food

Israel, Palestine, and the World Bank’s disappointing priorities

PNRJ current events, development economics, inequality, macroeconomics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 12 JDN 2460261

Israel and Palestine are once again at war. (There are a disturbing number of different years in which one could have written that sentence.) The BBC has a really nice section of their website dedicated to reporting on various facets of the war. The New York Times also has a section on it, but it seems a little tilted in favor of Israel.

This time, it started with a brutal attack by Hamas, and now Israel has—as usual—overreacted and retaliated with a level of force that is sure to feed the ongoing cycle of extremism. All across social media I see people wanting me to take one side or the other, often even making good points: “Hamas slaughters innocents” and “Israel is a de facto apartheid state” are indeed both important points I agree with. But if you really want to know my ultimate opinion, it’s that this whole thing is fundamentally evil and stupid because human beings are suffering and dying over nothing but lies. All religions are false, most of them are evil, and we need to stop killing each other over them.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are both morally wrong insofar as they involve harming, abusing or discriminating against actual human beings. Let people dress however they want, celebrate whatever holidays they want, read whatever books they want. Even if their beliefs are obviously wrong, don’t hurt them if they aren’t hurting anyone else. But both Judaism and Islam—and Christianity, and more besides—are fundamentally false, wrong, evil, stupid, and detrimental to the advancement of humanity.

That’s the thing that so much of the public conversation is too embarrassed to say; we’re supposed to pretend that they aren’t fighting over beliefs that obviously false. We’re supposed to respect each particular flavor of murderous nonsense, and always find some other cause to explain the conflict. It’s over culture (what culture?); it’s over territory (whose territory?); it’s a retaliation for past conflict (over what?). We’re not supposed to say out loud that all of this violence ultimately hinges upon people believing in nonsense. Even if the conflict wouldn’t disappear overnight if everyone suddenly stopped believing in God—and are we sure it wouldn’t? Let’s try it—it clearly could never have begun, if everyone had started with rational beliefs in the first place.

But I don’t really want to talk about that right now. I’ve said enough. Instead I want to talk about something a little more specific, something less ideological and more symptomatic of systemic structural failures. Something you might have missed amidst the chaos.

The World Bank recently released a report on the situation focused heavily on the looming threat of… higher oil prices. (And of course there has been breathless reporting from various outlets regarding a headline figure of $150 per barrel which is explicitly stated in the report as an unlikely “worst-case scenario”.)

There are two very big reasons why I found this dismaying.


The first, of course, is that there are obviously far more important concerns here than commodity prices. Yes, I know that this report is part of an ongoing series of Commodity Markets Outlook reports, but the fact that this is the sort of thing that the World Bank has ongoing reports about is also saying something important about the World Bank’s priorities. They release monthly commodity forecasts and full Commodity Markets Outlook reports that come out twice a year, unlike the World Development Reports that only come out once a year. The World Bank doesn’t release a twice-annual Conflict Report or a twice-annual Food Security Report. (Even the FAO, which publishes an annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, also publishes a State of Agricultural Marketsreport just as often.)

The second is that, when reading the report, one can clearly tell that whoever wrote it thinks that rising oil and gas prices are inherently bad. They keep talking about all of these negative consequences that higher oil prices could have, and seem utterly unaware of the really enormous upside here: We may finally get a chance to do something about climate change.

You see, one of the most basic reasons why we haven’t been able to fix climate change is that oil is too damn cheap. Its market price has consistently failed to reflect its actual costs. Part of that is due to oil subsidies around the world, which have held the price lower than it would be even in a free market; but most of it is due to the simple fact that pollution and carbon emissions don’t cost money for the people who produce them, even though they do cost the world.

Fortunately, wind and solar power are also getting very cheap, and are now at the point where they can outcompete oil and gas for electrical power generation. But that’s not enough. We need to remove oil and gas from everything: heating, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation. And that is far easier to do if oil and gas suddenly become more expensive and so people are forced to stop using them.

Now, granted, many of the downsides in that report are genuine: Because oil and gas are such vital inputs to so many economic processes, it really is true that making them more expensive will make lots of other things more expensive, and in particular could increase food insecurity by making farming more expensive. But if that’s what we’re concerned about, we should be focusing on that: What policies can we use to make sure that food remains available to all? And one of the best things we could be doing toward that goal is finding ways to make agriculture less dependent on oil.

By focusing on oil prices instead, the World Bank is encouraging the world to double down on the very oil subsidies that are holding climate policy back. Even food subsides—which certainly have their own problems—would be an obviously better solution, and yet they are barely mentioned.

In fact, if you actually read the report, it shows that fears of food insecurity seem unfounded: Food prices are actually declining right now. Grain prices in particular seem to be falling back down remarkably quickly after their initial surge when Russia invaded Ukraine. Of course that could change, but it’s a really weird attitude toward the world to see something good and respond with, “Yes, but it might change!” This is how people with anxiety disorders (and I would know) think—which makes it seem as though much of the economic policy community suffers from some kind of collective equivalent of an anxiety disorder.

