I counted 65 links on the first of the NYT screenshots reproduced above and only 14 in the first Spiegel Online reproduction (in both case counting two links to the same URL as one). One way of interpreting this is that the NYT page is made for people who are extremely adverse to scrolling down. A related one is that the page seems to be designed for attention markets in which people will leave your page if they don't find anything to their liking right away (without scrolling down). However, I submit that while the number of links noticed increases with the number of links displayed, the increase is not proportional. That should especially be a concern if your page looks as chaotic as the NYT's. In other words, I don't see an excuse for displaying the links in such a chaotic manner.

Something which is much harder to measure is whether the trashy look of their web pages - not newspapers' main sources of income - hurts the perception of the NYT and, to a lesser extent, the Guardian as quality newspapers.

Views, explanations? Comments on this post are especially welcome.

Related link: Back in 2004, Michael Blowhard had similar complaints about the design of magazines' tables of contents.

The Kindergeld Mystery

In Germany there is a monthly transfer payment that parents get from the state called Kindergeld. There are two justifications I can think of for this, namely fairness (or whichever similar term you prefer) and incentivization. Kindergeld is € 154 per month for each of the first three children and €179 for each subsequent child. Why the progression?

It doesn't make any sense in terms of incentivization because people who already have three children have already demonstrated their preference for having children at € 154/month (- and see next paragraph).

It doesn't make any sense in terms of fairness. If anything, subsequent children are cheaper because they can use their elder siblings' old toys, clothes, etc. and a flat's or house's square metres have a decreasing marginal price, for whatever reason.

Someone who knows a lot about these things had no clue why this state of affairs persists. Nor do I.

Things I Don't Understand, YouTube Edition

In the post below I linked to some YouTube pages because embedding was disabled for those videos, presumably following a complaint by the band or record company. I think that both have every moral and legal right to do this, but I think it is an unwise policy - after all, if your video is embedded on a blog, this is free promotion. In fairness, however, I can see two reasons for restricting the use of the video:

1. There is an argument that if a song is played on the radio too often, the record will be bought less than it otherwise would have. (There's an interesting experiment in there. Good luck organizing it.) Similarly, it is possible that some people who would otherwise have bought the record will not because they can listen to the song online at any time.

2. Some bands publish collections of their videos on DVDs. The incentive to buy these is reduced if you can watch the videos for free. (But: These DVDs aren't a main source of revenue for any band.)

So I can see why copyright holders would want to restrict the availability of the video. But here's what I don't understand: If you have the legal means to have embedding disabled, you also have the legal means to have the video taken down altogether. If the two points above are your concern, that's what you should do. After all, YouTube is a site which is a bit more popular than, say, The Church of Rationality.

Can anyone explain this?

Bilingual Post: The Mobile Mystery

In my experience, in most countries people answer the phone using some variant of "Hello". Traditionally, this has not been the case in Germany: You're supposed to answer the phone saying your full or last name. True, there have always been people that answered the phone saying "Hallo" or "Ja" (Hello and Yes, respectively), but in the 2000-plus-books-at-home circles I come from*, this was seen as on par with picking your nose in public.

Here's the strange thing: I have never, ever witnessed anybody answering his or her mobile phone saying his or her name, it's always "Hallo" or "Ja". This is surprising given that one should expect the norms applicable to regular phones to carry over to mobile phones; after all, they're basically the same thing. Why is this so? Three hypotheses:

1. Contrary to regular phones, mobile phones are often answered in public. Saying your name out loud in public is a bit like walking barebreasted in public.

2. The early adopters of mobile phones were disproportionately young people. Young people were always less likely to obey the say-your-name norm.

3. If someone calls whose name and number you've saved, you'll see the name of the caller on your display. Hence there is no need to assure that the caller reached the person he or she wanted to reach.

An interesting question is whether the say-hello norm spills over into the realm of regular phones. Hypothesis: Yes.

*Ein Bekannter von mir ist mal umgezogen aus dem einzigen Grund, dass er keinen Platz für seine Bücher mehr hatte. Noch besser: Die Eltern einer Freundin einer Freundin haben sich mal ein Zweithaus aus diesem Grund gekauft. Die Freundin der Freundin hat dort mal eine Party gemacht. Am nächsten Morgen stand sie vor den Resten des Buffets und rief aus: "Oh nein, die Ernst-Jünger-Erstausgabe ist in den Nudelsalat gefallen!"

Things I Don't Understand, a Continuing Series

Why on earth is support of anarchy usually associated with the left? Leaving aside the fact that the general consequences of anarchy have been aptly described by Thomas Hobbes, for the economic system anarchy would mean the most unregulated, cut-throat form of capitalism you can possibly think of. That's not exactly an aim the left is typically striving for, is it?

The Diabetes Mystery

When I was getting to know a new girlfriend, she praised me repeatedy for not minding her having diabetes. Huh? If you're into Bon Jovi, then we're talking, but having diabetes? That is pretty much the most uninteresting thing about a human that I can imagine. I know people get stigmatized for sitting in a wheelchair or having AIDS, but it seemed to me that suffering from diabetes is similar to suffering from hayfever in that respect. She, however, could come up with stories about discrimination.

I put that down to a mixture of bad luck and paranoia until I was sitting at a bar and overheard what the woman next to me said to the bartender:

"You serve those alcohol-free cocktails, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Do you also have something for... [starts whispering] something for diabetics?"

Is discrimination on the basis of diabetes common? And if so, why on earth?

P.S.: This is now the third ex-girlfriend I mention in a post in a relatively short while. This may give you an inaccurate impression of the wildness of my lovelife.