The Paradox of "Food Insecurity"

ERS has its annual report on food insecurity.

There's a paradox here: the number of people receiving food stamps is at an all-time high. The number of "food insecure" people is high.  The number of obese people is high, with the poor having the highest proportion of obesity. This seems to me to amount to a paradox.

What's going on?  To analyze it, there's four characteristics of people:

1. poverty
2. "food insecure"
3. obese
4. receive food stamp

Receiving food stamps is a binary attribute: you either do or you don't during the time frame, the other three are more scalar, but government surveys convert them into binary attributes.  With 4 attributes, there's 16 possible combinations, ranging from: poor and food insecure and obese and receiving food stamps to not poor and not food insecure and not obese and not receiving food stamps.

It seems we don't have good data to map the distribution of people into those 16 combinations.  We can assume we know how the world works:

 In one conception, the people getting food stamps are the poorest of us; everyone who is really poor gets food stamps and only the poor get food stamps. In that world, everyone who is poor and obese gets food stamps. Implications:

•  food stamps are well distributed
• the food insecure get food stamps but don't manage them well.
• the food insecure are also obese, perhaps because they binge eat.

In another conception of the world, the world of the poor divides into two portions: one set is poor, no food stamps, and food insecure; the other set is poor, gets food stamps, and not food insecure.  Implications:

• food stamps are poorly distributed
• food stamps fill their role of preventing hunger and the only social problem is getting all the poor to participate in the food stamp program.
• NOTE: the missing issue is where are the obese in this conception.  

Now the ERS report says 57 percent of the food insecure participated in a food program (food stamps, WIC, and a third program), but they compare apples and oranges: food insecurity is for a calendar year, participation in food stamps, etc. is for the month before the survey, meaning a family which suffered food insecurity in January, goes on food stamps in July and is surveyed in August would count as food insecure.

What's my point: the ERS work lacks essential information.  Of course, in their defense I can imagine their surveyors would be reluctant to carry a scale and tape measure with them on their interviews so they could check the BMI of the respondents.   One of the prices we pay for privacy is the lack of information to make good policy.

The Country It Is Changing

Two factoids, with no credit to sources:

New York City and Washington DC are among the metropolitan areas which are now majority minority.

Over half the students in the Fairfax county school system use a foreign language.

Standing Staff Meetings

Too soon old, too late smart.  Somewhere this week I read of some guy who does meetings standing up, and I realize that's the way I should have done my meetings. 

The idea is, people get tired of meetings so there's an incentive to be brief and to the point.

All Hail Mr. Griffin III

That is all.

The Dispersion of Takent and Character

Barking Up the Wrong Tree has a post on a study showing how widely dispersed are talent and character.

What they found is that in low complexity jobs, workers’ outputs do not vary much, and the best worker is usually not much better than the average worker. As the jobs become more complex however, there’s more and more variation, and the difference between the best worker and the average grows. For example, in low-complexity jobs the top 10% of workers produce 25% more than the average, and 75% more than the bottom 10%. For high-complexity jobs, such as professional and sales jobs, the difference is much larger. The top 10% of workers produce 80% more than the average, and 700% more than the bottom 10% (8).

That's no surprise to any manager.  Unfortunately it makes performance appraisals, which are difficult in the best of circumstances, even more difficult.  

Selection of Hens by Combs

National Geographic (hat tip owed somewhere) has an article which says:

Farmers and other breeders of poultry have long known that the comb, that reddish display of spiky skin on top of chicken heads, can be a reliable indicator of health and vigor. Now scientists have demonstrated that hens with the largest combs produce the most eggs — and roosters have it all figured out.

“Hens with the largest combs are like to get a bigger dose of sperm from roosters,” according to a paper presented this week in the science journal PLoS Genetics by scientists at Linköping University in Sweden.

 We raised our hens from day-old chicks in brooder houses, then they went outside on the range until they started laying.  In the fall we'd cull the old hens and bring in the best of the pullets from the range.  Mom would select the pullets, and mostly used comb size for the selection.  We'd start with 900 chicks and end up with maybe 750 layers, with the remainder sent off to NYC as fryers. 

A Form for Autonomous Vehicles

Be still my heart--a form, a sure-enough honest to goodness form.

 I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I can turn my driving over to an autonomous vehicle like Google's.  As I may have said previously here or in some comment somewhere, I'm aware my capabilities are diminishing: my attention span is shorter, I'm more easily distracted and upset, and my reactions are slower.  All of which means the day is coming when I should no longer drive, which means a considerable blow to our lifestyle.

But it seems the great state of Nevada, blessed be its name, has actually come up with a form, an application for permission to test autonomous vehicles.  As any good bureaucrat knows, once you have a form, the rest is downhill all the way.

[Update: hat tip, Eugene Volokh at Volokh Conspiracy.}

How Soon We Forget

Watching the Newshour tonight Judy Woodruff suggests President Clinton faced less opposition than President Obama.  I disagree.  Clinton squeaked some stuff (taxes, gun control) through his first session with no Republican support; then he faced Newt and the Republicans.  The vehemence of the opposition to Clinton, with the suggestions of murder and drug dealing, Filegate, etc. matches the birther nonsense.

Restaurants and Their Customers

The NYTimes had an article on how restaurants are tracking their customers, recording their preferences:

Even a single visit can prompt the creation of a computer file that includes diners’ allergies, favorite foods and whether they are “wine whales,” likely to spend hundreds of dollars on a bottle. That’s valuable information, considering that upward of 30 percent of a restaurant’s revenue comes from alcohol. Some places even log data on potential customers so that the restaurant is prepared if the newcomer shows up.

That a waiter you have never met knows your tendency to dawdle or your love of crushed ice may strike some diners as creepy or intrusive. But restaurant managers say their main goal is to pamper the customer, to recreate the comfort of a local corner spot where everybody knows your name.

Is this an invasion of privacy or the way technology enables the free market best to satisfy customer desires?

What Robots Can't Do

Robots can do more and more every day, and I'm eagerly waiting for the day when they can drive a car.  But what they can't do is use a toothbrush to fix a space station, as described here.