Against organic farming

by  Tyler Cowen in

Perhaps the most eminent critic of organic farming is Norman Borlaug,
the father of the “green revolution”, winner of the Nobel peace prize
and an outspoken advocate of the use of synthetic fertilisers to
increase crop yields.  He claims the idea that organic farming is better
for the environment is “ridiculous” because organic farming produces
lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to
produce the same amount of food.  Thanks to synthetic fertilisers, Mr
Borlaug points out, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and
2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%.  Using
traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to
supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a
tripling of the area under cultivation.  The more intensively you farm,
Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

Read more here.

Addendum: Speaking of The Economist, here are their book recommendations for the year.

Economics for children

by  Tyler Cowen in

A loyal MR reader asks:

I would like to start introducing my daughter (age 8) to the concepts
of economics.  She is a voracious reader so I thought that might be a
great place to start her thinking like an economist (on the other had,
she dismisses anything her father tells her out of hand)
 

Do you have any suggestions on books that would be great for a 3rd or 4th grader?

Any suggestions?

My favorite things New Jersey

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Music: There is Count Basie, Lauryn Hill (download "I Just Want You Around"), Paul Robeson, and Deborah Harry’s best songs; my favorite is the reggae-inspired "The Tide is High."  Paul Simon was born in New Jersey, and of course there is sax player Wayne Shorter.  Even at age 44, I’m still not into Frank Sinatra.  Bruce Springsteen I now find mostly unlistenable (monotonous rhythm sections), but parts of Born to Run still send a thrill through my heart.

2. Author: Philip Roth is the obvious pick, but I prefer Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, a neglected masterpiece, and the first half of his Executioner’s Song.  Stephen Crane is from the state, but somehow he doesn’t count in my eyes as a New Jerseyan.  Mencken had the bottom line on James Fenimore Cooper.

3. TV show: Duh.  I still don’t get the appeal of The Wire; for obvious biographical reasons, I’d rather watch white New Jerseyans kill each other than black Baltimoreans.

4. Poet: William Carlos Williams, here is a quickie poem.

5. Comic: Jason Alexander, by far the funniest guy on that show.  Bud Abbott is another pick.  James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) can be funny when they let him.

6. Director: Steven Spielberg, AI is about how morally superficial people can be; Sugarland Express and Close Encounters (director’s cut) are other favorites of many.  There is also Brian de Palma, his best film is the Hitchcockean Dressed to Kill.

7. Non-fiction writer.  John McPhee has raised the bar for all of us.

8. Painter: Jacob Lawrence, especially the early works.  There is also George Inness, who painted Montclair, and Ben Shahn, here is my favorite of his.

9. Sculptor: George Segal I am not so fond of, but otherwise I draw a blank.

10. Economist: Milton Friedman.

11. Movie, set in: Here is a list, plus there is Clerks and other Kevin Smith creations, not to mention Big (Tom Hanks) and Buckeroo Bonzai.  I opt for Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.  What else am I missing?

12. Mom: Mine.

The bottom line: Too obvious to state.

The second bottom line: Population density is a wonderful thing.

Got Milk?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Washington Post has a great front-page article on the milk cartel and how they crushed a competitor.  Titled "Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator who Bested Price-Control System," it lays everything out from the law and its history to how the system really works e.g. campaign contributions, Innovator: $172,900, Dairy Industry: $7,577,409.

In the summer of 2003, shoppers in Southern California began getting a break on the price of milk.

A
maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and
selling it for as much as 20 cents a gallon less than the competition,
exercising his right to work outside the rigid system that has
controlled U.S. milk production for almost 70 years. Soon the effects
were rippling through the state, helping to hold down retail prices at
supermarkets and warehouse stores.

That was when a coalition of giant milk companies and dairies, along
with their congressional allies, decided to crush Hettinga’s
initiative. For three years, the milk lobby spent millions of dollars
on lobbying and campaign contributions and made deals with lawmakers,
including incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Last
March, Congress passed a law reshaping the Western milk market and
essentially ending Hettinga’s experiment — all without a single
congressional hearing.

Read the whole thing.

Silly guessing games, part II

by  Tyler Cowen in

Go to an old-style movie theater where you can tell which are the people coming out of the feature you wish to see.  As they file past, make a guess about their personal qualities.  Possible guesses are "immature," "pretentious," "dopey," "sad sacks," "not very attractive," and so on.

Then pick up the mirror, so to speak, and start believing that you hold this same quality more than you used to think you did.

I played this game last night at Bergman Island (recommended, the best part is when he calls bad conscience "a petty conceit"), with distressing results.

Here is the previous installment of Silly Guessing Games.

Does “doing time” harden prisoners?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Wunderkind Jesse Shapiro says yes:

Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated, with roughly six hundred thousand to be released this year.  Despite this, little is known about the effects of confinement conditions on the post-release lives of inmates.  In this paper we estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels, and find that harsher prison conditions lead to significantly more post-release crime.  We check our identifying assumptions by showing that similar discontinuities do not arise in a control population housed separately from other inmates, and that predetermined correlates of recidivism do not change discretely around score cutoffs.  We argue our findings may have important implications for prison policy, and that our methodology is likely to be applicable beyond the particular context we study.

