The environmental movement is a puzzling phenomenon. On the one hand, environmentalists frequently claim that global warming is a major problem, perhaps the major problem facing the globe. Yet despite these expressed views, one repeatedly see environmentalists opposing the sorts of steps that would be required to address global warming. Matt Yglesias recently linked to a story where three major environmental groups in Maine succeeded in stopping construction of a power line from Canada that would have brought enough clean hydropower electricity down to America to reduce carbon emissions by 3 million tons per year, equivalent to taking 700,000 cars off the road.In Germany, environmentalists succeeded in getting the government to agree to shut down the entirely nuclear power industry, which will lead to a large increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Elsewhere, environmentalists have succeeded in demolishing clean hydro plants and have prevented the construction of solar and wind power facilities. Many are even lukewarm on carbon taxes. So what gives?In my view, there are two types of environmentalism. Scientific environmentalism looks at issues from a rational cost/benefit approach, always keeping an eye on the bottom line—how do policies affect the natural environment?The bigger and more powerful part of the environmental movement is what you might call “emotional environmentalism”. This movement is centered around the interests of human beings, not the rest of the animal kingdom. Policies that are seen as risky to humans (like nuclear power) are opposed even though they are beneficial to other animals. The focus is on the visible and the local (unsightly power lines), not the unseen and the global (climate change.)There’s nothing strange about political movements working against their own stated interests. Many housing advocates oppose new housing developments and favor rent controls. Nationalists in the US worried about China’s growing power often oppose immigration of high-skilled Chinese people into the US. Those who assert that “black lives matter” try to defund the police.  Proponents of higher interest rates favor tight money policies that reduce interest rates in the long run.  There are numerous similar examples.But even compared to those examples, the environmental movement really stands out. The weakness of scientific environmentalism and the power of emotional environmentalism raises important questions for public policy intellectuals. How can we develop effective public policies in a world where most of our political allies don’t understand how to achieve their stated policy goals? (1 COMMENTS)

Without government, how would we be able to keep the homeless from getting shelter? Temperatures in Gloversville, New York, are expected to fall to -4 degrees tonight. That’s bad news for the roughly 80 homeless people who live in the upstate community, and who have few options for escaping the dangerously frigid weather. About half of those people could be housed on the second floor of a building owned by the city’s Free Methodist Church, where 40 empty beds sit ready to welcome people in from the cold. Stopping that from happening are Gloversville’s zoning officials, who say that the commercial zoning of the church’s property and its downtown location prohibit it from hosting a cold weather shelter. Those empty beds will have to stay that way. This is from Christian Britschgi, “Zoning Officials Stop Church from Opening 40-Bed Shelter in Sub-Zero Temperatures,” Reason, January 14, 2022.   (0 COMMENTS)

A commenter to one of my recent posts blamed me forcefully for suggesting that wokism and fascism “are not so different anyway.” The kinship between wokism and socialism on the one hand and fascism on the other is often blurred by the  fact that they cater to different beneficiaries and pursues different victims; but they demonstrate the same ignorance of economics, the same preference for coercive collective choices, the same hatred for anything that looks like classical liberalism or libertarianism, and, in practice if not in theory, the same attraction for political power. For those interested in the alliance of different totalitarian ideologies against classical liberalism, I cannot do better than recommend Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944 [2007]); my recent review of this important book may serve as a poor substitute. Labels are only labels, but it is often useful to realize that different phenomena with different names share some common denominators. Sometimes and despite political propaganda, they can be seen as different shades of the same color. Consider the following. In 1932, Benito Mussolini, published an article on fascism in the Encyclopedia Italiana. An “authorized translation” soon appeared in English under the title The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, first in The Political Quarterly and then as a book (London: Hogarth Press, 1933). Il Duce expressed many ideas that today’s people in the woke and socialist galaxy would not renege, at least once after they get more firmly in power. I am quoting from the book (note that by “Liberalism,” Mussolini broadly means “classical liberalism,” not “liberalism” in the American sense of progressive): Fascism·may write itself down as “an organized, centralized and authoritative democracy.” (p. 16) Fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrines of Liberalism, both in the political field and the field of economics. (16) For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State.” (20) Whoever says Liberalism implies individualism, and whoever says Fascism implies the State. (23) [The Fascist State] meets the problems of the economic field by a system of syndicalism·which is continually increasing in importance, as much in in sphere of labour as of industry. (23-24) Fascism desires the State to be a strong and organic body, at the same time reposing upon broad and popular support. (24) The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone. (24) Hayek quotes another reflection from Mussolini (op. cit., p. 91): We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become. In his book The Coming American Fascism (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1936), American fascist Lawrence Dennis explained: The authoritarian state can say ‘Stop” to business or in the market, as the liberal state cannot do.” (p. 102) Social planning is the outstanding imperative of public order and material abundance in the present day and in the near future. (104) Under a fascist State … the property owner or corporate management which contested a new law would not be allowed to advance any argument assessing a private right as superior to the right of the State. (157) Both fascism and communism are, in the technical sense of the term, radical schemes for rationalizing the social machinery, just as engineers have rationalized the machinery and technology of production. (164) Fascism does not accept the liberal dogmas as to sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market. (180) My contradictor also accused me of invoking the h-word, which in fact I had not done. But if we forget one specific kind of racism and xenophobia, we can trace the kinship of the wearer of the h-name and his ideology with socialism and thus wokism. The 1920 program of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, an interesting document, declared: We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. … We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts). We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises. We demand … the prohibition of all speculation in land. … The publishing of papers which are not conducive to the national welfare must be forbidden. … Our nation can achieve permanent health only from within on the basis of the principle: The common interest before self-interest. In my review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, I emphasized some ideas from the Nobel economist: Many Nazis or Nazi forerunners came from Marxism or socialism. Professor Werner Sombart, a former Marxian socialist, had welcomed World War I as the “German War” in defense of the “German idea of the state” against the commercial civilization of England. This German state stood over and above individuals, who had no rights but only duties. Nazi philosopher of history Oswald Spengler thought that Prussianism (the German ideal of the state) and socialism were the same. Moeller van den Bruck, whom Hayek describes as “the patron saint of National Socialism,” thought that the classical liberals were the archenemy. Although Hitler was a politician and not a political philosopher by a long stretch (a very long stretch), he was quoted as saying that “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.” Hayek tells us that, according to a leader of German “religious socialism,” liberalism was the doctrine most hated by Hitler. On the softer fascist side, Mussolini himself was a former socialist. (0 COMMENTS)

The call for parent volunteers went out at 9 pm on Sunday, reports John Fensterwald on EdSource. By 9 am Monday, 360 Palo Alto (California) parents had offered to work as classroom aides, Covid testing staff, office workers, recess and lunch supervisors, custodians or whatever else is needed to keep the community’s schools open. By Tuesday morning, 1 Palo Alto had 670 recruits, says Superintendent Don Austin. Volunteers — the number has passed 700 — started work today. The schools wills stay open, he pledged. “There is nothing short of a state or county mandate or order that will shut us down. And if they do that they better be ready for a fight too. We are staying open.” This is from Joanne Jacobs, “Will parents help? 670 volunteer in Palo Alto,” Linking and thinking on education, January 12, 2022. Alexis de Tocqueville was the Frenchman who wrote about how Americans always stepped up to handle problems and didn’t wait on government. That has diminished as government has encroached more and more, but it still happens a lot, especially when government employees abdicate their responsibilities. A student of mine from Greece sometime last decade said in class that he was so happy that his young kids got to live in America for 18 months while he was earning his MBA because they got to see how Americans got together to solve problems. I met Joanne Jacobs, if I recall correctly, at a Hoover conference in May 1993 titled “Choice and Vouchers: The Future of American Education?” She was covering the conference for the San Jose Mercury News. Either at the conference, or earlier, or later, she became a passionate and informed advocate of school choice and has kept it up. Here’s her bio.   (0 COMMENTS)

