Categorizing Flash Mobbery

Among my alternate personas is a theater buff. That theater buff gets interested in the various performance moments known as "flash mobs," probably through contagion in interest in improv theater. And being an exacting and precise sort of fellow (when I want to be), I wonder at what truly constitutes a "flash mob." Though there are plenty of web commentators/trolls arguing "this isn't a flash mob," but there have been very few attempts to systematically define what constitutes a flash mob.  It seems to me there are four dimensions:

1. How were the performers gathered? Via social media or traditional means? Do you know all the performers before it starts?
2. How choreographed is the action?
3. Did the venue know ahead of time?
4. Did the audience know ahead of time?

I submit that if the event was planned by traditional means, it's not a flash gathering. Further, if you know everyone who shows up ahead of time, you're not a mob. You and your buds, your colleagues, your classmates, your knitting group, your whatever decide to meet at a certain place and do a silly thing, you're not a flash mob.

If your action is choreographed, I'm happy to still let you be a flash mob, but you can't claim to be improv. Boarding a sub in Vader and Leia costumes and acting out interrogation scenes is NOT improv or a flash mob. However, you should get bonus "flash" points for having or needing very little rehearsal. If anyone COULD join in, you're more likely a flash mob. Flash mobs can carol, flash mobs can line dance, flash mobs can reenact dance steps from Flashdance ... but if it's your dance class or your church choir and you've been rehearsing forever, you're probably not a flash mob. Again, there are really two issues here: to be flash you need less rehearsal; to be a mob you shouldn't necessarily know everyone participating ahead of time.

If you're using the venue's sound equipment and made an appointment with them, I don't see a reason why you can't be a courteous flash mob. But you should get bonus "flash" points if they don't know you're coming.

However, if the audience knows ahead of time that you are coming, you are definitely NOT a flash mob.

The Tabernacle Choir this week gets points for using a nontraditional venue choice, but the audience knew they were there, they got permission weeks ahead of time, they knew everyone performing, it was spread by traditional means, and it was highly rehearsed ... it doesn't sound very flashy or mobby to me. When the Opera Company of Philadelphia that got together at Lord and Taylor to sing the Hallelujah Chorus, they probably weren't either because they knew everyone performing ahead of time. However, if they were joined by enough spectators or announced it via the web to attract additional singers, I would be willing to allow it.

Birthday parties can be planned on Facebook, but that doesn't make them flash mobs. Police in a number of areas point out how many disturbances are not flash mobs.

The groups that get together to swing Jedi lightsabers or freeze motionless for 3 minutes probably do count.

Potentially there is a fifth dimension that you need a critical mass of people to be considered a mob, but that number will vary with location and purpose, and I am just generous enough to allow for less-successful flash mobs that just didn't attract enough people to go viral.

LDS in Africa and Asia

An LDS teenager won a national Nigerian chess championship.

Last month, a new stake was formed in the Democratic Republic of Congo out of a district. A district is a collection of very small congregations separated by large distances, while a stake has several larger congregations closer together and possibly some outlying smaller congregations. This is the ninth stake in the DRC.

Elder Holland meeting with members

Elders Holland and Bednar visited thousands of members of the Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints in Hong Kong (~25,000 members), India (~9,200 members), Mongolia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan. Growth in Mongolia has been particularly pronounced, with almost 1/10 citizens of the capital city joining the Church. They hosted Q&A sessions in most areas in additional to giving prepared talks so they could answer and get a better feel for local needs. Among my favorite comments that he made concerned the "pioneer" heritage and situation the members in Asia are creating.

"It's always 1830 or 1840 somewhere in the Church," added Elder Holland, "and in Asia, it's about 1840" in terms of the development of the Church. "We are always beginning somewhere and parts of Asia are beginning beautifully."

Right now, it's about February 1830 in Yola, with no organized church, but very soon there will be (4) members there.

Meanwhile, Elder Nelson created the first stake in Russia in Moscow. That's right, there are nine times as many stakes in DRC as in Russia. This was particularly pleasant for Elder Nelson because his granddaughter is a missionary there. We have friends who have accepted a job in Moscow also, and we are very pleased for them to have a full stake there to welcome and support them. Elders Oaks and Cook also visited Mexico, where there are 1.2 million Church members, to strengthen them.

