Monthly Archives: July 2009

Urban Farming

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This idea is hilarious here in Iowa, where we wonder if some city folk have ever seen real farms. “The reality is that farming is an inherently space-intensive enterprise,” as even Manhattan native Matt Yglesias can recognize. 86 percent of Iowa is farmland (down from over 90 percent just a decade ago). That’s a bit shy of 30 million acres. That’s about 2000 Manhattans. The mind-blowing productivity growth in agriculture over the 20th century stands as one of the great achievements of human history. It involved immense strides in pest and weed control, farm machinery, bioengineering, and economies of scale. All this has made it possible to feed a rapidly increasing population with decreasing amounts of land and labor.

(Aside… No doubt Happy Planet Index-type people in 1909 were pointing out the physical impossibility of our one finite planet supporting 7 billion people.)

It’s nice to have a garden. But didn’t seem nice when I was a kid, when my family had a huge garden plot (a quarter acre, maybe?) on the property of a farmer who went to our church. That much garden in a city would seem like some pretty serious urban farming. Set in the vast scale of cultivated central Iowa, it seemed like what it was: almost nothing. Later, as a teenager, I detasseled corn and walked beans. If a field is big enough, and the curve is right, from the middle you can’t see anything else.

If not for the massive subsidies it receives, the percentage of land under cultivation in Iowa would decline even more rapidly than it has. But it would remain one of the best places in the world for growing stuff. An unsubsidized Iowa would grow a different mix of stuff, and would traffic in a different mix of animals. Greater heterogeneity would reduce some economies of scale, but the scale of the actual farming–the kind that keeps humanity fed–will probably remain inconceivable to many rooftop basil growers.

UPDATE: People we’re  justly complaining about the junk chart. It’s the only one I could quickly find that had the time-scale I wanted. Here’s a better one that goes back just 60 years.

Most Unexpected Comparison of the Day

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From Arnold Kling:

I worry that today’s equivalent of Robert McNamara is Peter Orszag, who I fear is poised to do for our health care system what McNamara did for Vietnam.

I suspect this is a bit overheated, but the fact that Arnold’s book, Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, is so outstanding makes this tough to simply dismiss.

Anyway, my similar but less dramatically stated worry, which I expressed in my latest column for The Week, is that the reforms currently on offer take the form they do because of Democratic dreams of a single-payer system, but such reforms, once they make contact with political reality, will likely produce a U.S. system that is even more of an convoluted, unsustainable mess. I think Princeton’s Paul Starr is spot on about the politics:

Some supporters favor this approach [i.e., a new "insurance exchange" offering a "public plan"] because they see it as a step toward single-payer, which is exactly what the opponents fear. Squeezed by the public plan, providers might raise prices for patients insured by private plans, sending those plans into a death spiral.

But a Congress that is not about to adopt single-payer is unlikely to adopt a Trojan horse for single-payer. Some compromise proposals — such as Sen. Charles Schumer’s — offer a second model, calling for a “level playing field” between private insurers and the public plan, including limits on the latter’s ability to flex its purchasing muscle. But tight controls on its bargaining power might doom it entirely if it faces severe adverse selection.

Here’s the delicate political problem: Depending on the rules, the entire system could tip one way or the other. Unconstrained, the public plan could drive private insurers out of business, setting off a political backlash not just from the industry but from much of the public. Over-constrained, the public plan could go into a death spiral itself as it becomes a dumping ground for high-risk enrollees, its rates rise, and it loses its appeal to the public at large. Creating a fair system of public-private competition — giving the public plan just enough power to offset its likely higher risks — wouldn’t be easy even if it were up to neutral experts, which it isn’t.

FUBAR, as McNamara’s pawns would say.

Why Can't My Team Do Whatever It Wants!?