In economics, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) now stand at the pinnacle of the methodological hierarchy.  “Natural experiments” are a distant second.  Work based on old-fashioned observational data is actually hard to publish anywhere prestigious.  For many scholars, RCTs aren’t just the gold standard of research.  Nothing else is even fungible.  This is the Age of the Randomista. Which raises a serious problem: How can researchers address questions where no RCT is feasible?  To do an RCT on national monetary policy, for example, you would have to randomly assign monetary policies to a bunch of countries.  Not gonna happen.  To do an RCT on national disincentive effects of welfare, you would have to randomly assign welfare policies to a bunch of countries.  Again, not gonna happen.  Sure, you could run some RCT laboratory experiments on monetary policy.  But why assume that some silly games in a lab carry over into the real world?  Similarly, you could run a pilot welfare program for a single city and measure the effects.  But perhaps a lot of the labor supply response comes from the society-wide erosion of stigma against idleness.  If so, your pilot program will fail to detect it.  The same goes if a Marxist claims that once capitalism has been eliminated, people will work for the sheer joy of contributing to the community.  You could try running an experiment on a utopian commune, but the Marxist could protest, “Capitalism must be eliminated world-wide before my claim holds.”  And on the flip side, the collapse of Communism wasn’t based on RCTs either.  Critics just said, “This is an awful system and must be dismantled.”  And amazingly managed to get their way in a bunch of countries. The upshot is that, like the US and UK, RCT methodology and the status quo (SQ) have a “special relationship.”  If you take RCTs seriously, you have to label virtually any radical departure from the SQ as “unscientific.”  After all, if the change is radical, it won’t be feasible to run an RCT.  And if RCT is the only scientifically respectable methodology, then every radical departure from the SQ is scientifically baseless.  Ironic, given all the publicity about how wonderfully “radical” the RCTers are. Still, there are multiple ways to interpret the special relationship between RCT and SQ.  Let’s start with the mildest, then intensify, step by step. 1. Big changes from the SQ can’t be justified using RCTs, but neither are they unjustified.  As far as social science is concerned, it’s a “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” situation.  In other words, RCTs tell us to be agnostic about big deviations from the SQ. 2. Big changes from the SQ can’t be justified using RCTs, so we should, by default, be skeptical.  That’s how the FDA would react to new untested pharmaceuticals, right? 3. Big changes from the SQ can’t be justified using RCTs, so we should expect them to fail – and regard their proponents as charlatans.  Even if, by some miracle, they happen to be right, their methodology is reckless. 4. Big changes from the SQ can’t be justified using RCTs, so we should expect them to be disastrous – and regard their proponents as monsters.  You would practically have to be a psychopath to blindly push for big social changes.    If you are a staunch RCT person, however, positions 2, 3, and 4 all suffer from a common problem: None of them has ever been justified by an RCT!   There has never been an RCT showing that big changes sans RCTs merit skepticism.  There has never been an RCT showing that big changes sans RCTs typically fail.  And there has never been an RCT showing big changes sans RCTs typically end in disaster.  Indeed, as far as I know, there aren’t even any old-fashioned observational studies supporting these conclusions. Should we then retreat to position 1?  It too suffers from a dire problem.  Namely: If you don’t believe that changes supported by RCTs are, on average, better than changes not supported by RCTs, why do you support RCTs in the first place?   In short, there’s a dilemma of methodological advocacy: You can be enthusiastic, or you can apply the methodology.  But not both.  The randomista crusade is either hypocritical or stillborn. Is there any way to escape from this dilemma?  Yes, but only with repentant methodological humility.  Admit that the real foundation of science is just common sense.  And common sense tells us that RCTs are the most helpful way to advance our understanding of extremely narrow questions.  But when you ponder bigger questions, RCTs are just one intellectual input out of many.  Including the bigger question of, “When should we dismiss people who fail to use RCTs as charlatans?”  For pharmaceuticals, the right answer is “often.”  For economic growth, in contrast, the charlatans are those who dismiss everything we’ve learned without RCTs. (0 COMMENTS)