As Elder Holland said, the reason for sending the apostles to so many countries and members recently is to say one thing:

"I’ve come halfway around the world literally to say basically one thing. … We love you,” Elder Holland said. “You may be a long ways away from us physically or geographically, but you’re not more than a prayer away and a heartbeat away from our affections and our admiration.”

Hiatus and slow down

I appear to have been on hiatus. First it was allergies that turned into a sinus infection that needed antibiotics. Then that turned into (or was compounded by a new infection of) strep that needed different antibiotics. And then our new baby came: Econolass. She is happy and healthy.

Econolad is a very happy and attentive older brother. The Lovely and Gracious is doing very well.

So I don't expect to be doing much blogging for the next week either while I enjoy my new daughter and try to finish getting rid of this terrible cough.

Economics is really really important for Ethics: Kristof edition

Kristof wants to come back in his next life as an economist. One wonders how that would change his reporting. Imagine a Kristof who takes self-selection bias seriously and doesn’t conflate correlation with causation. At any rate, he praises:

[Economics] possesses a rigor that other fields in the social sciences don’t — and often greater relevance as well. That’s why economists are shaping national debates about everything from health care to poverty, while political scientists often seem increasingly theoretical and irrelevant. Economists are successful imperialists of other disciplines because they have better tools.

Now most of the time, economics is accused of ignoring ethics. While I do wish we were more explicit about some of our deeper assumptions, I argued in my upcoming textbook that it's a very unfair characterization. Then there is the other side: ethics without economics, which to a greater or lesser extent Kristof and many others have been practicing:

To engage in passionate activism while ignoring what economics has to say about international trade, wage determination, etc. is, I think, not merely unwise. It’s morally irresponsible. The Foundation for Economic Education’s Sheldon Richman calls it “the intellectual equivalent of drunk driving.” Murray Rothbard makes this point with characteristic verve ... :

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

One of my favorite essays on this point is Paul Krugman’s “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea.” In it, Krugman makes the point that the critics of international trade are not dismissing the law of comparative advantage because they think the world is better described by some of the technical theoretical exceptions to the law of comparative advantage. The problem is that the critics don’t understand comparative advantage to begin with. …

[E]conomists’ convictions on issues like these are not the product of an unreasoned faith in free market magick. They are the product of carefully-reasoned theory and carefully-collected, carefully-analyzed evidence. [emphasis added]

Not only that, but it is likely that studying ethics will have an impact on the ethics you advocate.

Seeing Market Power

One of the things that separates the economist from the political scientist or the sociologist is power. No, I don't mean that we have more power in political discourse than they, however true that probably is. I mean how we talk and think about power.

To an economist, the exercise of market power is a real possibility in today's world of very large firms with largely unprecedented concentration ratios. But our basic assumption is one of free markets. We assume markets are free and fair, and you have to prove to us that market power exists and that it is being used. We have sophisticated tests to identify if market power is being exercised and entire literatures devoted just to various questions about market power.

To a political scientist or a sociologist, this is naive at best and a complete waste of time at worst. In many ways, they represent the scientific study of power in human relationships. Power is everywhere. It is assumed to exist from the get go. You have to somehow prove (and I do not know if they have tests for this) that power does not exist.

This makes conversations between the two camps a bit strained at times.

Most of the time, I am quite contented with the power of market forces as an instrument of regulating firms. Most of the time, you have to prove a power relationship exists.

The one time when I'm willing to crack is at a doctor's office. Since this happened recently, watch as my calm economist demeanor breaks down completely:

The Dark Side: bailouts and path dependence

(via Mankiw) “Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.”

 
Blattman refers us to the dark sideof path dependence: “Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.”

Cardon, commenting on Aid Watch’s citation of his work on development in the US South: “It was the structure of institutions and social capital that had built up around slavery that constrained the South’s ability to make a peaceful and prosperous transition. … Even when we get unambiguous changes from an Evil system (like slavery) to a Good system (like freedom), societies with a new Good system will be constrained by norms and social capital that have accumulated around the Evil system. … Someday, I want to write a paper in which I ask whether cotton was to the antebellum South as oil and diamonds are to some countries today: an exportable commodity that provides high incomes for elites but that masks the underlying pathological institutions."

Big Bag of Interesting Sentences

Marron: Zanran is Google for data.
 

Economist: The alternative-medicine industry plainly excels as a placebo delivery service.
 

