Results for “food” 2044 found
Not From the Onion, No Really, *Not* From the Onion
CBS News uncovers a frightening new trend, unregulated dinner parties:
As you sit down to dinner, this story illustrates eating out like you have never experienced before. We are talking about super-secret, illegal dining experiences hosted in homes.
CBS 2 investigative reporter Tamara Leitner went undercover to see firsthand how this underground world works.
It may look like a dinner party, but it’s really an underground supper club.
The diners are a mix of New Yorkers and tourists. CBS 2’s undercover cameras captured one experience — eight people who didn’t know each other eating a meal in a stranger’s home.
Horrifying. CBS, however, missed an even bigger story. It’s one thing when adults subject themselves to danger but surely even libertarians with their heads stuck in the 19th century must recognize that it is something else again when the least powerful among us are subject to these same dangers without their consent. Intrepid economist Art Carden has the story of abuse and shame that has remained hidden for too long:
…children–children, mind you–are being fed food that’s prepared in unregulated, uninspected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything. And a computer fit for the Amish.
2. “Our goal is to make Bitcoin truly grandma-friendly.”
3. Good post on job ladders from Dube’s new blog.
4. Ant trade and symbiosis. And economics, Adam Smith, and psychoanalysis.
5. Henry on the tech intellectuals (pdf), or the web link here.
A few notes on Singaporean (and other) health care systems
This is oversimplifying of course, but you can think of the Singaporean system as “2/3 private money, 4/5 public provision,” with private hospitals on the side.
You can think of the UK system as “public money, public provision.” Again with some private supply on the side.
The US system is “lots of public money, lots of private money, mostly private provision.”
Many other systems are “public money, private provision.” In all cases there are various complexities piled on top.
Singapore now is making some changes, outlined in brief here. For the most part, Singapore is adding on some public money, but in targeted fashion (one of the changes is for people over 90 years old, another is for people over 60).
Here’s from The Straits Times (gated, I write from the paper copy) from Saturday:
The first [priority] is to keep government subsidies targeted at those who most need them, rather than commit to benefits for all. Universal benefits are “wasteful and inequitable”, and hard to take away once given, he [the Finance Minister] said.
That’s exactly the liberaltarian line and sometimes the conservative line as well. It is a principle I strongly agree with.
I am grateful to have had a lengthy dinner with several of the civil servants who run the Singaporean health care system (I don’t need to tell you about the food). I had the liberty to “ask away” for several hours and I learned a lot.
Yes, the system really is a marvel, and no it is not laissez-faire. The mix of “private money, public provision” has some marvelous properties for economizing on costs, not the least of which is that private hospitals and doctors and medical device salesmen do not become too strong a lobby. And the level of conscientiousness in Singapore is high enough that the public hospitals work fine, though they don’t in general have the luxuries of the private hospitals. Furthermore those public hospitals have to compete against each other for patient loyalty and thus revenue, and so the reliance on private money helps discipline public hospitals.
Whether those public hospitals would work fine everywhere in the world is a debatable proposition. It’s easier to monitor quality in a small, Confucian city-state with high levels of expected discipline. (Oddly, Krugman, who thinks the VA model in the U.S. could be generalized to a national scale, should be especially sympathetic toward a Singapore-like system. An alternative is that the public hospitals are run at city, county, and state levels.)
In any case let’s start by admitting, and keeping on the table, the notion that the current version of the Singapore system is indeed a poster child of some sort. And it is not being modified because somehow it has started spewing out unacceptable health care outcomes. It is being modified because, for better or worse, Singaporean politics is changing.
Now enter Aaron Carroll, who tries to argue Singapore is moving in an ACA-like direction. His post has been cited numerous times, but it is not insightful nor does it show much curiosity about the new changes in Singapore. It is mostly a polemic against Republicans. In any case the new Singaporean emphasis on taking care of the elderly isn’t well understood by a comparison with ACA.
For an additional and important point, here is a good comment by Chris Conover on just how limited Singaporean coverage can be. This ain’t your grandfather’s ACA, though with some luck it may be your grandson’s. Even if the Singapore model is not fully generalizable to larger, more chaotic countries, it shows that government health care coverage and finance, no matter what exact form they take, should and indeed can be quite limited and you still can end up with excellent outcomes, including better cost control.
I also should add that quite a few intelligent, non-ideological Singaporean economists and civil servants believe the new changes to be bad ones, driven primarily by the demands of citizens for goodies rather than by the quest for the best technocratic policy. The alternative view is that Singapore is now a wealthy place and it can afford to spend extra on these health care services and indeed should do so to limit inequality and also for reasons of political popularity and stability.
The Singaporean health care system is not done changing.
An update on labor market polarization
Here is Mark Thoma quoting Josh Lehner:
What we see here is strong job growth at both the top and bottom ends of the wage spectrum. Yes, food preparation and personal care account for a disproportionately large share of jobs gained in recent years, but so too have business and financial services, healthcare practitioners, computer and mathematical occupations and management. Where we have seen slower growth is in the middle. The light blue bars, which I term lower middle-wage jobs account for about 40% of all occupations in 2012 yet account for just 26% of the growth. The dark blue bars, which I term upper middle-wage jobs, account for another 19% of all occupations and 0% of the growth. This, by definition, is job polarization.
