monkey’s uncle

While running seemingly interminable errands this past Saturday, I listened to NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.  Sub Pop Records president, Jonathan Poneman, was the guest for the Not-My-Job segment and related a story in which a heroic employee at Sub Pop, Megan Jasper, simply made up a lingo when a New York Times reporter called to ask how the kids were talking in Seattle back in 1992.  Listen here. Beautiful.  As someone who spent a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest throughout the nineties but lived in the rather more uptight Northeast, this story provided particular amusement for me.  The original NYT piece is here.  See page three for the Lexicon. Score.  (though a harsh realm for the reporter who couldn’t be troubled to go to Seattle to fact check)

Until next time, rock on you dishes and lamestains alike…

Man, this is something pretty amazing that I missed when I lived in Mississippi briefly in 1991-1992.  I heard fife and drum every 4th of July growing up in a New England town with a strong sense of its colonial heritage.  It didn’t sound like this.  This amazing film produced by Bill Ferris, Judy Peiser, David Evans in 1972 and distributed by the Center for Southern Folklore is available in its entirety on folkstreams.net.

A recent story in The Guardian reports on an unpublished World Bank study that suggests the conversion of food crops to biofuels, and the resulting economic pressures entailed in this process, is responsible for most of the steep price increases in food this year.  The World Bank report has not been published, though it was completed in April, and speculation is that the delay is meant to avoid embarrassing the Bush administration, who maintains that biofuels have had only a minor impact on food prices. For example, the report contradicts statements by US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman made in a letter sent to the Senate Energy Committee last month.  The World Bank report attributes fully 75% of the increase in food prices to biofuels in contrast to the official US estimates of just 3%.

Biofuel development distorts food markets in three ways, one of them obvious, the other two less so: (1) it diverts grain production for food to the production of biofuels, (2) it creates incentives for farmers to set aside more land for biofuel crop development, and (3) it induces speculation on the commodities market, driving up grain prices.

The results of this report (at least as reported in The Guardian) resonate well with my own intuitions about biofuels. It seems like a very bad idea to me to make fuel for SUVs out of food.  It’s all too easy for people in the developing world, where the leading dietary problem is obesity, to forget that a substantial portion of the world (somewhere in the vicinity of 800 million) is still regularly hungry. I remain open to the idea of generating biofuels from organic waste, but the consequences of growing grain and other basic foodstuffs for biofuels on commodity prices, and therefore the price that people pay for food, should be obvious to anyone who has taken an introductory economics class. Price increases with demand and decreases with supply, remember? Given that world population is still growing and that some formerly poor parts of the world are rapidly developing (and therefore increasing their demand for grain both directly and indirectly through increased demand for meat), there is no way that demand for grain as food is going to decrease.  This can only mean that increasing crop production for biofuel is bound to decrease supply for food in the absence of large expansions of crop land.  Generating demand for biofuels through legislation requiring a certain proportion of biofuel use (as is the case in the EU) or marketing ethanol-burning SUVs as somehow environmentally friendly is similarly going to increase demand for biofuels.  This means that prices for grains (and substitutable commodities) are bound to increase. Or am I missing something here?

A piece in today’s New York Times notes that the existence of $10 bed nets makes charity for malaria easy, cool, and almost addictive.  Our kids’ school ran a Nothing But Nets fundraiser this spring.  I had the privilege of giving a lecture to a couple hundred very sharp elementary school kids about what malaria is, how you get it, and what we can do to eradicate it.  

Classrooms competed to see which could raise the most money and, this being Palo Alto, I think there was a lot of money raised.  I also had the amazing experience of clandestinely watching my own son open up his piggy bank one morning before school, pull out his own money (and there’s not a whole lot of it in there), and decide to contribute his own $10 in addition to the $100 we had already given his class.  You could see the reasoning being played out on his face: “If I give this $10 bill, I can help save the lives of a family of four.  That’s more important than a new Wii game.” I was very very proud, to say the least. Providing kids with the opportunity to do good and feel like they are making a difference can lead to some incredible behavior.  Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for us still. 

OK, this is just good nerdy fun.

A new paper (discussed in this New York Times article) shows what many demographers have suspected for a while.  Life expectancy in the nation’s poorest counties has actually declined since 1983, while life expectancy continues to rise for the more affluent counties.  This finding stands in stark contrast with the trends recorded from 1961-1983.  During this period, life expectancy increased in nearly every county in the United States.  The basic idea is that if you were well off when Ronald Reagan entered the White House, you have done well in terms of mortality since.  However, if you had the misfortune of being poor, then you have typically fared less well.  The result? Diverging health fortunes among the haves and the have-nots in American society.  

This finding relates to what my colleagues Shripad Tuljapurkar and Ryan Edwards refer to as “the ultimate inequality.”  The manifestation of inequality does not get much more stark than through systematic differences in the number of years lived by people of different socioeconomic or ethnic backgrounds.   

In the 1983-1999 period, mortality from the largest cause of death, cardiovascular disease, declined in both rich and poor counties.  So what has caused the divergence in life expectancy between rich and poor counties?  It appears to be driven largely by increased mortality among the poor from diabetes and other non-communicable diseases on the one hand, and lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD; of which emphysema is an example) on the other.   Among men in the poor counties, the probabilities of death from homicide or HIV/AIDS have also increased.  While the probabilities of death due to either homicide or AIDS increased only a little, homicide and AIDS can have a big impact on life expectancy for a population.   This is because victims of homicide and AIDS are usually young, so that every homicide or AIDS death leads to a relatively large number of lost years for the sub-population. So much for that goal of  ”accelerat[ing] CDC’s health impact in the U.S population and to eliminate health disparities for vulnerable populations as defined by race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, geography, gender, age, disability status, risk status related to sex and gender, and among other populations identified to be at-risk for health disparities.”  We can do better…

This strains my credulity.  Did it not occur to anyone that no one’s  ”family recipes” include Ahi tuna with Napa cabbage slaw?!

It’s always nice to have one’s work written up in Science.  It would be even nicer to be named as a co-author in the write-up.  I suppose being the stats guy in a multi-author collaboration is kind of like being the drummer in a rock band…

I don’t want to jump to conclusions about global warming, but the extremely early start to the 2008 West Nile Virus season in the Western United States is extremely troubling. Earlier this week, a Maricopa County, Arizona man became the first human case of WNV this year.  The report of a WNV infected bird this week in Bakersfield, California means that WNV has appeared 2 months earlier than last year in Kern County, a place that saw 140 human cases and 4 deaths last year.  There are a number of possible ecological explanations for why WNV activity could be off to such an early start this year.  One set of possibilities  involve warming temperatures. There is real concern that global warming will expand the range of a variety of vector-borne diseases.  Let’s hope that dengue and malaria don’t manage to invade California too.