Quotulatiousness

June 6, 2011

Oxfam’s latest report a Curate’s Egg

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Tim Worstall points out the good bits first:

Oxfam’s latest campaign, “Grow”, seems so lovely and cuddly that to criticise it is almost like torturing puppies. What could be wrong with trying to feed the hungry and thus make the world a better place? Alas, if wishes were kings we could all be monarchs for the day and what’s wrong with the campaign is not the initial wish but the list of damn fool things it intends to do.

Praise first: Oxfam is quite right that there are several entirely stupid things that are being done about food currently. The first and most obvious is the biofuels nonsense: food should go into people, or at least animals we can eat, not into cars. But the European Union has insisted that 10 per cent (to rise to 15 per cent) of all petrol/diesel must be made from plants instead. Oxfam seems to think that this will reduce emissions: despite every scientist worthy of his slide rule pointing out that growing and processing the plants emits more than the oil being replaced.

Another policy we should stop yesterday is the subsidy of the rich world’s farmers. Can’t make a profit growing what people want to eat? Then stop and do something else. We say this to car makers, to buggy whip makers and there’s nothing about wading in cow shit that makes farming any different. New Zealand did it and farming profits went up.

Well, that’s about it for the good:

And then the report goes entirely doolally over commodities speculation, over futures and options. One of the points the report makes (in one of the good bits) is that price volatility is damaging both to producers and consumers. So we’d like to have some method of dampening such volatility. At which point it insists that this means we must lessen speculation in foodstuffs. But, umm, speculation in foodstuffs is what dampens price volatility in foodstuffs.

If any Oxfam type happens to read this by mischance, here’s why. To make money in commodities you have to buy low and sell high. When you buy low you prevent prices from falling further, in fact you raise them: maybe only a little depending on how much of the market you’re buying, but raise them you do. Good, so we’ve just reduced the slumping of prices which do so much damage to farmers. When you sell high you’re increasing the supply onto the market at a time of shortage. This reduces the price volatility at the high end which does such damage to consumers. So, our speculator making money reduces price volatility: it’s only the speculator who buys high and sells low who increases it and as he goes bust very quickly we don’t need to worry about him.

The term in the headline explained.

June 3, 2011

QotD: New York City, the capital city of Nanny State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The lowest blow in City Hall’s war on wicked food is its recurring efforts to ban the buying of fizzy pop with food stamps. In an initiative that could easily be titled ‘No Coke for poor black folk’, the Bloombergers have sought federal permission to prevent welfare recipients from using government cash to purchase fizzy drinks. The killjoyism of this campaign, the Scrooge-infused miserabilism of it, is astounding. City Hall has launched an advertising campaign demonising sugary drinks as one of the great evils of our time, and its internal email correspondence about the campaign, which was leaked to the New York Times, shines a rather harsh light on the evidence-lite nastiness of the modern-day nudge-and-nanny industry. Scientific advisers emailed Thomas Farley, Bloomberg’s overactive health adviser, to say that the ad’s claim that drinking pop can make you gain 10 or 15 pounds is ‘simplistic’ and ‘exaggerated’. Overriding them, Farley responded: ‘I think what people fear is getting fat, so we need some statement about what is bad about consuming so many calories.’ Who needs evidence when you have fear? The ad shows human fat gurgling from the top of a can of soda. One City Hall employee could barely conceal his excitement: it is ‘deliciously disgusting’, he said in one of the emails that was leaked.

‘Deliciously disgusting’ — that just about sums up how New York’s new rulers view the huddled masses of this extravagant city. In a complete reversal of the traditional democratic relationship, Bloomberg and co don’t consider it their duty to mirror the desires and outlook of those who elected them. They want to remake New Yorkers as models of what they consider to be healthy citizenship. Much of this stuff comes from Thomas Farley, who is championed by both Bloomberg and the liberal media as an admirably thin jogging aficionado who believes in the power of the nudge to remould the citizenry. He is a ‘superman’, the New York Times recently gushed, who has ‘grasshopper-like legs’ (eurgh), a result of the fact that ‘he exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette’ (boring). This fanboy fluff piece was illustrated with a picture of Farley leading a workout of not-so-thin black New Yorkers, his grasshopper-like legs just as sure a sign of his superiority as his white skin would have been 100 years ago.