Blattman: Why use spray cans when you can simply strategically clean dirt?  [right]
 

McArdle via The .Plan: [Affluent white people in Manhattan] tend not to view themselves as affluent because they believe that living in Manhattan is a natural condition, like psoriasis, rather than a very expensive personal choice.

Yglesias on racism and egalitarianism in colonial America: there are multiple dimensions of inequality and social privilege, and tradeoffs between them do happen at the margin.

Fromson (via The .Plan) tells us that health food was created by cults (I’ve always felt there was something cultish about health food fads): The 1974 edition of the Spiritual Community Guide, "The Yellow Pages of the New Age Movement," listed 2,470 addresses throughout the country. ... 31.2 percent of the total, were health-food stores or restaurants. ... [U]nlike large religions, which can sustain themselves with tithes and donations, smaller groups usually have to generate revenue through actual businesses—and the restaurant industry has low barriers to entry.

Some of my soon-to-be colleagues at AUN evaluated Nigeria’s mobile phone network, finding that service has not improved in the last decade. Among the problems they want the government to address is corruption in activating SIM cards: "The registration and activation of SIM cards for MTN and Airtel took beyond seven days in Yola. This has led to some level of corruption on the part of their agents or employees, who expect some gratification before they would upload the registration request to head office," the report said.

The Economist on India’s new foreign policy efforts: Mr Singh promised $5 billion of loans on easy terms over the next three years for Africans willing to trade with India, plus another $1 billion to pay for education, railways and peacekeeping. It is a steep rise in aid and assistance—last year India gave a mere $25m to Africa

Lit in Review: Food Demand -- Ethiopia and Speculators

K. Tafere, Taffesse, and Tamiru, with N. Tefera and Paulos, (2010) “Food Demand Elasticities in Ethiopia: Estimates Using Household Income Consumption Expenditure (HICE) Survey Data), IFPRI and EDRI, ESSP2 Discsussion Paper 011.

One of the difficulties of working with Ethiopian food data is that there are four staple cereals: wheat, maize, teff, and sorghum. Another difficulty is that this means there are a lot of zeroes in the data: 28 percent consume no sorghum, 22 percent no teff, 16 percent no maize, 9 percent no wheat, and 2 percent no animal products.

They come up with a fairly large group of significant own-price and expenditure elasticities (90% of the 230 possible price effects are significant). Most commodities are own-price unitary elastic, though maize (-.75) and sorghum (-.66) are the furthest from -1 and wheat closest (-.98) of the major cereals. Cross-price elasticities are relatively small, with complementarity between teff-sorghum and maize-sorghum, but substitution between teff and wheat. Own-price elasticities appear to be the same in urban and rural areas, but there are different cross-price effects.

Hailu and Weersink, “Commodity Price Volatility: The Impact of Commodity Index Traders,” CATPRN Trade Policy Brief 2011-04

While both sides agree that there is a correlation between CIT (commodity index trader) activity and commodity futures prices, the direct of causation is the point of contention. The empirical evidence is mixed with very limited support for the view that higher commodity prices draws in investment activity by index funds. … There is more empirical support for the claim that CITs are associated with greater market volatility. Khara in a Brookings report argues it is unpredictable price volatility that is the real problem for producers, consumers and governments, not the level of prices. … Thus, an increase in commodity market volatility may lead to greater costs for managing risk: more costly insurance premiums, higher options premiums, and greater margins for hedging. … The research conducted to-date suggests commodity index traders had little to do in driving prices upward but are one of the reasons for the significant increase in market volatility over the last several years, but are not the sole cause.

Harvard (et al) in Africa

The Oakland Institute is publishing a series of reports showing, among other things, that the "land grab" in Africa is not just about Middle Eastern countries, India, and China. US Universities are speculating that the value of land in Africa is going to go up, so they are buying low and selling high. Land is being bought at 1/2000th the price of land in Iowa and 1/1000th the price of land in Brazil. Note please that this is not a "market" price -- it is negotiated between government and (government, firm, institution, investor), usually with no input from or repayment for the people currently living and working the land. Eminent domain indeed: "a foreign investment group was able to acquire 100,000 hectares of fertile land in Mali for a 50-year term for free."

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

Emergent claims that it's not speculation or land grabbing, but that real investments are being made to make the land more valuable, and more productive to the extent it helps with it being valuable.

