The Pin Factory Blog

A nice piece detailing the new GM foods which are being developed. The first generation of such crops concentrated either on increasing yields or on decreasing inputs, thus raising the profit margins of farmers and thus the quantities grown. All good news of course but not enough to sway the near hysterical opposition to the technology.

The new generation of such foods depends rather more on increasing the nutritional quality of the crop, rather than volume or the reduction of input costs. For example:

Cassava has been packed with new genes that help the plant accumulate extra iron and zinc from the soil, and synthesise vitamins E and A.

Cassava is the basic crop for hundreds of millions (some 800 million) around the world and its nutritional failings are responsible for  the damaging of many lives through under- and mal-nutrition. The addition of those nutrients will help to reduce such problems: that vitamin A will for example stop many cases of blindness.

Sadly, there are those who would oppose even this:

Claire Hope Cummings, a former lawyer with the US Department of Agriculture and author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, published in March, said: “People do not need miracle crops offering enhanced nutrients. What they need is a good varied diet. Who wants to eat a giant bowl of cassava or golden rice each day? These ideas are just a new way of marketing GM."

It's true that most people do not wish to eat a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day and yes, that they would prefer a varied diet. But that isn't something that's on offer just yet: we need to remind ourselves that life currently offers all too many people all too short a list of options, none of said options being all that enviable and some just plain awful. Like, perhaps, eating a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day or eating nothing each day and thus dying.

The GM cassava, like the golden rice which is also vitamin A enhanced, will allow hundreds of millions to continue living and reduce their risk of going blind while doing so (250,000 children currently blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency and a further hundred million at risk).

I realise that Ms. Cummings (and no doubt others) will disagree with me here but I take that to be 100,250,000 damn good reasons why we should get on with marketing GM.

It seems like the worst of news. Cash-strapped Americans have given up their cars andf their coffee. Car firms in Detroit say their sales are down 20% on last year, and Starbucks is closing 600 of its 7000-odd company-owned coffee bars. How bad can things get?

A lot worse, probably, because I'm not convinced these problems are completely due to an economic slowdown. The thing about hard times is that they are like a forest fire. A lot of dead old wood goes up in smoke but the tender, younger plants survive and go on to grow and bloom in a couple of years' time. The fact is that cars and other capital goods don't do at all well in a downturn – they are a purchase which people don't mind postponing for a few months or more. And, even Americans know that American cars are rubbish – lumbering, heavy, greedy, unresponsive. Detroit can only survive so long on patriotic purchases: once people are strapped for cash, if they buy at all they buy Japanese.

As for Starbucks, they used to be great but they have lost their edge. The last few times I've visited one (in the UK admittedly), my coffee has been weak and cold, the place has been littered with debris from previous customers, and the staff have roped off large areas of the seating, for their convenience rather than ours. That's bad management, and that dead wood has to get burned off.

In the UK, meanwhile, Marks & Spencer have suffered some bad figures, and that's thought particularly bad for a store that has been bouncing back so energetically. But M&S is a very upmarket store. It goes for quality in food and clothing, but that comes at a price. Again, when people are a bit short, it's the luxuries they cut back on. Everyone goes downmarket until things recover.

So sure, things are bad but I don't think we should play up these particular problems as a sign of coming catastrophe. The market is hugely diverse, and things rise and fall all the time. And as Adam Smith said, 'There's a deal of ruin in a nation.'

Eleutherophobia. e·leuth·er·o·pho·bi·a – n. 1. The fear of freedom.

Remarkable news: when petrol prices go up then sales of cars which use a lot of petrol go down. Amazing, isn't it? Perhaps someone would like to study such matters, make it the basis of a new science or something?

More motoring: while petrol prices might be high nominally, there're still highly affordable by historic standards.

Looks like we might be about to lose the biofuels mandate as well, in favour of "renewable".

This, however, does not look like a sensible substitute.

A strange thought: might it be possible to have too many property rights, or ones that are too strong?

An idea for shrinking the BBC. Perhaps as a back up if flogging the whole thing off doesn't suit?

And finally, suggestions for modern pub names. 

Greg Clark's recent book, Farewell to Alms, makes the argument that the Industrial Revolution happened because the bourgeois values necessary for it to do so were bred into the English population. It's an appealing argument to both Little Englanders and Great Britons, that there's something special about us: and indeed it's also true that since the IR did indeed start here there was indeed something different about our forefathers.

