Autonomy and the Ethics of Biological Behaviour Modification

Much disease and disability is the result of lifestyle behaviours. For example, the contribution of imprudence in the form of smoking, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, and drug and alcohol abuse to ill-health is now well established. More importantly, some of the greatest challenges facing humanity as a whole – climate change, terrorism, global poverty, depletion of resources, abuse of children, overpopulation – are the result of human behaviour. In this chapter, we will explore the possibility of using advances in the cognitive sciences to develop strategies to intentionally manipulate human motivation and behaviour. While our arguments apply also to improving prudential motivation and behaviour in relation to health, we will focus on the more controversial instance: the deliberate targeted use of biomedicine to improve moral motivation and behaviour. We do this because the challenge of improving human morality is arguably the most important issue facing humankind (Persson and Savulescu, forthcoming). We will ask whether using the knowledge from the biological and cognitive sciences to influence motivation and behaviour erodes autonomy and, if so, whether this makes it wrong

The impact of altered management on long-term agricultural soil carbon stocks

Land use in general and particularly agricultural practices can significantly influence soil carbon storage. In this paper, we investigate the long-term effects of management changes on soil carbon stock dynamics on a Swedish farm where C concentrations were measured in 1956 at 124 points in a regular grid. The soil was re-sampled at 65 points in 1984 and at all grid points in 2001. Before 1956 most of the fodder for dairy cattle was produced on the farm and crop rotations were dominated by perennial grass leys and spring cereals with manure addition. In 1956 all animals were sold, crop rotations were thereafter dominated by wheat, barley and rapeseed. Spatial variation in topsoil C concentration decreased significantly between 1956 and 2001. C stocks declined in fields with initially large C stocks but did not change significantly in fields with moderate C stocks. In the latter fields, soil C concentrations declined from 1956 to 1984, but increased slightly thereafter according to both measurements and simulations. Thus, the decline in C input due to the altered management in 1956 was partly compensated for by increasing crop yields and management changes, resulting in increased C input during the last 20 years. A soil carbon balance model (ICBM) was used to describe carbon dynamics during 45 years. Yield records were transformed to soil carbon input using allometric functions. Topsoil C concentrations ranging between 1.8 and 2.4% (depending on individual field properties) seemed to be in dynamic equilibrium with C input under recent farming and climatic conditions. Subsoil C concentrations seemed to be unaffected by the management changes

An Even Sterner Review: Introducing Relative Prices into the Discounting Debate

The Stern Review has had a major influence on the policy discussion on climate change. One reason is that the report has raised the estimated cost of unmitigated climate damages by an order of magnitude compared to most earlier estimates, leading to a call for strong and urgent action on climate change. Not surprisingly, severe criticism has been levied against the report by authors who think that these results hinge mainly on the use of a discount rate that is too low. Here we discuss the Ramsey rule for the discount rates and its implications for the economics of climate change. While we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review, our main point is that the conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting. We build our analysis on earlier research (Hoel and Sterner 2007) that has shown that the Ramsey discounting formula is somewhat modified in a two-sector economy with differential growth rates. Most importantly, such a model is characterized by changing relative prices, something that has major implications for a correct valuation of future climate damages. We introduce these results into a slightly modified version of the DICE model (Nordhaus 1994) and find that taking relative prices into account can have as large an effect on economically warranted abatement levels as can a low discount rate.discounting, relative prices, Ramsey, climate damage

Environmental Policy and Product Specialization

This paper characterizes income and commodity taxation as the outcome of a noncooperative Nash game in a two-country economy where one of the countries produces an environmentally clean good, while the other produces a dirty good. Among the results, it is shown that the commodity tax on the dirty good implemented by each country does not contain any term that directly serves to correct for the external effect. Instead, the country producing the dirty good internalizes part of the domestic external effect by choosing a relatively high marginal income tax rate.Trade and Environment; Optimal Taxation; Externalities.

Have Countries with Lax Environmental Regulations a Comparative Advantage in Polluting Industries?

We aim to study whether lax environmental regulations induce comparative advantages, causing the least-regulated countries to specialize in polluting industries. The study is based on Trefler and Zhu’s (2005) definition of the factor content of trade. For the econometrical analysis, we use a cross-section of 71 countries in 2000 to examine the net exports in the most polluting industries. We try to overcome three weaknesses in the empirical literature: the measurement of environmental endowments or environmental stringency, the possible endogeneity of the explanatory variables, and the influence of the industrial level of aggregation. As a result, we do find some evidence in favor of the pollution-haven effect. The exogeneity of the environmental endowments was rejected in several industries, and we also find that industrial aggregation matters.comparative advantage, environmental regulation, trade, pollution haven, Porter hypothesis

Optimal Taxation and Transboundary Externalities - Are Endogenous World Market Prices Important?

