Results for “food” 2044 found
Elephants engage in Mengerian indirect exchange
At the main Pondicherry temple, an elephant will bless you — by tapping its trunk on your head — if you hand it some money. Of course this is a temple elephant and it is also a Mengerian elephant. The elephant has no use for money but understands that it is a general medium of exchange. The elephant hands the money over to the temple authority and is later rewarded with food.
The elephant is not merely trading, but it is engaged in indirect exchange and thus in monetary economics.
There is in fact a sign up forbidding such Mengerian transactions, but the elephant seems not to notice it.
And yet this is not the end of the story. In many parts of Tamil Nadu, temple elephants have attained so much prosperity through Mengerian indirect exchange, and been able to consume so much leisure, that now elephant obesity is a more serious problem than elephant malnutrition.
Assorted links
From the comments, on UID
This is concerning the forthcoming Indian attempt to register individuals through unique eye scans and implement more cash transfers:
The domestic debate in India has largely been around :
1) This is just a sop before elections, a kind of brazen legitimised bribery. 2) The welfare architecture will not simply be migrated, it will be expanded. 3) Is conditionality critical to success? There remains no clear method to establish conditionality. 4) Identification of deserving families remains the problem. Until that is solved, nothing changes. 5) This is basically a turf war between ministeries and the previous operational/financial failures of the UID program are being hidden through the hasty implementation being planned now. 6) Getting in-kind subsidised goods through regular intervals during a month is superior cash flow management for a poor family than a lump-sum cash transfer at the end of the month
All the criticisms could be partially true. But the operational costs of the welfare delivery infrastructure will surely go down. Food and fertilizer have not yet been shifted – too politically sensitive – but amazingly, fuel has been. The biggest no-distortion gain is likely to come from there – the consumption of kerosene will most likely take a massive beating. It reduced by about 90% in a pilot.
The other corollary benefit – of using an Aadhar card as a means of establishing identity and for KYC norms in banks – is also absolutely tremendous.
It is indeed a top 5 most important economic policy issue in the world. But India is generally a low-trust society and in particular this gov’t is distrusted in most policy circles. Hence the rabid skepticism all around. I tend to be a lot more optimistic than that.
The great public choice question is – will they ever manage to bring food under this? For one, the PDS system was showing signs of an organic improvement. Second, the popular imagination has always conceived of the ‘man of the house’ frittering away hard earned money on country liquor if the woman of the house is not given grains directly. Third, giving away PDS distributorships has been an effective method of giving favours to those who the dirty work for national politicans at local levels – it is perhaps the longest running and biggest scam in India.
If they actually conclude that the greater ease for a poor family will convert into more votes than the losses they might take on the previous three fronts, it would be absolutely amazing. My sense is, like most great policy decisions, this will go through simply because it’s an idea whose ‘time has come’, and we will invent post-facto justifications of how it was politically rational to go through with this.
That is from Ritwik, who started off his comment with this sentence:
Privacy is actually a non-issue for most Indians.
The most important economic policy in the world is only weeks away
At the very least this is in the top five most important economic policies and yes it is from India:
D-day is 18 days away. On January 1, the Congress-led UPA government will start migrating the delivery of welfare services to a new architecture: straight into an individual’s bank account, verified by a unique identification (UID) number called Aadhaar.
It’s a soft launch. The first of the three stages will unravel in 43 districts where a large percentage of people have bank accounts and Aadhaars. Also, in the programmes earmarked for stage I, worth about Rs 20,000 crore, transfers to bank accounts is already happening; what will change is that they will now be linked to the Aadhaar number to reduce, if not eliminate, duplication.
The complexity of the exercise will increase manifold as more of India is covered in the other two stages, in April 2013 and April 2014. This will also increase as more programmes are added, especially food, oil, fertiliser and employment. In full flow, the money flowing through those pipes could go up to Rs 300,000 crore. So, is the government ready?
This will likely prove part of a much larger move to a reliance on cash transfers and conditional cash transfers. Eyescans will be used to create unique identification numbers for individuals and in theory 800 million people will be enrolled in this program over the next fifteen months. (Don’t count on that pace.) The government is easing the procedural barriers to creating bank accounts. I am mostly hopeful although I do worry about privacy issues, this kind of identification becoming a more generally used network, and government misuse of the information.
You can read much more at the link. The virtuous Tim Harford covered some of it here, but most of you have been pretty silent.
Chennai bleg
Your recommendations are very much welcome, including of course food. It will be Yana (some shopping) and I, no Alex.
Mumbai vulture sentences
The cost of building the aviaries and maintaining the vultures is estimated at $5 million spread over 15 years, much less expensive than it would have been without the ready supply of food.
“Most vulture aviaries have to spend huge sums to buy meat, but for us that’s free because the vultures will be feeding on human bodies — on us,” Mr. Mehta said.
Here is more, interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Apoorv Trivedi.
Addendum: Here is further commentary on this story.
Israel notes
The food is quite good, as is the gelato. Don’t forget the Libyan, Ethiopian, and Yemeni offerings.
Poverty is more evident than I had expected, and one wonders whether extreme Israeli income inequality is a harbinger of a broader global future. A simple, small bottle of mouthwash costs about $10. It is surprising, for this American, to see beggars wearing yarmulkes.
How much of the high cost of living here is from inefficient retail and consolidation? How much from “the Island effect”? Since the locals feel the high costs too, we cannot rely on the productivity of the tradeables sector as an explanation. As for the rent, when it comes to construction permits, Israel ranks #137 (!, pdf) on the World Bank’s Doing Business Index. Yet the quality of the construction is often somewhat ramshackle, although I expect the Wall and the Iron Dome to last for some while.
Cost of living aside, I imagine living in Tel Aviv as quite pleasant, and I prefer it to most of the other Mediterranean cities I have visited. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem displays its collection wonderfully.
