Infrastructure Megaprojects: Mosquito Eradication

Mosquito-borne diseases kill a million people every year. Admittedly, most of those aren't in the United States, which is what this post series is focused on, but some are. And even ignoring the disease aspect, the buggers are just hugely irritating.

We have a safe and simple way to wipe out the entire species. No chemicals, no engineered diseases, no possibility of spreading mutations into the gene pool. And mosquitoes have few known environmental niches.

I suggest the United States implement sterile insect technique in a significant but controlled area, and look very closely for environmental damage. If the species actually does turn out to be necessary, they can be (shudder) reintroduced. (Or preferably, some substitute species found.) And if there are no problems, we've just made the world a slightly better place.

There are two benefits. One, our own comfort and safety. And two, to demonstrate the ecological effects if such a policy is implemented worldwide.

Oh, and three: screw mosquitoes.

Now if we could just get rid of the bagworms...

Failed States

The modern state is based on territorial integrity. Here's the cartoon version: we divide the world into regions with clear borders, each region with a government. The government of a region are the only ones allowed to use force in that region. If the government of a region uses force on another region, that's called a war.

But what if a government can't control its territory? What if the people of a region use force on another, without the permission of the government? This describes much of the conflict in the world today. Huge swaths of the world are failed states, areas where no government has control.

Think about what that means for a moment. Civilization as we live it is only possible because life is made predictable. The government guarantees my security, unless you do certain pre-defined things. That allows me to gather wealth without worry about it being stolen by someone with more guns than I have. That in turn allows me to have leisure time, lets me invest, get an education, and not spend every waking moment worrying about bandits taking everything I have and killing me. Removal of chaos improves quality of life. Failed states lack that guarantee.

Further, what if a group in a failed state wants to attack another state? Terrorists, militias, drug cartels, such entities threaten other states. But the usual means of handling such situations don't apply. If you don't like what the Taliban is doing (and who does?), negotiating with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is pointless. They don't control the relevant territory. Similarly, the Palestinian government may not be able to prevent all Palestinians from attacking Israel, and the Mexican government clearly can not shut down the cartels shipping drugs into the United States.

The concept of failed states is one of the great geopolitical problems of this century. Their very existence challenges all the rules we've put in place to deal with states. But how do you change it? If other armed groups can challenge the local government, how can this be resolved? Someone has to end up the biggest fish the pond again. Either the borders are redrawn, or one side defeats the other and takes the whole state. The former is usually the kind of civil war that ends up in tens of thousands of deaths, and the latter rarely ends in functioning democracy. Dictatorship may be stable in the short term, but in the long term you can't deprive a populace of what they want forever. Trying leads right back to violence. So unless your state lucks out and gets a particularly enlightened dictator who can successfully transition to democracy, you end up with a succession of dictators and civil wars. (See the above map.)

Surely there must be a better option.

For a region to be successful, security of the people in that region must be guaranteed in a predictable fashion. That guarantee can only be made by a stable power with definite rules, and sufficient force to take on all potential adversaries. In short, an area needs rules and force. Either can be developed internally or externally. Failed states, by definition, can not control their territory with internal force.

What about external force? Well, if an external force enters your country and starts enforcing its own rules, we typically call that an invasion and colonization by an empire. Frowned upon these days. But what if an external force enters a country and starts enforcing local rules? What if you've got (at least by historical standards) a quasi-benevolent empire? That would be state-building. We've seen this happen in a number of cases, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's a dismal failure, but it can work.

So take the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany after the second World War, probably our most successful endeavor. I suggest the world should use that example as a base for a long-term project to restore civilization to these chaos regions, one small sliver at a time. It may take centuries, but it may be the only way to build up a failed state into a successful one that can stand on its own. Someone comes in, kicks out all the armed gangs from one city or small region, and secures the area long enough for economy and infrastructure to be put in place.

So how would this happen? If there's enough government to ask, we can go by invitation. ("Hey, we'd like to come spend a hundred billion dollars fixing your country for the next three generations. Good by you?") But if there's no government to negotiate with, it has to be by external consensus. The UN would have to agree that a region would benefit from (mostly) peaceful intervention, and there would need to be evidence that the local populace would respond positively. Only then would intervention be considered.

But who provides the force? There are two prongs to this, after all. You send in construction workers and educators and bureaucrats and whoever else it takes to train a populace to modernize. But you also have to send military force, because security was the original concern. That force could operate under the UN, but they don't have much of an army. The actual force is most likely provided by nearby neighbors able to spare the materiel. This runs into problems with areas the size of Africa, where it would take literally centuries to work from the outside in. But this is envisioned as a very long-term project.