This paper concerns income and commodity taxation in a multi-jurisdictional framework with transboundary environmental damage. We assume that each jurisdiction is large in the sense that its government is able to influence the world market prices via public policy. In such a framework, a noncooperative Nash equilibrium does not only imply that the commodity tax on the externality-generating good is inefficiently low seen from the perspective of global well-being; it also means that the marginal income tax rate is inefficiently high, and that too much resources are spent on public goods. With the noncooperative Nash equilibrium as a starting point, we also consider the welfare effects of policy coordination with respect to taxation and public expenditures.Trade and Environment; Optimal Taxation; Externalities

Mixed Taxation, Public Goods and Transboundary Externalities: A Model with Large Jurisdictions

This paper concerns income taxation, commodity taxation, production taxation and public good provision in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. We assume that each jurisdiction is large in the sense that its government is able to influence the world-market producer price of the externality-generating commodity. The decision-problem facing the government in each such jurisdiction is represented by a two-type model (with asymmetric information between the government and the private sector). We show how the possibility to influence the world-market producer price adds mechanisms of relevance for redistribution and externality-correction which, in turn, affect the domestic use of taxation and public goods. Finally, with the noncooperative Nash equilibrium as a reference case, we consider the welfare effects of policy coordination.Trade and Environment; Optimal Taxation; Externalities

A Communication-model for Intangible Benefits of Digital Information

The communication of the intangible benefits to different stakeholders is important at the development of organizational resources, in this study digital information, and could be described as a boundary-spanning activity. In this study we build on Ahlin’s model (2014) and illustrates categorization of intangible benefits of digital information by using Carlile’s (2002; 2004) efficient boundary objects, the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Qualitative empirical pictures from three cases are illustrated by questions, derived from the efficient boundary objects. The illustrations show that this is an accessible path forward and that the illustrations can be changed to further research with the goal to practical test the communication model

Late Weichselian and Flandrian biostratigraphy and chronology from Hochstetter Forland, Northeast Greenland

Two lakes on Hochstetter Forland have been analysed with respect to lithostratigraphy and pollen and algae stratigraphy. The sediments have been radiocarbon dated and these dates show that Hochstetter Forland was not covered by the Inland Ice during the Late Weichselian. The early Flandrian stratigraphic sequences of the two lakes are interrupted by barren interzones, dated at 10 100 - 8100 B. P. and 10 100 - 9200 B. P., which are partly correlated to an ice-advance. No evidence for an earlier ice-advance during the Late Weichselian has been found. Apart from the abundance of pollen grains indicating pioneer vegetation, Artemisia pollen grains are found in high quantities in the Late Weichselian, although it is today not found within the area. The Flandrian pollen stratigraphy indicates a development similar to that which has been found in the Scoresby Sund area. However, Cassiope tetragona and Salix arctica immigrate much earlier than further south. The Flandrian climatic optimum in the Hochstetter Forland area seems to have been reached between 6000 and 5000 B. P. The Flandrian shore-line displacement is roughly estimated.Two lakes on Hochstetter Forland have been analysed with respect to lithostratigraphy and pollen and algae stratigraphy. The sediments have been radiocarbon dated and these dates show that Hochstetter Forland was not covered by the Inland Ice during the Late Weichselian. The early Flandrian stratigraphic sequences of the two lakes are interrupted by barren interzones, dated at 10 100 - 8100 B. P. and 10 100 - 9200 B. P., which are partly correlated to an ice-advance. No evidence for an earlier ice-advance during the Late Weichselian has been found. Apart from the abundance of pollen grains indicating pioneer vegetation, Artemisia pollen grains are found in high quantities in the Late Weichselian, although it is today not found within the area. The Flandrian pollen stratigraphy indicates a development similar to that which has been found in the Scoresby Sund area. However, Cassiope tetragona and Salix arctica immigrate much earlier than further south. The Flandrian climatic optimum in the Hochstetter Forland area seems to have been reached between 6000 and 5000 B. P. The Flandrian shore-line displacement is roughly estimated

Scaling up MIMO: Opportunities and Challenges with Very Large Arrays

This paper surveys recent advances in the area of very large MIMO systems. With very large MIMO, we think of systems that use antenna arrays with an order of magnitude more elements than in systems being built today, say a hundred antennas or more. Very large MIMO entails an unprecedented number of antennas simultaneously serving a much smaller number of terminals. The disparity in number emerges as a desirable operating condition and a practical one as well. The number of terminals that can be simultaneously served is limited, not by the number of antennas, but rather by our inability to acquire channel-state information for an unlimited number of terminals. Larger numbers of terminals can always be accommodated by combining very large MIMO technology with conventional time- and frequency-division multiplexing via OFDM. Very large MIMO arrays is a new research field both in communication theory, propagation, and electronics and represents a paradigm shift in the way of thinking both with regards to theory, systems and implementation. The ultimate vision of very large MIMO systems is that the antenna array would consist of small active antenna units, plugged into an (optical) fieldbus.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, October 201