There also seems to be a collective sense that higher prices are always bad. This is hardly just a World Bank phenomenon; on the contrary, it seems to pervade all of economic thought, including the most esteemed economists, the most powerful policymakers, and even most of the general population of citizens. (The one major exception seems to be housing, where the sense is that higher prices are always good—even when the world is in a chronic global housing shortage that leaves millions homeless.) But prices can be too low or too high. And oil prices are clearly, definitely too low. Prices should reflect the real cost of production—all the real costs of production. It should cost money to pollute other people’s air.

In fact I think the whole report is largely a nothingburger: Oil prices haven’t even risen all that much so far—we’re still at $80 per barrel last I checked—and the one thing that is true about the so-called Efficient Market Hypothesis is that forecasting future prices is a fool’s errand. But it’s still deeply unsettling to see such intelligent, learned experts so clearly panicking over the mere possibility that there could be a price change which would so obviously be good for the long-term future of humanity.

There is plenty more worth saying about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in particular what sort of constructive policy solutions we might be able to find that would actually result in any kind of long-term peace. I’m no expert on peace negotiations, and frankly I admit it would probably be a liability that if I were ever personally involved in such a negotiation, I’d be tempted to tell both sides that they are idiots and fanatics. (The headline the next morning: “Israeli and Palestinian Delegates Agree on One Thing: They Hate the US Ambassador”.)

The World Bank could have plenty to offer here, yet so far they’ve been too focused on commodity prices. Their thinking is a little too much ‘bank’ and not enough ‘world’.

It is a bit ironic, though also vaguely encouraging, that there are those within the World Bank itself who recognize this problem: Just a few weeks ago Ajay Banga gave a speech to the World Bank about “a world free of poverty on a livable planet”.

Yes. Those sound like the right priorities. Now maybe you could figure out how to turn that lip service into actual policy.

Why is our diet so unhealthy?

PNRJ cognitive science, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457447

One of the most baffling facts about the world, particularly to a development economist, is that the leading causes of death around the world broadly cluster into two categories: Obesity, in First World countries, and starvation, in Third World countries. At first glance, it seems like the rich are eating too much and there isn’t enough left for the poor.

Yet in fact it’s not quite so simple as that, because in fact obesity is most common among the poor in First World countries, and in Third World countries obesity rates are rising rapidly and co-existing with starvation. It is becoming recognized that there are many different kinds of obesity, and that a past history of starvation is actually a major risk factor in future obesity.

Indeed, the really fundamental problem is malnutrition—people are not necessarily eating too much or too little, they are eating the wrong things. So, my question is: Why?

It is widely thought that foods which are nutritious are also unappetizing, and conversely that foods which are delicious are unhealthy. There is a clear kernel of truth here, as a comparison of Brussels sprouts versus ice cream will surely indicate. But this is actually somewhat baffling. We are an evolved organism; one would think that natural selection would shape us so that we enjoy foods which are good for us and avoid foods which are bad for us.

I think it did, actually; the problem is, we have changed our situation so drastically by means of culture and technology that evolution hasn’t had time to catch up. We have evolved significantly since the dawn of civilization, but we haven’t had any time to evolve since one event in particular: The Green Revolution. Indeed, many people are still alive today who were born while the Green Revolution was still underway.

The Green Revolution is the culmination of a long process of development in agriculture and industrialization, but it would be difficult to overstate its importance as an epoch in the history of our species. We now have essentially unlimited food.

Not literally unlimited, of course; we do still need land, and water, and perhaps most notably energy (oil-driven machines are a vital part of modern agriculture). But we can produce vastly more food than was previously possible, and food supply is no longer a binding constraint on human population. Indeed, we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. People who say that some new agricultural technology will end world hunger don’t understand what world hunger actually is. Food production is not the problem—distribution of wealth is the problem.

I often speak about the possibility of reaching post-scarcity in the future; but we have essentially already done so in the domain of food production. If everyone ate what would be optimally healthy, and we distributed food evenly across the world, there would be plenty of food to go around and no such thing as obesity or starvation.

So why hasn’t this happened? Well, the main reason, like I said, is distribution of wealth.

But that doesn’t explain why so many people who do have access to good foods nonetheless don’t eat them.

The first thing to note is that healthy food is more expensive. It isn’t a huge difference by First World standards—about $550 per year extra per person. But when we compare the cost of a typical nutritious diet to that of a typical diet, the nutritious diet is significantly more expensive. Worse yet, this gap appears to be growing over time.

But why is this the case? It’s actually quite baffling on its face. Nutritious foods are typically fruits and vegetables that one can simply pluck off plants. Unhealthy foods are typically complex processed foods that require machines and advanced technology. There should be “value added”, at least in the economic sense; additional labor must go in, additional profits must come out. Why is it cheaper?

In a word? Subsidies.

Somehow, huge agribusinesses have convinced governments around the world that they deserve to be paid extra money, either simply for existing or based on how much they produce. Of course, when I say “somehow”, I of course mean lobbying.

In the US, these subsidies overwhelmingly go toward corn, followed by cotton, followed by soybeans.

