Lit in Review: Child Undernutrition and Labor

Harttgen, Klasen, and Vollmer, "Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in Africa," GlobalFood Discussion Paper.

They add to the short but slowly growing literature on the impact of economic growth on child undernutrition that I based my dissertation work on. They add Klasen (08), Friedman and Schady (09), and Subramanyam et al (11) to the ones I knew about.

They identify a micro-macro paradox: increasing household income reduces undernutrition significantly but increasing average incomes doesn't make nearly the same difference. It is rather disturbing to me to see for how many SSA countries there has been significant improvement in GDP/capita, but a worsening of child hunger. Among the things they find that matter more than GDP/capita, household asset rank matters, suggesting that inequality may be an important part of the story.

Bhagowalia, Menon, Quisumbing, and Soundararajan, "What Dimensions of Women's Empowerment  Matter Most for Child Nutrition?' IFPRI Discussion Paper 01192

Women's empowerment can be a fairly vague (their preferred word: complex) term, so it is nice to see the authors breaking various dimensions of it down to see which are correlated with better outcomes. From the abstract: "Results from logit models indicate that both a greater degree of women’s empowerment and greater maternal endowments [read: height and education] are associated with better long-term nutritional status of children [in Bangladesh]. Attitudes toward domestic violence have an effect on child stunting and mobility; participation in decisionmaking is an important influence on dietary diversity. Consistent with previous studies, maternal height and maternal schooling decrease the probability of stunting, and maternal schooling is positively associated with dietary diversity. While these are not immediate measures of empowerment, they are positively associated with child nutritional outcomes and reflect prior investments in women and girls." However, they have almost no control variables in the regressions, so it is uncertain how much is due to these factors directly, and how much is the fact they signal correlation with socio-economic status or other factors.

De Paoli and Mendola, "Does International Migration Increase Child Labor?" Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano Development Studies Working Paper 339.

An interesting data combination allows them to look out how out-migration of workers from different skills impact local labor markets, and how those impacts affect some 200,000 children studied in 38 different countries. They find that allowing low-skilled workers to emigrate increases local wages for the parents, reducing child labor. It might have also been the case that it raised the wage for child labor, which would increase child labor, but this does not seem to be a significant factor. They also see that female emigration reduces child labor by more than male emigration. "According to our estimates, a 10% increase in the migration rate decreases the probability of child labor by 1.2 percentage points (p.p.) and the total time of weekly work by 7.3 hours." I count 209 reported regressions and, at first glance at least, the vast majority tell the same overall story.

Economics in Unusual Places

1 - Using game theory at a buffet with limited food options to figure out what foods you should choose first (HT: MR). Basically, instead of just grabbing your favorites first, you should think about what other people will grab first (and as importantly, last). If your favorite food is hated by your fellow diners, leave it alone - it will still be there later - and pick up something else that might disappear if you don't grab it now. The article also has insights about the kinds of social norms that make everyone better off, how to pile the most on your plate, and some Wansinkian insights how much women's food choices are influenced by their neighbors.

2 - Some more game theory on why Iran has told the US just how it captured the Sentinal drone: by ensuring that it will only have one to sell, it makes other countries much more willing to pay for that one than they would be if they thought 2-3 more might appear in the next few years. Iran is sending a signal or using a commitment device about its future behavior to impact the actions of its fellow players today.

3 - I reported earlier on how G.I. Joe action figures are not classified as "action figures", but are "dolls" so they can get a lower tariff. The X-Men apparently are marketed by Toy Biz as not being human at all so they can avoid being tariffed at the doll rate altogether and instead get classified as "toys." Little did the X-Men realize their own marketing agents were plotting against their basic humanity, and all in the name of economics!

4 - Are we on our way to a Kuznets Gender Curve? Very poor countries and households can't afford to select children based on gender. As income rises (to the level of India and China, say) there is more and more discrimination favoring boys - medicine can tell families whether the fetus is a boy or a girl and they can react as they wish. However, new evidence is showing that upper-middle class Indian families ($3200/yr and up) are reversing the trend. The Economist praises bourgeouise values for saving the girls.