In Ethiopia, a process of "villagisation" by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies. [Ethiopia map source]

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues.

Meanwhile the Republic of Congo (not the DRC) is giving 80k ha to 40 of the white farmers ousted from Zimbabwe a few years back:

Aid effectiveness on a bad day

But all three books make the case that the ineffectiveness of much philanthropy is actually the fault of the philanthropist. They applaud the motives for giving, but all make the point that people too often let their philanthropy be guided by their hearts alone. “Deciding what you will do to make change happen is a choice that requires both your head and your heart”, write Messrs Fleishman and Tierney in the best chapter in “Give Smart”, entitled “What Am I Accountable For?” The biggest problem for philanthropists, they argue, may be that “they are essentially accountable to no one but themselves.”

Some of the problems:

1 - There’s the overall lack of evaluations being done, and even when we do them we can’t simply aggregate the results and call it done, as Blattman points out:

We’re selective in which programs we evaluate, and ten[d] towards the decentralized, uncoordinated, and less sensitive programs. I call it the “non-random impact of random impacts”

2 - Then there's the question of who receives the aid. Do we give to "bad governments"? On the one side, giving aid supports a corrupt regime. On the other, removing aid is likely to harm the poorest instead of the targets. Admittedly, there is a lot of disagreement about the model here: aid is hurting when it goes in and when it goes out. One of the ethical underpinnings, though may just be "strongly determined by how much you discount future suffering versus suffering today," writes Aid Thoughts.

Note: in the case being discussed at Aid Thoughts (Malawi and the British) I do not intend to imply that the Malawi government is “bad” on the basis of their insulting an ambassador. A little more care should be given, in my view, to differentiating between “behavior we don’t like” and actual villainy. If someone wants to argue that the government is villainous, then the debate should be about whether aid should be cut for that reason, rather than because a diplomat was expelled. Although, from an economist's perspective, I guess it reveals the true British preferences.

3 - And then Tales from the Hood tells us it may be time for aid -- all international aid -- to leave Haiti. His argument is that Haiti has been constantly interfered with without ever being given the chance to govern itself.

Tucker argues that this may not be the best thing, that the root cause of Haitian poverty is lack of capital, and the root cause of lack of capital is incredibly bad governance. He concludes unusually, however:

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

Where Tucker gets the idea that Haiti only eats the food it produces is a little beyond me. Starvation is high, but so are food imports. The standard story (which Erica Philips and I debate in a forthcoming case study) is that massive US rice imports have harmed local agriculture significantly.

Unnatural Organic Products?

His Argument Will Lose Him Ground 

GROCERY STORE | BEAVERTON, OR, USA |
Customer: “Excuse me.”
Me: “Can I help you?”
Customer: “I don’t understand what this sign says.”
(The customer points to a sign above the organic section. It indicates that all produce needs to be washed thoroughly.)Me: “It means that before you eat any product, you should wash it.”
Customer: “Why?”
Me: “Because there might be dirt or other things on the item.”
Customer: “But these are organic!”
Me: “Organic means they were grown only with natural substances.”
Customer: “Dirt isn’t natural!”

I'm reminded of a story Isaac Asimov told. He was visiting a friend who showed him his garden. The friend picked a potato and tossed it to Asimov. "What do I do with this?" he wondered. "You eat it," came the reply. "But it came out of the dirt!" Now, because he was Asimov and was known as a witty fellow, they all took it as a great joke, but he confesses that he was temporarily befuddled at the thought of eating something that had just spent all that time in the dirt. Let's hear it for hydroponics?

PSAs in Nigeria

While visiting Nigeria last month, I was fascinated by the public awareness signs.

Do not urinate at the airport. Fine: $13. I can think of several European countries that could use a sign like that.

There are a large number of signs regarding HIV. Even at the hotel, they reminded me of the importance of chastity (or holding body, which doesn't quite have the same image for me as I'm sure it does for them).

Drug abuse is a dream killer - again at the airport.

Two more without words about sexual health below the fold were found in several places at the university and the 6-12th grade school. One tells you to get tested for HIV before you get married, the other to get treatment for "yama yama disease" (some form of STD - I'm not sure which and I'm not overly interested in searching long enough to figure out which one) if you have pain while urinating. Oh yes, and they are paid for by our good friends at USAID.