This place is now a preliminary R&D laboratory for good U.S. TV shows. Hani Furstenberg is Israeli, it turns out, and Tel Aviv has been named the world’s #2 city for high-tech start-ups.
I am basing this following comment on a limited sample, but so far I have found this country to have a disproportionately large share of taxi drivers who are Jewish, at least compared to anywhere else I have visited.
The Segway seems to have some commercial viability in Israel.
Sometimes the security question consists simply of “Do you have a weapon?” I do not.
Against my expectation, Jerusalem is a more populous city than Tel Aviv.
Natasha cannot pass for an American here.
India, India, India!
Today at MRUniversity we release the first of our country sections, India. In nearly 50 videos we cover key aspects of India’s history, economics, politics and culture from the viewpoint of development economics. Among the topics are India’s Early Growth History, Gandhi and the Salt March, the Green Revolution, Food Crises and the Media, the Rise of Private Education in India, and the Economics of Bollywood.
Tyler and I will both be in Delhi on Thursday December the 20th to talk to students of MRUniversity and others about economics, development and the future of online education. Information on times and places to follow.
By the way, for those of you taking the Development Economics course the India material is bonus to be sampled at will – this won’t be on the exam!
MRU also introduces new features this week including user contributions of links, videos and other materials directly from the video pages, ordering of questions by votes or recency and easier ways to see and access related materials and user contributions.
Tripolitanian cuisine in Tel Aviv
Libya is an artificial country, so they don’t call it Libyan food, even though the restaurant is run by “Libyan” Jews.
Odelia, Ben Yehuda 89, Tel Aviv. The “Hrime” is pieces of snapper in an excellent red pepper sauce, very spicy and tasty. Eggplant Mafrom, with root vegetables, is recommended too. It’s also an excellent neighborhood for walking.
There are a number of Tripolitanian places in Tel Aviv.
Markets in everything
Craft & Commerce, a gastropub located in San Diego, has chosen the more forward approach and taken to playing audio clips of their
bestworst Yelp reviews while patrons do their business in the bathroom.
Here is more, and I thank Michael Rosenwald for the pointer.
What I’ve been reading
1. Rwanda, Inc., by Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond. The positive story on that country, though I don’t buy it, given that the broader region still is not close to peace. Governance problems will do them in.
2. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. It is stunningly good, not just “stunningly good for a 90-year-old.”
3. Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. The first 61% of this book, as measured by Kindle, is fascinating and superbly original. The rest is a well-done retread of other intelligent popular food books. That is for me a high ratio of excellent to good.
4. Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel. Everyone else loved it, though for me it was too impressionistic. Call it my fault.
5. Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography. An excellent book, though I find it hard to care. Easier than reading Derrida, and the author doesn’t make the mistake of trying to tell you what Derrida is all about.
I have not yet seen a copy of Erik Angner, A Course in Behavioral Economics, but perhaps it is of interest.
Assorted links
1. Eagleton reviews the new Derrida biography.
2. The economics of France in the 1920s.
3. Photos of Chinese architecture (recommended), and a new study of overinvestment in China, and Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese food.
4. Peter Leeson on the economics of human sacrifice, a rational choice approach.
The North Korean productivity miracle
…brewing remains just about the only useful activity at which North Korea beats the South. The North’s Taedonggang Beer, made with equipment imported from Britain, tastes surprisingly good.
That is from The Economist, I cannot confirm this judgment. Furthermore there is no North Korean great stagnation:
Talking to CNN, a South Korea government official showed the apparently innocent objects that the killer was planning to use to kill Park Sang-hak on the streets of Seoul. Two of them were pens, which apparently are standard issue among North Korean secret agents. The first kills on contact, injecting quickly a poison that paralyzes the victim and kills it within seconds. The second one fires one single bullet, a tiny projectile which is also filled with a killing venom.
But those two were well known by the South Korean’s intelligence agency. The third weapon, however, is completely new to them: a flashlight that has three holes. Each hole is actually gun barrel, which gets activated with the push of a button. One click and boom, you are dead.
The article, with photos, is here. And North Korea may soon be launching long-range missiles.
For the pointer on the first item I thank Nick Slepko.
*The Dawn of Innovation*
That is the new book by Charles Morris and the subtitle is The First American Industrial Revolution. Excerpt:
The overwhelming proportion of American mechanization efforts went into basic processing industries, not precision manufacturing. Food and lumber processors were 60 percent of all power-using manufacturing industries in 1869. Add textiles, paper, and primary metal industries like smelting, and the number rises to 90 percent. Industries that would plausibly lend themselves to armory practice methods — fabricated metal products, furniture, machinery, and instruments — accounted for only 7.5 percent of 1869 manufacturing power demand.
…Mid-Century America was still a predominantly agricultural country. On the eve of the Civil War, only 16 percent of the workforce was in manufacturing. They worked in grain milling, meatpacking, lard refining, turning logs into planks and beams, iron smelting and forging, and making steam engines and steamboats, vats and piping, locomotives, reapers and mowers, carriages, stoves, cotton and woolen cloth, shoes, saddles and harnesses, and workaday tools. These were the industries in which America’s comparative advantage loomed largest and were the ones that dominated American output. It was the drive to mass scale in those industries, by a wide variety of strategies and methods, that was the real American system, or perhaps the American ideology, of manufacturing.
Recommended.
Assorted links
1. Interview with Daniel Tammet.
2. Blueberry Cheesecake Kit Kat Oyatsu Break! The full blog, one Canadian man studying Japanese snack food, is here.
3. How not to give a gift to the President of the United States, Homeland edition.
4. Danish molecular gastronomy set to revolutionize Bolivia? And The Day of the Skulls in Bolivia (good photos).