Romans in general don’t seem to be big on charity shops, or second hand. Of course, The Church is the charity, and there are big yellow bins on the streets that harvest used clothing for redistribution. For non-clothes, however, there’s not much in the way of options to recycle. There is, however, an entirely wonderful and very third-world solution. You put your stuff by (not in) the dumpster and someone (often, but not always, raggle-taggle gypsies-o) takes it away. An entirely different approach to the canonically Teutonic “leave your stuff out on the third Tuesday in the month and if nobody takes it away by noon then we, the authorities, will remove it and deal with appropriately”. Like that approach, however, it works.

We’re about to move, and there are non-clothes that we just don’t have space for, or want. Nor did any of the members of Freecycle Roma. So we enlisted the help of a well-muscled young man and schlepped them down to the dumpster. While we were doing that a woman, dressed all in white, making me think, after the event, that perhaps she was a dental hygienist, parked her car in the driveway that we were using to cross the road easily. No problem, there were other gaps we could use. On the way back from carrying the last load to the dumpster, she called me over.

“May I say something,” she said, in very good English. “What you’re doing is illegal, leaving things by the side of the road.”

I laughed, good-naturedly, I hope, and from then on cannot recall the conversation even nearly verbatim. It went roughly like this:

“You’re joking, aren’t you? It may be strictly illegal, but it is also something that happens every day every where.”

“In your country, and I have lived in your country, you wouldn’t do this.”

“No, because in my country I could call a number and the community would come and collect my things. There is no number to call here.”

Things got a little shrill then, as she shouted at me from the safety of her car, and I did my best to maintain my version of a good-natured grin and equable tone, almost guaranteed to add fuel to her fire. Eventually, I simply gave up and left her fulminating, which the well-muscled young man had wisely done at the outset.

What I should have said, it occurred to me moments afterwards, was not “Why don’t you just mind your own business, you dental hygienist parked illegally in a driveway,” but simply:

“When in Rome …”

In my yoof, I do believe I was the only person I knew who knew and liked both Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. Not merely liked, but was extremely fond of. So I read this young man’s take on what he (or a sub) called L.A. Weirdos with great pleasure, and not a little envy at his perspicaciousness. As in

Most of Newman’s songs are written from the perspective of what some might call an “unreliable narrator,” or, in less delicate terms, an “asshole.” Good Old Boys is full of assholes big and small. They’re racists and provincial creeps. They have big dogs in their yard, and they’re happy to sic them on you. And Newman’s grace as a writer is that he puts you in a position to care about these jerks.

But while I was nodding happily in agreement, one thing bothered me. If Nilsson and Newman are so inextricably linked in this bloke’s mind — ” (If you’re looking for a nice point of connection, the first song on Song Cycle, “Vine Street”, was written by Newman and later covered by Nilsson.)” — how come I never really got round to Van Dyke Parks then? And is it too late now?

I like the BBC’s More or Less, which takes a look at what it calls the numbers in the news. This morning I caught up with the most recent podcast of the World Service edition, which included an item on the exact measurements that determine whether a food shortage is a famine, or merely a humanitarian emergency.

One of the guests expressed the worry that just because the food shortage no longer fits the famine bill, doesn’t mean the problem is over. It occurred to me that maybe it would be possible to build some hysteresis into the measurements. What I mean is, the metrics for coming out of a famine ought to less stringent than the metrics for going into a famine. That way, it would still be a famine in people’s minds, even though it was getting better. And that might help to keep the reconstruction and relief coming.

That’s the title of an article on the New York Review of Books blog by Tim Parks.

My laconic friend Luigi’s answer was “No”. Parks comes to much the same conclusion, but in support he adds a great deal of insight and historical learning, which I am sure Luigi shares, internally.

I’ve yet to read a dull word by Tim Parks, and when he says that Italy is a country for initiates, I know exactly what he means. Good piece, overall, and I wonder what my Italian friends think of it.

But here’s something very strange. I was going to quote a line from the article, but when I went to copy it from the source article, it had changed. What’s there now, is:

“Every Italian,” Giacomo Leopardi dryly remarked in 1826 “is more or less equally honored and dishonored.”

In the version I downloaded yesterday, it is:

“No Italian,” Giacomo Leopardi drily remarked in 1826 “is ever universally revered or despised.”