Brendan O’Neill, “The men who killed New York”, The Spectator, 2011-06-04

May 14, 2011

“Fair trade” coffee may make you feel virtuous, but it harms poor coffee producers

Filed under: Africa, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Lots of people are scrupulous about selecting coffee that boasts that it’s “Fair Trade”, implying that other coffee is less ethical and more damaging to third world economies. This may be a dangerous misconception:

Saturday, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

“Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.”

How could an organization devoted to producing better results for poor coffee producers make their situation worse?

For starters, it discriminates against the very poorest of the world’s coffee farmers, most of whom are African, by requiring them to pay high certification fees. These fees — one of the factors that the German study cites as contributing to the farmers’ impoverishment — are especially perverse, given that the majority of Third World farmers are not only too poor to pay the certification fees, they’re also too poor to pay for the fertilizers and the pesticides that would disqualify coffee as certified organic.

Even worse, there’s also imposition of conditions on the farmers which violates local customs:

Most merchants of certified coffees are aware of these contradictions, but most won’t be aware of other problems in the certification business. For Third World farmers to qualify as fair-trade producers, and thus obtain higher prices for their coffee, farmers must join co-operatives. In some Third World societies, farmers readily accept the compromises of communal enterprise. In others, they balk. In patriarchal African societies, for example, the small coffee farm is the family business, its management a source of pride to the male head of the household. Joining a co-operative, and being told when and what and how to plant entails loss of dignity.

The cultural imperialist isn’t dead — he’s merely changed organizations.

May 12, 2011

Goar: Here’s why the poor voted Conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

In another dispatch from an alternate universe where the Toronto Star isn’t the house newsletter for the Liberal party, Carol Goar tells poverty activists why the people they agitate for voted for Conservatives in the last election:

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

• People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

• What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

• It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.

Of course, her message not only won’t be heeded, it’s going to mark her as an apostate to be spurned and ridiculed by all right-thinking intellectuals — especially those in the poverty activist ranks. She may never lunch in this town again.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

April 26, 2011

Archaeology as a form of collectivism

Filed under: Americas, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

L. Neil Smith was watching an old archaeology show on Netflix the other day:

What this otherwise interesting and enjoyable documentary on the early Mayans whined about — even more than Third World agricultural techniques — was the fact that descendants of these ancient people were venturing out in the thulies without government approval or, more importantly, academic sanction, finding pyramids and other structures abandoned by their ancestors before tenured treasure-hunters could, burrowing into them and laying claim to their inheritance, which they then used to supplement the crappy income that comes of subsistence farming.

These people were constantly referred to as “looters” by the documentary’s writers and the featured academics, who, unbelievably, begrudge them — and their hungry children — what Indiana Jones’ girlfriend Marian Ravenwood accurately called “little bits of junk”, a phrase that I firmly believe should be tattooed across every academic archaeologist’s torso simply to remind him of the proper priorities in life.

Backwards, so he can see it in the bathroom mirror.

Or upside-down, across his stomach.

Robert Bakker of hotblooded dinosaur fame has criticized proposed laws that make amateur paleontology a crime, pointing out that most good finds begin with non-professionals stumbling across interesting new materials. Unfortunately, many such laws are already in place for archaeology, with government, in effect, preclaiming everything under the topsoil before it’s discovered, a clear-cut case of underground Marxism.

You often hear supporters of such laws snort, “That ought to be in a museum!” when they spot some desirable something on a collector’s mantlepiece. But isn’t it infinitely better off there, than hidden in a museum basement where most “nationalized” artifacts and fossils end up? And given the miserable track record socialism has earned in every other field of human endeavor, isn’t it socialists who belong in a museum?

Believe me when I attest that archaeology is important to me for many reasons and has been since I was about five years old. Much like paleontology, it tells us where we are by showing us where we’ve been. Sometimes it explains how we got this way and warns us of mistakes we shouldn’t make again. And it’s just plain splendiferously mysterious and interesting — like an old adventure radio serial. My very lovely and talented wife is preparing herself even now for a second career in archaeology. She’d like to be curator of a private museum in the Southwest.

What fun we’re going to have!

But not only is there nothing under the ground worth depriving some poor farmer’s family of a meal, of arresting, jailing, possibly killing him over, there is yet another extremely important ethical consideration.

Or two.

What, precisely, is the moral distinction between a pot-hunting farmer, on the one hand, digging into a hill and extracting something for profit that will improve his life and the lives of his kids, and a college professor, on the other hand, from some faraway country, doing exactly the same thing for profit in the form of tenure and scientific prestige?