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Ezra Klein is annoyed with the Obama adminstration’s pusillanimous pussyfooting. Even that foul-mouthed hard-guy Rahm Emanuel is a squish these days. Why are the Democratic powers-that-be willing even to entertain the lame “trigger” public plan, which kicks in only if private plans fail to hit certain benchmarks for performance. Klein:

What Emanuel is saying here, however, is that in 2009, when Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate — and have larger margins than Republicans ever did in the latter two — that they are interested in settling on the same policy compromise [behind Medicare Part D, a product of a Republican president and Congress]: a weak public plan that would be activated if certain conditions aren’t met by private industry. That’s a bit weird. Weren’t elections supposed to have consequences?

Policy follows public opinion, more or less. And the public hasn’t really changed much since 2003. This is something partisans have to learn and relearn again and again. If a policy was unpopular before a change in the party controlling government, it will probably remain unpopular after. And politicians like getting reelected. It’s pretty simply, really.

Bush couldn’t reform Social Security because his plan was unpopular. Obama won’t be able to deliver a health-care bill ideological Democrats want, because what they want is unpopular and legislators know it. So Congressional Democrats want something they can cast as “victory” while doing nothing that could hurt their noble struggle for ongoing political self-preservation. Right now, strongly ideological media liberals like Klein have to decide whether they’re going to (a) act as enforcers, sending the signal to the powers-that-be that they will vocally and publicly count a “trigger” plan as a pathetic failure, or (b) sigh and prepare to declare whatever legislation passes a profound victory for ordinary Americans that shows just how great Democrats are.

But I imagine this one’s a tough call. For lots of ideological Democrats, the point of preserving political capital is to secure real universal health care. So I expect to see a fair amount of (potentially counterproductive) enforcer rhetoric.

Health-Care Reform Discussion Question

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Does the fact that the United States does not now have a system of universal health care, despite more than a half-century of strenous legislative efforts by the Democratic Party, imply that a U.S. system of universal health care would produce results significantly different than that of countries that have had such a system for decades?

Pithier: If the U.S. suddenly got the Canadian-style system that majorities of Americans have traditionally resisted, would Americans start acting like Canadians?

The Poor but Unusually Chipper and Long-Lived Index

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The Happy Planet Index is an ideologically rigged ranking released each year by the New Economics Foundation as part of their fight against the evils of economic growth. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is based on the false assumption that it is physically impossible for the entire population of Earth to achieve OECD-levels of material wealth. I suspect NEF sort of hopes media outlets will misunderstand what their index is an index of, as they’ve chosen a rather misleading name for a ranking of countries according to this formula:

Nevertheless, here are some of the headlines:

Australia Not Home to the Good Life – Sydney Morning Herald
Costa Rica: World’s happiest place – Xinhua
Happy Costa Ricans top global list for the good life – Financial Times
Costa Rica tops list of ‘happiest’ nations – CNN

I do like the quotes around CNN’s ‘happiest’. So, anyway, what is the Happy Planet Index and index of?! Who can say!? Not journalists, who can be counted on to read no further than the press release. If one takes a moment to poke around the website for the Index, they do get around to saying: “The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world,” which is a help. But they should put this up front, or change the name of the damn thing.

Anyway, so what’s this “ecological footprint”?

The ecological footprint of an individual is a measure of the amount of land required to provide for all their resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land required to sequester (absorb) all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume. This figure is expressed in units of ‘global hectares’. The advantage of this approach is that it is possible to estimate the total amount of productive hectares available on the planet. Dividing this by the world’s total population, we can calculate a global per capita figure on the basis that everyone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources. Using the latest footprint methodology, resulting in the data in the Global Footprint Network’s Ecological Footprint Atlas, the figure is 2.1 global hectares. This implies that a person using up to 2.1 global hectares is, in these terms at least, using their fair share of the world’s resources – one-planet living.

Don’t ask me why they think this makes sense. (Artifical trees!) In short it seems to mean that countries get docked for containing lots of people wealthy enough to buy lots of things.

