The Park Ranger and the Museum Curator

I think that the metaphor works well.

The idea that economics is about “forecasting” is deeply ingrained in popular culture, and to indulge it, as way too many economists do, is obviously a recipe for being discredited by events.

The only problem with the analogy is that it isn’t clear why economists should mimic the park rangers. The U.S. Botanic Garden is actually a very nice place and, in fact, we do know enough about plant life to regulate and control quite a lot of it – even in something so complex as a true forest if we really wanted too. Your analogy would make sense if the U.S. Botanic Garden’s sucked, but they don’t.

More generally on whether economists should study ways to regulate the economy, I think the answer is most definitely yes.

The reason is that this is simply practical. If there is a perceived problem, the government is going to intervene. It is preferable we know the optimal policy so government can try to approximately mimic this benchmark. Also, in some cases, government intervention is inevitable. The most obvious cases are optimal monetary and fiscal policy.

It’s fairly clear economists know enough to support some government interventions – to think the world is that complex we can’t make any improvements is silly. And, of course, a laissez-faire system is anything but perfect. In fact, Stiglitz-Greenwald made a very strong case that for any economy with externalities there almost always exists some tax (or something that mimics a tax) that can correct the externality. My biggest problem with government intervention isn’t that there isn’t a possible intervention. My biggest problem is that no matter how simple the solution appears to be in an economic analysis, the government will somehow screw up it’s implementation and not only not solve the original problem but it may even create new problems or make the original problem worse.

Also, just to make a point about terminology. I don’t really like the term “market failure.” What we identify as market failure is not usually a failure of free market mechanisms – but because it’s too difficult to apply the free market to the problem at hand. Most market failures are because we cannot easily apply the concepts of the free market to the problem. Most market failures are due to ill-formed property rights (e.g. the environment, tragedy of the commons etc) or incomplete or unenforceable contracts (e.g. adverse selection and moral hazard). Those are failures to execute market mechanism, not failures of the market.

Poorly for your purposes. The rain forests in WA are very well regulated. If they were not, they would simply not exist. (regulation in both in tree-replanting, and in old-growth exclusionary areas, regulations on what people can and cannot do in the bounds, etc etc etc.)

Beyond that park rangers also have the same job as the museum curator. Their job is to ensure that the wildlife grows and thrives. The difference is that the Park Ranger only has to protect against people intermittently (the primary concern being invasive species and fire) whereas a museum curator must protect against an entire city of people every day.

This is the problem your analogy has with regulation. Beyond that you have a problem of values. In your analogy, “people” are the species in a rain forest.

Half the people are going to hear that analogy and think “economists should not care when people get eaten by other people”. Your analogy in these instances is going to turn people the other way. Which frankly is a good thing.

Now, you do mention that the “Park Rangers only have to regulate other humans”. But in case you haven’t noticed, we happen to be humans and it seems that without regulation we have a penchant for destroying the places we live in.

Have you heard of Biosphere II? A really tightly regulated ecosystem has even more problems.

“The Hoh rain forest has park rangers. … They regulate other humans.”

By your reasoning, should not economists act likewise? You pretty much ignored that second sentence in your normative comments at the end of the post.

A possible supporting metaphor: Humans are the ants. The economy is the anthill.

It’s definitely not perfect — humans don’t constitute the rain forest — but … ??

I think it works great! You may also want to point out how much more expensive the curator approach is. There are externalities in both scenarios in that, among other things, the plants are being subsidized via money paid to the rangers and curators. But the money per plant is obviously much higher in the curator scenario. Someone must bear the cost for paying for the curators.

I think the analogy can be very useful. It basically goes to our bias for design. So, I think it is very useful to use areas where conventional wisdom among sophisticates has accepted decentralized processes over design (evolution vs. creationism, ecological minimalism vs. heavy-handed resource management). Tactics like over-hunting aesthetically unpleasing or scary species or introducing invasive species to try to solve a problem are universally disdained now. Many economic controls are highly analogous to these tactics.

This one’s had me pondering.

Here, I think, is where the metaphor breaks down: rain forests are not, mainly, made up of entities with sentience, hence the capacity for conscious suffering and feelings of well-being. (Yes, some animals including fairly sentient ones, but they’re not thick on the ground, and a rainforest conceived in toto is not a thing that embodies sentience.)

As such, I think the metaphor/model kind of epitomizes what Haidt has discerned about libertarians: If not a lack of compassion, at least a yearning for a stylized world in which empathy and compassion — less-dominant and less-comfortable capacities among libertarians — are not so necessary.

I don’t think this works well. A curator seeks to represent a particular system or period–art, botany, the curatorial mission is the same–to make it more accessible. The purpose of park rangers is precisely flipped: they work at preserving a system, interfering in it directly.

You should likewise flip your metaphor: the goal of a (libertarian) economist should be curatorial, they should be creating accessible representations so people can understand how larger systems work. A curator isn’t wandering the forest thinking about where to place fire breaks, a park ranger is.

Excellent metaphor! The botanical gardens illustrate the limits of what bureaucrats can manage. If we want bureaucrats to manage the market, the market can be be only as big as the botanical garden compared to the rain forest.

Also, the analogy shows that the market is natural. as natural law theory proposes, a free market agrees with the nature of mankind and allows mankind to flourish. It is not an alien imposition on mankind.

Of course the analogy breaks down if you get too much into the details. Analogies are intended to convey a single message or two in a dramatic fashion. Analogies are not dissertations or journal papers. But they are a powerful tool for communicating.

Funny, I was a park ranger in the Hoh Rainforest for the past four years. I like it, but I agree that too often park rangers act as museum curators.