0:00

Get 3% daily cash back when

0:03

you use Apple Card to buy a new

0:05

iPhone 15 or pair of AirPods at Apple.

0:07

You can choose to grow it at 4.40%

0:11

annual percentage yield APY when you

0:13

open a savings account through Apple

0:15

Card. Apply for Apple Card in

0:18

the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject

0:20

to credit approval, savings is available to

0:22

Apple Card owners subject to eligibility, savings

0:25

in Apple Card by Goldman Sachs

0:27

Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch,

0:29

member FDIC, terms and more at

0:31

applecard.com. How

0:42

much is a wild bat worth?

0:44

Bats are good, bats are friendly, bats eat

0:47

pests. But can we actually put

0:49

a dollar number on that goodness and

0:51

friendliness and pest eating? This

0:54

is a question that Amy Ando started asking herself

0:56

a few years ago at a conference. Because

0:59

there were some people there telling her about

1:01

something called White Nose Syndrome. The

1:05

fungus grows on the faces of bats while

1:07

they're hibernating. It's called White Nose Syndrome because

1:09

they end up with fuzzy white stuff on their noses. It

1:12

seems to irritate the bats, upsetting

1:14

their natural hibernation rhythms. This

1:16

is highly fatal to bats and

1:18

has been decimating bat populations. We

1:21

have seen populations of bats in

1:23

eastern colonies decline, in some

1:25

cases, to 100%. It

1:28

is a wildlife wipeout. Literally

1:30

millions and millions of bats in the

1:33

last two decades have died. Now,

1:36

there are potentially some solutions here, like

1:38

ways to keep bats from getting this

1:40

fungal infection and dying. But

1:42

those interventions are expensive. Stuff

1:45

like monitoring caves or protecting

1:47

bat habitats. People trudging

1:49

through bat caves full of

1:51

guano. Even developing vaccines.

1:54

You wouldn't want to do this unless it was

1:56

a very important thing to do. These are real

1:58

costs, both dollars. values

2:00

and, you know, human labor.

2:03

So, is it worth

2:05

doing? This,

2:09

of course, is a really hard question to

2:11

answer. But it's exactly

2:13

the kind of question that Amy Ando

2:15

answers for a living, because she's an

2:17

environmental economist. A lot of

2:19

people think that those two words are

2:21

opposites because economic activity is often the

2:23

thing that damages the environment. But

2:26

the way she sees it, using economics

2:28

to study the environment is actually key to

2:30

protecting it. Like, if we want to safeguard

2:32

the natural world... We need to

2:34

be able to quantify the benefits that

2:36

we get out of it. We can't just wave our

2:38

hands and say, oh, well, nature.

2:42

This is Unexplainable, I'm Benji Jones, and

2:44

today on the show, what

2:46

is a bat worth? I'm

2:50

here to talk about the economy. What, like

2:52

it's hard? You may be wondering, who got

2:54

all this money? Nobody knows. The

2:57

money's not here. Well, your money's

2:59

in Joe's house, on Mrs. Meiklin's house, and

3:01

100 others. It's just money. It's

3:03

made up. It doesn't exist. It's not real.

3:05

It's not a lie. If

3:07

you believe it. How

3:10

the hell do you put a price on a bat? Like,

3:13

I'm really curious. Well,

3:17

there's a couple of different things you can do. After

3:19

that conference, Amy wound up doing a whole research

3:22

paper on the value of bats. And

3:24

she started by thinking through the value of a

3:26

bat's labor. Not to put

3:28

a price on the bat, but

3:31

to put a price on its work. So

3:34

I'm thinking about Richard

3:36

Scarry books, and all the little

3:38

animals out there doing their jobs.

3:40

Squirrels planting the trees. Yes, yes.

3:44

And they all have jobs, and they're all wearing

3:46

their cute little outfits. And bats are out there

3:49

doing pest control. So

3:52

they are really helpful to farmers in

3:55

that they eat insects that are

3:57

pests to crops, the damaged crops.

4:00

Basically, bats are doing free labor

4:02

on farms all across America. But

4:05

Amy still had to figure out how to actually

4:07

put a price on that work. So

4:11

if you're not an economist and somebody says, oh

4:14

no, bats are dying, the inclination

4:16

is to say,

4:19

well, it's gonna wipe out

4:21

two-thirds of the crop and it's gonna

4:23

be really a huge impact. The

4:25

thing is, the people are

4:27

very adaptable. And

4:30

so if a service that nature

4:32

was providing goes away or is

4:34

reduced, we're not just

4:36

gonna sit around and do nothing. Farmers

4:39

are gonna say, well, okay, I've got

4:41

more pests, so I'm gonna

4:43

have to use more pesticide. So Amy

4:45

thought, okay, maybe one way to get

4:47

at the value of bats is to just

4:49

figure out how much it would cost to replace them.