The most amazing people in aid

1. The guy who changed his domestic ways to become a loving, caring husband after having been exposed once at a road-crossing to a billboard that said: "Stop GBV Now! (HRI with support from Country South of Canada)";
2. The Donor representative who, every month, reads every one of the 76 reports they receive from relevant HRI affiliates and therefore has a very clear idea of what each affiliate is doing and where they need most support;
3. The inhabitant of the village in "Africa" whose life has changed to the better once she received a slightly used pair of shoes from a mythical place South of Canada;
4. The government employee who has successfully made the transition from a cynical, underpaid, mis-qualified relative-of-someone-important to a dynamic, modern element of change in the government, after having interacted with a HRI "Technical Advisor" during a capacity building workshop;
5. The guy who returned part of his per-diem after a trip to Nairobi, claiming that the three meals and tea offered during the training were quite sufficient for his subsistence; 

More celebrated individuals at Hand Relief. 

Less sardonically, Aid Watch had a more serious paper praising and shaming various bilateral aid organizations. Water Wellness also celebrates a community where the impossible dream of proper water project maintenance is happening.

Vegetable Markets Need Land

But not much. Here is the Maeklong market in Thailand.



HT: Blattman

Arbitrage in Action

You say smuggler, I say arbitrager (HT:Poverty News Blog):

Social Solidarity Minister Gouda Abdel Khaliq cited smuggling to Libya and Gaza as a reason for [gas] cylinder scarcity in Egypt… . "Smugglers benefit from the difference in the price of the cylinders in Egypt," said Hossam Arafat, chairman of the petroleum section at the Federation of Commerce Chambers. "What makes this possible is that the government subsidizes the cylinders to the tune of 90 percent here."

Arbitrage in … used t-shirts?

Now along comes the notion of Project Repat that wants to exploit hipster demand for the double-irony of used t-shirts from Africa by buying these shirts at developing world markets, shipping them back to the United States, and using the profits to finance charitable activities.

Arbitrage in … investment opportunities

The arrival of large numbers of Chinese over the past few years is not something that Africans are so worried about (compared to the fixation in the western press). A Minister in Angola looked at us incredulously asking why we were so obsessed with the Chinese. He said they were only one amongst a range of new investors, and his country was open for business to all of them. …

A Chinese businessman in Accra told us “I don’t think I will be able to make more money in China than I can do here. The conditions in China are getting quite bad, and will be worse with this world crisis”. Commonly businessmen talked about earning anything up to three times what they could make in China for the same investment.

You say “misuse of scarce development funds,” Moss says “development” (emphasis added):

The project will also turn a disused old hotel site into an active hive of economic activity.  If that’s not development, then what is?  … When President Bill Clinton visited Ghana in 1998 he couldn’t spend even one night in Accra because of a shortage of suitable hotels.  Today, Ghana has several world-class business hotels, but if the country is going to live up to its ambition to become a regional business hub, then it needs places for business elites and tourists to sleep, eat, and meet.  Even if this is somehow distasteful to critics who may imagine that poverty-reduction is only about romantic notions of selfless activists helping peasants, development is really about building a vibrant business sector

While staying at one of these more luxurious estates for a development conference for the first time, I proposed a research agenda to my advisor: measure the importance and attention of development institutions in a country based on the presence or absence of luxury hotels. It seems there is some interest in coming to more of an answer of that question. Now if only I can get a grant to stay at a few more of them so I can do some data collection....

Microinsurance in Kenya

An initiative provides crop insurance to 22,000 Kenyan farmers via cellphone and solar-powered weather stations, making it the largest on the continent. It is financed in part by Syngenta and the IFC. Note, this is mostly a press release disguised as a news article:

Each farmer who buys insurance is linked to the nearest weather station — no one is more than 20 kilometres from a station. If the weather station shows that the rainfall was insufficient early in the growing season, or too much late in the corn season, all the farmers in that area get an automatic payout — farmers do not have to file a claim.