There are useful pictures at the link.
Jakarta notes
The National Museum is a scatter shot but revelatory assemblage of Javanese gold, gamelan sets, jeweled swords, Papuan wooden sculpture, puppets, Sumatran textiles, and much, much more. It could be the world’s best museum you’ve never heard of. The museums here have yet to figure out price discrimination, namely that they can charge tourists more than fifty cents for admission.
There is an excellent modernist mosque (more photos here). The shopping malls are surprisingly attractive and advanced, images here. There is one under construction called “St. Moritz,” without irony or need of irony.
No plan can be executed in a timely manner without running into the detour of street food, unless of course you are stuck in one of the shopping malls. In those malls there are extensive food courts but Japanese food is more popular than Indonesian dishes.
Taxi drivers don’t seem to know how to get anywhere. It is possible that Indonesians drive on the left because the Dutch once did.
A fork and spoon is more useful than a fork and knife for (almost) anything worth eating.
Although Jakarta is hardly a backwater, on plenty of streets outside the center I found people staring at me and once they even asked if they could take my photo. Few people speak English.
Overall this is an underrated tourist destination. It is the world’s most populous Muslim country, a Muslim democracy, and Southeast Asia’s largest city. There are many reasons to go, and few reasons not to go, distance aside.
How to eat well in Jakarta
There are three main tiers for eating: the stalls, the food courts and restaurants in the fancy malls, and the fancy restaurants and buffets in the fancy hotels.
Oddly, standard stand-alone “restaurants” play less of a role here than in any other major city I know. (Stand-alone stores are also less important, could it be that the hot weather and traffic encourages a clumping of retail visits into large malls?) And the very small restaurants can be good, but overall I think they are dominated by the stalls.
When it comes to the stalls, you will stumble upon a bunch and then you can simply choose what looks good. Stalls in the better parts of town appear more salubrious and indeed probably are.
The food courts are good, and clean, but too homogenized for my taste. Plastic trays reign.
The fancy buffets I would never go to if I lived here, but they are a good way to sample many dishes during the course of a meal. I recommend them for tourists and newcomers. The key to eating well from them is to choose those dishes which require outside aid for their assembly.
The key question is then the optimal ratio of stalls to fancy buffets, and that depends on how many days you have in town. The fancy buffets are also better for some of the fancier dishes, for instance as might involve lamb or crabs, or for dishes from other regions of the country.
And that is how you eat well in Jakarta. Knowledge of specific restaurants is not the key here.
Assorted links
1. MIE: bunny cafes. And the complete guide to getting into an economics Ph.d. program.
2. The hard life of celebrity elephants.
3. To what extent do macro conditions predict health care spending?
4. The psychology of accepting GMO foods.:”…the experimenters discovered that if a product was perceived as more necessary—butter, for instance, as opposed to fish fingers—people were more willing to accept genetically modified alternatives.”
5. Efficiency wages for military contractors are gone, by Charles Stross.
Assorted links
*Ninety Percent of Everything*
The author is Rose George and the subtitle is Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. Here is one excerpt:
The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European..
And here is one other part:
EU-NAVFOR releases 80 percent of detained pirates because it can’t find willing courts.
Here is the book’s home page.
How much does bad Chinese data on real estate prices matter?
The excellent Christopher Balding has the scoop:
Baseline Chinese economic data is unreliable. Taking published National Bureau of Statistics China data on the components of consumer price inflation, I attempt to reconcile the official data to third party data. Three problems are apparent in official NBSC data on inflation. First, the base data on housing price inflation is manipulated. According to the NBSC, urban private housing occupants enjoyed a total price increase of only 6% between 2000 and 2011. Second, while renters faced cumulative price increases in excess of 50% during the same period, the NBSC classifies most Chinese households has private housing occupants making them subject to the significantly lower inflation rate. Third, despite beginning in the year 2000 with nearly two-thirds of Chinese households in rural areas, the NSBC applies a straight 80/20 urban/rural private housing weighting throughout our time sample. This further skews the accuracy of the final data. To correct for these manipulative practices, I use third party and related NBSC data to better estimate the change in consumer prices in China between 2000 and 2011. I find that using conservative assumptions about price increases the annual CPI in China by approximately 1%. This reduces real Chinese GDP by 8-12% or more than $1 trillion in PPP terms.
If you would like to hear what is wrong encapsulated in a nutshell, try this:
According to [official] NBSC data, the food component of the CPI in China as responsible for 99% of inflation between 2003 and 2011. Thinking of this another way, this implies that the NBSC is claiming that the only prices to rise in china between 2003 and 2011 were food prices.
The Animals are Also Getting Fat
In a remarkable paper Allison et al. (2011) gather data on the weight at mid-life from 12 animal populations covering 8 different species all living in human environments. Dividing the sample into male and female they find that in all 24 cases animal weight has increased over the past several decades.
Cats and dogs, for example, both increased in weight. Female cats increased in body weight at a rate of 13.6% per decade and males at 5.7% per decade. Female dogs increased in body weight at a rate of 3% per decade and males at a rate of 2.2% per decade.
