Opposition to Genetically Modified Organisms

I once thought opposition to GM foods had to do with the technology itself, but I no longer believe that. It seems to me, now, that it is about opposition to Monsanto.

This is what trusted though anonymous sources tell me:

Apparently, when they first introduced Roundup Ready seed the Monsanto salespeople told farmers they would not experience any weed resistance to Roundup, but they knew it would occur. It did.


Monsanto did seem to bully farmers into accepting the seed.

I understand Monsanto's motivation. They had invested enormous amounts of money into GM research, made a revolutionary product that was good for food and the environment, and they had to make sure they were compensated. In hindsight, they should have been more amicable and there might be less resistance to their excellent product.

Both Monsanto (GM seed and pesticides) and Chesapeake (natural gas from fracking) just assumed they would be loved because they made a magnificent product. Their product is indeed magnificent, but they are also judged by the way they treated people.

It is not too late for Monsanto. Look at how ADM turned its culture around (or am I mistaken about this too?)

Things I didn't know (pork checkoff)

The pork checkoff was found to return $17 for every $1 invested (Feedstuffs; June 18, 2012; Page 10). Is that all?

Congratulations China! (on sadness and obesity)

Congratulations on becoming like the U.S.! That is, fatter* and less happy**.

*Goodyear, Sarah. June 22, 2012. "What's Making China Fat?" The Atlantic.
** The Economist. June 16, 2012. "Money can't buy me love." Page 52.

I didn't know that... (origin of EPA)

The Economist* says that, "The Cuyahoga river in Ohio was so polluted that it caught fire as recently as 1969. That spurred the creation of America's Environmental Protection Agency."

* The Economist. June 16, 2012. "Green growth: Shoots, greens, and leaves."

An article you should write... (meat and global warming)

ScienceDaily recently summarized research saying we should eat less meat to combat climate change. I'd like to see an article showing the impact of eating less beef versus chicken, and the impact of eating less chicken relative to, say, lowering your thermostat by 0.05 degrees during the summer.

No ag economists, once again (local foods)

A review of The Locavore's Dilemma* suggests the book is the most intelligent treatment of the local foods issue yet. It saddens me, though, that there is almost never any ag economist doing the work the public is interested in. Never has food been so popular, yet we are still working on econometric issues, experimental tweaks, and all kind of clever little articles that the public could care less about.

An article you should write...(on bird-flu)

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article* on the deadly potential of bird-flu. I would like to read an article describing the extent to which confined feeding operations prevent the spread of the disease (I would think considerably), compared to the case where most of today's broilers are given considerable outdoor access (which would probably be impossible to do).

*Naik, Gautam.  June 22, 2012.  "New Bird-Flu Study Shows Virus's Pandemic Potential."  The Wall Street Journal.

Those delicious McDonald's pictures

An excellent video on the marketing of food at McDonald's, especially in regards to how they take an ordinary burger and make it look so delicious in pictures--without deception about what is in the burger.

Kudos to McDonald's for interacting with their customers.

Natural and Industrial Trans-fats

A recent Feedstuffs article (6/11/12) cited studies showing trans-fats from natural sources (like from ruminants) does not pose cardiovascular risks, and may even provide health benefits.

What about "industrial" trans-fats?  Could they be "good" also?  The article states, "Although there is a large body of research confirming the detrimental effects of industrial trans-fats, research into natural trans-fats has not shown such outcomes."

One research for this may be the well-known bias in food health literature.  If researchers believe industrial trans-fats are bad, only articles that say such things will be published, because anything with results to the contrary will be assumed to contain some unidentified methodological flaw.  Also, scientific journals don't like to published studies simply replicating other studies, and so the replications discrediting another study go unnoticed.

For readers surprised at this accusation of science, they have a lot to learn about science!  See the following quotes for demonstration.

Every single time they've had a hypothesis of causation from their data that was tested in a clinical trial; without exception the trial failed to confirm the hypothesis. Doesn't mean the hypothesis wasn't true; but the trial found the opposite...So if you like the hypothesis, that one is not reliable; and if you don't like it, the other one is not reliable. Exactly. And literally the investigators who did that Minnesota study—it was finished by 1973 and it was published in 1988 or 1989, which was a year after the principal investigator retired. And I am a journalist and I tracked him down and I asked him: Why did you wait 16 years to publish? And he said: Because we didn't like the way it turned out. A moment of honesty. The assumption is if you don't get the answer you expect, you did the experiment wrong. And that is still the case today.

—Gary Taubes.  November 21, 2011.  Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific Discovery.  EconTalk.org.

Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.”

—Yong, Ed.  May 16, 2012.  “Replication studies: Bad copy.”  Nature.  News Feature. 485(7398).