4:52

But she couldn't know on every

4:55

single farm exactly what each

4:57

bat contributes. We can't

4:59

see them going around catching bugs

5:02

and we can't measure the bugs. We can't ask

5:04

the bats how many bugs they eat. It's

5:07

also not really practical to try and

5:09

call up every farmer and ask like,

5:11

what interventions have you used and how

5:13

much did they cost? What we

5:15

have to do is we have to say to ourselves, how

5:18

would this manifest

5:20

in things we can observe,

5:23

which is markets. And that's how Amy

5:25

chose to look at the price of land. Basically,

5:29

if you're a farmer and you're thinking about a piece

5:31

of land that you might rent or grow crops on,

5:34

you have to do a lot of math. You're gonna

5:36

think to yourself, well, how profitable is it

5:38

gonna be? What's the price of my inputs?

5:40

You know, what's the weather like these days? Farmer

5:43

stuff. Farmer stuff. How

5:45

much am I likely to have to spend on

5:48

pesticides? And all

5:50

of that goes into your calculation

5:53

of farmland profitability and

5:55

your demand for farmland. Bats

6:00

are doing free labor on the land.

6:02

They're eating up all these bugs. That

6:04

might make the land more valuable, like

6:06

more expensive to rent. On

6:08

the flip side, if the bats disappear,

6:11

you should then see the price of land go

6:13

down. Or at least that

6:15

was Amy's hypothesis. So she

6:17

and her colleagues pulled up a bunch of

6:19

maps. First, for example, they pulled

6:22

out the USDA data on how many acres

6:24

were farmed county by county across the U.S.

6:27

and also the average cropland

6:29

rental rates. This gave them a

6:31

sense of how the price of land changed over time.

6:34

But they also needed to know, what are the bats

6:36

up to? Which counties

6:38

had white-nose syndrome in

6:41

each year? This year, there

6:43

was no white-nose syndrome. When

6:46

you look later and you

6:48

see, okay, now this area

6:50

has white-nose syndrome, what impact

6:52

did that have on acres

6:54

planted and the price of land? Finally,

6:58

after a lot of data crunching, these

7:01

researchers had clear numbers showing how

7:03

white-nose syndrome had affected the price

7:05

of land across the U.S. We

7:08

found that losing bats in

7:10

a county caused land

7:13

rental rates to fall

7:15

by almost $3 an acre. And

7:18

there were also spillover effects. The

7:21

neighboring counties also experienced

7:23

some effects, which

7:25

makes sense because bats fly. Bats

7:27

fly. Yeah. When

7:29

Amy and her colleagues tallied everything up, they

7:31

came up with a pretty big price tag.

7:34

The bottom line is that

7:36

the cost to society of

7:38

white-nose syndrome in total was

7:41

between $420 and $500 million a year. Half

7:46

a billion dollars a year. The

7:50

best hope for stopping white-nose syndrome

7:52

is probably a vaccine or a

7:54

fungicide, but still years away. In

7:56

hard-hit Pennsylvania, those scientists are hoping

7:58

to slow the... fungus by

8:00

changing the temperature of bat caves.

8:02

Bat houses are being sprayed with

8:04

a naturally occurring bacteria that inhibits

8:06

the deadly fungus. Suddenly

8:09

spending $2 million to fight off

8:11

white nose syndrome or sending people

8:13

into guano-infested caves just doesn't seem

8:15

like such a big trade-off anymore.

8:17

White nose prevention on the way.

8:21

And eating bugs is just one example

8:23

of a way that bats are useful

8:25

to our economy. Like some might be

8:27

eating mosquitoes that carry diseases. Others

8:29

are, I don't know,

8:32

pooping, because poop is actually really

8:34

rich in nutrients and that's valuable

8:36

as a fertilizer. So here

8:38

we captured the value of one use

8:40

value, as

8:43

we call it. Use value, like literally

8:46

how useful bats are to our economy

8:48

in dollars. But there's

8:50

also this whole other way economists might

8:52

measure the value of animals or nature.

8:56

Some people, and I will include myself

8:58

here, value bats and

9:00

biodiversity in general for other reasons.