When should international boundary lines change?  This is a difficult question where a number of factors come into play: 1. Does the affected national government give consent? 2. Does the change affect de jure boundaries?  How about de facto boundaries? 3.  Do local residents favor a change? 4.  Are there severe human rights abuses against local residents? 5.  Would a boundary change involve a great deal of violence? Let’s illustrate a few of these points with examples: There are separatist movements in both Catalonia and Taiwan.  In both cases, the relevant central government is opposed.  In both cases, the regions are de jure part of a larger country (Spain and China).  In both cases, many local residents favor independence?  So why does the Chinese government’s case seem in some sense “worse” than the Spanish case? First, unlike with Catalonia, Taiwan has de facto independence.  And second, enforcing China’s claim to Taiwan would probably require a lot of violence, whereas Spain seems able to hold onto Catalonia without much violence. Or take Kosovo and the Crimea.  Why was the West more sympathetic to a border change in Kosovo than in Crimea?  Probably mostly because the Serbs had committed human rights abuses in majority Muslim areas of former Yugoslavia, whereas Ukraine had not committed major human rights abuses in Crimea. Kuwait (1990) and the Falkland Islands (1982) were two examples where boundary changes were successfully resisted and where there was opposition to change from local residents.  In contrast, Crimean residents did not exhibit strong opposition to the boundary change, and Ukraine did not receive outside military support. In my view, the first item on my list is the most important.  That might seem odd, given that these decisions seem so arbitrary.  The Czechs allowed the Slovaks to secede.  Quebec residents and Scots were offer referenda on independence.  In contrast, Spain refuses to give that option to Catalonia.  So why is this principle so important, given that the enforcement is so arbitrary? Central government consent is important because of point #5, the danger of violence.  The international community has decided that unless there is some sort of extenuating circumstances (i.e. Kosovo), boundaries should not be changed without the consent of the central government.  While this is an arbitrary rule, it minimizes the threat of violence.  Throughout the world, there are dozens of places where international boundaries don’t make sense.  If you allowed boundary changes without central government consent, it would open a can of worms.  There’d be many attempts for one region to break off and join another.  Often, the dispute would become violent. You might wonder why unconstrained boundary changes would necessarily end up in violence.  If the local people agree, why can’t the change occur peacefully?  There are two problems.  First, the local people don’t all agree–it’s complicated.  The majority of Northern Irish don’t want to be part of Ireland, but a large minority of Northern Irish don’t want to be part of the UK.  In former Yugoslavia, the ethnic map is like a jigsaw puzzle.  Whenever you move the line, you hurt one group. Economic considerations are also important.  If the oil-rich southeast of Nigeria declares independence, the rest of Nigeria would feel deprived of oil revenues. Even with all of these considerations, there are tricky cases that are hard to resolve.  Thus how much weight should be put on de facto boundaries that are not internationally recognized?  The US considers Taiwan to be part of China (de jure) but treats it like an independent country (de facto.)  Somaliland is another place that is de jure part of another country (Somalia) but is de facto independent.  How long does de facto independence have to last before it becomes internationally recognized?  In my view, the best policy toward Taiwan is the one that minimizes the risk of war.  But what policy is that?  The same question applies to Ukraine.  What weight should be put on deterring future aggression? America stole land from Mexico in the 1800s.  At what point do we no longer have the moral obligation to give it back?  Russia stole land from China in the 1800s, from Germany and Japan in 1945, and from Ukraine in 2014.  At what point does that theft become accepted by the international community?  At what point does the Golan Heights become part of Israel in a de jure sense?  Today, economic sanctions over the Crimea probably make more sense than economic sanctions over the Soviet theft of Königsberg or the Kuril Islands, but I’d be hard-pressed to provide a rigorous proof of that claim.  In other words, there are lots of “borderline cases”.  (Pun intended.) Europeans have wisely decided (outside of Yugoslavia) to accept international borders as of 1945, even though (for instance) lots of Hungarians live in Romania. They recall that the German claim on the Sudetenland was based on there being a large population of ethnic Germans in that part of Czechoslovakia.  It also makes sense to accept mutually agreed border changes, as with Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce”.  This principle is mostly accepted in Latin America, although that may be mostly because it’s the weaker countries like Paraguay and Bolivia that lost territory in the past.  In Africa, central governments are weaker, and the use of force to change boundaries is still an ongoing problem.  But even in Africa, the principle of central government consent is viewed as being very important. So what should we do about Ukraine?  Russian apologists insist that the Russians view NATO as a security threat.  That’s nonsense. Putin knows that NATO has no interest in invading Russia.  The real problem is that Russia has seller’s remorse over its decision to allow the Soviet Union to break-up.  It would like to grab back parts of the old Soviet Union that are ethnically Russian.  And it (correctly) fears that if those areas join NATO, it will be unable to do so.  Thus it’s too late to grab back the Baltic states.  NATO is not a threat to Russia, it’s a threat to Russia’s intention to grab territory from its neighbors. On the other hand, I’d oppose admitting any country into NATO that does not have clearly established boundaries.  That’s a recipe for war.  One compromise might be to assure Russia that NATO would not accept Ukraine until or unless the Russian government accepted Ukraine’s international borders.  The same assurance could be made for Georgia and Belarus.  That would give Russia an effective veto, while holding out the prospect of an eventual expansion of NATO if a future Russian government is more reasonable. (0 COMMENTS)

Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Steve Kuhn, Richard Hanania will be presenting his new book, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy, in Austin, Texas next week, with special guest Razib Khan. Free and open to the public! Location: Dreamland Dripping Springs, on the big outdoor stage Time: January 19, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM The Schedule: 6:30-7:00 – Richard Hanania presents his new book 7:00-7:30 – Caplan interviews Hanania about the book 7:30-8:30 – Ask Me Anything with Hanania, Khan, and Caplan If you’re unfamiliar with Hanania’s work, I’ve blogged it here, here, here, and here.  His work on wokeism has probably won the most attention, but he got his scholarly start in International Relations, and his new book is a major advance in the field.  Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is not just a critique of the dogmatic “realist” school of international relations.  It strongly argues that most countries’ foreign policies are simply incoherent because (a) each interest group (military, defense contractors, human rights groups, bureaucrats, foreign allies) focuses on its own narrow set of issues, and (b) politicians who adjudicate conflicts between these interest groups myopically focus on the next election. Though Hanania puts “public choice” in the title, I’d say that it is really a book about behavioral political economy.   His voters are deeply irrational, his politicians have lots of slack, and a strong-willed leader occasionally destroys a country on a whim.  My favorite part is probably his discussion of sanctions, where Hanania argues that (a) sanctions hardly ever work, (b) leaders rarely even try to make sanctions work, (c) sanctions kill lots of innocents, but (d) sanctions prevail because politicians fear war but still want to “do something.”  In a word,  sanctions are yet another deadly expression of Action Bias – the urge to “do something” even if you know nothing good to do. More on Hanania’s later this month.  For now, I hope to see y’all at Dreamland on Wednesday! (0 COMMENTS)

You might have seen that the inflation rate rose from the 6.8 percent reported in early December to 7 percent reported today. It’s important to understand what exactly is being reported. The reporters don’t necessarily do a terrible job, but readers often misunderstand. What is being measured in each case is the inflation rate over a 12-month period. Inflation between November 2020 and November 2021, which is what was reported in December, was 6.8 percent. Inflation between December 2020 and December 2021, which is what was reported this morning, was 7.0 percent. So it looks as if inflation is rising. Is it? No. The reason is that to know if inflation is rising or falling, we need to look at the latest data. So we need to compare the inflation rate in December with the inflation rate in November. In November, the Consumer Price Index rose by 0.8 percent, which implies an annualized inflation rate of 9.6 percent. But in December the CPI rose by 0.5 percent, which implies an annualized inflation rate of 6.0 percent. So inflation actually fell. One of the most careless statements I’ve seen on-line, and it’s in the headline of the news story referenced above, is that inflation rose by 7 percent. No. Prices over the last year rose by 7 percent. If you want to stick with annual, then to be correct, you would say that the inflation rate rose by 0.2 percent. If you want to report as accurately as possible what happened to inflation this last month, you would say that the monthly inflation rate fell by 0.3 percentage points and that the annualized inflation rate fell by 3.6 percentage points. One of the most important things I learned from Ben Klein in his Ph.D. monetary theory course at UCLA was always to distinguish between rates and levels. Levels tell us that prices rose. Rates tell us that the inflation rate fell.     (0 COMMENTS)

Public Granaries Writing in 1770, the French economist and statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot observed that there were two ways to deal with a price spike that followed a bad harvest. The first was to transport “grain from provinces where the harvest is good to those where it is bad.” The other was to “store it up in abundant years for use in famine years.” Turgot wrote that the “two methods entail costs, and free trade will always choose that which, all told, entails the least cost.” He added, that “barring special circum­stances,” transportation was usually preferable since “the return of the funds is speedier” and the “waste product is less considerable, the grain being consumed the sooner.” Very often though, governments placed “obstacles in the way of transportation” and tipped the balance in favor of storage. In the two centuries and a half since Turgot wrote these