His conclusion is widely upheld by other scientists: Just because two events are statistically associated in a study, it doesn't mean that one necessarily sets off the other. What is merely suggestive can be mistaken as causal.

That partly explains why observational studies in general can be replicated only 20% of the time, versus 80% for large, well-designed randomly controlled trials, says Dr. Ioannidis. Dr. Young, meanwhile, pegs the replication rate for observational data at an even lower 5% to 10%.

—Gautam Naik.  May 3, 2012.  “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.”  The Wall Street Journal.  A1.

Nearly 80,000 observational studies were published in the period 1990-2000 across all scientific fields, according to an analysis performed for The Wall Street Journal by Thomson Reuters. In the following period, 2001-2011, the number of studies more than tripled to 263,557, based on a search of Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide. The analysis likely doesn't capture every observational study in the literature, but it does indicate a pattern of growth over time.

—Gautam Naik.  May 3, 2012.  “Analytical Trend Troubles Scientists.”  The Wall Street Journal.  A1.

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

…

Other scientists worry that something less innocuous explains the lack of reproducibility.

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

—Sharon Begley.  March 28, 2012.  “In cancer science, many ‘discoveries’ don’t hold up.”  Reuters.

Our submission was rejected without being sent for peer review on the basis that the journal has a policy of not publishing replications.

—Chris French, on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal.  An illustration of why this journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology should not consider itself scientific.

Within parapsychology, there is a tendency to accept any positive replications but to dismiss failures to replicate if the procedures followed have not been exactly duplicated.

—Chris French, on why his article showing ESP doesn’t exist, an article replicating a previous study showing ESP does exist, was not published in the same journal.  An illustration of why many “scientific”  journal should not consider itself scientific.

If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia.
—Tyler Cowen

On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce the results of an unusual experiment.  Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had arranged to have slogans—specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie screen…the messages had increased soda sales at the theater by 18 percent and popcorn sales by 58 percent.

The public reacted with fury…

There was a glitch, however.  Researchers tried to replicate Vicary’s findings…but none succeeded.  After five years Vicary confessed that his so-called experiment was “a gimmick.”

—Stroebe, Wolfgang.  May/June, 2012.  “The Subtle Power of Hidden Messages.”  Scientific American Mind.

...he had been on on virtually everything he had done. But he'd just about demonstrated how he could move up to the very top of his field by claiming a discovery and then kind of moving on to the next experiment and leaving better scientists to clean up the mess after him. And this has been a common theme in everything I've written about. In making declarative pronouncements based on preliminary data, and fighting viciously to get people to believe in you, you can do very well for yourself in these careers. Nobody moves forward by spending their career checking other people's work to see if it was right or not. And actually one of my favorite lines from physics was from this Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting at MIT, who said to me, if I can get this right: To be first and right is good; to be first and wrong is not so good; and to be second and right is meaningless.

—Gary Taubes.  November 21, 2011.  Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar, and Scientific Discovery.  EconTalk.org.

20 Things You Didn’t Know About…Science Fraud: The geniuses who fudged data, the cheaters who did it in plain sight, and the frauds who got away with it.

1  What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.

2  After studying retracted biology papers published between 2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations.

3  But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed Steen’s data, they found that American’s aren’t so shifty after all.

4  Chinese scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud. (French researchers were least likely to misbehave.)

5  If caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.

6  But there’s no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the FDA investigated Francois Savery, a doctor who submitted identical data to two drug companies, claiming that they were from two different studies. When confronted, he explained that he was forced to re-create his data sets because he took the original research with him on a lake picnic and lost it when his rowboat capsized.

7  Government authorities later learned that Savery never conducted the studies in the first place—or received a medical degree.

8  Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.

9  Other legends who seem to have altered data: Freud, Darwin, and Pasteur.

10  And Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s famous pea-breeding experiments—the foundation of modern ideas of heredity—are suspiciously good, matching his theory of genetic inheritance a little too well.

11  One of the most notorious scientific hoaxes remains unsolved. Someone mixed human and orangutan bones, treated them, and planted them to create Piltdown Man, a “missing link” between humans and apes found in 1912. But who?

12  Science historian Richard Milner accuses Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who also fabricated Sherlock Holmes. Doyle lived near the Piltdown site and resented the scientific community for mocking his belief in spiritualism. Opportunity and motive. Elementary!

13  In 1974 immunologist William Summerlin created a sensation when he claimed to have transplanted tissue from black to white mice. In reality, he used a black felt-tip pen to darken patches of fur on white mice.

