One Year Anniversary

If I'm not mistaken, tomorrow I will have been blogging for a year (my first post was on September 5, 2012).  My goal was to post something almost every day for the first year and I was pretty close (I count 341 total posts over the past year).  I've gone from 0 to over 20,000 page views each month, and have enjoyed the ride.

I'm not sure I can keep up that pace for ever, but I'll keep it up as long as I enjoy it and feel like I'm having some impact.    

To recap the year, the 10 most popular posts to date are: 

Food fear mongering

What is natural food anyway?

 GMOs and crop yields

My interview with John Stossel on GMOs

Study shows GMO feed improves liver health in pigs!

What explains the difference in the the way Americans and French (and Brits) eat?

 The organic food subsidy myth

I was wrong about sustainability.  Well, sort of.

Who is to blame for obesity

Do I work for Monsanto?

One (positive) unintended consequence of obesity

An article forthcoming in the journal Health Economics paper by Dunn and Tefft finds a result I would have never considered.  If you're overweight, it takes more alcohol to make you drunk.  If you're less likely to be drunk, then you're less likely to be involved in drunk-driving accidents.  Ergo, growing obesity rates lead to fewer drunk driving accidents.  Now, I hardly think this is a sign to gain weight or booze it up, but it is interesting nonetheless.     

The abstract: 

We develop a model of alcohol consumption that incorporates the negative biological relationship between body mass and inebriation conditional on total alcohol consumption. Our model predicts that the elasticity of inebriation with respect to weight is equal to the own-price elasticity of alcohol, consistent with body mass increasing the effective price of inebriation. Given that alcohol is generally considered price inelastic, this result implies that as individuals gain weight, they consume more alcohol but become less inebriated. We test this prediction and find that driver blood alcohol content (BAC) is negatively associated with driver weight. In fatal accidents with driver BAC above 0.10, the driver was 7.8 percentage points less likely to be obese than drivers in fatal accidents that did not involve alcohol. This relationship is not explained by driver attributes (age and sex), driver behaviors (speed and seatbelt use), vehicle attributes (weight class, model year, and number of occupants), or accident context (county of accident, time of day, and day of week).

HT: Andreas Drichoutis

Experimental Auction Summer School

For the 3rd year in a row, I've had the privileged to co-teach a summer school for the University of Bologna in Italy with Rudy Nayga, Andreas Drichoutis, and Maurizio Canavari.  The topic of the school is experimental auctions, which is a method used to measure consumer preferences and study consumer behavior. 

We have a great group of students this year from Italy, Germany, Sweden, France, South Africa, China, Thailand, and the U.S, among other places.   Here are a few of us learning a bit about the history of Bologna on our day off.

We also caught a couple races at the Dino and Enzo Ferrari Autodrome race track in Imola.  After the Ferrari's and Lamborghini's cleared the track, they had an interesting race with Mini Coopers.

Today we are back at work thinking about economics, consumer behavior, food policy, and food marketing.   

My colleagues have had a good time harassing me about eating horse meat (yes, I willingly ate some two days ago and I'm pleased to say it was perfectly eatable as I've previously argued) and organics (for my latest take on that one see here), and why Americans eat differently than Europeans.  

Here's the whole group just outside the classroom:

Conservatives split over farm bill?

At Business Insider, Josh Barro discusses some interesting developments on the conservative side of the spectrum with respect to the farm bill. After discussing that some Republican members are upset with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative "think tank," for opposing farm subsidies, Barrow writes:

I'm no fan of Heritage. But here's what's maddening about this fight: Heritage is not only right about the farm subsidy issue, they're advocating a consensus view among policy experts all across the political spectrum.

and

The [Republican Study Committee]'s problem with Heritage isn't that it's trying to push the GOP too far to the right to be competitive in elections. Their problem with Heritage is that they're interfering with the GOP's effort to put special-interest politics ahead of conservative principles.

House Republicans do not actually care about free markets or cutting government. They care about pleasing their electoral constituencies and getting re-elected. Old people tend to vote Republican, which is why House Republicans have built their last two campaigns around attacking President Obama with claims he was cutting Medicare. Almost all rural areas are represented by Republicans, which is why Republicans don't want to cut farm subsidies.

Democrats are just as likely Republicans to pander to special interests.  But, I think this special issue is particularly perplexing for many conservatives.  Our research shows strong support for farm subsidies among most Americans, including rural, Republican voters.  Interestingly, those rural, Republican voters are also relatively free market and small-government oriented.  Somethings gotta give.

Does Big Farming Mean Bad Farming?

That was the subtitle of an interesting article in the Washington Post.   While I do not agree with all the premises of the article, it does a good job debunking the notion that small size is the same as sustainable. 

Size, as they say, isn’t everything. As shorthand, the big-equals-bad equation is convenient. But it obscures an inconvenient truth: Plenty of small farmers do not embrace sustainable practices — the Amish farmers I know, for example, love their pesticides — and some big farmers are creative, responsible stewards of the land. “Tony’s is a fantastic operation,” says Helene Murray, executive director of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. “And he just happens to grow a lot of corn and soybeans.”

and  

Thompson’s farm is not organic as he once dreamed it would be. Indeed, after studying the scientific literature, he finds himself mostly comfortable using genetically modified seeds. The rewards inherent in herbicide-tolerant soybeans outweigh the risks, he says. While he does have some concerns about GM corn, he says, “the prevailing technology is a good path, maybe the best available at the moment. This will change. We will learn.”

Still, Thompson has many tools to improve his farm’s environmental sustainability.

In my experience, Thompson is not all that unusual as a farmer - most are continuously trying to find ways to make food more abundant while making sure they leave healthy vibrant farmland for their kids.