lines, debates about food security have essentially been along similar lines. On the one hand are supporters of the so-called trade-based approach who promise a more abundant, affordable and reliable food supply through reliance on multiple foreign suppliers with comparative advantages in agricultural production. On the other are supporters of greater autarky and regional self-sufficiency. While the former had the upper hand at the end of the twentieth century, the latter have found new audiences in the wake of the 2007-2008 food crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. One key problem for supporters of increased local self-reliance, however, is that because of natural calamities ranging from droughts and floods to pests and diseases, no traditional agricultural systems could consistently produce enough food to eliminate malnutrition and recurring famine and starvation. The Roman poet Virgil alluded to some of these problems in his Georgics. Weeds invaded the land. Voles and mice spoiled the threshing floor. Cranes and geese attacked the crops. Goats ate the young vines. Moles, toads and ants feasted on or undermined the farmer’s work. Although he did not mention fungus and insect pests, Virgil added that whatever production survived this onslaught could then be damaged or wiped out by summer droughts and winter windstorms, snow, hail or heavy rain. Even in good years, he added, a field might be accidentally set on fire. Even in good years, the key challenge of traditional agricultural systems was to make it through the “lean season” between crops, meaning the period of greatest scarcity before the first availability of new crops. For instance, in England the late spring, and especially the month of May, was historically referred to as the “starving time” or the “hungry gap.” This is why granaries were invented over ten thousand years ago. Going back at least to Pharaonic Egypt and Han China, some of these were built and controlled by the state, either for provisioning bureaucrats and soldiers or else for the stated rationale of being filled in good harvest seasons and emptied in lean ones, thus softening hunger cycles and price spikes. Some prominent present-day proponents of greater local food production have picked up on the absolute necessity of greater storage capacity to fulfill their vision. Journalist Michael Pollan thus argued in an influential essay that the “the food security of billions of people around the world” would benefit from a government-run strategic grain reserve which would “prevent huge swings in commodity prices” and “provide some cushion for world food stocks.” By buying and storing grain “when it is cheap and sell it when it is dear,” he points out, public-minded bureaucrats would “moderat[e] price swings in both directions and discourage[e] speculation.” Needless to say, in recent decades public granaries and “strategic” reserves were also often a key component of foreign aid and protectionist agricultural strategies. Their supporters have included the prestigious International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); NGOs such as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (ITAP), OXFAM and Share the World’s Resources; several American consumer, environmental, religious and development groups and producers’ cartels; and the people in charge of the large-scale food reserves of India and China. Although recent proposals often take the form of special emergency reserves, international reserves, and “virtual reserves” controlled via commodity futures and options trading, their basic rationale remains the same. Government-run food reserves, however, have a long history of failure. As several analysts have documented in more recent times, they typically proved “expensive, ineffective, and generally short-lived.” They also proved unable to outperform futures markets that, through the buying and selling of commodities and their future delivery contracts, already smooth out long-term price volatility. Recent failures include Sahelian community-managed cereal banks that are small subsidized warehouses located in subsistence farming communities. As could be expected, their managers are tasked to buy grain when it is cheap and to sell it later at a discounted (but nonetheless profitable) price when it is dear. In practice though, cereal “community-run banks often run out of money. Borrowers default; bank managers price-gouge or simply steal money, leaving villages as hungry as before.” As one former NGO employee observed, people “stole, managers disappeared, or the bank was located too far for some villagers to get their food.” Supporters who acknowledged these problems could only defend this strategy by arguing that a “flawed solution to fight hunger is better than no solution.” Similar outcomes were observed in the strategic grain reserves set up throughout Africa under the aegis of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations after the first oil shock of the 1970s. As described by geographer Evan Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas, two analysts not particularly enamored of market forces, the “seemingly limitless hoard” in silos proved “too tempting for local officials to ignore, and the program was plagued by politicking, mismanagement, and corruption.” A decade ago, an internal note suggested that about a third of the grain stock reserve under the supervision