However, the perceived weakness in the argument has been over the transmission mechanism of those virtues.  Was it genetic? or cultural, memetic even? New research seems to show that it might have been a bit of both.

We find that parents who are more trusting and parents who are risk tolerant have children with similar attitudes. The correlation is strong with both mothers and fathers for risk; for trust, the mother plays a more important role than the father. Parents also tend to marry individuals with similar trust and risk attitudes. This reinforces the impact on the child; having one parent with a given attitude means that the child is likely to have a second parent with that attitude as well. We also find a role for environment, because child attitudes are similar to the prevailing attitudes in the local geographic region, even controlling for parental attitudes. Whether attitude transmission works through nurture, nature, or both is not clear, although several pieces of evidence suggest that nurture must play some role.

Trust and risk tolerance are of course cultural pre-requisites for any form of large scale trading economy. Whether it's directly genetic or more to do with nurture and education doesn't really matter for the purposes of Clark's argument. All that's necessary is that such attitudes were passed on by the part of society which was outbreeding the others, as his work on the bourgeois shows they were.

Another result of this research is that there are national differences in these levels of trust and risk tolerance, something which might aid in explaining why there are such differences in economic structure, the prevalence of entrepreneurialism and the rate of growth between nations.

Facebook is causing trouble left and right these days.

Londoner Mathew Firsht  is suing a former friend for creating a damaging false profile that revealed private details and wrongly indicated that Firsht was gay. Another woman, Kerry Harvey, has recently started receiving phone calls from strangers because they saw a fake profile that described her as a prostitute and gave out her private number.
 
Of interest to us at the Adam Smith Institute among the Facebook scandals is the recent alcohol ban in Torbay due to a "night of mayhem" beach party that is being advertised via Facebook’s event application. When officials caught wind of the event, which has over 7,000 confirmed attendees, they declared that as soon as the location is specified all pubs, bars and retailers in that area will be banned from selling alcohol.

Shutting down a region during the busy summer holiday weekends will be very damaging to business. And it's not just this constraint on trade that is worrisome. Intervention of this scope by the government is unexpected and unwarranted. While there are legitimate concerns for safety, forcing businesses to shut down a key aspect of their commerce is not the way to handle it. By all means be prepared to have extra security at hand or keep the number of people at a reasonable capacity, but imposing regulations on businesses that have every right to operate seems an unacceptable form of intervention. It sets a dangerous precedent.

More on the unveiling of that statue (what do you mean "which statue"?). And more here and photos too!

It's possible to be over-enamoured with Bob Geldof at times, then he comes up with a speech like this:

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

On the subject of liberty: looks like the War on Drugs is still failing.

The government running databases of the citizenry doesn't seem to work all that well either.

Amartya Sen got his Nobel in part for pointing this out: famines often aren't about a shortage of food, they're about a shortage of purchasing power.

Yes, we really do need to use cost benefit analysis in measuring matters environmental.

And finally, protecting the American mud hut building industry.

These figures relate to the US rather than the UK, but I think it's likely that the effects of Tesco's and China have been similar:

Inflation differentials between the rich and poor dramatically change our view of the evolution of inequality in America. Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 1994 – 2005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged. And the reason is just as dramatic as the result. Why has inflation for the poor been lower than that for the rich? In large part it is because of China and Wal-Mart!

Part of the reasoning is that the richer you are the more of your income is used to purchase services rather than goods: and goods are more likely to be traded internationally and thus to have come down in price as a result of globalisation. There is also another point, Baumol's one that we would expect services to be rising in price relative to manufactures anyway, given the difference in the way that labour productivity can be increased in each.

These different inflation rates do, as mentioned, have an effect on inequality. This means that once again we should not be measuring inequality as a function of income, rather as a matter of consumption. If we do measure that inequality correctly, it's effects on the actual living standards of real people, then we find that globalisation isn't increasing it at all.

Which leads to an interesting thought about that Joseph Rowntree Foundation figure on the amount needed to be not poor in the UK. If we really let globalisation rip, if we tore down the remaining trade barriers, we might actually find that the further cheapening of goods would reduce that amount, the income necessary to reach a particular level of consumption.