So either we go in by invitation, or the UN gets together, declares some area to not be part of a functioning state, and takes over administration, security, education, etc. How do we get out? There has to be an exit strategy, a definite series of steps towards internal democratization, with more and more being taken over by locals over the years. There have to be definite metrics and milestones, constant improvement every year, or people will stop believing in the goals. It will start to look like an unending occupation.

Now, there are a lot of failed states. How do we pick one? The one with the richest neighbor? The one with the most destabilizing impact on the world? North Korea is an obvious choice by those criteria, being close to South Korea, China, and Japan. But good luck with that! Haiti is another obvious choice, being practically on the USA's doorstep. Or perhaps the US and Europe should go for broke and fix Somalia, which has been near the top of the list since anyone started keeping track.

Okay, so this is crazy. I know it. But think about it this way: we spent over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, and half that destroying Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, including thousands of our own. And what have we bought with all that blood and treasure? Nothing. We are no safer. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are no safer (excepting Kurdistan, they're almost certainly better off). We could have taken that money and multiplied the GDP of Haiti by a factor of ten, and that's just by throwing money at the problem. Education and infrastructure would give vastly better returns than that. That's ten million people whose lives would be permanently improved, instead of millions ruined.

Here's my point: if we're going to spend that much on another country, let's get something for it. Let's be a force for good in the world. Let's build things, instead of destroying them.

Of course, I'm not saying we should spend that much on another country. I'd sooner see us spend it here. That will be my next series of posts.

What's better than public transportation?

I'm a big fan of public transportation. The ability to survive without owning a car would lead to a tremendous reduction in cost-of-living. Reduction in traffic is in everyone's best interest. And not having to drive every day would let me get a lot more reading done. (Or more realistically, sleep.)

But here in Nashville, the bus system is more or less a joke for much of the city. I live in the city limits, and I could get to work by bus, but I'd have to spend ninety minutes instead of twenty, I'd get there late, and I'd spend more money. The many thousands in the exurbs are pretty much hosed except for the Music City Star, and even then your options once you reach Nashville are limited.

The more I think about it, the more I think the emphasis on trains and buses may be misplaced. Mass transit as a concept has one inherent limitation: each rider wants to stop at only two places, and no others. The more riders there are wanting different stops, the less convenient it gets for everyone involved. But the fewer stops the bus (or train or whatever) makes, the fewer people the bus is convenient for. You want a very high person-to-stop ratio. This only works for high-density end-to-end traffic paths, like an express from a park-and-ride, a commuter train, or a small local circuit in a high-density area.

But what about those of us (and I'd guess we're the majority) who neither live nor work in high-density areas? By definition, we collectively have more stops to make. To keep a high person-to-stop ratio, you have to reduce the number of people per vehicle. Perhaps to, say, five.

I argue that mass carpooling could have more effect getting cars off the road than any imaginable public transportation system. Say we're comparing three options: 60-person buses, 5-person carpools, and the default single-occupant car. If there are six thousand people commuting from Clarksville (to pick a random number and exurb), that's six thousand cars, twelve hundred carpools, or one hundred buses. Obviously both carpools and buses are vast improvements to traffic. And if everyone would ride the busses, they win over carpools. But not everyone will bus, because of the lack of flexibility.

So the next question is, how many people are willing to bus? How many are willing to carpool? And at what point does realistic carpooling get more vehicles off the road than busing? I won't bore you with my algebraic prowess (maybe later), but in our case the answer works out to be pretty interesting: regardless of the number of people involved, if just 25% more people are willing to carpool than are willing to bus, mass carpooling gets more vehicles off the road. This even though a bus holds twelve times more people! Since a carpool is far more convenient than a bus, I'd expect far more than 25% greater ridership.

Now let's consider cost. If you've got 100 busses, that's at least $30,000,000 in capital expenditure. Probably more. Each bus costs around $100/hr to run. Even if you assume they only run four hours a day (two round trips), that's $40,000/day, or $10,000,000 a year in operating costs. Assuming each bus lasts ten years, that's $13,000,000/year to get 5,900 vehicles off the road. This seems like a lot, but consider that adding a lane of interstate between Nashville and Clarksville would cost something like $150,000,000 and take several years.

How about gasoline? A hundred mile round trip at 25 mpg costs $15 a day. That's $22 million a year in gasoline saved by getting those 5900 cars off the road! That's a number so big I almost want to cry.

Further, consider that traffic can add half an hour to your commute each way. One hour a day saved, times six thousand drivers, is 1.5 million man-hours per year. Figure an average wage of $12/hr, and $13,000,000/year starts to sound cheap.  If we come up with a solution that makes a significant reduction in traffic that only costs, say, a million dollars a year, we collectively are coming out way ahead.