If the rainfall was only slightly off, farmers get a small payment. If the weather was extreme enough to destroy their whole harvest, they get the full amount. No farm visits are necessary. … The shop owner is given a camera phone to record the purchase, which instantly sends a confirmation text message to the buyer. At the end of the growing season, payouts go electronically to the farmer’s cell phone account. It is remarkable that even for small farmers, text messaging and online banking are old friends that provide a comfort level with a new programme. The programme uses the M-Pesa money transfer system. …

The biggest cost is sending the text message welcoming the new client. … [DW - I have to think this is a joke because a little later it says] Forty per cent of the project’s budget goes to pay for trainers who work with farmers, a telephone help line and radio programmes about insurance. Kilimo Salama expects that this expense will drop as the product becomes more familiar. It aims to be commercially viable in three years.

More on the difficulties of providing microinsurance below the fold. Or you can read about ILRI's similar program here or watch a video.

The D word

Easterly zings (or zinged, back when he had a blog): The 2011 World Development Report (WDR) on Conflict, Security, and Development several times refers to using “external forces” and “peacekeepers” to improve stability and reduce conflict. This led him to be curious why the Bank is so phobic of the word “democracy” but not “external forces”:

Thanks for the refresher in your April 8 letter on the restriction that the World Bank “not interfere in the political affairs of any member.”
And thanks for explaining that any descriptive use of the word “democracy” on Arab revolts by President Zoellick would be such an interference in political affairs of a member state.
I was just wondering if you would consider a deployment of outside military troops to be less of an interference than using the descriptive word “democracy”?

Roper on democracy for demagogues (HT: Dictatorchimp)

“Democracy! Allowing people to choose their own doom for over 2 500 years!” Or even better: “Democracy! Recommended by nine out of 10 demagogues as an effective way to legitimate corruption!”

Amazing sentences: Calculus

I'm reading a paper that attempts to identify the best intermediate microeconomics textbook in terms of student outcomes at a Canadian university. Since I just learned I will be teaching intermediate micro next semester, I thought this was an important question. Among the variables they look at are the grades of prerequisite courses: intro micro, intro macro, and intro calculus. If a student took a prerequisite multiple times, they sensibly use the most recent course since that probably best reflects the student's current knowledge. Okay, fine. Then there's this line:

"Some students attempted introductory microeconomics and introductory macroeconomics up to four times and Calculus I seven times."

Four times in intro economics? Four? Clearly, someone never learned about decreasing marginal utility and comparative advantage (and hence needed to retake the course) or else they would have decided their comparative advantage led elsewhere.

The New Food Plate

USDA came out with the "new" food plate. I put new in quotes because that's the advice my nutritionist gave me last year. That is to say, the advice is longer-standing than you might think, in a picture that should hopefully be much more intuitive to a lot of people than anything they have done recently. Wilde gives it an A+.

M. Nestle: "This may not look much like action, but it is a sharp departure from previous USDA icons (which USDA has delightfully put online)." She also praises the organization for saying "eat less" and taking on salt in a political climate strongly against these changes.

Why is dairy moved out to the side? Two reasons. First is that, all of milk's advertising to the contrary, you don't actually have to have milk or milk products in order to get all the nutrients you need. You can get calcium from a fairly wide selection (pasta, rice, bread, broccoli, green beans, several other legumes if you're into that kind of thing, half a dozen nuts - not peanuts or cashews, sadly - sardines or salmon, apricots, oranges) not to mention vitamin pills, and it's not exactly like we're currently hurting for places to put a little cheese. Second is that the plate gets a bit messy otherwise. They almost came out with a plate with dairy on it in 1992 but the guidance is less clear than this.


That doesn't mean it doesn't have it's lighter side... (comics below the fold)

Big Bag of Africa: Malawi politics, Rwandan agriculture, S. Sudan constitution

Malawi’s politics used to be highly geographic, with each third of the country focusing on one primary party. Between 2005 and 2009, that picture changed dramatically:

The DPP party gained an enormous following, enough that some people have started worrying about single-party democracy. Matt at Aid Thoughts postulates the primary reason for the great upswelling of unity is the national fertilizer subsidy. During the election, parties differentiated themselves mostly be claims of how they would apportion subsidy money. Since DPP had already shown how it (relatively) evenly distribute the money, they were a known entity. Now, is this vote buying, or demand-responsive democracy, or political entrepreneurship, or rampant socialism, or something else altogether?