14  Some researchers still use “painting the mice” to describe scientific fraud.

15  Painting the mice can have serious consequences. In the 1980s, psychologist Stephen Breuning published results from fictitious “trials” of tranquilizers; his findings informed the clinical practices for treating mentally retarded children.

16  Have you no subtlety, sir? In 1981 John Darsee, a rising-star cardiologist at Harvard, faked log entries in a canine heart study in full view of his colleagues.

17  Although many of his papers were later found to have false data, Darsee continued to be cited positively for years (pdf).

18  Write what you know: Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser resigned last year after he was found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Now he’s working on a book, reportedly titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

19  The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity estimates there are 2,300 cases of misconduct among NIH-funded researchers each year.

20  A role-playing game on the office’s website, called “The Lab: Avoiding Research Misconduct,” has been downloaded 26,000 times since it launched last year. (Try testing your own moral compass here.)

—Eric A. Powell.  “20 Things  You Didn’t Know About…Science Fraud.”  May 8, 2012.  Discover Magazine.  Health and Medicine.

Scraps from magazine: The Atlantic

From an excellent article in the recent edition of The Atlantic titled, "The Triumph of the Family Farm".

Here are some highlights.

• Most farms are family farms. "In 2010 of all the farms in the United States with at least $1 million in revenues, 88 percent were family farms, and they accounted for 79 percent of production.  Large-scale farmers today are sophisticated businesspeople who use GPS equipment to guide their combines, biotechnology to boost their yields, and futures contracts to hedge their risk.  They are also pretty rich."
• "Farmers are flush with cash."
• Farmland is receiving considerable attention from professional investors, including hedge funds. What the worst that can happen from that? 
• "Prior to World War II, it took 100 hours of labor to produce 100 bushels of corn. Today, it takes less than two hours."
• "...in 2009 U.S. farm output was 170 percent above its level in 1948, having grown at a rate of 1.63 percent a year. Those figures understate the productivity revolution, because these increasing harvests have been delivered with fewer inputs, particularly less labor and less land."
• "Continuous technological improvements have resulted in a system of crop farming that someone who left the countryside 20 years ago would be hard-pressed to recognize, and certainly couldn't operate."
• "Ever since people first domesticated cereal crops in the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago, farming has followed a seemingly immutable pattern - plow your field, seed your field, harvest your field, repeat.  But today, farmers can skip the plowing step."
• The U.S. today has more bus drivers than farmers.

BTW, I think The Atlantic is the best magazine today for its price, and attracts viewers of every political flavor.

Scraps from the web

The blog Marginal Revolution on a new book about local foods, using the same title as one of my articles at the Library of Economics and Liberty.

Research on making sustainability a quantitative concept.

Food Distribution: Amazing Dynamic Pizza Delivery Map

For an economist, this is a glorious depiction of sellers working furiously to provide value to buyers.

Who corrupts: the lobbyist or the politician?

[Table Scraps, leaning neither to the political right nor the left, says]

Yesterday's The Wall Street Journal makes the following mention of a new report on the monetary payoff of lobbying and funding campaigns:

In a report to be released Tuesday by the Manhattan Institute, economist (and former senior Clinton Administration official) Rob Shapiro and co-author Douglas Dowson sort through the academic literature and find that "corporate political efforts generally have positive effects on a firm's market value and its shareholder returns."

...

Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Dowson looked at studies covering corporate political spending from 1974 to 2011, when most corporate political spending flowed through political action committees. Not surprisingly, the heaviest political spending was done by companies in industries that were heavily regulated, highly concentrated or when they received much of their revenue from government.

--The Wall Street Journal.  June 18, 2012.  "Political Spending Pays."  A12.

It will be interesting to see where food & ag corporations fall in this study, as they are certainly heavily regulated.

Also, let us not neglect that fact that it is often the politician who corrupts the corporation. If I may be cynical, economists sometimes view regulations as a threat to corporations, where politicians will less the regulations or at least not strengthen them, so long as they donate money to the politician's campaigns. If this sounds far-fetched, consider the following quotes.

I’ve had conversations with Democrat givers out here in the Bay area, and I’ll tell you, you won’t believe the requests their getting [that is, requests of lobbyists from politicians].  The opening ante is a million dollars…that’s sort of the baseline.  This is unprecedented.  And, in fact, one thing that John [McCain] and I experienced was that sometimes the corporations that didn’t like this system would come to us and say, “You know, it’s not legalized bribery, it’s legalized extortion.”  Because it’s not like the company CEO calls up and says, “Gee, I’d love to give you some money.”  It’s usually the other way around.  The politician or their agent who’s got the superpac: they’re the ones calling up and asking for the money…

—Russ Feingold.  “Take the Money and Run for Office.”  This American Life.  National Public Radio.  April 1, 2012.

