Results for “food”
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Are cruise ships a libertarian paradise?

The cruise ship Voyager holds more than a half-million gallons of fuel, five tons of meat, forty thousand eggs, and more than two tons of flour.  Its eight thousand passengers form a floating mini-city.  The cruise ship operator provides a large number of public goods.  Its laws are private, and imposed by contract.  Do not expect democratic procedures.  To the extent they treat you well, it is due to reputational concerns.  Many of the doctors and nurses do not have proper governmental credentials.  The laborers come from around the world, and the manual labor typically comes from very poor countries, such as Honduras or the Philippines.  Customers choose across a large number of cruises, and typically seek out similar demographics.  The sector is close to tax-exempt and encounters only minimal regulation.

Those facts are from Kristoffer Garin’s Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns that Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires, an interesting new book.  By the way, this book claims that fraud and food poisoning are rampant on cruise ships.

Here is an article about seasteads as a means of realizing libertarian ideals.  Randall Parker proposes cruise ships instead of nursing homes

Outside of a brief Galapagos jaunt, I’ve never been on a cruise — I would not be able to stand the socializing, bland food, and forced confinement — so I am in no position to judge.  But if I were a libertarian anarchist, this is what I would be studying. 

The Dogs of Peace

Last night as I was trying to sleep, something strange happened: a dog barked, and then another replied.  When I was in Liberia last year, just after the siege of Monrovia, I never heard or saw dogs.  At that time, the residents had been so poor and desperate that most of the dogs had been eaten.

Driving around yesterday, I also saw goats and chickens, lots of chickens (I awoke this morning to the call of a rooster). Another member of our team saw cows. This is a significant change from one year ago.  Farm animals require food, i.e. foregone current consumption.  Farm animals are the capital of pre-capitalist societies, they represent savings and property rights and are a sign that people have some hope for the future. 

The return of the dogs is a small beginning for a ravaged land but it is a beginning.

Global Warming and the US Economy

Laurie David, comedy developer turned environmental activist, writes in the Huffington Post:

Last week at the G8, President Bush restated his favorite global
warming canard: that mandatory curbs on fossil fuel pollution will “cripple the U.S. economy.”

WELL, WHAT DOES HE THINK GLOBAL WARMING WILL DO TO THE ECONOMY!?!?
 
I wish there was an even bolder bold on this computer to emphasize how
insane this logic is. Non-stop flooding, killer heat waves, energy and
food shortages: what will these do to the economy?

Actually Laurie, and PGL of Angry Bear who links to David, the best study of the issue indicates that global warming is most likely a net benefit to the US economy.  Carbon dioxide and greater temperature makes plants grow faster.  The author, Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn writes:

Climate change is likely to result in small net benefits for the United States over the next century. The primary sector that will benefit is agriculture. The large gains in this sector will more than compensate for damages expected in the coastal, energy, and water sectors, unless warming is unexpectedly severe. Forestry is also expected to enjoy small gains. Added together, the United States will likely enjoy small benefits of between $14 and $23 billion a year and will only suffer damages in the neighborhood of
$13 billion if warming reaches 5C over the next century. Recent predictions of warming by 2100 suggest temperature increases of between 1.5 and 4C, suggesting that impacts are likely to be beneficial in the US.

Speaking personally, I have undergone a greater shift in mean temperature by moving from Canada to the US than will occur in 100 years of global warming and I like it!  My fellow Canadians, still stuck in the frozen north, will be glad to know that in the future they too can have warmer temperatures without giving up their prized health care system.

For the developing world the effects of climate change are most likely negative but not so negative that further development – combined with some modest changes in first-world technology, such as greater use of nuclear power – is not the best solution.

My favorite things Texan

Music: How about Blind Willie Johnson, a pinnacle of the blues tradition?  Buy it here.  Can I overlook Scott Joplin and his "Euphonic Sounds"?  Lightnin’ Hopkins?  Woody Guthrie (if only he had read Economics in One Lesson…)?  Leadbelly?  Janis Joplin?  Roy Orbison?  Jimmie Rodgers?  Charlie Christian?  Ornette Coleman?  Buddy Holly?  Here is a longer list.

Painting: Robert Rauschenberg?  Look at this one with the goat, I believe it is in Stockholm.  I bet you, like I, say naaaah, but the field is thin.  I’ll opt for his "Bed" as an important work, however.

Literature: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the obvious choice, or try Katherine Anne Porter.

Food: Texas barbecue has a strong influence (sausage!) from German migrants.  That is also why Tejano music has so much accordion, with a hat tip to Poland as well.

Comedian: Steve Martin.  All of Me and Planes, Trains and Automobiles both make me laugh.