April 25, 2011

Grameen Bank cleared of “irregularities”, but Yunus will not be re-instated

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

The Bangladeshi government has completed their investigation into financial irregularities at microfinance specialist Grameen Bank, but the founder, Muhammad Yunus, will not be brought back:

Yunus, 70, was dismissed by a central bank order — upheld by the high court and supreme court — on the grounds that he had overstayed in his position and refused requests to quit.

Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize, set up Grameen, which means village in Bengali, and had been the bank’s managing director since 2000.

Lauded at home and abroad by politicians and financiers as the “banker to the poor”, he has been under attack by the government since late last year, after a Norwegian documentary alleged the bank was dodging taxes.

Yunus denied any wrongdoing and a Norwegian government investigation later also cleared him of any malpractice.

April 5, 2011

Grameen bank founder loses final appeal

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

The founder of the revolutionary micro-capital Grameen Bank has been removed from position of managing director:

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has lost his final appeal in Bangladesh’s Supreme Court against his sacking from the Grameen micro-finance bank he founded.

The court upheld the decision by the central bank to remove him from office.

The bank said Professor Yunus had been improperly appointed while past retirement age.

But Professor Yunus said the attempt to remove him from the bank had been politically motivated.

The Grameen Bank has pioneered micro-lending to the poor by giving small loans to millions of borrowers.

July 9, 2010

Matt Ridley on the onrush of DOOM!

Filed under: Environment, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’

And as we all know, it all came true . . .

Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.

May 20, 2010

QotD: Recruiting protesters for the G20 in Toronto

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:07

Are you a woman, person of colour, indigenous person, poor person, queer, trans-gendered or disabled?

If so, the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization team assumes you must sympathize with civic disruption, lawbreaking and maybe even a little good old fashioned terror. They want your help. They’re mobilizing to disrupt the gathering of democratically elected politicians who are meeting in Toronto next month and they assume — just because you’re a woman or a disabled person — that you must hate civilized society as much as they do.

That’s their logo, above.

The CN Tower, torn from its roots, used to stab the G20 like a knife in the heart. Gee, isn’t that inclusive, co-operative and non-violent. Hard to imagine anything more likely to attract widespread public support than an image like that. Hey, women and indiginous people, wanna stab some white guys? How about you, queers and indigenous people? Because we here at the Community Mobilization team take for granted that you must be as twisted, angry, vengeful and keening for violence as we are.

Kelly McParland, “Anti-G20 activists want your help in spreading the hate”, National Post, 2010-05-20

May 11, 2010

A quick spin through Canada’s refugee program

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

An interesting article at the Montreal Gazette looking at the current refugee system in Canada:

Want to know why Canada’s refugee system is a shambolic mess that leaves claimants in limbo for years while bleeding taxpayers for uncounted billions?

It’s not just because anyone from anywhere in the world can claim asylum in Canada simply by showing up at the border or in one of our airports and lying, although that helps.

It’s not the usual suspects, either. It’s the review process that is severely broken, encouraging abusers and discouraging legitimate claimants. The time it takes for an applicant to go through the process is breathtaking:

Average wait, with local taxpayers picking up half the tab for the welfare on their property taxes (the rest comes out of your provincial taxes): 19 months. [If turned down,] they can apply for leave to appeal to the Federal Court.

Average wait for a court date: four to six months.

If a risk assessment is required they wait another nine to 24 months. They can also return to federal court for another go, waiting yet another four to six months.

On welfare. For most of the world’s poor, “that’s pretty attractive,” Kenney points out.

If the courts still say no to our Swiss claimant the alleged refugee can appeal for admittance to Canada under Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds, which takes at least six more months. If they lose that they get another crack at federal court, waiting four to six more months.

On top of the 12,000 claimants allowed in under current refugee rules, another 40,000 try to get into the country every year. Nearly 6 in 10 of these claimants are refused refugee status by the courts, but the number of cases increases faster than the applications are processed. The current (admitted) backlog for applicants is 61,000 and growing. An unknown number have just abandoned the process but (in many or most cases) haven’t left the country: they’re underground, hoping not to get caught.