5 - Cowen pushes back hard on the idea that wealth is power, whether in politics, charity, or the market:

Second, the wealthy in groups do not always coordinate very effectively, to say the least.  ...  Third, many of the very wealthy choose to consume ego rents rather than effectiveness.  Fourth, “democracy” and “the market” control large chunks of modern life, and it is hard for outsiders to commandeer those processes.... the ability of the rich at the margin to control policy through intentional acts, either individually or in groups is much overrated.
Wealth does protect you from the depredations of others, such as being treated very badly by the police or legal system.  In this defensive sense wealth can give you a good deal of power.

Test Questions I Have Used: The price of everything

In the final for my introductory microeconomics students, I posed a question based on a post on Wronging Rights. It involved an NGO buying up AK-47s in Africa to scrap and sell as jewelry in the West as a means of "doing something" about conflict. The question was to identify why this was a terrible idea, thinking about the incentives increased demand has on the supply side. WR subsequently put up a correction based on an email to the NGO. They do not go around buying guns from dealers, but they buy guns that have been confiscated by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the UN. If anything, this encourages the government to confiscate more guns, which should do good things for reducing demand and supply.

On a midterm for the same class, I also posed a question based on the growing gender imbalance in some Indian states. Having 8 women to 10 men ought to increase the "price" of a bride that husbands pay, or in this case reduce the price the family of the bride has to pay the groom's family. This article from the World Bank discusses one campaign to encourage single men to get indoor plumbing and a toilet: No loo, no I do. And what do we find? Single men are becoming much more likely to have a toilet for prospective brides in states that have a low female-to-male ratio.


In class we also debated the ethics of kidney donations just in time for a slough of posts to go up around the blogsosphere about them.

Lit in Review: Nigerian Agriculture 1

This has been an impressive time for papers coming out about Nigerian agriculture. Eight were uploaded to my reader just last night.

Segun-Olasanmi and Bamire look at maize-cowpea intercropping in Oyo (far west). They find that while men (72%) and women (28%) farmers earn statistically different revenues from intercropping (N76,500 vs. N42,400 - about $500 vs $300) per hectare, and have statistically different costs, men don't have statistically higher profits (N31,000 vs N20,000 - about $200 vs $140). This is in large part explained because men use three times as much inorganic fertilizer and more than twice as much in labor costs. About half also work at other occupations, such as "carpentry, hunting, trading and tailoring in the order of predominance among male farmers, and trading, weaving and tailoring among the females." If male occupations earn more than female, I wonder if the apparent differences in profits are really caused by a higher imputed male wage, so it looks like own labor has a higher cost. So the questions are: is it that male farmers get more production per hectare or get a higher price for the crops? and is it that male farmers are imputed to have a higher wage or do they spend significantly more time on the crops?

Apata, Folayan, Apata, and Akinlua examine the role of subsistence agriculture in Nigeria following the 1994 structural adjustment. They find that subsistence agriculture played an essential role in mitigating the hunger and poverty that ensued following SAP; that trade openness improves agricultural productivity through technology transfer and increasing the gains to education; however it also reduces demand for local production, shifting farmers into more export-oriented areas but not enough to replace lost GDP; 71% of household and subsistence agriculture never reaches the formal market, in part due to high transaction costs, so most impacts from imports and exports hit the largest 10% of farms. They cite government policy shortcomings (instability, inconsistency, poor implementation, and weak institutional development) for being the primary constraints to growing agricultural productivity for both large and small farms.

Interesting Sentences

The Economist: The world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century’s preferred option, making humans behave like robots.

HT: Grandiloquent Bloviator: “If you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” Also known as: there is no such thing as a free lunch on the internet. If you can’t tell what the website is trying to sell you, they are either selling your eyes to advertisers or your information. 

Beckworth: “money is special: it is the only asset on every other market (i.e. it is the medium of exchange) and thus is the only one that can affect every other market.  Money, therefore, is what makes it possible to have economy-wide recessions.”

Marron: Sometimes, it’s more than $100 lying on the sidewalk: “You can sell 9,999 shares of The Donald …  at $0.52 a piece [on Intrade]. In just that one trade, you can pocket almost $5,200 of free money.” The only question is whether the government decides this is an illegal activity for influencing voting and elections. “For the latest Trump action, click here.”

The Economist: “The [United Arab Emerites] government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.”
 

The history of political cartooning in South Africa: “I tried to define when South African cartooning started … all the way back to a cartoon which was published in 1819 by George Cruikshank who was a leading London caricaturist of the day. I called it the Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon. It shows the white settlers being devoured by these cannibal figures – these huge, hulking monstrous figures. … For me that became an iconic cartoon, a prototypical South African cartoon.”
 