What gives? No explanation at the page. Did Tim Parks the translator take issue with Tim Parks the writer? And who changed the popular “dryly” to the less-favoured “drily”? The public demands to know.

Nature recently carried a Comment setting out A market approach to saving the whales. It got a fair bit of traction, which is nice.

The authors, Christopher Costello, Leah R. Gerber and Steven Gaines, admit that their proposal is complex and could be hard to administer. Rendered down, it is simple. Allocate quotas on whales and allow them to be traded. Whalers could choose to kill “their” whales, trade them with other whaling nations, or save them for another season. Non-whalers — conservationist societies, for example, or whale-friendly governments — could buy quota and save those whales forever.

Predictably, Greenpeace finds the idea “abhorrent”. If the whales are saved, what happens to their income stream? And other economists are not impressed either. Science quotes Martin Smith, an environmental economist. “The trading system could have unintended negative consequences. If fewer whales are killed but the demand for whale meat stays the same, he says, then prices will rise — and that could stimulate illegal whaling.” Frankly, that would be the least of my worries.

I’m not impressed for a bunch of other reasons, some of which are purely peevish. The authors admit that the idea is not new. Indeed, it is not, having been put forward by Colin Clark and Roland Lamberson in 1982. Nature’s authors say it failed to take off “because the concept was ahead of its time”. They also give the distinct impression that Clark and Lamberson’s work has remained buried until they unearthed it. That’s almost true. The paper has been pretty well cited in the academic literature, and the quota idea was explored by, er, me in my 1988 book The hunting of the whale.

I confess I couldn’t put numbers on the potential price of a whale, back then, because the moratorium had only just been agreed, and the costs of saving whales weren’t as well known either, so my exploration wasn’t nearly as thorough as that of Costello et al., and of course I don’t expect them to have read my book. What annoys me more about both the proposal and the response to it is that both ignore the one big fundamental truth about whaling, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Objections from anti-whalers have mostly been of the “they’re sentient beings too” variety, which doesn’t seem to acknowledge that these fine sentiments have so far failed to put a permanent end to commercial or subsistence whaling. Others have pointed out that there’s more to whaling than costs or profits; whaling continues because it is subsidised by governments and is directed at that government’s standing among its people and internationally. Having to buy a quota wouldn’t materially affect that.

So what’s the real problem? “Sustainable,” that’s what. Costello et al. refer repeatedly to the idea that for each population there is some “sustainable” number of whales that could be taken. Biologically, of course, they are correct, and it depends on the reproduction rate of the whales, among other things. I used to think that the big problem was agreeing on the correct quota, until Sidney Holt, a great fisheries scientist, set me straight by pointing out that “economics is against it”. How so? Holt referred me originally to Colin Clark’s papers, which in addition to floating the idea of a quota also point out that money multiplies faster than whales. In the real world, the reproduction rate of the whales runs smack into the reproduction rate of money, and money wins.

Oversimplifying, a whaler has to decide whether to milk or mine the stocks; to kill a whale, or leave it in the ocean to breed, for some future year. By not killing it, he is effectively investing in its future reproduction. Because whales reproduce relatively slowly, he actually loses money that way. He makes more profit by killing all the whales he can and investing the proceeds in some other venture, like razing tropical forests. As I wrote at the time:

This is a pretty pessimistic conclusion for anyone with a non-financial interest in whales. It means, in effect, that we cannot expect whaling nations to regulate their activities “rationally,” because in fact the rational approach is to exploit the stock as quickly as possible until it is exhausted. That may be disappointing, but it is true. All the so-called disasters of the history of whaling — the system of Blue whale units, the depletion of the most valuable resources first, the excessive fishing capacity of the early heady days — are in fact entirely rational responses to the motive of maximising profits.

It would have been nice if Costello et al. had explored not only Colin Clark’s idea for a quota-selling World Whaling Authority, but also his explanation of why, in the case of slowly reproducing natural resources, conservation doesn’t pay. My own prediction, for what it is worth, is that it will probably never be worth investing in new whaling ships, and that most commercial whaling, especially far from shore, will stop when the last rust-bucket is beyond repair. I haven’t kept up with the state of the main fleets for some years now, so I don’t know how far gone they are, but I honestly think it is just a matter of time before commercial whaling does indeed grind to a halt. Quotas will only delay that day.