Results for “food” 2044 found
Tuesday assorted links
2. Who is the greatest British novelist of all time? You get to vote, too.
3. How far can Irvine (CA) go?
4. How and why drug traffickers are infiltrating Costa Rica (NYT).
5. Mr. Beast YouTube hiring and production guide.
6. Chinese do Mun vs. Ricardo, on trade, violent cartoon.
7. Recycled paper and cardboard possibly are bad for the chemical content that leeches away from them?
My video contribution to the new Strawberry release
One and a half minutes, you will find it here, mostly me talking about how well the new OpenAI o1 model does economics. Spinoza (the dog) steals the show.
As I said to the OpenAI film crew, “Spinoza may not be AGI, but if you leave any foodstuffs near the couch, he will beat anything you people come up with.” That said, when it comes to mathematical, economic, or many other kinds of reasoning, OpenAI o1, the new model, is in the clear lead.
You need to click through horizontally in two different rows, but you will find many different and relevant short videos here on the new model.
France frozen croissant fact of the day
In France, frozen products accounted for 24 per cent of all pastries and other sweet baked goods in 2021. In the UK 21 per cent of pastries were frozen, compared with 13 per cent in Spain and 17 per cent in the US, according to research groups Gira and Global Market Insights.
Industry researchers have predicted that sales of frozen baked goods, including both bread and pastries, would increase by 7 per cent a year from 2021-26. They said the baked goods market overall, comprising both fresh and frozen food, would expand by just 1-2 per cent a year.
Here is more from Barney Jopson at the FT. The producers of the frozen products, as interviewed in the piece, claim their outputs can pass a blind taste test.
Peer Approval to Address Drug Shortages
Reuters: Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Company said…that it is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to import and distribute penicillin in the country temporarily….Cuban’s Cost Plus will import Lentocilin brand penicillin powder marketed by Portugal-based Laboratórios Atral S.A.
There are two remarkable items in the above passage. First, there is a shortage of penicillin in the United States! Crazy. The second remarkable item is that the FDA has authorized the temporary importation of penicillin from Portugal. In other words, the FDA will accept the EMA’s authorization of penicillin as equivalent to its own, at least for the purposes of alleviating the shortage. That’s good. What is needed, however, is a more permanent form of peer-approval.
I have long advocated for peer approval or reciprocity for any drug or device approved in a peer country but notice that this form of peer approval is only for drugs already approved in the United States. Thus, the approval is really only for labeling and manufacturing, a pretty small ask.
Peer approval for imports would also help to discipline domestic firms who sometimes take advantage of monopoly power to jack up prices. Indeed, you may recall Martin Shkreli and the massive price increases for Daraprim (Pyrimethamine) to $750 a pill when the same pill was available in Europe for $1 or less and in India for 10 cents. Importation would have solved that problem entirely.
Mpox Vaccines Stuck in Limbo: WHO is at Fault
In 2022, Mpox, a viral disease endemic to parts of Africa and primarily transmitted through close contact—especially sexual contact between men—spread to developed countries, including the United States. The U.S. saw over 30,000 cases and approximately 58 deaths. Despite two available vaccines there was not nearly enough supply to vaccinate even the high-risk populations. Fortunately, health authorities adopted vaccination strategies my colleagues and I had recommended for COVID such as first doses first and fractional dosing. For example, several small studies (e.g. here and here) suggested that 1/5 doses delivered intradermally could be effective and the FDA, EMA, and the UK all recommended this fractional dosing strategy. As result, the US was able to vaccinate around 800,000 people and the epidemic ended (natural immunity and other preventive measures also played a role).
Unfortunately, a new Mpox variant is now spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and nearby countries. Here’s the crazy part: despite declaring Mpox a public health emergency on August 14, the WHO has not approved any Mpox vaccines. You might think, “Who cares what the WHO authorizes?” After all, the FDA, EMA, and the UK have all granted emergency approval. But here’s the catch: the WHO’s approval is crucial for GAVI, the vaccine alliance that donates vaccines to developing countries. Without WHO approval, GAVI is reluctant to provide vaccines to the Congo. To add insult to injury, the Congo itself has approved the Jynneos and LC16 vaccines. Yet, the WHO refuses to authorize and GAVI to donate these vaccines, citing vague concerns about safety and efficacy.
