Results for “food” 2044 found
Is Haiti safe again?
I mean sort of safe. "Haiti safe." Reed Lindsay reports:
Today, Haiti’s reputation is undeserved, say security analysts and
officials from the U.N. peacekeeping mission. They argue that Haiti is
no more violent than any other Latin American country. "It’s
a big myth," said Fred Blaise, spokesman for the U.N. police force in
Haiti. "Port-au-Prince is no more dangerous than any big city. You can
go to New York and get pickpocketed and held at gunpoint."
He may not be a totally objective and disinterested observer. How about this:
Reliable statistics are scarce in Haiti, but U.N. data indicate that the country could be among the safest in the region. The U.N. peacekeeping mission recorded 487 homicides in Haiti last year, or about 5.6 per 100,000 people.
A
U.N.-World Bank study last year estimated the Caribbean’s average
homicide rate at 30 per 100,000, with Jamaica registering nearly nine
times as many – 49 homicides per 100,000 people – as those recorded by
the United Nations in Haiti.
In 2006, the neighboring
Dominican Republic notched more than four times more homicides per
capita than those registered in Haiti: 23.6 per 100,000, according to
the Central American Observatory on Violence. Even the United
States would appear to have a higher homicide rate: 5.7 per 100,000 in
2006, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
I believe these numbers; at some margin even murder is a normal good. But most convincing, I think, is this:
Viva Rio, a Brazilian-based violence reduction group that came to Haiti
at the request of the U.N. mission’s disarmament program, has found
Port-au-Prince’s armed groups more receptive than those in Rio de
Janeiro’s slums.
Elsewhere in the country poor Haitians are eating cakes of dirt, and William Griffiths points me to this:
While
millions of Haitians go hungry, containers full of food are stacking up
in the nation’s ports because of government red tape – leaving tons of
beans, rice and other staples to rot under a sweltering sun or be
devoured by vermin.A government attempt to clean up a corrupt port system that has helped
make Haiti a major conduit for Colombian cocaine has added new layers
of bureaucracy – and led to backlogs so severe they are being felt 600
miles away in Miami, where cargo shipments to Haiti have ground almost
to a standstill.
China fact of the day
There are some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States — more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.
That is from the often quite interesting The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, readers, her middle initial is the number "8"). Of course arguably most of these restaurants do not count as Chinese food at all.
At the end of the book the author undertakes a global pilgrimage to discover the very best Chinese restaurant outside of China. The winner?: Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine, just outside of Vancouver. The number two choice came — justly — in Mumbai (Nelson Wang’s China Garden). I’ve never been to Richmond but I believe all of my top picks would come in India. Hunan, in London, deserves consideration as well. The author is correct that Chinese chefs, for whatever reason, do not flourish in France. Recommended.
Forward markets in everything, restaurant edition
Jason Kottke relates:
The Riverdale Garden Restaurant in the Bronx is trying out a novel way of staying in business: they’re asking for their regulars to pledge $5000 in exchange for a year of free dinners.
The problem of course is obvious. First, you probably won’t get your money back. Second, if everyone paid up, the restaurant has a weaker incentive to serve good food. And which customers do you think will receive the best treatment? The ones who put up nothing per each meal?
How poor does Cuba look?
The question is why anyone might think Cuba is doing OK, relative to northern Mexico. Megan McArdle offers (more than) two points:
3) Deep poverty is much more picturesque than moderate poverty. Poor
countries have their old colonial buildings still standing, because no
one had the money (or the reason) to tear them down and put up
something bigger. The countryside is dotted with adorable houses made
out of natural materials and natives wearing colorful traditional garb.
Animals graze in verdant fields, besides teams of sowers and reapers.
Middle income countries are smoggy, and almost everything looks like a
cheaper, shabbier version of what you get in the US. Scenic landscapes
are despoiled by cinderblock buildings with hideous tin roofs, or
trailers; cities are choked with boxy modern buildings that look
something like our housing projects. The genteel decay that looks
gothic and intriguing on an old Victorian mansion just looks seedy when
it’s eating away at badly poured concrete. Affluent Americans
underestimate the utility value of things like having personal space,
or an automobile.4) Cuba was relatively wealthy in 1959; it therefore has more
of the markers, like old majestic buildings, that we associate with
wealth.