Yglesias on Chomsky’s denunciation of Osama’s death as an illegal assassination: “International law is made by states, powerful states have a disproportionate role in shaping it, and powerful states have obvious reasons to not be super-interested in the due process of suspected international terrorists or the sensibilities of mid-sized countries. Many people are pacifists and/or strong critics of western military power, and that’s fine. But it’s simply not the case that international law is identical with these policy preferences. On the contrary, one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers."

Calzadilla, Rehdanz, and Tol: “Trade liberalization tends to reduce water use in water scarce regions, and increase water use in water abundant regions, even though water markets do not exist in most countries “

Easterly and Freschi: “Belief in Hell raised … economic growth potential. … A different twist than the Protestant Ethic: Scared Rich?

Measuring the Unmeasurable II

I do not think we are measuring what we think we are measuring...:

Gallup's Economic Confidence Index improved 10 percentage points in the week after Osama bin Laden's death, May 2-8, resulting in the best weekly confidence level since mid-February. Thirty-seven percent of Americans now say economic conditions are "getting better."

Measurement error in surveys:

Matt reminds us that there are reasons to want husbands and wives together and reasons to want them separate for questioning. Neither way is going to dominate.

Researchers sometimes forget that most of the multitude of questions respondents face in a study are extremely private. Imagine if someone from your city, claiming to be associated with some distant, foreign university, came to your door and started asking you about your detailed household expenditure, or your spouse about their sexual history?

Measuring gender fairness the Dilbert way (ie - Scott Adams said this) (HT: Newmark).

So I propose a simple test to determine if you, individually, are a victim of gender unfairness. If a genie gave you the chance to magically switch your gender, and become a member of the other sex, would you do it? And let's say the new you would be about the same as now on the scale of attractiveness, intelligence, ethnicity, circumstance, and health. The only real change would be gender. Do you take the offer?
If your answer is no, then maybe fairness isn't what you really want. Maybe what you want is all the advantages you have now plus the good stuff that other people have. I totally understand. I want the same thing.

Big Bag of African Agriculture

Fair trade coffee in Uganda, which liberalized coffee export in the 1990s: Prices remained low initially, leading to reduced supply and quality. Organizers of a free trade initiative with 7500-15000 farmers claim that they have known how to produce high quality coffee but haven’t had incentives. The price premium is roughly 25% plus investment in community public goods.

Also in Uganda: mud quarries. “what we get is a fascinating portrait of a village doing the best it can with an informal land system, yet obviously still in need of some sort of formality.” The mud is a valuable building material locally.

South Africa plans that agroprocessers will add 500k jobs over the next ten years and are providing capitalization funds. The funds are coming from the court payments required of Pioneer Foods for collusion and price-fixing. The government also hopes to increase the number of smallholder farmers from 200k to 250k by providing training and extension services. Employment in agriculture and agroprocessing has been declining.

Zambia’s president is not predicting turmoil from the north spilling in, crediting good multiparty elections for his confidence.

Learning African English via Wikipedia

FAO estimates that if rural women had equal access to land, technology, financial services, education, and markets , agricultural production could increase enough to feed an additional 100-150 million people, 12-17 percent of the world’s total. Diouf has called for equality as a means to “win, sustainably, the fight against hunger and extreme poverty.” Again, the question is if we pursue equality as a right, or because it is morally right, or because it pays us to do so.

On the infrastructure constraints in African agriculture:

Statistics indicate that only 34% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population lives within two kilometers of a paved road. In most of Africa, poor road infrastructure accounts for investors deciding to look elsewhere. “Every fifth African needs at least five hours to get to the nearest market….” Beavogui says.

Reasons to be optimistic about Africa, video below the fold. Among the interesting points he makes is that vehicle operating costs in Africa are no higher than in price, but the prices to put goods on ships are the highest in the world. Only 1% of the money allocating for non-wage health support actually gets where it was intended. Yes, this is why he is optimistic. It means that there are obvious problems that can be readily solved. As a result, implementing some simple remedies reduced Rwandan child mortality by 33%.