The bottom line: I love Texas, but I am surprised that the weight of achievement is so unbalanced toward music and food.  By the way, I’m in El Paso, doing research for my next book.

Addendum: Several readers write to tell me Guthrie is not a Texan…

The economics of Las Vegas

Casino/hotels invest resources to keep you within their space, so you will gamble on behaviorally tempting negative-sum games. This means excellent food at bargain prices, and of course disorientating space designs as well.  No one can find their way through a big casino for the first time without getting confused.

These two features — food quality and imperfect mobility — are two sides of the same coin.  You are more likely to gamble where you eat, so they win back your culinary gains on the slot machines.  If gambler mobility increases enough (e.g., Las Vegas now has a monorail), the quality of casino food will decline.  There is no point in luring in those who will not stay.

For the pure non-gambler such as myself, it is the cross-subsidies which make the city attractive.  I get the lower prices and never cough the money back up at the slot machines. 

Would more mobility across casinos make me better off?  On one hand, more mobility would mean more freedom of choice.  I would no longer be stuck in the hotel restaurant, unwilling to navigate the casinos and the deliberately unsynchronized traffic lights along the main road.  Yet the macro-state of being stuck (ex post, but not ex ante, when choosing a hotel) also delivers, in competitive equilibrium, lower prices and higher quality for the meals I want.  Do I love or hate this unusual trade-off?  Is this how life in a gilded cage would feel?

How can non-casino restaurants survive here?  They must compete against highly subsidized competition.  Yet the range and quality of non-casino places is first-rate.  Does this mean that restaurants elsewhere could be better — essentially for gratis — if only they had to try harder?  Have we found "X-Inefficiency" within the restaurant industry?

I’ve opened up the comments section.

Alfonso Lorenzo

Last weekend I visited Alfonso Lorenzo — one of the greatest of the amate painters — in a Cuernavaca mental hospital.  Life in rural Mexico can be tough.  Did you know that Alfonso spent several years of his life chained to a wall, and by his relatives?  I asked one compatriot what he thought of this, and received (roughly) the following answer:

Yes, it is sad.  But we have people chained to the wall in most of our villages.

In fairness, if he were not chained to the wall he might well be in jail.  Did I mention that your relatives have to bring your food and the jail is several hours away?

Here are his unique amates.  Yes one is of a naked woman but rest assured it is true art, I believe it is office-safe.  My favorite is the stations of the cross picture.  You’ll be hearing more about Alfonso soon.

Will the Middle East run out of water?

Farmers, who account for 70 percent of the world’s water consumption, are often hugely uneconomical about it.  For example, in growing water-intensive crops they derive a less-than-optimal nutrition content from a given quantity of water.  Agriculture, in fact, is one of the real villains in the global water drama…Half the water used by the world’s farmers generates no food…A 10 percent improvement in the distribution of water to agriculture would double the world’s potable water supply.

Middle Eastern countries could solve many of their water problems with free trade, economic diversification, and better agricultural incentives, and yes that means don’t grow bananas in the desert.  Yemen needs to stop growing qat; this addictive drug accounts for over seventy percent of their water use.

Ideally the relatively water-rich Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey could be selling water to the rest of the region but for political reasons don’t expect much of that anytime soon.  Sometimes the easiest way to trade water is inside a tomato.

As for desalination, the costs have fallen dramatically over the last decade, and may continue to fall.  The real problem is not producing the water but rather transporting it uphill.  Desalination won’t solve your problems if you live in the mountains.

The above passage is from Fredrik Segerfeldt’s excellent Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the World’s Water Crisis, published by Cato, and thanks to Alex for the pointer.

Why health care is good for you

Here are the bald asseverations I made to Bryan Caplan yesterday, over Bolivian food:

1. Health care is very, very good for you.  Here is one good summary of the earlier blogosphere debate.

2. Don’t be fooled by studies that say the opposite.

3. At most those studies show that health care is not good for you at some additional margin.  Make sure you get to that margin.

4. It is true that many regressions show a zero positive effect for health care once you introduce a variable for income.  This mainly shows that income is a better proxy for real health care than many of our highly imperfect measures for health care.

5. Almost every family in my Mexican village has lost a kid or two before the kid reaches age five.  Few of these deaths would have occurred if a) a doctor rather than a shaman were around, b) they had a ready antidote for scorpion bites, c) they knew to take the right pills for diarrhea and fever and to stay hydrated.  These variables will be more closely correlated with measured income than with whatever screwy figure the Mexican government provides for expenditures on medical care.  Health care still matters, even though it won’t show up as significant in the regression.

6. The above example can be generalized to wealthier countries.  Might education be the best proxy of all for the consumption of real health care?  Yes stupid doctors can kill you but a smart patient will not do better staying at home.

