Results for “food”
2089 found

Guess who is lobbying against marijuana legalization?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Yup, beer distributors and the police.  Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post does a very nice job on the politics:

The California Beer & Beverage Distributors is spending money in the
state to oppose a marijuana legalization proposition on the ballot in November,
according to records filed with the California Secretary of State. The beer sellers are the first
competitors of marijuana to officially enter the debate; backers of the
initiative are closely watching liquor and wine dealers and the pharmaceutical
industry to see if they enter the debate in the remaining weeks…

Public Safety First is largely funded by a different industry whose interests are threatened by the legalization of marijuana: law enforcement. Police forces are entitled to keep property seized as part of drug raids and the revenue stream that comes from waging the drug war has become a significant source of support for local law enforcement. Federal and state funding of the drug war is also a significant supplement to local forces' budgets.

Amusingly, the Teamsters and the teachers (!) are supporting legalization:

The Service Employees International Union, a major presence in California, has endorsed the proposition. The Teamsters in September made its first successful foray into organizing pot growers. The United Food and Commercial Workers is backing the initiative and organizing cannabis club employees in the Bay Area. The teachers union, citing the revenue that could be raised for the state, is also backing the initiative.

The value of a liberal arts education

by  Tyler Cowen in

Seth Roberts writes:

…is “liberal education” so hard to defend that no one can coherently defend it?

Bryan Caplan also seems skeptical, although I do not recall if he has tackled liberal arts education per se.

A liberal arts education helps us think with greater subtlety, even if it does not improve our performance on subsequent standardized tests.  I see an impact here even on the lesser students in state universities.  It also helps explain how the U.S. so suddenly leaps from having so-so high schools to outstanding graduate schools; how many other countries emphasize liberal arts education in between?

Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols.  We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process.  That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths.  It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.

For related reasons, I believe that people who learn a second language as adults are especially good at understanding how other people might see things differently.

I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself.  I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole.  I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects.  I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education.  

Up close, I see Yana getting four years of a liberal arts education and I believe that her school is a very good one.  I have not seriously flirted with the idea that she is learning nothing important.  

The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-61

by  Tyler Cowen in

Written by Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pirerre Yared, this paper is a very good applied study of Mises and Hayek:

This paper investigates the institutional causes of China’s Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.

You can find ungated copies here.

Paul Langley asks about consumer surplus

by  Tyler Cowen in

What non-subsidized common products and services do you think have the highest average consumer surplus? Cell phones? Shampoo? Antibiotics? Just wondering.

Obviously it depends what margin you are at; for many people antibiotics or pharmaceuticals mean the difference for life or death but right now they do not for me.  And surely we cannot answer with "all food" or "all water."  For average value, I'll go with antibiotics, but a separate question is about median value.

I'm not sure cell phones have a positive marginal utility for a lot of people.  I would be happy with an email-only iPhone and I know people — close to us all right now — who don't even own a cell phone.

How about a toothbrush?  Eyeglasses?  The median adult wears them.  Often it's a car, though in the longer run you can adjust by moving to a walkable city.  A properly functioning toilet and waste disposal system?  Television?  Painkillers?

I thank the lunch group for a useful conversation on this topic.

*Sakhalin Island*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a book by Anton Chekhov, part memoir, part ethnographic study of a penal colony and the surrounding economic institutions on Sakhalin Island.  I hardly ever hear of this work, but it is both a literary and social science masterpiece; I will teach it next spring in my Law and Literature class.  Here is one review of the book.  This excerpt reminded me of some recent events:

On the fifth line I marked their age.  The women who were already over forty remembered theirs only with difficulty, and had to think for a bit before answering.  Armenians from the Yerevan Region had no idea of their age at all.  One of them answered me: "Might be thirty, but it could be fifty by now."  In cases such as these, the age had to be determined approximately from their appearance and then verified from the relevant prison documents.  Youths of fifteen and slightly older would usually reduce their ages.  Some women would already by married, or have been engaged for ages in prostitution, yet still said they were thirteen or fourteen.  The point about this is that children and juveniles in the poorest families receive a food ration from the state; which is issued only up to the age of fifteen, and here a simple calculation induces young people and their parents to tell lies.

These days, lying about age, and continued existence, seems to a standard practice in Japan.  Here is more on Japan's "missing elderly".  Apparently 884 people are listed as over 150 years of age; it is believed that many of these pensions still are being collected.

My Buffalo visit

by  Tyler Cowen in

For architecture, it is one of America's best cities.  The Guaranty building, Ellicott Square building, and City Hall are peaks of the art, plus there is lots of Frank Lloyd Wright.  There are hundreds of excellent residential homes, off of Elmwood for instance, but all over town.  Elmwood itself is a fun, walkable area.  There are two good art museums, plus a strong alternative culture scene, low rents, and lots of art galleries.  It feels more like the Midwest than say New England and the people are friendly and relaxed.  Food is not exceptional although meals can be had.  If you're not into architecture I would describe a city visit as optional, but for me it was a must.