9:03

We see value in just having bats

9:05

around, whether or not we

9:07

actually benefit from them directly. Bats

9:09

are cool. Bats are cute. Bats

9:11

are really interesting. You know, you have summer

9:13

nights and you have them flying around up

9:16

above making their little clicky bat

9:18

noises. Amy says that economists

9:20

also try to measure this. They

9:22

try to figure out exactly how much

9:25

an animal or a plant or

9:27

like an ecosystem is worth to

9:29

us, spiritually and emotionally. Like

9:31

how much we value biodiversity, just for the

9:34

sake of having a rich and complex

9:36

world around us. And they

9:38

call this non-use value. And

9:40

we see people donating money

9:42

to save species that

9:45

they will never interact with on

9:47

an individual basis. It's not

9:49

affecting any market. It's

9:52

just out there. And

9:54

we might just want to save

9:56

it just because it is. And

9:59

while Amy hasn't measured... non-use values for

10:01

bats yet. She says that

10:03

researchers can actually put concrete numbers on

10:05

this too. It's just trickier. You

10:08

can't just look at market data. The

10:11

whole point of non-use values is that

10:13

they exist distinct and

10:15

not interacting with any markets.

10:18

So we use this

10:21

approach because we have to have a fancy

10:23

name for it called stated preference, which

10:26

is just a way of saying, yeah,

10:28

tell me what it's worth. Essentially,

10:33

they just ask a bunch of people, like,

10:35

what is a wetland worth to you or

10:37

an animal or this park? Except

10:40

not so directly. We

10:43

don't just merge up to people and say, what's this

10:45

whale worth to you? It's a nice whale you got

10:47

there, shame if anything happened to it. We

10:49

don't do that. Exactly,

10:51

yeah. But they do try to figure

10:53

out how much someone would be willing to pay to save

10:56

something. This is actually a technical

10:58

term. They're willingness to pay for nature.

11:04

Amy has done research on how much people

11:06

value grasslands, like how much

11:08

they're willing to pay to have grasslands

11:10

around. It's a way

11:12

to capture the value that

11:14

somebody has for a thing.

11:17

Economists also try to capture value by

11:19

looking at something that they call willingness

11:22

to accept. Like, I

11:24

live in a world with polar

11:26

bears and monarch butterflies. If

11:28

either of those species were to go extinct, what

11:31

amount of money would we have to give you to

11:34

compensate you for loss? And

11:36

you can imagine that that number is often much

11:38

higher. What you would have

11:41

to give people to compensate them for

11:43

its disappearance would be vast.

11:48

All these calculations that Amy is talking about,

11:51

like all the studies about use values and

11:53

non-use values and willingness to pay for nature

11:55

or to accept the loss of it, they

11:58

might sound kind of a fear. But

12:01

these kinds of studies aren't just

12:04

academics musing in obscure journals. Research

12:06

like this actually plays a very

12:08

important role in how we make

12:11

environmental policy, especially in

12:13

the U.S. After

12:16

the break, why it matters that we get it right,

12:19

and whether that's even possible. Reboot:

12:30

Your credit card with Apple Cart the only

12:32

credit card design for I found it gives

12:34

you up to three percent daily cash back

12:37

on every purchase. Bless! Applecart has no fees

12:39

not even hidden once. Apply for Apple Card

12:41

now in the wallet app on I phone

12:43

Applecart issued by Goldman Sachs Bank Usa Salt

12:46

Lake City branch subject to credit approval. Variable.