I found the most evident signs of Cuban poverty to be the unceasing supply of articulate and sometimes weakly sobbing mendicants, none of whom sounded like con men, all of whom needed money to buy food and clothes for their families. The most shocking part is what small sums of money they would ask for or be made happy by. Or the numerous women — and I mean ordinary women in the streets — who would offer their bodies to a stranger (handsome though I am) for a mere pittance. Yes in Cuba there is good access to doctors but anesthesia is in short supply and the health care system stopped improving long ago.
If you want to understand northern Mexico, get out of the Tijuana tourist strip and visit Hermosillo. Count the number of new housing developments, and then count how many of them are inhabited by fairly dark-skinned, previously dirt poor, Mexican mestizos. Put that number over the number of buildings in Havana that do not have serious maintenance problems and see if you can divide by zero.
It’s quite possible that a lower middle class Mexican eats better food than you do, but there is no chance of that for anyone in Cuba except the top elite. Powdered milk is a luxury there.
I’ve long thought that Prague looks much richer than it is, and that the ugly northern Virginia or Houston looks poorer than it is. Where else looks deceivingly rich or poor?
How high is the U.S. poverty rate?
Here is some wisdom, from the non-libertarian, non-right-wing, never-asked-to-contribute-to-the-WSJ-Op-Ed-page Lane Kenworthy:
Poverty comparisons across affluent nations typically use a “relative”
measure of poverty. For each country the poverty line – the amount of
income below which a household is defined as poor – is set at 50%
(sometimes 60%) of that country’s median income. In a country with a
high median, such as the United States, the poverty line thus will be
comparatively high, making a high poverty rate more likely…Using a relative measure, the U.S. poverty rate is higher than Romania’s and only slightly lower than Mexico’s (see here). Similarly, Mississippi’s relative poverty rate is the same as Connecticut’s.
So when you hear that the U.S. poverty rate is about 20 percent, keep this in mind. Here is more, including links to research. Here is a response from Paul Krugman. Note that Krugman’s initial Op-Ed stresses how the measured rate has not fallen over (some periods of) time, but his response simply cites a ranking of the U.S. among other wealthy nations, based on an absolute poverty rate. Have the time series comparisons been jettisoned or should we stand by them?
Here is more useful information. It’s also worth noting that poverty rate numbers do not take into account food stamps, housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Medicaid, among other benefits. Not to mention black market income and underreported income (often for EITC reasons); yes it is worth referring back to consumption data which show that the poor do quite a bit better than income data alone would indicate. That said, a very good case can be made that we overinvest in fighting the poverty of the elderly and underinvest in fighting the poverty of children.
The bottom line: Be very suspicious when you hear talk about the poverty rate. The real question, as stressed by James Heckman, is what rate of return we can hope to achieve from feasible interventions in favor of poor, young children. That’s a much harder question to argue. Heckman of course finds a high rate of return, so I suspect the key question centers around what is "feasible" given the imperfections of politics. It’s worth noting that many federal anti-poverty programs have in fact failed, or so changed that we don’t even call them anti-poverty programs any more. At the end of the day that calls for "better action" rather than inaction, but softening people up with overly pessimistic and uncritically presented numbers will probably make a good program less rather than more likely.
Why no Industrial Revolution in China?
John Darwin gives it a shot:
The best answer we have is that it [Kiangnan and China] could not surmount the classic constraints of pre-industrial growth. By the late eighteenth century it faced steeply rising costs for food, fuel and raw materials. Increasing population and expanding output competed for the produce of a more or less fixed land area. The demand for food throttled the increase in raw cotton production. Raw cotton prices probably doubled in the Yangtze delta between 1750 and 1800. The demand for fuel (in the form of wood) brought deforestation and a degraded environment. The escape route from this trap existed in theory. Kiangman should have drawn its supplies from further away. It should have cut the costs of production by mechanization, enlarging its market and thus its source of supply. It should have turned to coal to meet the need for fuel. In practice there was little chance for change along such lines. It faced competition from many inland centres where food and raw materials were cheaper, and which could also exploit China’s well-developed system of waterway transport. The very perfection of China’s commercial economy allowed new producers to enter the market with comparative ease at the same technological level. Under these conditions, mechanization — even if technologically practical — might have been stymied at birth. And, though China had coal, it was far from Kiangnan and could not be transported there cheaply. Thus, for China as a whole, both the incentive and the means to take the industrial "high road" were meagre or absent.
In other words, who really knows? The excerpt is from Darwin’s new book After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, which should be read by anyone…who…reads books with titles like that. It is most interesting on the Indian and Arabic collapse of the 18th century and on fitting the Russian conquest of Central Asia into the more general history of European imperialism. I didn’t find any revelations in the book, but it was consistently interesting and readable throughout.