One of my most-consistently-visited posts dealt with Rwandan agricultural growth prospects being potentially oversold. In the meantime, growth has been good and better than the regional average for five years. Hansl believes the way forward is to invest in irrigation, integrated fertilizer management, diversification of ag products, and most controversially get out of smallholder agriculture:

The relatively high level of land productivity reflects the favorable agro-climatic potential resulting in two harvest seasons, as well as the intensive nature of the predominant agricultural production systems. In contrast, labor productivity remains low compared to these countries, albeit increasing over the last decade. This is related to the fact that Rwanda has the highest proportion of rural population, most of them engaged in labor intensive agriculture. It appears that most opportunities for future productivity gains lie in the area of making agricultural production less labor intensive, in other words less subsistence based.

I commented earlier that the Rwandan hills will make mechanization somewhat difficult.

Comments on South Sudan’s temporary constitution. Primary concerns: it doesn’t say just how temporary, nor how the new process will be more transparent and participatory, nor if there will be term limits which the vice president had spoken in favor of. (HT: Roving Bandit)

Vaguely on the subject of African geopolitics, below the fold is a map of energy connections between African states:

More on the difficulty making long-term predictions

From the magazine Technical World in 1904, heralding the discovery of radioactivity and the energy in uranium and radium:

The experiments of the last eight years have marked a most notable advance in science, in that they have proven the existence of this immense store of sub-atomic energy. It seems highly improbable, however, that this energy can ever be utilized on the earth to serve man’s economic needs.
…Radium may possibly prove to be of some practical value in the cure of disease, although it is too early yet to assert even this with assurance.

 HT: Wondermark

Isn't Graphing Lovely?

Coming soon to an intro econ course near me: getting students excited about the awesome powers of graphing. (HT: I love charts)

Lit in Review: Child health

An excellent natural experiment: the electricity was cut from Zanzibar for 4 weeks in May, 2008. Families who had just gotten pregnant and wouldn’t have known about it yet wouldn’t have done anything to change their behavior, but families who did know they had a pregnancy would adapt behavior to safeguard the mother’s and child’s health. As a result, women who knew they were pregnant delivered babies within the usual distribution for Zanzibar, while women who had not known were 11% more likely to give birth to children with low birthweight, according to a new paper by Burlando. Food prices hadn’t changed. Also interesting is that there was a increase in babies born 9 months after the blackout (also about 11%). Friedman particularly highlights the long-lasting effects of temporary shocks.

Vasilakis also has a new working paper on poverty and child malnutrition, using an overlapping generations framework to generate malnutrition-induced multiple equilibria and poverty traps. He models several different World Food Program policies. In his model, a school feeding program “locks” poor countries into a poverty trap by increasing fertility and lowering human capital, but the country could escape. A school feeding program increases efficiency and human capital accumulation in middle-income countries. WFP food price subsidies or investments in local agriculture and food industry allow poor families to increase human capital in their children and increase incomes, helping the country out of poverty. Clearly the body is buried in the adopted and adapted Becker model of fertility decisions (parents face a quantity/quality tradeoff). Since my read of the literature has made me skeptical of the fertility model, I end up skeptical of these results, but the rest of the set up (2 period OLG with poverty traps) is quite interesting.

Glewwe, Park and Zhao (HT:MR) have a work in so much progress there are still notes from the authors to each other in the pdf: 

after one year, making eyeglasses available increased average test scores by 0.09 to 0.14 standard deviations (of the distribution of the test scores). For those students who accepted the glasses, average test scores increased by 0.12 to 0.22 standard deviations….

Cowen asked who refused the glasses and why. About 30% of the children who were eligible were not outfitted. “The stated reasons for not accepting them are not very informative, the two most common reasons being 'child refused' and 'parents refused.'” Running some simple regressions, acceptance is correlated with eyesight (worse eyesight means more likely to accept), already having eyeglasses (more likely to accept a new pair), “children of schoolteachers 22.4 percentage points less likely to accept eyeglasses, and children of party cadres 35.2 percentage points less likely to accept them”, and higher income towns were more likely to accept.

Big Bag of Inequality: Global, Environmental, and Ideological

Economix (HT: MR) brings us this fascinating graph. The people in each country are ordered left to right by income and from bottom to top based on their position in the global income distribution. We see that Brazil has enormous inequality: the poorest are as poor as anyone in the world and the richest are as rich as any American. In the US, however “the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants.” Meanwhile even the richest people in India are only about as well off as the poorest in the US.