12:48

A Pr for Apple card. Range from nineteen point

12:50

Two four percent to twenty nine point

12:52

four nine percent based on credit worthiness

12:54

rates as of February first, twenty twenty

12:56

Four terms and more. At. Apple Cart. Dot

12:58

Com. I'm

13:06

Batman. One

13:08

reason that we have environmental economists doing the

13:10

work that Amy Ando does, measuring

13:12

the value of a ferret or a stretch

13:15

of desert, is because of a big policy

13:17

shift in the 1980s. Members

13:19

of the Congress, the

13:22

President of the United States. In

13:25

1981, Ronald Reagan stood in front

13:28

of Congress and gave a speech to wild

13:30

applause. Thank you very much. He

13:32

basically explained to the crowd that

13:34

he's cracking down on regulations and

13:37

regulatory agencies. And finally, just

13:39

yesterday, I signed an executive order

13:41

that for the first time, provides

13:43

for effective and coordinated management of

13:46

the regulatory process. That

13:48

executive order, and another one from Bill Clinton a

13:50

few years later, created so

13:52

that a lot of regulations passed in the

13:54

US have to go through a cost benefit

13:57

analysis. So now, if you

13:59

want to pass regulations, to protect some

14:01

grasslands, say, you often need to

14:03

do a study showing how the benefits compare to

14:05

the costs. And you can find

14:08

project after project measuring things like the

14:10

benefits that trees bring to a city

14:12

or the use and non-use values of

14:14

wetlands. And these numbers show up

14:16

in pretty big fights. The misery

14:18

in the Gulf of Mexico continues. Who'll pay for

14:20

the cleanup? Like after the Deepwater Horizon

14:23

oil spill in 2010, the

14:25

government asked scientists to try and figure

14:28

out how much people valued the natural

14:30

resources that BP's oil had destroyed. BP

14:33

will have to pay billions for the oil

14:35

spill in the Gulf. The

14:37

point is that studies that put dollar

14:39

values on the natural world, they're powerful

14:42

tools. They help hold

14:44

companies accountable. They give people more

14:46

of a reason to save bats

14:48

and other animals. They really

14:50

defend biodiversity's interest in the real

14:52

world. Unfortunately though,

14:55

they also have some real world

14:57

problems. Yeah, yeah, so let me

14:59

take a pause to think about it and try

15:01

to organize my thoughts a little bit. This

15:04

very thoughtful person is Nathan

15:06

Chan. He's an environmental economist like

15:08

Amy and he actually wrote a paper with her

15:10

about what can go wrong when you try to

15:12

put a number on nature. The

15:14

first problem they found is that when you

15:16

ask someone to tell you about how much

15:18

they value something, like how much

15:21

they're willing to pay for it, their answer

15:23

often depends on just how much money they

15:26

have. So if someone has $10 million, they

15:29

could hypothetically pay up to $10 million

15:32

for the thing that they care about. Whereas if I'm

15:34

less wealthy and I only have $10,000, then

15:37

my willingness to pay for the benefits that I

15:39

get are capped at $10,000. And

15:42

the problem is that if you're using

15:44

these techniques to decide where to build

15:46

something like a polluting power plant, you

15:48

might accidentally say, oh,

15:51

this rich neighborhood thinks their green

15:53

space is really valuable. And this

15:55

poor neighborhood thinks their green space

15:57

is actually less valuable. to

16:00

this analysis, so we should therefore build in

16:02

the poor neighborhood. It might be

16:04

better to call it willingness and ability to pay.

16:07

The other thing is that in the US,

16:09

race and class are really tightly linked to

16:11

one another. And so the same

16:13

study might conclude that we should build that power

16:16

plant in a black or brown neighborhood. And

16:19

Nathan says the value that people ascribe to

16:21

a green space or a park isn't

16:24

only about how rich they are, it's

16:26

also about how welcome they might feel there.

16:29

Let's say it was in Central Park and I was being

16:31

made to feel unsafe by going there, then

16:35

I might not go there as often and it

16:37

might look like I'm not valuing Central Park, but

16:40

what we're actually learning from people's decisions isn't

16:42

that they're not valuing it. It's actually being

16:44

caused by the constraints that they're being put

16:46

under or the kind of social environment that

16:48

they're in. And so

16:51

what that would mean is that we might

16:53

grossly underestimate the valuation of green spaces for

16:55

black folks in a scenario like that. He

16:58

says economists might measure the value of

17:00

a park or whatever by tallying up

17:02

how much time people spend in it.

17:05

But if black and brown people use that

17:07

park less because of racism, that

17:10

would again skew these kinds of assessments. And

17:13

then people haven't only critiqued these

17:15

sorts of economic assessments, they've

17:17

also questioned the fundamental premise

17:20

of environmental economics. One

17:22

of the things we point out on the paper is, you know, like sometimes

17:26

even thinking about the monetary value of

17:28

this might be distracting us from what

17:30

really matters. They basically asked

17:33

whether we should even be putting a dollar number

17:35

on nature in the first place. Like,

17:37

are there circumstances where that's just not

17:39

appropriate? One of the maybe

17:41

more clear cut examples, I think, is if

17:43

we're talking about lands that have

17:45

sacred or historical meanings to certain groups

17:47

of people, that might be

17:49

a place where, you know, if we work

17:52

really hard to say this is worth X

17:54

million dollars, that's kind of distracting from the

17:56

broader point that this has kind of deeper

17:58

heritage significance to people. Like

18:00

there are some things that we do

18:02

for spiritual or historical or even like

18:04

moral reasons. We don't say, hey,

18:06

you shouldn't murder people because we have calculated

18:08

the precise economic value that people bring to

18:10

society or the amount that someone would pay

18:13

to keep them on Earth. Like that's ridiculous.