Lit in Review: HIV/AIDS

De Walque reports in third person on his own research:

The pervasive if unstated belief in the HIV/AIDS community is that males are primarily responsible for spreading the infection among married and cohabiting couples.... most couples affected by HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa live in ... relationships in which only one of the two partners is HIV-positive while the other one is HIV-negative.

Contrary to assumption, however, it is not the case that the HIV-positive partner is most often the male. In fact, a new study found that women were just as likely to be the HIV-positive partner. An earlier study had placed the figure closer to 30-40%. When the same is restricted to women who have been in one relationship for 10 years (reducing the chance of her bringing HIV with her into the union), the proportion is still roughly 1 in 3. Though I don't agree when de Walque calls this "just as likely" I would agree that it calls the basic assumption into question and supports better research into the channels by which AIDS spreads. Ignoring one apparently significant channel by assuming it does not exist not only prevents progress, it serves to further the victimization of women.

Topping this off is another paper (Leclerc et al, 2009) that tried to fit Zambian HIV infection data with epidemiological models and demonstrated just how difficult a task it is to model: "Our reference simulation (H0) was obtained after more than one hundred simulation trials, all the others leading to inconsistent patterns." They find that "the lifetime risk of infection is quite similar for both sexes, and women tend to be infected earlier." "Among the main constraints found in the simulation was the age at peak infection for males. It was almost impossible to reach values greater than 35 or 36 years for men while keeping the main parameters within a range of realistic values."

Another paper, also by de Walque and colleagues, shows that HIV households in Mozambique were not affected more than non-HIV households by the 2007/08 food crisis, perhaps thanks to increased health interventions that increased their labor force participation.

Meanwhile, there is actually good news from Zimbabwe: HIV infection rates halved between 1997 and 2007.
The study cites increased awareness of AIDS-related deaths as the primary cause of the drop. The Leclarc study also reports a drop (or at least a slowing) in infection rates in Zambia since 2001.

The Way We See Ourselves

An article on national symbols (that I meant to post 6-7 months ago) that largely comes from Wikipedia. Of note is that the US's anthropomorphic symbol (Uncle Sam) is a stand in for its government rather than its people. 

Also featured are Britain's everyman, John Bull, whom Wiki tells us is "well-intentioned, frustrated, full of common sense, and entirely of native country stock ... a yeoman who prefers his small beer and domestic peace, possessed of neither patriarchal power nor heroic defiance."

The German Michel (Michael) similarly shows a national character: "his easy-going nature and Everyman appearance. He also represents the innocent and simple person who must endure and fight against tyranny and injustice."  

Portugal's Joe Public or John Doe is appreciated for "his kindness, his will to help others and, most of all, his utter contempt and disrespect for the powerful ones that try to dominate him."

Despite the popularity of male everymen, every one of the countries the article considers uses a female ideal to represent the country itself.

More on Unemployment

The large change in the unemployment estimate last week got Sumner ready to pop champagne. Yglesias believes the news is largely measurement error: "Basically, more people had jobs a month ago than we thought had been the case, and also there were fewer unemployed people than we thought had been the case."

I doubt that it has anything to do with the fact that we changed how we are measuring unemployment in the US -- accounting for up to 5 years' unemployment at a stretch instead of only 2. So now people who were listed as 2+ years can be listed as 3. That doesn't change how many are unemployed, only our understanding of unemployment dynamics.

Aid Thoughts discusses the problems of using the same notion of unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa that we use in the US:

Firstly, the condition of ‘being without work’ discriminates against women who are involved in economically productive activities. ... Women in Africa are very likely to combine economic activities with ‘non-economic’, household activities, and thus work intermittently over the year, or to work from home in either own-account or waged occupations – massively increasing the likelihood of being under-represented as employed labour. What’s more, in many countries, economically productive activities conducted by women (which may be crucial inputs to smallholder agriculture or home-based goods production) are classed as ‘housework’ and not an input into production. Men carrying out separate parts of the same production process are counted as working, self-employed. Another, equally large problem with the idea of unemployment exists in much of Sub-Saharan Africa: the condition of being completely without work hardly ever exists for people of working age without disability.

Big Bag of Miscellany: Moral Hazard, Gambling, and Assorted Rights

Greg Mankiw demonstrating "moral hazard" in the home: "if I do have an accident, make sure the fall kills me."