of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was rotting in the open because of a lack of adequate storage space. Despite the “full knowledge of the precarious condition of food grains, governments, both at the centre and in states, were unable to protect the country’s precious food reserves.” The FCI was also accused of being unable to move stocks after acquiring them and having difficulty carrying out fumigation, “thus making preservation difficult.” According to the news report, the “apathy of the people and officials responsible for feeding millions may result in more losses in years to come. The big question which needs to be answered is whether anyone would be held responsible for this seemingly criminal negligence.” Far from being aberrations, however, such outcomes are typical of the history of government-run food reserves. Apart from the perennial temptation of public officials to dip into them for their personal benefit, they also proved extremely costly and technically challenging, especially before the development of modern technologies. Among other challenges, their operators had to aerate and turn the grain, control moisture levels, sell and replace the grain frequently if it was to be used as seeds, and repair and maintain large structures. Not surprisingly, Turgot observed that the large granaries built by the French state always increased “the share of the rats and weevils to no purpose.” At about the same time, the Englishman Walter Harte considered “public granaries quite detrimental, rather than useful in a free state” for “[n]ational and even provincial magazines of corn” quite naturally produced monopoly, an “undue fear of famine” and “much anxiety about hoarding up grain” that would then inevitably create pressures to stop exports. These factors, he added, were “one of the surest methods I know of bringing on a dearth.” The political philosopher and politician Edmund Burke similarly observed in 1795 that the construction of such granaries throughout the kingdom, would be at an expense beyond all calculation. The keeping them up would be at a great charge. The management and attendance would require an army of agents, store-keepers, clerks, and servants. The capital to be employed in the purchase of grain would be enormous. The waste, decay, and corruption, would be a dreadful drawback on the whole dealing; and the dissatisfaction of the people, at having decayed, tainted, or corrupted corn sold to them, as must be the case, would be serious. This climate (whatever others may be) is not favourable to granaries, where wheat is to be kept for any time. The best, and indeed the only good granary, is the rick-yard of the farmer… The Belgian historian Louis Torfs further added in 1839 that public granary managers who could rely on the public purse were never as careful in their purchases as private individuals who spent their own money. Other problems were that massive state-sponsored purchases drove up prices for everyone and safeguarding large warehouses during turbulent times always proved nearly impossible. Besides, while the building and maintenance of massive structures entailed enormous sums of money, it paled in comparison to the amounts required to provision a decent sized city for even a short period of time. As such, Torfs stated, the very notion of effective public granaries had always been impractical (“sans aucune valeur pratique”). Efficient provisioning, he concluded, should be left in the hands of farmers and merchants, with government intervention limited to guaranteeing freedom to trade and private property rights. In the end, as William Harte argued, the best public granaries were “vast tracts of country covered with corn,” wherever they may be. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that trade liberalization and technical advances have delivered an ever more abundant, cheaper and more secure food supply. Promoting “solutions” that have always been plagued with unavoidable problems can only deliver the more expensive, scarcer and less food secure world of yesterday.   Pierre Desrochers, is Associate Professor of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga. (0 COMMENTS)

I learned this morning that my former colleague and mentor, Bill Haga, died at age 83 on January 6. Here’s his obituary. Rather than repeat what’s in the obituary, I want to give an appreciation and tell a bit about how important he was in my life. How He Inspired My Academic Writing I arrived at the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1984 and quickly found out that most of the faculty had voted against my being hired. But the chairman, Dick Elster, had wanted me and that made the difference. It was at some faculty meeting or faculty lunch in the first few months I was there that I met Bill. I found him fascinating. He had such unusual ideas and when I thought about them, many of them made sense. He  quickly struck me as a wise man and someone I wanted to be around. I wasn’t hired into tenure track but was instead an adjunct who had a year-to-year renewable contract. A tenure slot appeared in the spring of 1986, and I applied. By that time, I had turned around a lot of the faculty’s views on me and I got the offer. I accepted in May 1986. But that meant that I needed to start trying to publish academic peer-reviewed articles again. I went to see Bill to get his thoughts. I pointed out that with our just having purchased a house, I needed