18:15

We just know that murder is bad. And

18:18

similarly, maybe we should just say, hey, destroying

18:20

the environment is also bad and you really

18:22

should not need a dollar number to know

18:25

that. I think that's one definite

18:27

limitation and one place where we

18:29

as economists need to be a little humble

18:32

with what our estimates can do and what

18:34

types of questions they can and should be

18:36

answering in the policy sphere. Actually,

18:38

I started my career saying I would never do this

18:41

kind of research at all ever. I

18:43

wasn't going to do valuation. And

18:46

I've interacted especially with a lot of biologists

18:48

who feel like as soon

18:50

as we put dollar values on things, we're

18:53

distracting from the more important argument.

18:55

Of moral certitude. And this is

18:57

absolutely a thing we have to

19:00

do. Over

19:03

time, I think nature

19:07

just gets attacked and attacked and

19:09

attacked. For Amy, economics can

19:11

be a really strong defense

19:14

against those kinds of attacks. Some

19:16

people you can convince

19:18

with moral

19:20

stories and art

19:23

and photographs and experiences.

19:26

Other people need to see the dollar values. A

19:30

couple of years ago, I worked with a whole team

19:32

of ecologists and we wrote a paper estimating

19:36

the benefits to the world

19:39

of preventing the next pandemic by

19:42

doing things to protect forests

19:44

and protect species that

19:47

would make crossover of

19:49

something like COVID-19 from nature

19:51

into people less likely. The

19:54

paper found that if governments invested $22 billion

19:57

a year on stuff like protecting

19:59

tropical rain. forest and preventing

20:01

wildlife trafficking, they could potentially

20:03

bring the risk of another

20:05

pandemic like way down. And

20:08

yes, $22 billion sounds like a lot of

20:10

money, until you realize that

20:12

by some estimates the cost of the COVID

20:14

pandemic was $14 trillion in

20:16

the US alone. It's a huge

20:18

amount of money, and that speaks

20:20

to governments, and it helps convince

20:22

people to do something. This

20:25

paper has been cited hundreds of times.

20:28

It was, for example, in a report on

20:30

wildlife risks that was pulled together for Congress

20:32

last year. If people

20:34

like Amy and Nathan don't do this work,

20:37

then when important people like policymakers

20:39

weigh the costs and benefits of

20:41

a project, nature's value might

20:43

come up as zero. This

20:57

is the first episode in a whole

21:00

series we're doing on economic unexplainables. Next

21:03

week, we'll look at how much we can actually do to

21:06

control inflation. It's

21:08

like the Fed is treated like the Wizrovos

21:10

behind the curtain, that they're in charge of

21:12

the economy and they do all these things.

21:14

It's like, no, the Fed share is not

21:16

in charge of the economy. In

21:19

many ways, he's watching it roll along like

21:21

the rest of us. So that

21:23

is next episode, but this episode was

21:25

produced by me, Bird Pinkerton, and

21:28

reported by Benji and me together. It was

21:31

edited by the wonderful Marianne McKeown,

21:33

with help from Jorge Jast. Meredith

21:35

Hadnott has been spearheading the series.

21:37

Mandy Nguyen helped me pull this

21:39

episode together, as did Noam Hasenfeld

21:41

and Noam also did the music.

21:44

Christian Ayala did the mixing and the

21:46

sound design. Melissa Hirsch did our fact

21:49

checking. And we are grateful

21:51

always to Brian Resnick for

21:53

co-founding the show. I

21:55

also want to say a special extra thanks

21:57

to Nathan Chan and to Amy Ando, for

22:00

their generosity in responding to follow-up

22:02

emails. If

22:04

you have questions about this episode

22:06

or thoughts, please send them to

22:09

us. We are at unexplainable at

22:11

vox.com. You can support this

22:13

show and all of Vox's journalism by

22:16

joining our membership program today. Go

22:19

to vox.com/members to sign

22:21

up. Or you

22:23

can also support the show by leaving us

22:25

a nice rating or a review. It

22:28

means a lot. Unexplainable is part

22:30

of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and

22:33

we will be back next week.