7. It is obvious that health care leads to greater longevity, and this is the greatest good of all.  Just ask yourself, how much money would you have to receive to give up health care for the rest of your life?  For me no sum of money would suffice.

8. Yes the famous Rand Corporation study showed that more doctor visits don’t help people.  I can buy that, but advances in medical science still bring huge pay-offs.

Caveats: These are lunchtime comments, I am not accountable for them in the same way as if I posted them on my blog.  And I am still too afraid to go see the doctor and get a check-up.

Why Mexican barbeuce [barbacoa] is superb

Goat and lamb are the specialties.  They cook the food in a buried pit at low heat, for about ten hours.  It is then shipped out by truck, early in the morning.  The restaurants, or should I say tables, open between nine and ten o’clock, yes that is a.m..  When they run out of fresh meat, the restaurant simply closes, usually by 1 p.m. or so.  You can only keep the stuff heated and fresh for so long.  A few restaurants receive a second shipment of meat, in which case you sit there and wait until it arrives.

Dubner and Levitt on monkey monies

It seems that monkeys can be taught to use money:

…[but] do the capuchins actually understand money? Or is Chen [the researcher] simply exploiting their endless appetites to make them perform neat tricks?

Several facts suggest the former. During a recent capuchin experiment that used cucumbers as treats, a research assistant happened to slice the cucumber into discs instead of cubes, as was typical. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could ”buy” something sweeter with it. To the capuchin, a round slice of cucumber bore enough resemblance to Chen’s silver tokens to seem like another piece of currency.

Then there is the stealing. Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment. All seven monkeys live in a communal main chamber of about 750 cubic feet. For experiments, one capuchin at a time is let into a smaller testing chamber next door. Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them — a combination jailbreak and bank heist — which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

Here is the full story.

Problems no one worries about anymore

The concern over the rising cost of living, which reached an acute stage about 1909, was the basis for much of the criticism directed against cold storage.  In the search for a reason for the greater cost of food, a vocal segment of the public came to believe that the refrigerated warehouse was largely responsible…

It went so far that commissions were appointed to look into the problem.  Which of today’s issues will someday seem equally ridiculous? 

And how did this all happen?

This very human tendency to blame the new and strange may have been stimulated by politicians with ulterior motives…beginning in 1910 the Republicans had blamed cold storage for the high cost of living in an effort to save the high tariff…

Both passages are from Oscar Edward Anderson’s excellent Refrigeration in America: A History of a New Technology and its Impact.

Markets in everything — brown rice edition

Foodies are feeling a little "flushed" about a new restaurant in Taiwan that serves them food in pint-sized toilet-bowl dishes.

And, yes, the food is designed to look like something that belongs in pint-sized toilet-bowl dishes.

Restaurateur Eric Wang’s theme eatery, called "Marton" – named after the Chinese word for "toilet," matong – has become quite the popular one in the southern city of Kaohsiung (search), Taiwan’s second-largest, since its opening last year.

You see, at Toilet, the food isn’t served on boring old plates. No, no, no. The meals "bowl" diners over as they arrive at the table in miniaturized Western and Asian-style porcelain thrones.

And Wang doesn’t stop with the theme. The venue is a bottomless pit of toilet tricks and treats [TC: dare I mention the phrase pu pu platter?].

Nestled in the teeny-tiny toilet bowls are squishy offerings like curry chicken rice, chocolate ice cream and anything else that reminds one of, well, the real thing.

Patrons seem to love it.

Here is the link.

Vermont Fact of the Day

I’m in Vermont singing Eagles songs and toasting marshmallows while gathered around a campfire.  I know, know, but I have only one vote!  One the positive side, it is has been a long time since I’ve really seen the stars.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from our guidebook:

The 1870s saw the maximum of cleared land in the state – at that time as little as 20% of the state was in forest – the figure today approaches 85%.

I can’t vouch for the specific fact but the general idea is certainly correct.  Forestland is up not down.  We think of the city as the enemy of the environment but in fact the main constraint on forest is farmland and better technology has meant that we are producing more food from less land than ever before.  See here for more.

Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.

American vs. European labor revisited: the household dimension

…you ask why we Americans work more hours than do Europeans.  But perhaps we don’t.  While the data do show that Americans work more hours AT FORMAL JOBS, it doesn’t follow that Americans work more hours in total.  The reason is that, compared to Europeans, Americans have more time-saving household appliances, as well as greater access to other time-saving amenities such as prepared foods, child care, and housecleaning services.  As a result, we Americans work fewer hours taking care of our households and, hence, can work more hours earning income.

Let’s not forget that buying things is much easier in the U.S. as well.  Don Boudreaux just submitted the above in a letter to The Economist.