to do a lot of free-lance writing for Fortune and so I was wondering when I would have time for academic articles. “Do you have any ideas for an article?” Bill asked. “Yes,” I replied. “When I was the energy economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, I wrote a memo to Marty Feldstein and Bill Niskanen laying out an analysis of the International Energy Agency’s oil-sharing plan that I hadn’t found anywhere in the literature. Marty and Bill thought it was right. So I think I could turn that into a full-fledged article.” “How long do you think it would take?” asked Bill. “I think about a month,” I answered. “That’s the wrong way to think about it,” he said. “What’s the right way?” I asked. “Think about it in terms of hours,” he answered. “So how many hours will it take to write each section?” I was stunned. I thought he was crazy. I had always heard academics talk about how many months they needed. I had never heard anyone talk the way Bill talked. I estimated 10 to 15 hours. Then he said, “Write a draft and stick it under my door by 8:00 a.m. next Friday.” I foolishly said I would. By the next Thursday, I had made a lot of progress, much more than I would have thought possible. But I didn’t think I would make it. Bill seemed inflexible, though, and so I didn’t dare ask for an extension. Instead, I made a little more progress on Thursday afternoon. I went to bed early and set my alarm for 2 a.m. When the alarm rang, I got up, went into my office, and finished a draft by 6 a.m. I stuck it under his door and went home for breakfast and to be there when my daughter, Karen, age one and a half, woke up. I don’t know if Bill even read my paper. It didn’t matter. I looked at it with fresh eyes the next week, made minor changes, and sent it off. It was accepted and was the beginning of a stream of articles in energy economics that were the core of my research case for tenure 5 years later. I don’t think that would have happened without Bill. Bill’s Sense of Humor Bill had a great sense of humor, especially about the weirdness of academia. If you’ve read Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, you’ll have a sense of the kind of weirdness and humor I’m talking about. One particular story stands out. Bill was supposed to put together a course with another professor. I’ll call him Ronald. The course was on communications. They tried to work together but had such big differences that they got in big fights. They quit talking to each other. I’m not sure if Ronald saw the irony. Bill did. “A course in communication, and we’re not willing to communicate,” he said, grinning. Bill as Teacher Bill was legendary as a teacher. When we had students in common, they would tell me about some of his methods. He did case courses and would call on people when they least expected it. So, for example, if student A had been called on the previous class and had done a so-so job, student A, early in the course, would think he wouldn’t be called on again for at least a few weeks. Wrong. Bill would make sure to call on him the next class. This strategy completely worked to cause a huge percent of the students to prepare. Bill also had a legendary “echo jar,” labeled as such. If a student asked a question that already been answered, he or she had to put a quarter in the echo jar. By the end of the course, with about 25 students in the class, there were a lot of quarters. He would take the quarters and buy as many doughnuts as they would buy and bring them to class. There were always a few left over and he would put them in the chair’s assistant’s office. I always had one or two. Bill as Baseball Fan and Commentator  If you’ve read Moneyball, you know about the 20-game winning streak the Oakland A’s had in 2000. Well, Bill and I had driven from Monterey to Oakland for that game. The A’s were up 11-0 over the Kansas City Royals but KC clawed its way back to an 11-11 tie. Here’s how Shayna Rubin sets it up for Scott Hatteberg’s home run in the bottom of the 9th: All of 55,000 eyes were watching Hatteberg launch that 1-0 pitch off Royals closer Jason Grimsley that Sept. 4 night. Just an hour earlier, when the A’s had a 11-0 lead, Hatteberg had kicked his feet up with a cup of coffee ready to celebrate history until he realized he was watching his team give up the comfy lead in real time. Here’s Bill King’s excited commentary on the home run. When we got in the car after A’s games, we would always turn on the radio to hear the after-game commentary. Bill would take every cliche the commentators used, and there were many, and make droll comments about them that had me in stitches. He did that for this game too. On the 110-mile drive home, we were so jazzed about the game that I didn’t pay attention to my speed. Driving through a 55-mph zone, I saw a red flashing light in my rearview mirror, looked down to see that  I was going 77 mph, and pulled over. Bill and I had the same fear of cops. I lowered my window and put my hands at 10 to 2 on the steering wheel. Bill, in the passenger seat, put his hands on the dashboard. The CHP officer noticed that and said to Bill, with a little humor in his voice, “You can put your hands down.” The last time I saw him was when I was on sabbatical at George Mason University in the spring of 2007. My wife Rena came for the middle 2 weeks of my sabbatical and we had lunch in Annapolis with him and his lovely wife Carline. I will miss him. (0 COMMENTS)