Jacob:  Alex, you’ve been doing these pieces on lobbying for a while now, and what’s been illuminating to me is how much the Congress people themselves need these fundraisers.  They need this constant flow of money to get reelected...

Alex:  Yeh, you know a lot of people think of all these lobbyists, that they’re bum-rushing Congress, throwing money at them and trying to corrupt them with their money, but [lobbyist] Jimmy Williams says it’s the other way around:  Congress people were constantly pestering him.  They were constantly calling, and a lot of time it was Congressmen whose votes he didn’t even need.

—Planet Money podcast.  “A Former Lobbyist Tells All.”  January 27, 2012.

Farm animal welfare developments

Subway unveils new vegan sandwiches and an undercover investigation by Compassion Over Killing shuts down a hatchery (with the help of the courts and the Animal Legal Defense Fund). 

Evidence-Based Criticism of Genetically Modified Food?

That is the claim in this report. Although readers might be wary of the source, after reading the authors' backgrounds I believe the report is worth considering. Besides, one should be wary of all sources, even those advertising themselves as objective.

I or We? (for Ayn Rand fans and Catholics)

In economics, we often differentiate between decisions made by individuals and decisions made by groups. Sometimes we use the word "we" in a misleading way, like if I say "we" determine how much to spend on school programs, we obscure the fact that it is really individuals (politicians, unions, lobbyists) who make these decisions, although these decisions are influenced by the public.

Ayn Rand Versus Pope Alexander

The famous novelist Ayn Rand emigrated from Russia, where individuality was almost a crime. She portrayed the problems in group decisions in her novella Anthem, a fictional land and time where the word "I" is not allowed. The novel is confusing at first, because the character is saying things like, "And as we undress at night...," when it feels like they should be saying, "And as I undress at night." It took me more than a few pages to figure out what is going on.

The purpose of Anthem is to illustrate the dangers of allowing individual thought and initiative. Mrs. Rand is a  very controversial author, and many Progressive dislike her, but I think even the most Progressive reader can  read Rand and learn how to be a better Progressive - just like a Libertarian can read Upton Sinclair and learn how to be a better Libertarian (but maybe I'm asking too much).

As I watched the end of the fourth episode of Borgia: Faith and Fear (Season 1, but the European version, not The Borgias that Showtime played in 2011-2012) I caught this dialogue.

Pope Alexander Borgias: ...I will build new apartments.
The Pope's assistant: We will build new apartments:
Pope Alexander Borgias: You and I?
The Pope's assistant: No.  "You" are "we" now.
Pope Alexander Borgias: Yes, I am "we".


It's an interesting contrast, I think.

The Makings of a Great Blog

One of the most popular economic blogs is Marginal Revolution.  It's appeal to me is the eclectic nature of its posts. Rather than obsess about free-markets versus government it discusses and provides links to interesting items one might never come across in their daily perusing of the web.

As I was deliberating putting together this blog, I asked one of the blog's authors, Tyler Cowen, how he found the items in his Assorted Links posts. I assumed he used some fancy tool like Google Alerts, but I was wrong. His answer to how he discovers his links was, "Mostly from readers!"

So, I ask you, help me make FRD's blog great by doing my work for me!

Criticizing Rachel Carson (Reason magazine, not me)

A few years ago I read one of my state's politicians refused to attend an event honoring Rachel Carson (the mother of environmentalism, it is said) because of the human damage she caused by creating fear of DDT in her famous book Silent Spring.

At the time I thought it was just odd, perhaps just political, but recently I've noticed Reason magazine (Aug/Sept 2012, page 12) join in the criticism here they say Carson (1) exaggerated cancer rates (2) ignored the benefits of pesticides and (3) promoted the myth of the balance of nature.  More from Reason here.

This "myth of the balance of nature" I'm only recently beginning to understand.  Supposedly, some became fearful that once the environment received a certain amount of damage a feedback mechanism amplified the damage multiple times, leading to considerable damage.

I wonder to the extent ecological economists subscribe to the balance of nature argument.

Reason suggests the "balance of nature" argument is a myth.  I would be interested in learning more, especially if it is a myth in some cases but not in others.

A missed opportunity to improve school lunches

A nine-year-old in the UK was recently told by her school to cease her popular blog, NeverSeconds, where she took pictures of her school lunches and posted them online as a protest over the food's quality (link).  Although it helped her raise $3,000 for a food charity and received the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, her school could not take the criticism.

Perhaps the school could have exploited the child's blog to help it raise money for better foods?  This makes one wonder whether good food was the school's main concern.