Here is the paper.  The authors also argue that these peer effects appear large, relative to the deterrence effects of sending people to nasty prisons.  Here is a good recent article on the prison economy.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World.  A best-seller and critical rave in Germany, but it is dull.  Did it succeed because Germans are overreacting to a "normal" (read: non-Nazi) novel about their history?

2. Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, by Esther Perel.  This is the most dangerous book I read this year.  The main thesis is you keep your sex life alive through anger/arousel and distance, not intimacy.  Here is a review. 

3. Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place: A Novel.  She is a consistently intriguing writer who finally wrote her breakthrough book; one of the best-reviewed novels of 2006.

4. Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock: Stories.  I’ll put her with early Pynchon, Coetzee, Rushdie, Saramago, Sebald, and Pamuk.  A wonderful collection, but read this "roots approach" last, not first.  You might start here instead, be ready for lots of Ontario.  A big dose of her is the easiest way to make Philip Roth look overrated.

5. Javier Marias, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear.  Spain’s best-known current writer, but ignored by Anglos.  Here is a good article on him.  The English-language translation is first-rate, but the story doesn’t click with me.

6. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, by Joshua Foa Dienstag, interesting from beginning to end: "Freedom for the pessimists is not merely a status but an
experience that a time-bound person can aspire to through a certain
approach to life.  As I will elaborate later, the pessimists have
tended to see this approach exemplified in questing figures like
Columbus or Don Quixote."

Negative real rates of return, part II

by  Tyler Cowen in

Apocalypto, yes storage costs for goods are positive in the movie.  The film is about theology; virtually frame-by-frame it is commentary on Passion of the Christ, the Bible, or both.  Call it mishnah, if you wish; the reviews I read didn’t get this at all.  The movie’s central question is what the idea of a miracle, or salvation, can mean in a non-Christian world.  I found it remarkable, but I can’t imagine it drawing many viewers beyond the curious, the omnivorous, the Mayan, and the deeply committed.

Here is my previous post on negative rates of return.  Comments are open, but if you wish to simply complain about Mel Gibson, please use this old space.

Addendum: Here are reviews.

Does skill-based technical change explain growing wage inequality?

by  Tyler Cowen in

John DiNardo (of the University of Michigan) and I were troubled by the
fact that there are a lot of patterns and trends in the labor market
that don’t fit in very well with a skill-biased technical change
explanation. We were motivated to embark on a Don Quixote mission, a
noble cause that wasn’t going to go anywhere [laughs].

One thing we pointed out, for example, is that women are lower skilled
than men, if you take the fact that they have lower wages as evidence
of their skill. The SBTC theory says that people with lower skills
should have slower wage growth than people with higher skills. But over
the 1980s, women did much better than men. It’s also the case that over
the 1990s, women’s relative wages were fairly stable again. So there
was a long period of stability of women’s relative wages, then a period
of convergence of women relative to men that ended in 1991-92, and then
stability again. That’s an important set of trends that SBTC doesn’t
address. SBTC might be consistent with it; it might not be, but the
theory needs a lot of auxiliary hypotheses to work.

The same thing is true with respect to the black/white wage gaps.
Blacks earn less than whites, and many people believe that the reason
they do so is because they’re less skilled. Nevertheless, during the
1980s, the black/white wage differential was stable. It didn’t widen as
people had predicted it might.

Another trend that didn’t fit with the SBTC hypothesis concerns the
relative wages of people with different bachelor’s degrees. There are a
couple of different data sets that collect starting salaries for newly
minted B.A.s. What these data show is quite remarkable. Everyone knows
that the average wage of young college graduates went up over the
1980s. It wasn’t the case, however, that the gains were most pronounced
in engineering or science. They were actually greater for graduates in
the humanities, which doesn’t seem consistent with the idea that there
is increasing demand for technically proficient, computer-savvy people.

…A final puzzle concerned the age structure of the increases in the
relative wages of college versus high school graduates. Wages of young
college-educated workers rose relative to young high school workers,
but for people over age 40 or so, there really wasn’t any change in the
high school/college premium.

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw and Matt Yglesias.

Are we approaching labor market equilibrium?

by  Tyler Cowen in

After four years in which pay failed to keep pace with price
increases, wages for most American workers have begun rising
significantly faster than inflation.

With energy prices
now sharply lower than a few months ago and the improving job market
forcing employers to offer higher raises, the buying power of American
workers is now rising at the fastest rate since the economic boom of
the late 1990s.

The average hourly wage for workers below
management level – everyone from school bus drivers to stockbrokers –
rose 2.8 percent from October 2005 to October of this year, after being
adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only a year ago, it was falling by 1.5 percent.

Productivity has been rising for years, so it is comforting to see wages follow suit.  Every now and then the predictions of economic theory are correct.

Here is the full story.  The timing of this news could not be better, if you get my drift…