Strange Bloggingheads episodes
It is a cook off: on one side was Megan McArdle and Will Wilkinson, on the other side was Ezra Klein and Spencer Ackerman. The five-person panel of judges includes Natasha and yours truly. I deliver the final verdict at the end, citing Benthamite, Perfectionist, and Rawlsian standards for the food. If there is one lesson, it is taken from the cooking of Megan: for most of you frozen cherries will, for cooking, be tastier than non-frozen cherries which in fact are not so fresh at all.
Please do your calculations in the margins
Which do you think takes a bigger toll on the environment, owning a dog, or owning an SUV? My bet would be on the dog. I’m thinking of all of the resources that go into dog food.
That is from Arnold Kling. And if you believe in a zero or very low discount rate, don’t forget to count all those puppies too.
Interview with Paul Romer on Mauritius
Via Mark Thoma, here is an interview with Paul Romer about growth in Mauritius. One question is how much Romer’s growth theory was needed to generate this advice. Second, I am surprised how little attention he gives to Mauritius being a small country. I don’t think that country size makes the advice much different, but perhaps expectations should be adjusted. Most small countries aren’t well-diversified and their growth rates depend heavily on real shocks. Singapore is an exception, most of all because its citizenry is obsessed with accumulating human capital and thus it depends upon a general flow of foreign capital rather than specific sectors. I don’t see harm in Mauritius trying to follow this same path but I wouldn’t expect them to succeed to a comparable degree.
Speaking of small countries, Fred Sautet has an interesting blog post on what happened to the New Zealand reforms. Since the reforms starting in the 1980s, New Zealand has had excellent economic policies, probably better than Mauritius can expect to implement. But New Zealand has not had stunning rates of economic growth. A big part of the answer is simply that New Zealand still depends on the demands for dairy and agriculture. Yes, many parts of the country are booming but the worldwide demand for commodities is a big part of the reason why. The deregulation of agriculture helped but without rising food prices growth would be lower yet. Earlier, it was Britain’s removal of imperial preference in 1972 that sent the country tumbling over the edge in the first place. Yes freedom is still better but in general small countries are less of an "economic laboratory" than we might think. Conversely, while there are some good explanations for "the Irish miracle," a small country with a few million people can with good luck grow quite rapidly.
Just think about the determinants of your own family income; probably for most years policy changes are not #1 on the list. A country of 1.2 million people, such as Mauritius, is more diversifed than your family, but not as much more diversified as you might think. When it comes to real factors, Say’s Law does hold. Demand for your labor depends on the production decisions of 300 million mostly wealthy and often quite diversified Americans. That offers your income a great deal of protection, relative to what suppliers on Mauritius can expect.
David Cutler on mandates
Cutler is very smart, tenured at Harvard, arguably the leading health care economist, and yes he is an advisor to Barack Obama. He says mandates are not the way to go, and no I do not think he is just "falling in line" here. Read the whole thing. Yes, the key is to make insurance cheaper, not more expensive. Yes, mandates are a political loser. Yes, ex post fiddling can make up for a lot of the problems in the "no mandate" approach and there is going to be lots of ex post fiddling anyway.
Of course Ezra is right that the non-mandate plans, such as Obama’s, don’t do much to lower the cost of insurance. But I would like to make a more general point about the correct direction to move in.
The way most goods and services become excellent — I mean really excellent — is through competition. Yes, right now health insurance has lots of screwy incentives, most of all cost shedding. But if you stifle competition and write off hope of getting a better-functioning private insurance market…well…I believe you have not thought long and hard enough about just how much of the social value on Planet Earth has come, ultimately, from competition in the provision of goods and services. How do you think we got from subsistence agriculture to super-cheap food? By mandates?
Mandates, of course, tend to require minimum coverage and thus they limit competition in the content of policies and also the expense of policies. It’s unclear if they are truly cheaper, all things considered.
I might that mandates make social cost less transparent and they encourage government to commit societal real resources outside of the usual budgetary process. Those were two good general criticisms of the last eight years of the Bush administration; let’s not carry those principles of governance over into our health care policy.
If someone needs covering, for whatever reason, give them some stuff. If need be give them some government stuff. Some kind of plan. Give them whatever. But don’t overregulate private insurance companies and take them off the table as a source of future productivity improvements and super cheap coverage, however partial it may be.
The pointer is from Brad DeLong.
By the way, if you’re looking for a ray of competitive good news on the health care front, start here. We need something similar on the insurance front and yes I know that means not every illness will be covered. Given the Grim Reaper, it’s all about marginal choices anyway.