Let’s move on to alpha and beta. What do they mean? NEF doesn’t tell you on the website. But if you diligently hunt around the pdf of the report, it is possible to discover Appendix 2, where it is finally revealed what the Happy Planet Index is an index of:

… a constant (α) is added to the ecological footprint to ensure that its coefficient of variance across the entire dataset matches the coefficient of variance for HLY across the dataset. In effect, this serves to dampen variation in the footprint. Once this is done, HLY can be divided by the adjusted footprint to produce an efficiency measure. This is then multiplied by a second constant (β) such that a country achieving a maximum life satisfaction score of 10, and life expectancy of 85, whilst living within its global fair share of resources (one-planet living), would score 100.

They apparently want to dampen the effect of the footprint to avoid the embarrassment of miserably impoverished countries “winning” simply due to the fact that they’ve got antibiotics but are too poor to buy coal.

It is well known in the happiness biz that Latin American countries tend to do better in terms of self-reported life satisfaction than their economic and political fundamentals would predict–in much the same way East Asian countries do worse. Given that the index strongly penalizes wealth, it’s not much of a surprise that the winner would be a poor-but-unusually-chipper Latin American country that also has a suprisingly good average lifespan.

Here is an article on Costa Rican longevity.

Here is my annoyed response to the 2006 index.

What do you make of this claim, just thrown out there in NEF’s explanation of its notion of ecological footprint: “[E]veryone is entitled to the same amount of the planet’s natural resources”?

The Public Option vs. Public Reason

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Here’s my latest column for The Week, in which I try to understand why the health care reform debate has had the same general dynamic since forever. In particular, I want to explain the transparent bullshit surrounding the “public option.” I wanted to be able to explain, for example, why Atrios says things like this:

Hopefully Chuck Schumer isn’t just blowing smoke and there will be a [good] public plan in the final bill. Without it there really isn’t much point to any of this. The public plan is the point. [empasis added.]

And the point of the public plan is what? To put competitive pressure on private plan providers, thereby controlling costs? Sure, because when you listen to left-leaning speakers talk about health-care reform in front of left-leaning audiences, they just won’t shut up about how important it is to make sure consumers have more choices in the health plan market and about all the great ideas for making private-sector health plans more competitive! What’s the point of new health reform if we don’t end up with a better Aetna–one of those “skimmers who provide no useful service”?

For more public plan boredom, here I am puzzling over the point of it all with Ezra Klein.

Below we have a less circumspect Ezra Klein explaining the point of it to a friendly audience. (FYI, Some people might wish to point out that the following was recorded last summer before the elections, and so is really totally irrelevant, since it does not pertain to the strategy of any actual health legislation. So here’s the larger context for Ezra’s remarks, in case you’re interested in evaluating that claim.)

And here’s where the long Jacob Hacker quote in my column comes from:

Finally, here’s my summary of the ruse behind our Social Security system, which I think is helpful in understanding what’s going on now in the health-care reform debate. Here’s my full Cato paper on Social Security, which goes on to make the case for a politics that takes the ideals of public reason and democratic transparency seriously.

Keep an eye out for the following dynamic in the debate. (1) Republicans push hard on the idea that a public option is a “trojan horse” or “back door” to single-payer. (2) Democrats loudly deny with exasperated, eye-rolling annoyance that the public option has anything whatsoever to do with backing into single-payer. (3) Republicans say, Well, okay. Then I guess you won’t mind structuring the public plan in a way that will help ensure that it competes with, but can’t use implicit and explicit government subsidies to crowd out, private plans. (4) Democrats freak out about a “neutered” or “watered-down” public plan. It just so happens, they say, that in order to work–to improve the quality of care and keep costs from rising–a government-run plan has to be set up in exactly the way you’d want to set it up if you were trying to crowd out the rest of the market. But we aren’t trying to do that!!! (5) Republicans: Are too! (6) Democrats: Are not! (7) Republicans: Are too! (8) Democrats: Are not! ….

For the philosophically inclined, here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on publicity.