Ed Conway Profile picture
Aug 23, 2019 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
What can we learn about capitalism from this valley in Mallorca? My @thetimes column: thetimes.co.uk/article/what-m…
This is Sóller. A town in the north of Mallorca with a pretty church, lovely botanical gardens and a quaint tram that trundles down to the sea. But the thing it’s prob best known for is... 1/
Oranges. The orange groves, or “huertas” around Sóller (see pic) produce oranges of a particular sweetness and succulence. Louis XIV used to demand only to be served oranges from Sóller. Take it from me, they’re really juicy and lovely. 2/
But orange trees are relatively thirsty and rainfall in Mallorca is not esp frequent, so there wouldn’t be Sóller oranges without a complex system of irrigation canals originally constructed by the Moors hundreds of yrs ago. You see them all around the valley 3/
If you’re a farmer you’ll be entitled to a certain no of hours of water each week, after which it’s yr responsibility to switch a gate, diverting water onto yr neighbour downhill (pics show one of the junctions & one of those gates, which in practice is just a rock in a hole) 4/
The striking thing abt this system is it’s managed and enforced not by the Ajuntament (town hall) or a company but by the farmers themselves. If you forget to move your rock you’ll soon get a visit from an irate neighbour. The COMMUNITY manages this common resource (water) 5/
And this is not really what conventional economics implies. The whole point of the “tragedy of the commons” is that it’s a tragedy: people are doomed to deplete common resources because someone will always take advantage. But Sóller’s orange groves show that’s not quite right 6/
Indeed it turns out there are hundreds of examples of small communities coming together to manage common resources. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel memorial prize for her work cataloguing them. Her Nobel speech is a must read on this topic [pdf]: nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/0… 7/
One of Ostrom’s examples was the orange growers around Valencia, who operate a very similar system to the one in Sóller. Here’s the map from the relevant chapter of her seminal work Governing the Commons 8/
Ostrom found that actually these community managed systems tended to be MORE efficient than those managed top down by governments or companies. This is the exact opposite of what conventional economics and the tragedy of the commons suggest. And it’s an important reminder... 9/
We often assume that if there’s the risk of a market failure the obvious solution is either top down regulation or slicing something up into parcels of privately owned land/resource. Ostrom’s work suggests there is a better bottom-up alternative 10/
Of course there are many provisos. Small community schemes to manage common resources prob won’t solve climate change or overfishing since these issues are too vast. Still it’s striking how often ppl trot out the “tragedy of the commons” w/o remembering it’s not that simple 11/
Before anyone pipes up, yes that includes me; I made a whole documentary about problems facing the oceans which talked extensively about the tragedy of the commons 12/
Anyway plenty more on this in my @thetimes column today thetimes.co.uk/article/what-m… 13/13

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More from @EdConwaySky

Oct 31
🧵How worried should we (and @RachelReevesMP) be about the slightly nervy reaction from financial markets towards her first Budget?
Short answer: certainly a bit worried.
But perhaps not for the reasons you might expect...
Worth saying at the outset: these markets are volatile.
Trying to interpret movements in govt bonds is v tricky.
They're moved by all sorts of factors - fiscal, monetary, economic and structural - from all over the world.
So yesterday's Budget is only one of many factors here...
Even so, there has been a marked rise in UK bond yields following the Budget which is greater than what we're seeing in other markets.
This morning the UK 10 year bond yield hit the highest level in nearly a year. It's up 1.7% since yday - far more than US or German equivalents Image
Read 9 tweets
Oct 8
🚨Latest UK population numbers just landed.
Two headlines:
- The UK natural population (eg domestic births minus deaths) is now FALLING - at the fastest rate in modern history.
- Yet OVERALL population is rising at the fastest rate since 1948 🤯
How? Lemme explain...
🧵
Nearly every year since records began a century and a bit ago, more people in the UK were born than died.
In the year to 2023, that changed.
664k births. 681k deaths.
The net drop of 16k is the biggest on record (also in % terms).
It's a watershed moment for UK demographics. Image
Yet the overall UK population rose.
& not by a little:
...at the fastest rate in 76 years! A near 1% increase.
That's a massive change in the number of people in the country.
How? You probably already know the reason... Image
Read 5 tweets
Sep 24
🚨This is the story of how UK & EU goods are STILL going into Russia in vast quantities, despite sanctions.
Of how the economic war waged by the G7 is failing.
Of how I witnessed sanctions rules broken in plain sight.
But above all else it’s the story of a chart... 🧵
Here’s the chart in question. It shows you UK car exports to Russia.
And there’s a clear story here.
Look: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK (and for that matter most of the G7) imposed sanctions on Russia. So exports of cars to Russia stopped.
End of story, right? Image
Wrong, because now look at what happened to exports of UK cars to countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
At precisely the same moment as sanctions were imposed on Russia, exports of these cars to Russian neighbours suddenly ROSE. Image
Read 32 tweets
Aug 13
🧵Here’s the extraordinary story of a Frenchman who came up with an invention that changed the world, before events took a twist.
It’s a rollercoaster story that just might help us solve one of the biggest challenges facing humanity.
Sounds far-fetched, I know, but read on… Image
The man in question was Nicolas Leblanc.
Born in 1742, he trained as a doctor but was always short of cash. He became the physician to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans - a minor French royal. Like many enlightened intellectuals, his hobby was scientific experimentation. Image
And when he heard about a scientific competition, launched by the French Academy of Sciences and backed by none other than King Louis XVI, he jumped at the chance. The prize of 2,400 livres (quite a lot - a few years of earnings) would go to whoever could turn salt into soda ash Image
Read 29 tweets
Aug 9
🧵Want to understand why weaning ourselves off fossil fuels like oil is such a tricky challenge?
Best place to start is with this ubiquitous toy👇
This is a thread about what I call the LEGO conundrum.
It begins when you ponder what a LEGO brick is actually made of... Image
Standard Lego bricks are made of something called Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene.
ABS is a tough thermoplastic you often find in the handles of scissors or the frames of hard carry-on baggage cases.
But Lego bricks are prob the most iconic application.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonit…
Image
It's worth saying btw not all Lego pieces are made out of ABS.
Baseplates are moulded from high impact polystyrene. Gearwheels are polyamide.
The small, flexible green pieces that look like plant stalks or flags are polyethylene, and so on and so on.
lego.com/en-us/sustaina…
Read 22 tweets
Jul 31
🧵
It might look like something from space, but some folks think lumps of rock like this could help us solve one of the biggest problems facing the planet.
Others fear they could trigger ecological catastrophe.
Presenting the weird, unsettling story of polymetallic nodules Image
These potato-sized mineral lumps form over millions of yrs on the ocean floor as metals accrete around organic fragments.
Up until 150 years ago no-one knew polymetallic nodules even existed. Today they're a very big deal.
So. Here are the 2 main things you need to know abt them Image
1. These nodules contain ASTOUNDING concentrations of certain metals - esp nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper. The grades of metals are multiples better than anything you can find on land (esp now we've mined out most of the easy stuff). Image
Read 17 tweets

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