Laura Freschi lamenting the shift from women's rights to development for women as being cost-effective:

The seeming triumph of the 1990s had been that social justice was seen as a sufficient reason for efforts to be made to secure gender equality. Women’s and girls’ well-being was an end in itself. Today, it is all about calculating the rates of return from investing in a person as if she were a piece of machinery.

Jon Hunstman's (planned and now realized) retirement from being US ambassador to China has increased interest in whether he will run for the presidency.

Using statistics to game the lottery system. The tax on poor math skills may be upgraded to a way for advanced mathematicians to add a little something to their income...

And a short bit on the overuse of instrumental variables as a tragedy of the commons. But if it's a tragedy of the commons, doesn't that mean that we need to centralize economics research output? That's the standard economics answer (at least before Ostrom won the Nobel). Given that most researchers are government-funded, it's probably less of a stretch than it might be. Does someone else's use of my IV constitute a violation of my intellectual property rights?

2011 -- Year of the ...

The promises of a tranquil Year of the Rabbit are nice, but unlikely in our household. The Lovely and Gracious and I learned yesterday that it will be a little girl that we will be welcoming this summer. In the spirit of celebrating the Chinese New Year, we recite to ourselves the marriage advice from the Chinese Zodiac that you marry someone 4 years younger or older than yourself, but never someone 6 years apart. (We happen to be 6 years apart and very happy together.)

But 2011 is not only the year of the rabbit. FAO has declared 2011 the Year of the Forest. The UN has also inaugurated the Year of Chemistry and the Year of Youth. Combining them would suggest we are celebrating the use of chemical fire retardant to fight youthful arsonists. Or maybe we're using homeopathic chemistry to make ourselves look younger.

Conservation groups declared last year the year of the shark. This time we get the Year of the Bat under the banner "Together with bats."

CNN has called for Latin America to celebrate the Year of the Female Politician with Brazil's first female President and several other notable state leaders from Costa Rica to Peru and beyond.

The Center for Consumer Freedom opines we may see The Year of the Nanny. "(Qualities: irritating, finger-wagging, spiteful, incapable of having a good time. Partners best with regulators. Incompatible with freedom and common sense.)" Then again, nearly every year is the year of the nanny to freedom-lovers because some dimension of freedom is constantly on the defensive. This year the theme seems to be food and obesity-related nannying.

The year 2011 will see the "M1C problem," similar to the Y2K bug, but only in Taiwan which dates this as year 100. The Australian of the Year for 2011 is a social entrepreneur who encourages philanthropy for international development.

All of this is assuming that 2011 is not, in fact, the Year of the Zombie Apocalypse. My favorite post on Zombie Politics.

Sentences that Intrigued me a month ago

Not sure why this didn't post then, but here they are:


Coulmas describing Japan - "A growing percentage of the population, both married and never married, without children has no vested interest in society, with hitherto unknown consequences for its self-image and sense of purpose"

Reported by Economix - "Bulgaria’s defense ministry on Thursday lifted a ban on women serving aboard submarines just as parliament decided to mothball the country’s only submarine."

Kaestner and Khan on Medicare Part D - "much of the additional use of prescription drugs that results from gaining prescription drug insurance is [of ] relatively low value in terms of health benefits"

On EU regulators: "Nonsensical decisions may be taken by majority vote on things that are really about the UK." But who will supervise the supervisors of the supervisors?

This Month in Food News

Rodrik notes how most development groups are a very dismal bunch: low food prices are bad for the poor and so are high food prices ... just for different groups of poor people. He argues that this accentuating the negative and living off bad news makes for bad public policy. Oxfam retorts that while they do point out who suffers from whatever is currently happening, this hasn't changed their policy recommendations. World Food Prize winner Pinstrup-Andersen, who has just begun blogging, also speaks out on the culture of negativity in a new post on Food Apocalypse Fatigue.

The African Food System

The African Food System and Its Interaction with Human Health and Nutrition is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research effort between researchers at Cornell University, United Nations University, and other eminent scholars and policymakers worldwide under the direction of Per Pinstrup-Andersen. It is the first in a series discussing the gaps in knowledge that prevent governments in Sub-Saharan Africa from accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals. The research is targeted at a broad audience and does not assume specific technical knowledge to make use of the insights from the chapters.

