ELEPHANTS. AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 90(1): 212-234. ABSTRACT, KEYWORDS, JEL CODES

featured an article by Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom, titled simply, “Elephants. ” As one would expect in such a prestigious journal, the article is clever and the mathematics are sound. The paper, essentially, takes a species-extinction model of the kind pioneered by Colin Clark (1973) and introduces the wrinkle that the valuable good derived from certain species is storable, and hence subject to speculation. Kremer and Morcom focus on how the price of ivory affects the incentive to poach elephants and how government policies can be developed to address this problem. Despite an ostensible emphasis on policy, however, the ‘state of the world ’ that is assumed throughout the paper is so far removed from the real world of elephant conservation that the authors ’ policy recommendations ring hollow. Indeed, they are effectively irrelevant. This comment reviews the shortcomings of Kremer and Morcom’s article and briefly explains a more important institutional approach to elephant conservation. Speaking to the New York Times, Kremer described the problem of elephant poaching. * The Reason Public Policy Institute. MICHAEL DE ALESSI If some people go out and poach a lot of elephants, and everyone thinks that the elephants are going to go extinct and there’s not going to be any more ivory, that can induce speculation on ivory prices.... And that speculation on ivory prices can induce more people to go poach. So you get the possibility of self-reinforcing expectations (quoted i