Central American sour cream stand-off, Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Following a perceptive query from Kevin Drum, I bought and sampled sour creams from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, all from my local Mundo Latino supermarket.

The Honduran cream had a taste and consistency somewhat like that of the El Salvadoran cream.  Yet the cream from El Salvador was sweeter in a nice way; this came more to the fore when each cream was combined with a tamale.  The Guatemalan cream tasted noticably worse than either — flatter, heavier, and less tart/tangy.  Its label indicated it had a much higher level of saturated fat and cholesterol.

The Mexican cream was different altogether.  One Kevin Drum reader commented:

Mexican crema is yellowish and buttery. Salvadoran is whiter and tangier. American is lighter, firmer and more yogurty.

Of the creams from El Salvador, the best ones are in the small plastic bags, not the plastic containers.  If you have the feeling you don't know how to store the thing once you open it, that's the one you should buy.

Those are the supermarket brands.  The very best sour cream I've had was in Nicaragua, where the poverty and underdevelopment have kept the food supply chain shorter and fresher, albeit at the cost of higher food prices relative to real wages.  San Salvador has much more fast food than does Managua, for instance.  But they don't have mass produced Nicaraguan sour cream in my local supermarket, perhaps because relatively few Nicaraguans live in northern Virginia.

Here is comment from a retailer who appreciates the diversity of the creams.

Assorted Links

by  Alex Tabarrok in

1)  "The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a
soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to
play soccer."  Ron Paul on the mosque controversy.

2) Interesting review (pdf) of the health care bill from NCPA.

3) Philosopher Galen Strawson defends my most absurd belief.

4) "We've learned more about cooking in the past 15 years than we had in the previous 15,000 years." Video interview with Wylie Dufresne. By the way, I don't think this is true–we have learned more why but the previous 15,000 years developed a lot of how.  Surprising amount of political psychology in cooking, how to sell an unfamiliar food idea.  FYI, don't forget the book.

The permanent jam?

by  Tyler Cowen in

K. writes and tells me that she imagines someone writing a novel based on this incident and that I will assign it in my Law and Literature class.  Here is the excerpt:

A number of people have written in, or tweeted (and don’t forget to find me in the tweetosphere), to tell me about a traffic jam in China, currently in its ninth day, that seems to be on the verge of evolving, as per Cortazar’s story “The Southern Thruway” (an inspiration for Godard’s Weekend), into some kind of makeshift settlement.

This has struck an enterprising verve in some locals, notes the BBC:

The drivers have complained that locals are over-charging them for food and drink while they are stuck.

Then again, what is the “market price” for selling food and drink to 100 km traffic jams?

Instant noodles have risen to four times their market price in this new Chinese city.  This account, sent to me by Joshua Hedlund, notes that the jam is 62 miles long and offers good photos.

Pecuniary externalities

by  Tyler Cowen in

Samson, a loyal MR reader, requests:

Tyler,
What do you think about pecuniary externalities? What would be a good definition of such externalities, if you find them to be plausible? Without the fiction of an infinite number of buyers and sellers, why isn't it the case that any transaction through the price system, through an impact on price, causes an externality, and might one call such an externality a pecuniary externality? I cannot find much on this subject.
Thanks!

Economists try to make a distinction between pecuniary externalities — changes in price which merely redistribute wealth — and non-pecuniary externalities, which involve a real good or service being provided or denied at the margin.  If the price of wheat rises, wheat consumers suffer a pecuniary externality.  If you dump garbage on my lawn, that's a non-pecuniary externality, although it may be accompanied by a pecuniary externality, namely a decline in the value of the house.  In the meantime, the lawn stinks.

The distinction is often a tricky one, especially in the absence of perfect markets.  A lot of the complaints about health care markets are actually complaints about pecuniary externalities, namely that some people get priced out of the market.  Alternatively, the risk of facing high prices for cancer treatment may make people nervous and insecure.  The notion of "risk" often bundles together pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities in a not-too-easy-to-separate form.

Efficiency and distribution are not always possible to separate, no matter what the first and second welfare theorems seem to imply. 

What about people near subsistence?  Say you redistribute $500 from a poor Haitian to a somewhat less poor Mexican, and the Haitian dies and the Mexican buys a used motorbike.  Is that "just a transfer"?  Or is it "a real resource loss"?  I say it's the latter, but then virtually any redistribution will destroy some complementary value from the portfolio of the individual losing the money.  What is then left to count as a pure transfer?

There is also no such thing as a pure lump-sum transfer when population is endogenous, either through child-bearing decisions or through taking risks with one's life.

The distinction between pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities is useful, and hard to do without, but its foundations are shaky.  In practical terms the weakness of the foundations matters most when we are doing health care economics or analyzing food subsidies (or comparable forms of aid) in poor countries.  The richer and healthier the people are, the more likely the distinction can be invoked without much trouble.

And Samson is correct to think that large numbers of transactions involve pecuniary externalities, at least whenever the particular actions of a buyer or seller influence market price.