Stephanie Nolen at the NYTimes has a very good piece on this mess:
Three years after the last worldwide mpox outbreak, the W.H.O. still has neither officially approved the vaccines — although the United States and Europe have — nor has it issued an emergency use license that would speed access.
One of these two approvals is necessary for UNICEF and Gavi, the organization that helps facilitate immunizations in developing nations, to buy and distribute mpox vaccines in low-income countries like Congo.
While high-income nations rely on their own drug regulators, such as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, many low- and middle-income countries depend on the W.H.O. to judge what vaccines and treatments are safe and effective, a process called prequalification.
But the organization is painfully risk-averse, concerned with a need to protect its trustworthiness and ill-prepared to act swiftly in emergencies, said Blair Hanewall…
In addition, no one has followed the other practice my colleagues and I recommended for COVID (which Operation Warp Speed did), namely advance market commitments. So the vaccine manufacturers have basically been twiddling their thumbs and not gearing up for greater production. (The Congo can also be faulted for not buying more on their own account.)
All of this means that when the WHO does authorize and the vaccines begin to flow, we will still desperately need strategies like fractional dosing.
Hat tip: Ben H. and special thanks to Witold Wiecek.
Why massive deregulation is very difficult
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, just to clarify context for the newbies I think more than half of all current regulations are a net negative. Anywhere, here are some of the problems:
Consider the relatively straightforward idea, popular in some Republican circles, of firing large numbers of federal bureaucrats. There would be immediate objections, not only from the employees themselves but also from US businesses.
Businesses need to make plans, and they frequently consult with regulatory agencies as to what might be permissible. The Food and Drug Administration needs to approve new drug offerings. The Federal Aviation Administration needs to approve new airline routes. The Federal Communications Commission needs to approve new versions of mobile phones. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice need to give green lights for significant mergers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. needs to approve plans for winding down failed banks. And so on.
If those and other agencies were stripped of their staffs, a lot of US businesses would be paralyzed. You might argue that this fact is itself proof that there is too much regulation, but the fact remains. Shutting down a large chunk of the federal regulatory apparatus would make it harder, not easier, for the private sector. Furthermore, regulation would give way to litigation, and the judiciary is not obviously more efficient than the bureaucracy.
And this:
The basic paradox is this: Government regulations are embedded in a large, unwieldy and complex set of institutions. Dismantling it, or paring it back significantly, would require a lot of state capacity — that is, state competence. Yet deregulators are suspicious of greater state capacity, as it carries the potential for more state regulatory action. Think of it this way: If someone told a libertarian-leaning government efficiency expert that, in order to pare back the state, it first must be granted more power, he would probably run away screaming.
Recommended, the piece has numerous good points of interest.
Moms Against Price Gouging
An excellent essay by John Cochrane:
Uber surge pricing was an important lesson to me. I loved it. I could always get a car if I really needed one, and I could see how much extra I was paying and decide if I didn’t need it. I was grateful that Uber let me pay other people to postpone their trip for a while, and send a loud signal that more drivers are needed. But drivers reported that everyone else hated it and felt cheated.
This cultural and moral disapproval came home to me strongly about 25 years ago. We were driving from Chicago to Boston in our minivan, with 4 young children, dog, and my mother. We got to upstate NY, and needed to stop for the night. This was before cell phones and the internet, so the common thing to do was just pull of at a big freeway intersection, marked food, phone, gas, lodging, and see what’s available. Nothing. We tried hotel after hotel. We asked them to call around. Nothing. It turns out this was the weekend of Woodstock II. As the evening wore on, the children were turning in to pumpkins. Finally we found a seedy Super-8 motel that had 2 rooms left, for $400. This was back when Super-8 motel rooms were about $50 at most. I said immediately “Thank you, we’ll take them!” My mom was furious. “How dare he charge so much!” I tried hard to explain. “If he charged $50, or $100, those rooms would have been gone long ago and we’d be sleeping in the car tonight. Thank him and be grateful! He’s a struggling immigrant, running a business. We don’t need presents from people who run Super-8s in upstate New York.” But, though an amazing, smart, wise, and well-traveled woman, she wasn’t having it. Nothing I could do would persuade her that the hotel owner wasn’t being terrible in “taking advantage of us.”
