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chaosmage comments on Open thread, Nov. 24 - Nov. 30, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Lots of existing ivory becomes illegal, leading to a local drop in value, leading to lots of US ivory being traded to countries where it isn't illegal. Right?
So that first of all that sets up excellent opportunities for police sting operations. But it also drives down prices (at least for a few years), making elephant poaching less lucrative.
In parallel to that, the US is setting an example. A lot of countries copy US criminal laws rather than thinking them up from scratch (the War on Drugs being the textbook example), and since almost everyone loves elephants and the ivory trade is a huge and growing threat to them, there'll be a particularly low threshold to copying this one.
Sigh. Wrong. Why don't you at least look at the original link to the article about the ban? Notably, it says (emphasis mine):
I neither said nor meant it was going to be exported legally. It'll be black market trade, but it'll still respond to market forces, just like drug trafficking does.
Hold on. No new ivory products can (legally) be imported or exported from the US, but ivory products already in the US can still be bought and sold, albeit subject to restrictions. Providing demand for ivory remains roughly constant, and the US continues not to be an ivory producer, we would expect that to lead to a rise in ivory prices in the US market, and almost no ivory being exported (but some being imported on the black market).
So how much ivory do you expect to be illegally exported out of the US as a result of that law?
And if you don't care about legality, why would you export ivory, anyway? The prohibition destroys legal markets, but tends to raise prices in the black markets.
False. Scarcity raises prices, and black market goods are often scarce, but where illegal goods are not scarce (say street quality heroin) the profit margins are fairly low because illegality makes it hard to compete on brand so everyone competes on price.
I don't see how my estimate would matter in the slightest.
And you don't think ivory is scarce in the US..?
It would because your argument is that US exports will depress prices in the rest of the world. If the US exports amount to half a tusk, it's not going to depress world prices much :-/
In any case, this seems to be descending into bickering. Agree to disagree?
No, I'm saying this law makes it less scarce, because it makes buyers leave the market.
I can't make an informed prediction of how much ivory is going to leave the US because I know nothing about future rates of persecution or the effectiveness of the ivory trade. I imagine that a few people will "help" ivory owners avoid law enforcement by buying their illegal ivory at a sharp discount, then trading them for drugs and letting the drug traffickers get the stuff out of the country. Other, still legal ivory is going to be traded off too, since it is obvious the legal trend is going only one way. The economic incentives are pretty obvious, it'd be really weird if this didn't happen at least a little. But I can't know how much. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say 15% of ivory inside US borders is leaving it in the next ten years.
No. On what do we still disagree? Much of my argument on the likely effect on the ivory market is prediction descending into outright speculation - but this is all a sub-point answering your refusal to judge whether this or the survival of the elephant species is more important. You disputed neither of my other points on why these are causally linked (ease of sting operations and the prediction other countries would copy this law). So this does not appear to be a false dilemma. Which is why I'd like to return to my main point: Isn't helping the elephant species worth this law?
<shrug> Suit yourself.