In my food policy textbook, which Per and I just finished proofreading for the last time, we discuss how climate change is expected to be beneficial for colder climate areas and harmful for areas that are already warm. This exacerbates global inequality. A recent working paper by Richard Tol of ESRI argues that this was only the case since 1980. Prior to 1980, climate change had a positive net-impact in most countries.

Then there’s ideological inequality in the classroom: 

The distribution of academic talent was the same across “Republican” and “Democratic” classrooms, judging from SAT scores. But the Republicans gave grades of C-minus or worse 6.2% of the time, compared with 4% for Democrats. And Republicans awarded the gold star of A-plus 8% of the time, compared with only 3.5% for Democrats.”

Some more on ideology and economic knowledge (HT: Yglesias) and the kinds of questions asked by a Libertarian economics teacher of his intro course.

The proof is in the publisher

The final proofs of the food policy textbook are off to the publisher. Huzzah!

OXFAM Reactions

The headline from Oxfam's GROW initiative, started yesterday, is their prediction that food prices will double by 2030. I imagine someone might have predicted much the same about the year 2000 in 1975 at the tail end of the last major food price crisis. I hope they are equally as wrong. Even if they are not equally wrong, there is little doubt that they are trying to estimate something with an enormous standard error looking at it from this far back, says Bellemare.

Matt at Aid Thoughts:

Of course, while Oxfam may believe this prediction now, they are trying to change behaviour so it doesn’t come true – this means that the claims will be incredibly difficult to (dis)prove. If food prices happen to double in 20 years, Oxfam will say “Look! We told you so.” If they don’t, they will say “Look at the disaster we averted!” Either way, the winning narrative will be constructed ex-post.

Evans thinks that the kind of holistic, systems-approach Oxfam is taking is the right way to go, as indeed our textbook says policy analysts need to think:

This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.

The report is upfront about some of the political economy challenges their proposed changes will face, but not enough is said about how to change the incentives of the "vested interests" (you may also know them as "stakeholder groups," depending on your ideology), says Ranil, who is also skeptical about putting quite so much faith in smallholder-led growth. Ranil also thinks they aren't being all that holistic, focusing too much on agriculture and not enough on growth in the rest of the economy.

Former Brazilian President da Silva puts his faith in the benevolence of governments: "If the political will is there no one will be denied their fundamental human right to be free from hunger."

Big Bag of Food Policies: Farm Bill, Seeds, and Antibiotics

Elliott calls on budget cutters to not only cut the direct farm payments from the next Farm Bill – intended as a bridge away from trade-distorting policies that never got off the ground – but also from the trade-distorting subsidies that still exist. And shocking as it is for me to agree with my former Sentaor Feinstein, do so I must:

Oh, and Congress could save another $3 billion this year and $6 billion in future years by voting to eliminate the subsidy for ethanol as proposed by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Tom Coburn (R-OK). Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) rightly calls it “bad economic policy, bad energy policy and bad environmental policy.”

FAO and the African Union have teamed up to create a Forum for Africa Seed Testing to speed up seed policy harmonization and promote seed markets. Guei, an FAO senior officer, indicates that “Inadequate supply of quality seeds for both food and cash crops is one of the biggest bottlenecks to food production on the continent..."

Loglisci (HT: Wilde) reminds us that Denmark has been using antibiotics in livestock only when needed by illness – rather than keeping all animals constantly under a mild dose of antibiotics as we do in the States – for a number of years. As a result, they use a lot fewer antibiotics and they have had less trouble than we have from the growth of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. This hasn’t prevented increasing use of antibiotics as hog population has grown (see chart), but it is far lower today than it was at peak and lower still than it would have been without the law.

Confirmation Bias: Health Care Tort Reform

Kessler, in the current Journal of Economic Perspectives, confirms my biases: decreasing the pressure of malpractice suits reduces the cost of healthcare "with essentially no adverse consequences for health outcomes." How much? About 6% without any adverse effects in elderly care.

Well, that didn't take long: McD's

San Fransisco passed a ban on selling children toys with happy meals unless they met certain dietary guidelines. It did not take McDonald's long to demonstrate how easy it is to get around such legislation:

 

McDonald's started a program of giving music away with their Big Mac Extra Value meals back in 2004. It is apparently coming to the rescue of the Happy Meal too. After all, the ban is about toys and advertising to children, which I don't think many people would argue is the target demographic for Cascada music. Raffi she is not.