In fact, they don’t actually even go to corn as you would normally think of it, like sweet corn or corn on the cob. No, they go to feed corn—really awful stuff that includes the entire plant, is barely even recognizable as corn, and has its “quality” literally rated by scales and sieves. No living organism was ever meant to eat this stuff.

Humans don’t, of course. Cows do. But they didn’t evolve for this stuff either; they can’t digest it properly, and it’s because of this terrible food we force-feed them that they need so many antibiotics.

Thus, these corn subsides are really primarily beef subsidies—they are a means of externalizing the cost of beef production and keeping the price of hamburgers artificially low. In all, 2/3 of US agricultural subsidies ultimately go to meat production. I haven’t been able to find any really good estimates, but as a ballpark figure it seems that meat would cost about twice as much if we didn’t subsidize it.

Fortunately a lot of these subsidies have been decreased under the Obama administration, particularly “direct payments” which are sort of like a basic income, but for agribusinesses. (That is not what basic incomes are for.) You can see the decline in US corn subsidies here.

Despite all this, however, subsidies cannot explain obesity. Removing them would have only a small effect.

An often overlooked consideration is that nutritious food can be more expensive for a family even if the actual pricetag is the same.

Why? Because kids won’t eat it.

To raise kids on a nutritious diet, you have to feed them small amounts of good food over a long period of time, until they acquire the taste. In order to do this, you need to be prepared to waste a lot of food, and that costs money. It’s cheaper to simply feed them something unhealthy, like ice cream or hot dogs, that you know they’ll eat.

And this brings me to what I think is the real ultimate cause of our awful diet: We evolved for a world of starvation, and our bodies cannot cope with abundance.

It’s important to be clear about what we mean by “unhealthy food”; people don’t enjoy consuming lead and arsenic. Rather, we enjoy consuming fat and sugar. Contrary to what fad diets will tell you, fat and sugar are not inherently bad for human health; indeed, we need a certain amount of fat and sugar in order to survive. What we call “unhealthy food” is actually food that we desperately need—in small quantities.

Under the conditions in which we evolved, fat and sugar were extremely scarce. Eating fat meant hunting a large animal, which required the cooperation of the whole tribe (a quite literal Stag Hunt) and carried risk of life and limb, not to mention simply failing and getting nothing. Eating sugar meant finding fruit trees and gathering fruit from them—and fruit trees are not all that common in nature. These foods also spoil quite quickly, so you eat them right away or not at all.

As such, we evolved to really crave these things, to ensure that we would eat them whenever they are available. Since they weren’t available all that often, this was just about right to ensure that we managed to eat enough, and rarely meant that we ate too much.

 

But now fast-forward to the Green Revolution. They aren’t scarce anymore. They’re everywhere. There are whole buildings we can go to with shelves upon shelves of them, which we ourselves can claim simply by swiping a little plastic card through a reader. We don’t even need to understand how that system of encrypted data networks operates, or what exactly is involved in maintaining our money supply (and most people clearly don’t); all we need to do is perform the right ritual and we will receive an essentially unlimited abundance of fat and sugar.

Even worse, this food is in processed form, so we can extract the parts that make it taste good, while separating them from the parts that actually make it nutritious. If fruits were our main source of sugar, that would be fine. But instead we get it from corn syrup and sugarcane, and even when we do get it from fruit, we extract the sugar instead of eating the whole fruit.

Natural selection had no particular reason to give us that level of discrimination; since eating apples and oranges was good for us, we evolved to like the taste of apples and oranges. There wasn’t a sufficient selection pressure to make us actually eat the whole fruit as opposed to extracting the sugar, because extracting the sugar was not an option available to our ancestors. But it is available to us now.

Vegetables, on the other hand, are also more abundant now, but were already fairly abundant. Indeed, it may be significant that we’ve had enough time to evolve since agriculture, but not enough time since fertilizer. Agriculture allowed us to make plenty of wheat and carrots; but it wasn’t until fertilizer that we could make enough hamburgers for people to eat them regularly. It could be that our hunter-gatherer ancestors actually did crave carrots in much the same way they and we crave sugar; but since agriculture we have no further reason to do so because carrots have always been widely available.

One thing I do still find a bit baffling: Why are so many green vegetables so bitter? It would be one thing if they simply weren’t as appealing as fat and sugar; but it honestly seems like a lot of green vegetables, such as broccoli, spinach, and Brussels sprouts, are really quite actively aversive, at least until you acquire the taste for them. Given how nutritious they are, it seems like there should have been a selective pressure in favor of liking the taste of green vegetables; but there wasn’t. I wonder if it’s actually coevolution—if perhaps broccoli has been evolving to not be eaten as quickly as we were evolving to eat it. This wouldn’t happen with apples and oranges, because in an evolutionary sense apples and oranges “want” to be eaten; they spread their seeds in the droppings of animals. But for any given stalk of broccoli, becoming lunch is definitely bad news.

Yet even this is pretty weird, because broccoli has definitely evolved substantially since agriculture—indeed, broccoli as we know it would not exist otherwise. Ancestral Brassica oleracea was bred to become cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and kai-lan—and looks like none of them.

It looks like I still haven’t solved the mystery. In short, we get fat because kids hate broccoli; but why in the world do kids hate broccoli?