So here's the idea: we should pay people to carpool. But not at a flat rate. Put a million dollars in a pot, and declare that that pot will be distributed evenly among everyone who carpools that year, weighted by how many days they do it. Imagine how people would respond to an incentive like that! If only five people carpool all year, boom, easy $200k each. Pay it out more often than once a year, too. Say every two weeks. Within a few months you should reach an equilibrium point where exactly the right number of people are carpooling for the money being offered. After that you can see just how good the system is and how much it's worth.

As an added bonus, you could let people without cars sign up for the system, and basically turn every driver in the city into a government-provided taxi for the carless. The driver gets paid by the number of passengers, so its a win for them. And the car-free individual gets better service than busses.

The problem is making the matches. If you could get our hypothetical six thousand people to put their schedules in a system, a relatively simple computer program could make matches between them and make a huge dent in traffic. There are already such systems, but there's relatively little data in them. Paying people to participate will fix that. And with smart phones becoming ubiquitous, hitching a ride without advance planning becomes easy.

Now, how does this apply to the Amp? To be clear, I’m not presently taking sides in the debate over the Amp. Traffic on West End is abysmal, and something needs to be done. The Amp is, indeed, something. But what alternatives are there? I think this alternative is better from almost every perspective. Let's run the numbers.

Amp is projected to cost $4 million a year to operate, plus the $174 million startup costs. Add some for inevitable overruns, divide that over 20 years, and you get about $14 million annually. A comparable BRT system in Cleveland has ridership of around 14,000 daily. Each rider represents at most one car off the road, but maybe not even that. Depends on whether they count the same person going both directions as one rider or two. So being generous, we’re spending at least a thousand dollars per year to get each individual car off the road.

How about instead, we just pay people to carpool? If someone paid me a thousand dollars a year for my trouble, you can bet I’d be carpooling! Set up a good smartphone-based system to make ride matches, and I guarantee you you’ll get more cars off the road for less money. The result helps all of Nashville, not just one dense strip. And there’s zero construction disruption.

Obviously there’s a lot of variation possible. Who gets paid? The driver? The rider? Both? How do you keep track and minimize gaming the system? I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you that the system has to be set up well from the start; I've seen far too many systems like this half-complete with clearly zero ease-of-use consideration. The problem isn't trivial. But it is solvable, and I think this is what we should be looking at as an alternative to ripping up West End for a few years.

Footnote:

Suppose you have two forms of transit available to people. Cars, which hold 5 people, and busses, which hold 60. Suppose your goal is to get as many vehicles off the road as possible. For cars to get more people off the road than busses, more people have to be willing to use cars than are willing to use busses. How many more?

Define DB to be the number of people held by a bus, and DC to be the number of people held by a car. The ratio of people willing to carpool vs. number willing to bus must be at least (1-1/DB)/(1-1/DC)

If this criterion is met, more vehicles will be off the road by carpooling, even though each vehicle holds fewer people.

Polio eradication

Humans change the world. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. One change is extinction of a species, a change that cannot be undone.

Think about what it means for an animal to go extinct. Say, elephants. If elephants went extinct today, your children or grandchildren will grow up in a world without elephants. They will never see one, ever, no matter where they go or what they do. A significant experience will be denied them; a choice will be denied them. So even if you don't care about elephants in themselves, won't you please think of the children?

Disease eradication is the opposite. By eradicating a disease, mankind makes a mark on the planet for the rest of time. Most things people do will eventually crumble. But as bad as the extinction of an animal is, extinction of a disease is the antithesis. It is a permanent, unalterable improvement in the state of the world. Disease eradication is one of the greatest achievements of man. And it only happens because of vaccines. If anyone ever tells you vaccines aren't safe, point out the alternative.

Only two diseases have ever been eradicated, and of the two, only smallpox affects humans. But we're making progress on several others, and polio is at the top of that list. Forty years ago there were 50,000 reported cases of polio in the world. The last few years, there have been under 500. There are only three countries with endemic polio (meaning it's transmitted within the country, not imported), and the number of endemic cases is down to under 150. Now, the game isn't over; as long as there are endemic populations and large groups of unvaccinated people, there can still be outbreaks, like happened this year in Somalia. But the vaccination will continue. Within the next decade, polio will be dead.

And then nobody, anywhere, will have polio again. Ever. This will never happen again:

 

Think about that.

In the same period of time, you can expect to see an end to guinea worm, and yaws may not be far behind. Then malaria and the measles.