Topics include: economics; nutrition; politics; poverty traps; malaria; AIDS; livestock; environment; food aid; population; gender studies


I am very happy to see the book come out as it is my first publication (I am the lead author on chapter 2 on nutrition). There will be a book launching event November 23 at Cornell University G10 Biotech Building from 4:30-6:30pm. There will be short presentations by those authors who can make it followed by a reception and book signing.


The chapters are as follows:

More Praise for Corporations

A lot has been written lately on the role of business in development (a little more here). Mostly because this has been underused. Even the neoliberal synthesis of the last several decades focused efforts on reforming government (admittedly to improve the business environment) rather than on directly improving the opportunities for businesses in developing countries.

Multinationals are reducing gender discrimination in South Korea by hiring women who are paid less than their male counterparts. This lowers their costs relative to domestic firms, giving them a competitive advantage. The way to level the playing field? Stop domestic discrimination.

IBM is leading the way by training management for international work by organizing volunteer international service projects that are accountable to the firm for success. On the other hand, there's the difficulty of getting out of social businesses or separating the profit and not-for-profit parts.

Rojas argues that the reason contemporary classical music sounds so terrible is that it is funded by subsidy and mandate rather than as a business that has to appeal to its consumers. Fedako would like to claim that the reason India and many African countries have many cell phones and few toilets is that the former are produced by companies and the latter by government... but who says businesses can't provide toilets? or electricity? They can, they do, and it's by far not enough. Companies are better suited to providing some goods than others.

The Economist's Schumpeter addresses importance of companies doing what they do best (earn profits by providing better goods and services at lower prices, generating employment and economic growth in the process) rather than focusing on corporate social responsibility. Excerpt below the fold:

Global Hunger Index - Child Malnutrition

IFPRI has released the GHI in preparation for World Food Day on Saturday. This year the report highlights child malnutrition. GHI warns that half of the hunger in the world is child hunger.

Now in fairness, this is not a new finding that is somehow different from hunger in the past but is an artifact of how the index is generated: it combines FAO's measure of the percentage of hungry people in a country, the percent of children more than 2 standard deviations underweight before age 5, and the under-five mortality rate. That is, more than 2/3 of the index is created by identifying child hunger. The surprise is that they only estimate half of world hunger is child malnutrition.

The GHI report highlights the following needed interventions:

The burden of child undernutrition could be cut by 25-36 percent by providing universal preventive health services and nutrition interventions for children under two and their mothers during pregnancy and lactation....

“Nutrition interventions should be targeted towards girls and women throughout the life cycle and especially as adolescents before they become pregnant.”
The report recommends that to reduce global hunger, countries must:

• target interventions where they will do the most good – among pregnant and
breastfeeding women and children in their first two years of life;

• address the underlying causes of undernutrition, including poverty, gender inequality, and conflict;

• engage, empower, and support those working at the local level to improve nutrition;

• and make nutrition, especially for young children, a political priority.

Hat tip: Poverty News Blog

What's Wrong with This Picture?

Speaking of professional ethics, Landsburg points us to the following evidence used by the AFL-CIO to support the Paycheck Fairness Act. After all, just look at the plummeting gray line showing the ratio of women's wages to men's! I think I feel a parody coming on....

“Hello, ladies, Look at the graph. Now look back to me. Look at the graph again. Now look at the scale on the right hand axis. It's upside down. Sadly, these are the right numbers, but if we stopped thinking that numbers climb as you go up a graph and switched to AFL-CIO spin-mode, your statistics could smell like this horse's dinner rejects. Anything is possible when your statistician drinks the Enron Kool-Aid. I’m on prescription medication!"

Four on Ethics

What ethical theories do people most closely follow? Economists have a thing for consequentialism (it's the outcomes that matter) and we're often hammered for it by deontologists (do the right thing because it's right), human rights advocates (no trade offs allowed), and so forth. In a new paper, many people were presented with a variation of the well-known Trolley Problem in which a trolley is hurtling out of control and will run over and kill several children unless you are willing to push another person in front of the trolley to stop it. How you answer that question and the reasons for doing it tell professional ethicists a bit about your ethics.

The paper finds some support that "people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclusions" rather than reasoning from their most preferred ethic to choices. For instance, comparing participants who were told a) no name for the pushee; b) a stereotypically White American name; or c) a stereotypically Black American name showed that the name changed how politically liberal respondents answered. Liberals were less likely to push the supposed African-American and subsequently less likely to push anyone else. Priming tests also showed that people valued American and Iraqi lives differently depending on if you talk to them about patriotism or multiculturalism first, with the greater effect on conservatives. (HT: MR)

Oh, and add to any of these the effects of anti-depressants, which make you less likely to intervene.

