![]() I felt like this was a good area for an economist to think about trade-offs.Īs you may know, the gray wolf - or Canis Lupus - shares more than 99.9 percent of its DNA with dogs. RAYNOR: I think living in Wisconsin and just hearing all these controversies about wolf expansion in the state, and I just became really interested in this fight around wolves. RAYNOR: I’ve been at wolves since about 2012.ĭUBNER: And what attracted you to wolves? But most of her time has been spent on land she got her Ph.D. For a time, she worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Hawaii, studying fishing yields. Raynor has studied a variety of animals and habitats. ![]() What might give us the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak? And where do we spend that? We can’t necessarily protect everything that we want to protect. We have limited money for conservation, for example. The main thing that economics brings to the table when it comes to natural resources is thinking about trade-offs. RAYNOR: It’s pragmatic in that we can’t generate economic benefits from resources that have been eliminated or depleted. Is it as virtuous as it sounds, or does it have enough economics in it to make it very pragmatic? RAYNOR: We think about how to manage natural resources in a way that’s both sustainable and generates economic benefits.ĭUBNER: That sounds virtuous. They’re also incredibly impactful on the economy.ĭominic PARKER: It’s a great, great question to think about.Īnd if you think the Big Bad Wolf meme is outdated, don’t even get us started on Bambi.Ĭould the wolf you think of as a cold-blooded killer actually save your life?Įarlier, we described Jennifer Raynor as a “natural-resource economist.” What does a natural-resource economist do? RAYNOR: My view of the wolf is that they have an important ecological role. Today on Freakonomics Radio: a new view of the big bad wolf. But now there is a movement to kill off the wolves again, for the same reasons as before: they are a threat to the animals we prefer - and, theoretically, a threat to us too.ĭISNEY : Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? But thanks to the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. wolf population fell from the millions to roughly zero by the 1960s. If you haven’t been following wolf news closely, here are a few key things to know: As Jennifer Raynor said, the U.S. ![]() created a huge demand for fur, leather, and meat the populations of elk, beaver, bison, and passenger pigeon were also decimated. Some scholars call this period of American history the Age of Extermination. RAYNOR: That means there was not a single wolf left in the lower 48 states. Stephen DUBNER: What does that mean, “local extinction”? RAYNOR: We drove wolves, essentially, to local extinction across the lower 48 states. RAYNOR: These programs were super-effective. These bounty programs continued into the 1960s at the time, a dead wolf might fetch as much as $50 - the equivalent of around $450 today. RAYNOR: In the 1800s and early 1900s, we started putting bounty programs on wolves, which means the federal or state government will pay you money to provide a wolf pelt. They’ll eat all kinds of livestock, including the animals being raised by the settlers. There were probably millions of wolves.Īnd these wolves were “problematic,” as Raynor puts it, because wolves don’t only eat cartoon pigs. RAYNOR: They ranged across almost all of the lower 48 states. Before the Europeans came to America, she says, wolves were everywhere. Jennifer Raynor is a natural-resource economist at Wesleyan University. Jennifer RAYNOR: Well, I don’t know about fairy tales, but I know that the colonial history of wolves in the United States would suggest that, at that time, wolves were really problematic. And centuries earlier too, in one of Aesop’s fables, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” All these fictional wolves have something in common: they want to eat you and ruin the things you treasure. And in the Russian musical story “Peter and the Wolf,” by Sergei Prokofiev. But the Big Bad Wolf also shows up in German folk tales, like “Little Red Riding Hood” from the Brothers Grimm. “The Three Little Pigs” is an English fairy tale which was later turned into a short animated film produced by Walt Disney. It’s also protection against you know who…ĭISNEY : Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf. It could also be that the three pigs have different risk preferences because a house isn’t just for sleeping in. If you had to guess, you might imagine that cost is a factor - and, who knows, maybe supply-chain issues. Why do these three similar-seeming pigs use such different building materials? The original story doesn’t tell us why. ![]() The first one builds a house from straw the second one, sticks and the third one, from bricks. You’ve probably heard this story before: “Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.” Each pig is building a house. ![]()
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