One ready, although not necessarily correct explanation, is that fat people feed their cats and dogs more and exercise them less. Thus, the authors also looked at animals not directly under human control such as rats.
…For the 1948–2006 time period, male rats trapped in urban
Baltimore experienced a 5.7 per cent increase in body
weight per decade from 1948 to 2006 and a nearly
20 per cent increase in the odds of obesity. Similarly,
female rats trapped in urban Baltimore experienced a
7.22 per cent per decade increase in body weight, along
with a 26 per cent increase in the odds of obesity.
that too has a ready, although not necessarily correct, explanation:
… just as human real wealth and food
consumption have increased in the United States, rats
which presumably largely feed on our refuse, may also
be essentially richer.
To counter both of these objections the authors do something very clever, they gather data on the weight of control mice used in many different experiments over decades.
Among mice in control groups in the National Toxicology
Programme (NTP), there was a 11.8 per cent
increase in body weight per decade from 1982 to 2003
in females coupled with a nearly twofold increase in the
odds of obesity. In males there was a 10.5 per cent
increase per decade.
Control mice are typically allowed to feed at will from a controlled diet that has not varied much over the decades, making obvious explanations less plausible. Could mice have gained weight due to better care? Possibly although that is speculative.
More generally, there are specific explanations for the weight gain in each of the animal populations, just as there are for humans. Each explanation looks plausible taken on its own but is it plausible that each population is gaining weight for independent reasons? Could there instead be a unifying explanation for the weight gain in all populations? No one knows what that explanation is: toxins? viruses? epigenetic factors? I am not ready to jump on any of these bandwagons and in some cases the author’s samples are small so I am not yet fully convinced of the underlying facts, nevertheless this is intriguing and important research.
Hat tip: David Berreby writing in Aeon about The Obesity Era.
Assorted links
2. How good would LeBron James be at football? And a fun discussion of Jeff Bezos. Here is why WaPo is not a vanity project for Bezos. And Raghu Rajan has just been appointed RBI Governor.
3. The food culture that is Indiana.
4. Timur Kuran on political Islam, Turkey, and Egypt.
Why don’t they eat more fish in the Caribbean?
David Lomita, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
I have often wondered why, given that they are a bunch of small islands, that so many of the more famous dishes of Caribbean countries are meat and not fish. The woman of this house is Jamaican and she is much more proud of jerk than of escabeche fish. Puerto Rico has its lechon, Cuban food has ropa de viejo and so on.
I don’t have any data here (though try the incomplete Table 7 in this pdf), but independently I have wondered about a similar question. I see a few possible factors:
1. Often fish are available, and excellent, immediately right near the ocean. Transport and adequate refrigeration are not to be taken for granted. In any case, those dishes won’t always become iconic national recipes. Note also that a lot of the fish consumed will be boiled, spiced, and salted, presumably for health and storage reasons.
2. Food is an energy source, and meat is often superior to fish in this regard, especially for diets which may otherwise lack calories. For the same reason such meals also can be more carbohydrate-heavy than the typical daily diet.
3. Cows, chickens, and pigs are media for savings. Fish are not. Why not invest in some insurance while you are planning your food supply? Keep in mind that local banking systems often do not serve the poor very well. Furthermore it may be easier to own a chicken than to catch a fish. Fishing is low-productivity in many parts of the Caribbean, due to poor knowledge and implementation of aquaculture.
4. Which countries are we talking about? In the wealthier Trinidad and Jamaica, retail fish shops are common (that link is useful more generally) In Barbados, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands, culinary infrastructure is quite good and there is plenty of wealth. In Haiti and Cuba, the two most populous nations in the Caribbean, economic conditions are dire.
5. Never overlook the heavy hand of government, plus a lack of resource management expertise: “Most of the governments of the islands aim at self-sufficiency in fish production. Some, such as Antigua, try to prohibit exports; others, such as Jamaica and Trinidad, limit imports. All of them are giving more attention to post-harvest practices both at sea and on shore, processing and storage, and to improved marketing and distribution. Many are now more interested in assessment of their resources, and collecting statistics to determine the best management practices to sustain the stocks.”
By the way, here is a very good recent piece on the rising cost of food imports in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica.
Assorted links
1. There is no great stagnation, kitchen larva edition.
3. Pictures of 200 calories, and the most expensive kitchen appliances.
4. What happens when an employee’s last name is Null?
5. One professor’s story, more here (pdf).
Assorted links
1. John Cochrane on the case for gold.
2. An update on European economies, including some pieces of good news.
4. The experiment with a tipless restaurant, part II here. Here is one good passage: “The other reason we didn’t accept tips was that removing any option for tipping was the only way to remove those two parasitic businesses — the side business between the server and guest, and the side business between the server and cooks — from our own company. By not allowing these side businesses to exist, we created an environment where all of us were engaged in only one mission, our stated goal of creating remarkable experiences for our guests, around local food and drink. Being in only one business made us like pretty much every other company in America, except that it also made us unlike any other restaurant in America.”
5. “Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages.”
6. Hermit shell crabs and city skylines, from Japan.