It is surely morally worthy to give what you have to your neighbors in time of need, especially the less fortunate. But we should not demand gifts. And appropriation of property by threat of force, turning off the best mechanism we know for alleviating scarcity, does not follow. Moral feelings are a terrible guide for laws.
If we can’t get the moms on board we are going to have a tough time. Still, I feel confident that the Cochranes are ensuring that the generational trauma stops with them.
*The Hidden Victims*
The author is Cormac Ó Gráda, the renowned Irish economic historian, and the subtitle is Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars. This is a first-rate and also horrifying of a still underdiscussed topic. Here is one excerpt:
The death rate from famine in Greece was probably higher than in any other European country with the exceptions of the Soviet Union and Poland. Following its occupation by Axis troops in April-June 1941, the British Navy, which controlled the Mediterranean, blocked sea access to Greece. Greece was one of the few Nazi-occupied economies that depended on imports for much of its food. The theft of meat and dairy cattle in the area around Athens for army use quickly followed occupation. Very soon, essential foodstuffs became scarce, particularly in Athens, which led to a famine at its most intense in 1941-42. The capital and its port city of Piraeus and some of the islands were hit particularly hard. The context was one of hyperinflation, an Allied blockade, and state-sponsored theft by the occupation forces.
This important book will make my best non-fiction of the year list.
Rampell On Harris’s Economic Policy
Here is the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell on Harris’s price control policy:
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Some far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.
…If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.
And here is a primer on Nixon’s price controls announced 53 years ago yesterday. Read Modern Principles for more.
Tuesday assorted links
My excellent Conversation with Paul Bloom
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust so that they avoid left-wing bias?
BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?
COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion, and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy view. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’re going to get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, “Well, that was my goal.” But obviously, not everyone will accept that conclusion either.
BLOOM: I wouldn’t want woke LLMs. I think there’s a lot in extreme —
COWEN: You’ve got them, of course.
BLOOM: I’ve got them. I think Gemini is the one, if I wanted to go — the woke LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways, but I wouldn’t mind left-wing LLMs.
In fact, I’m not a fan of disgust. You’re right that disgust is often associated with right-wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. Disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, the exclusion of other races. If there’s one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t put into LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I’d keep away.
COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
And:
COWEN: I think at the margin, I’ve moved against empathy more being a podcast host, that I’ll ask a question —
BLOOM: Wait. Why being a podcast host?
COWEN: Well, I’ll ask a question, and a lot of guests think it’s high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
Paul cannot be blamed for doing that, however. So substantive, interesting, and entertaining throughout.
Life in Belarus update (from my email, from anonymous)
Just an interesting update:
Chinese cars are rapidly replacing European & American cars in the city. An improvement in terms of comfort. Luxury cars still only European.
Housing prices in Minsk are reaching highs not seen since 2016. Government bodies that deal with the sales of properties are booked out 2 weeks. (Not common)
Subjectively, restaurants have improved immensely in the past few years with the influx of Chinese students and businessmen. Minsk has its first proper Korean restaurant, and Chinese food has become as good as in China. Minskers have a new found taste of spicy food (so says friends in the food industry)
Everyone I know that lost their jobs from sanctions has found something new working for a locally (or CIS) focused company.
Any products that disappeared after sanctions was either replaced by local (or russian) products, or reappeared with a Chinese label.
From my perspective, regarding Chinese, the immigration center I go to every year has become very very crowded with Chinese. It went from maybe 10 people waiting, to over 100 – every day.
Oppositional people have left long ago, people who remain accept or support the Government. . .
There has to be some profound lessons to draw from this, but I’m not sure.
It’s hard to measure & quantify resilience? Sanctions are ineffective with such a global economy? China is in control of this century? Maybe it’s a good thing to produce things locally? GDP is taken too seriously in the public mind?