Should we abolish trays?
Behavioral economics in action, or call it voluntary paternalism:
Students ran a test last semester showing that on two days when trays
weren’t offered, food and beverage waste dropped between 30 and 50
percent, according to Kathy Woughter, vice president for student
affairs at Alfred. That amounts to about 1,000 pounds of solid waste
and 112 gallons of liquid waste saved on a weekly basis, according to
the college.
And why?:
Think back to your undergraduate days eating in the dorm dining hall.
When you moved through the buffet line, did you ever get a little too
ambitious with portions just because you had extra room on that plastic
tray?
If I ran a cafeteria I would consider abolishing utensils, thereby encouraging South Indian and Ethiopian food, but I don’t expect that would be popular with all patrons.
Banana, by Dan Koeppel
You will never, ever find a seed in a supermarket banana. That is because the fruit is grown, basically, by cloning…Every banana we eat is a genetic twin of every other.
It turns out, by the way, that the world’s supply of Cavendish bananas — the ones we eat — is endangered by disease (more here) and many experts believe the entire strain will vanish. Most other banana strains are much harder to cultivate and transport on a large scale, so enjoy your bananas while you can. The previous and supposedly tastier major strain of banana — Gros Michel — is already gone and had disappeared by the 1950s, again due to disease. Today, European opposition to GMO is one factor discouraging progress in developing a substitute and more robust banana crop.
I liked this bit:
"Uganda doesn’t endure famine, and to a great extent that is because of bananas," said Joseph Mukibi…
And finally:
Most horrifying of all to Americans, the Indian banana is used as a substitute for tomatoes in ketchup.
I’ve grown tired of single topic foodstuff books, as they are now an overmined and overrated genre. But Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World is one of the best of its kind. It is a seamless integration of politics, economics, history, biology, and foodie wisdom. Here is one review of the book. Here is Dan’s one-post banana blog.
Objective vs. subjective globalization
Most of all, the growth of markets has
made food in India more Indian. The major regional cuisines are now available in
many different parts of India, not just in their original regions. The most
important globalization, if we can call it that, has occurred within India
itself and it has spread Indian diversity around the country. But that
development feels like it should have been the case all along, even though it
wasn’t, and so it is discounted in importance. The fast food outlets are simply
more noticeable and thus create many objections. A more dispassionate view would
realize that the growth of food markets, viewed as a whole, has disseminated and
supported India’s many cultures.
Here is more, by me, in the Indian newspaper Mint. Here is the conclusion:
The good news is this: cultural
globalization will, with time, become less of a polarizing issue in India and in
other developing countries. The first Martian to arrive is the biggest news
story, but at some point change becomes commonplace and ceases to attract much
notice. At the subjective level, people eventually realize that globalization
has preserved or enhanced many parts of India’s heritage. The bad news, however,
is closely connected to the good. While cultural evolution in India is hardly
over, it is possible that the exciting and heady feelings of change have already
peaked.
Which sectors will prove technologically stagnant?
Megan McArdle writes:
As the Boomers age, they will consume fewer of the things that we produce efficiently, and more of the things that we provide relatively inefficiently.
Here is more, and I hereby take Megan to be a robot pessimist.
It is a revealing question to ask which sectors a person considers technologically stagnant. Baumol claimed it is the performing arts, but TV and the internet have belied this; it is true that those media are not *live* performance but that is substituting objective aesthetic judgment for what consumers really care about. People love Dexter, whether or not there is someone actually in the box. For stagnant sectors, I will nominate:
1. Haircuts, you might as well get them in Mexico
2. Automobiles (given the overall extent of technological progress, are they really so much better than in 1957?), although the $2500 car may change this
3. Spicy food, it seems best in relatively poor countries
I’m not yet sure about teaching. It seems to be a candidate but people are learning an awful lot from blogs these days; don’t fixate on delivering the old service the way we always have.
Your picks? Keep in mind that something has to be stagnant in relative terms, to date it sure isn’t computer chips but they raise the bar for the average. I expect pharmaceuticals and webcams to make it much easier to care for old people, but only on a per year of life basis; the number of years lived and thus total cost will rise too.
Markets in everything, Freakonomics style
A student is selling his spot in Steve Levitt’s Economics of Crime class.
The pointer is from Alec Brandon. And via Michelle, here is another installment in the Markets in Everything series. And here is yet another installment, I would call it obvious ("markets in food," can you believe that?) but apparently not to Professor Houston at Brown University.