2 - What should we learn from this graph?

Yglesias' conclusion is that we really don't understand inequality. The poor are a lot poorer than we think and that affects voting patterns.

Sumner argues that this conclusion is spurious because the data itself is, well, in his own words "income inequality data is nonsense, and wealth inequality data is nonsense on stilts." Why?

A - People earn more as they gain experience and better jobs. Even if everyone was exactly the same and lived the exact same amount during the course of their life and saved the exact same amount, you would still end up with a lot of income and wealth inequality.

BIG Bag o Foodie Links

Water

Libya's Great Man-Made River nears completion at $20 billion and 2,333 miles long to connect the 5% of the country with rain to the rest.

What makes water projects work? Social capital, says IFPRI. Water and sanitation committees (cleverly known as WATSANs) in Ghana are not only more likely where communities have other social groups and less likely where communities are ethnically divided, they seem to improve payment for water services and improve water safety. Female leaders seem particularly important.

Food Safety
Powell gives NY Times reporter Bittman's new book two thumbs down for terrible food safety advice: "This is food safety idiocracy. Any food safety advice in Bittman’s book should be disregarded as fantasy."

Powell also found something worse than e. coli and salmonella:a metal staple in his pretzel-filled M&M. "I would rather take my chances with Salmonella or E. coli that I know I can cook to death rather than bleeding internally to death."  Update: Contrition from Mars goes a long way.

Foodie Faddies
Ben and Jerry's has surrendered. They're taking the "All Natural" label off their ice cream because a number of the ingredients are heavily processed (high fructo... I mean, corn sugar, highly processed? you don't say...)

And speaking of corporations, Wilde lets us know that corporate heads are either deluded or lying when they claim that "Personally, I would like to serve a healthier product.  But, if these efforts threaten profitability, I risk getting sued by stakeholders.  Corporations are obliged to pursue maximum profits and no other goal." A recent study of actual court cases says this is not the case.

If one can argue with a straight face that selling healthier food enhances the reputation and long-term prospects of the company, I think that would count as a reasonable business judgment.

Wilde's best line: "Markets are a great game, but a dreadful religion."

Powell urges us to buy local while avoiding "locavore nonsense" by quoting Doering:

buying local makes a good deal of sense when the natural conditions support the seasonal production of good, fresh local food. Who wouldn’t buy our local asparagus in June and fresh sweet corn and tomatoes in August? ...  What is new is the pretentious elevation of this simple idea by the chattering culinary class to the status of a comprehensive creed, which, they assert, can make a major contribution to a more sustainable food system.

I was in a very chic restaurant in Tucson, Ariz. where the smug chef righteously proclaimed that all his ingredients were locally grown. He was quite offended when I asked him about the environmental and other costs of importing all that fresh water to grow that food in the Arizona desert. And how is it more sustainable to deny developing countries the opportunity to export their tropical fruits and vegetables?

And five programs to improve school lunches:

• Salad bars
• Healthy vending machines (Cornell nutrition and agricultural economics students occasionally foment for that when gradual changes move the vending machines back to less healthy choices.)
• Chefs joining the staff or advising kids on healthy eating and food prep
  
• School gardens (not without controversy)
• Buying food from local farmers

Potpourri
Breakfast in Iraq: "At first this weekend I was jealous of my friends in DC enjoying DC brunches.  Then we went to a local hole-in-the-wall and I saw breakfast. ...  After that, I was basically jealous of myself, because the food was so good." 

Tyson is facing a suit for gender discrimination which could jeopardize millions in government contracts if a) it is proved true and b) they don't give 750 female workers backpay and roughly 100 more female applicants jobs. That could cause a significant market power shift. Change.org naturally assumes guilty before proven innocent.

And the FAO is touting small-holder dairy farms. There are presently over 750 million people engaged in it, with an average of two cows. The most interesting and unexpected problem they bring up is environmental: "Low-yield dairy systems in Africa and South Asia are estimated to have higher carbon footprints per 100 kilogram of milk produced than high-yield systems in the United States and Western Europe."