The federal government is hoping to pass reforms to the refugee process, raising the number of legitimate refugees allowed in annually, but cutting down on bogus claimants earlier in the process, with an eye to both improving fairness and cutting the costs of supporting the current system.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

April 13, 2010

Expect to read more stories like this

Filed under: Britain — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Britain’s welfare support system was originally designed to provide temporary assistance — at barely-above-survival-levels — to workers and their families until the primary wage-earner could find new work. It wasn’t intended to provide this kind of support:

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Hard to blame ’em, really: if you can get substantially more through welfare support than you can by working, what’s the incentive to keep that job? Once upon a time, it was shame that would provide that extra spur to keep people in marginal economic circumstances from claiming welfare or other social benefits, as friends and neighbours would disdain them. These days? They’re probably envied by the next-door and down-the-street folks still dumb enough to get jobs.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer — not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes.

But proof that material wealth does not translate directly into happiness, the Daveys still yearn for things they can’t yet have. But at least they’re not feeling burdened by feelings of guilt or shame:

She added: ‘I don’t feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there.

‘If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.’

[. . .]

Mrs Davey, who spends £160 a week at Tesco, says she does not intend to stop at eight children. Her target is 14.

And she adds: ‘I’ve always wanted a big family — no one can tell me how many kids I can have whether I’m working or not.’

It’s true: in spite of all the other intrusions into everyday life by the British and European bureaucracies, there are still things they can’t tell you.

H/T to Jon (my former virtual landlord) for the link.

July 22, 2009

Tinkering with “the engine of poverty”

Filed under: Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Jon sent me this link with the comment “Don’t know if the article is bloggable, but I liked the opening salvo”:

Natural disasters can cause enormous human misery, and require massive relief operations, to provide food and medical aid. To cause serious, long-term, grinding poverty, however, you need government involvement.

I have to agree with Jon, the opening to the post is quite good. After digging into some of the examples (the Ukraine under Stalin, Ethiopia in the 70s-80’s, and the US experiment with the “Great Society”), the first point at which an apolitical or undecided reader would say “Now, hold on there . . .”

Of course, the meaning of “poverty” has changed a lot over the years. The poor of the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in much of the rest of the world. They also have a higher standard of living than the filthy rich of a hundred years ago, or the crowned royalty of the centuries before that. This improved standard of living has very little to do with the government.

Poverty is something any civilized society wants to reduce and then eliminate, but it never seems to happen. The reason for that, aside from the vast amounts of time, effort, money, and resources being wasted through inefficiency, incompetence, and bureaucratic delay, is that the problem cannot be solved in most countries by definition. Most of the time when people use the term “poverty” they mean relative poverty. For most of the western world, absolute poverty affects a vanishingly small number of people (it’s not gone, but it’s lower than it’s ever been for any civilization in history). Relative poverty, however, is usually linked to a formula (like a set percentage of the average family income), which means that even as individuals’ and families’ financial situations improve, they will still be proportionally lower than the average (which will have improved over the same relative period of time). Statistically, no improvement will appear.

Popular belief, shaped by the official statistics, is that many people live in dire circumstances. Some do, but most who are technically below the poverty line are doing better than the average family from a few decades back. Proportionally, they’re still below the line, but from the standpoint of access to food, shelter, health care, and transportation, they’re better off.

If you are motivated by a humanitarian desire to help the poor – the ostensible mission of much of the modern liberal state – you must realize that nothing helps them more than the increased standard of living and economic opportunity brought about by the private sector.

However, the public perception is quite different: that it is the modern liberal state that has made these improvements against the active resistance of the private sector.

Here, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between reality and the perception of most voters:

The value of every wasted government dollar must be judged by what free enterprise could have accomplished with it.

Most westerners think that General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG are the perfect exemplars of the free enterprise system, replacing the earlier capitalist icons of Enron and Worldcom.

When you say “capitalist”, most people hear a very different word than the one you’re using. “Free enterprise”, to far too many people, means vast corporations with dozens of legislators (or even legislatures) in their back pockets, using their tame politicians to obtain tax credits, advantageous labour codes, or “eminent domain-ing” their way through neighborhoods. The “private sector” decodes to “rich, secretive plutocrats”.

What you say and what they hear bear very little resemblance to one another. You’re not speaking the same language.

Then, the touching statement of hope:

If the six long months of this Administration serve any constructive purpose, it should be permanently dissolving the illusion that a small group of political appointees can predict what the economy will do, and control it to produce an improved outcome.

Most people, in times of stress, look for that man on the white horse. Most Americans still think they found one.

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