Houston France markets in everything
Houston First, the city’s tourism department, revealed that it is paying $90,000 per year for three years — meaning the city will invest a whopping $270,000 to have the Michelin Guide here in Houston. Holly Clapham-Rosenow, Houston First’s chief marketing officer, says the city redirected some of its budget from various departments to the guide, which is standard for opportunities that come about during the year or when business strategies shift. “Budgets have some fluidity if the right opportunities come about, and opportunities like Michelin, Top Chef, and James Beard — we’re going to jump on them,” she says, adding that the investment seemed worth it considering the culinary scene is one of Houston’s biggest traveler draws.
According to Houston First’s 2023 Strategic and Budget Summary, money spent on food and beverage accounts for around 32 percent of the money spent during day trips to Houston and 24 percent of the money spent during overnight trips — the highest cost behind lodging.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism”
Jeffrey Clemens points us to some bonkers editorializing in the NYTimes coverage of the likely stolen election in Venezuela. The piece starts out reasonably enough:
Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was declared the winner of the country’s tumultuous presidential election early Monday, despite enormous momentum from an opposition movement that had been convinced this was the year it would oust Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired party.
The vote was riddled with irregularities, and citizens were angrily protesting the government’s actions at voting centers even as the results were announced.
The term “socialist-inspired party” is peculiar. The party in question is the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) and it’s founding principles state, “The party is constituted as a socialist party, and affirms that a socialist society is the only alternative to overcome the capitalist system.” So, I would have gone with ‘Mr. Maduro’s socialist party’. No matter, that’s not the big blunder. Later the piece says:
If the election decision holds and Mr. Maduro remains in power, he will carry Chavismo, the country’s socialist-inspired movement, into its third decade in Venezuela. Founded by former President Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s mentor, the movement initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.
For a time it did. But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.
Venezuela is now governed by “brutal capitalism” under Maduro’s United Socialist Party!??? The NYTimes has lost touch with reality. From the link we find that what they mean is that some price and wage controls were lifted, including allowing dollars to be used because the bolívar, was “made worthless by hyperinflation,” and remittances from the United States were legalized:
NYTimes: With the country’s economy derailed by years of mismanagement and corruption, then pushed to the brink of collapse by American sanctions, Mr. Maduro was forced to relax the economic restraints that once defined his socialist government and provided the foundation for his political legitimacy.
Lifting some controls does not make Venezuela a capitalist country. Moreover, the lifting of controls led to improvements:
…Seeing shelves stocked again has also helped ease tensions in the capital, where anger over the lack of basic necessities has, over the years, helped fuel mass protests.
…The transformation also brought some relief to the millions of Venezuelans who have family abroad and can now receive, and spend, their dollar remittances on imported food.
Of course, the improvements were not equally shared. If you want to call unequal improvements, “brutal capitalism”. Well, I don’t think that’s useful but if you do so be sure to note that “under Maduro’s administration, more than 20,000 people have been subject to extrajudicial killings and seven million Venezuelans have been forced to flee the country.” (Wikipedia.) That’s brutal socialism.
Lastly, I don’t expect, the NYTimes to keep up on the latest counter-factual estimation techniques so I won’t ding them too much, but it’s clear that the Chavismo regime never lifted millions out of poverty. At best, poverty fell during the good years at the rate one would have expected from looking at similar countries. It’s the later rise in poverty which is unprecedented, as the NYTimes previously acknowledged.
Cuba Libre! Part 2
In April I posted, following an excellent piece by Martin Gurri, that 4% of Cuba’s population had recently escaped. The Miami Herald now reports, based on official Cuban data, that 4% was a large underestimate.
A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
…It was a somber moment that capped a week of National Assembly sessions in which government officials shared data revealing the extent of the economic crisis and the failure of current government policies meant to increase production, address widespread shortages, deal with crumbling infrastructure and tame inflation.
Most seriously food production has collapsed:
Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.
Pork production fared even worse. The country produced barely 3,800 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 149,000 tons in all of 2018. Almost every other sector reported losses and failed production goals.
And yet
…Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced several new restrictions on the island’s private sector (!!!)
Raul Castro is 93. I am betting that his death or something similar will signal a new revolution. Is the US prepared for an open Cuba?