The Free Rider Problem in Agriculture

Back before I was born farmers experimented with voluntary cooperation in limiting production. Unfortunately it's hard to sustain because of the free rider problem. Here's another instance from the 1930 blog:

Minnesota Gov. T Christianson says doubts success of Farm Board campaign to reduce wheat acreage; approach should start at the smalller cooperative units and build up rather than working top down from national agency, and should be focused on substituting other crops such as flax for wheat. Requiring farmers to restrict output of all products would be strongly opposed as it “would permanently subordinate agriculture to industry,” since farmers wouldn't be able to produce a surplus to sell abroad as industry can.

How To Mislead With Statistics

From treehugger, a Lester Brown article on how to rethink food production for a world of eight billion:

"The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually."

This sounds like disaster in the works. What Mr. Brown doesn't do is compare the rates of increase of population and food production on the same graph. Looking at a table of world population growth, we see that in 1962 and 1963, the rate of population increase was 2.19 percent. But those were the only years in which the rate was over 2.1 percent. So between 1950 and 1990 food production outstripped population. Now since 1990 the rate of population increase has declined steadily, reaching 1.25 in 2000 and 1.11 percent this year. So, once again, the rate of food production is higher than population.

Although this part of the piece is misleading, he has an interesting discussion of various techniques, especially doublecropping, which might be possible. And he doesn't hit the locavore/organic drum at all.

Now USDA Messes With the Definition of a "Month"

Not content with defining "beef" and "veal", the USDA decides there are 13 months:

"Please be advised that 2008 13th month data has been applied to the FAS U.S. Foreign Agricultural Trade Database "

(The Foreign Ag Service has redone their statistics database here and "13th month" is a term for a catchall of corrections and late reports.
[Updated with the link I intended]

Salute to Willie Cooper

Willie's been reappointed as state director of the Lousiana FSA office. He's been SED since 1972, showing he's been able to bridge the partisan divide in LA between Dems and Reps. (Mostly SED's get dumped with a new administration.)

The press release announcing it observes he has more than 50 years service in, meaning he's basically donating his time to public service. (He really does have more brains than that might indicate, lots more.)

Times Have Changed

Geezers become tiresome when they keep comparing the past and the present. I know that. But I can't resist. It's as bad when I used to smoke (2 packs+). (Why are we so proud of our vices?)

Anyhow, when I was young, the press would focus on a few metrics: cars, tons of steel, tons of coal, houses. Those were the measures of how well the economy was going and where the US stood compared to the Soviets.

So this figure surprised me:

Currently,85,000 people in the United States are employed by the wind industry; Slightly more than the 81,000 in the United States working as coal miners.

Maybe We Aren't Bigger in the Rear?

The 1930 blog reports this item:

Changes in women's dress styles have enabled Princeton to reduce width of stadium seats from 19 inches to 17.5, allowing 6,000 more seats in stadium.

Found this bit Googling:

The standard airline seat is 17.2" wide, while seat pitch ranges from 28" on some short-haul, down-and-dirty charters, to 33-34" on some planes.

The Technology Learning Curve

From the 1930 blog:

Actuarial Society of America survey reports death rate for passengers travelling on scheduled airlines is 1 in 5,000, or 200 times railroad death rate; safety increases by 63% after pilot has had 400 flight hours.

Obama's Books

Politico has a piece on how Obama's book selections have increased sales. I haven't read the Price or the Friedman (although I follow his NYT columns), have read the Haruf and the McCullough, and maybe the Pelecanos. I like Pelecanos, both because he's from DC and writes about it, and his hitch on The Wire, but I think this is his latest book. I'll get to it.

I like Haruf--one of the few serious fiction writers I've read in the last few years. And McCullough is maybe a little popular (as a failed historian I'm implied by the historians' creed to look down on any popular writer) but the man can tell a story.

So Much for the Sunshine

All good liberals and progressives think sunshine purifies government operations. That's why they push and push for transparent governance.

We fail to remember, that our founding fathers operated in the dark, using an "Agreement of Secrecy" to cloak their treason against the king.

Asymmetric Information on the Croft

Economists talk about "asymmetric information", where the two parties to a transaction have different information. The classic case was selling a used car--where the owner knows how good it is or isn't, but the buyer can't tell.

Musings from a STonehead, the small farmer/pig grower in Scotland, runs into a case of that. He knows his product, but his potential customers often don't know pigs from pokes. As he writes:

The typical customer wants a fantasy, a lifestyle statement, a “product” that says something about them, and they want it now because that’s the fantasy of the moment.

They have an image of themselves as a “modern urban farmer”, as a “saviour of rare breeds”, as someone capturing “the good life”, of being a “modern smallholder”, of joining the ranks of “celebrity pig keepers”, showing their “anti-supermarket” credentials, and so on.

Certainly, we do have people that come to us with a genuine, practical, reality based desire to fatten a couple of pigs but they are in the minority.

But I also know from talking to the wide array of people that come to us, that the real motivation for buying pigs is to “live the dream”, just as it is for buying any other consumer item.