Water - where is it?

Did you know that yesterday was World Water Day? It seems like water is getting higher visibility these days, from the Chairman of Nestle giving dire warnings to National Geographic devoting this month's issue to it.

Here is an interesting map showing where the water is. I'm pretty comfy here on the shores of the Great Lakes, but most of the rest of the world is not in as easy a situation.

Freedom to Fail

From last week's Time magazine...

At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix.

That's a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. Our bankruptcy system's generosity, for instance, has been convincingly linked to higher rates of entrepreneurship.

Green Meanie

You all know my green leanings and interest in energy security & conservation. This article in the Telegraph tells you about the real me.  (Just kidding, but it's quite funny.)
Hat tip: Dad.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People?, a paper in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science, argues that those who wear what the authors call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. Faced with various moral choices – whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage – the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper's question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.

The authors, two Canadian psychologists, came up with an intriguing explanation for this. "Virtuous acts," they write, "can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviour." It's the yin-yang theory of psychology, or "compensatory ethics", to give it its proper name. Buy an organic potato, then go home and beat your wife with The Guardian. Hop smugly into a green hybrid car, then use it to run over little old ladies doing their shopping.

This "moral balancing" argument, however, clearly has its limits. Most people are sufficiently balanced without having to swing to opposite ends of the moral spectrum. We can give money to charity without dipping into the company till at the same time. Every good act doesn't necessitate a bad one. To every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction. Buying an expensive courgette with a bit of mud on it need not turn you into a tyrant.

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As with the worst type of religious zealot, there is nothing more annoying than the zeal of the converted, especially when it is tainted with the hypocrisy of self-righteousness. As we report today, people are more likely to buy environmentally friendly produce in shops than on the internet. Being seen to be green is more important than anything else. I wonder whether that will change if it now becomes a case of being seen to be mean.

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And now, at last, we have confirmation that they're tight as well. They might be willing to pay over the odds for a lovingly tended carrot, but in every other area of normal human activity, their greenness is merely a mask for miserliness. The wind turbine, the tandem bike with a dangerous little buggy on the back for the twins, the self-denying holidays in Wales… Get a boiler! Get a car! Get out of here!

We have been kind to these unkind people for far too long. Now that their halo has fallen and they can no longer boast their green credentials as a shorthand for moral superiority, it is time to fight fire with fire. How about a little compensatory ethics of our own? Double the tax on organic food as a deterrent; it is clearly a starter drug to a lifetime of amorality. Stop and search anyone in a Prius. Conduct dawn raids on north London allotments. Otherwise, one can only imagine the sort of dystopia that would ensue if these mean little green men were allowed to run amok.