The Liberal Order

Good Information for Parents to Have

Which cereals contain the most sugar? Check out this graph. And I've only seen King Vitamin in Food Lion.

MRE Directions

Thanks to Steve, I am now the happy recipient of one box of MREs (that is, meal-ready-to-eat). They are the nastiest and grossest looking meals, other than the candy that's included in some packages. I've also been informed that MREs are laced with chemicals or something to inhibit bowel movements. It makes sense; if you're out in the field you can neither leave yourself open as a target nor do you want to leave traces of yourself behind. But they're not happening with me.

Of particular interest and humor, each meal has its own chemically-induced heating mechanism. You take the meal, which is packaged well in a plastic bag, instert it in the plastic heating bag, add the chemical pack and then water, and then put it back in the box in which the meal came. After about ten minutes, the heat from the chemical reaction heats the meal. Oh yeah, but during that ten minutes while the food is heating, you're supposed to lean the package on a "rock or something." I wonder what "somethings" there are in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Lead, Follow, or (Government) Get Out of the Way

Ben Braxton wants to work and train to be a chef. Seth Kingsbury, owner and chef at Pazzo's restaurant in Chapel Hill is willing to train Ben. Problem: Ben is only 14-years-old. What could possibly go wrong?

Kingsbury took Ben under his wing two years ago, taught him the skills of the kitchen and saw the boy improve his grades and even get off his ADHD medication. But despite Kingsbury's good intentions and results with the boy, the chef was unknowingly violating child labor laws. He has been fined almost $8,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor.

But this is just a travesty; Ben should be taking home economics or teen living in high school, not engaged in servitude to this greedy chef/owner. How has it helped Ben?

At school, Ben thrived. During his freshman year at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough, he took three honors courses and got a 3.6 GPA. He used his time at Pazzo toward 400 hours of a food service internship to earn a national certificate. He talked about attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. Ben's mother noticed a change in her son: "There's just a maturity about him."

Read the whole story. As a finale, Ben's mother, Kingsbury (the chef), and Ben's doctor all wrote the state asking for a waiver to allow Ben to train at Pazzo. You see, Pazzo sells liquor and this violates state law. (Read the account of Our State magazine and how this story led to Kingsbury's problems.) The state acquiesced under the provision that Ben not cook over an open flame and that he not handle alcohol. . . . Oh yeah, and that Kingsbury pay another $300 fine.

Forward Looking or Backward Looking Peanut Butter Producers?

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Brace yourselves, peanut butter lovers -- prices are set to spike following one of the worst peanut harvest seasons growers have seen in years.

Prices for a ton of runner peanuts, commonly used to make peanut butter, hit nearly $1,200 this week, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's up from just $450 per ton a year ago.

It won't be long before consumers see this price increase reflected on store shelves.

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What's to blame for this sticky situation? The intense heat and drought that hit the southern U.S. this year, said John Beasley, a professor of crop physiology and management at the University of Georgia.

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In addition, Beasley said, high prices last year for other crops, such as cotton, corn and soy beans, led farmers who might otherwise have grown peanuts to focus their efforts elsewhere.

Overall, U.S. peanut production will hit 3.6 billion pounds this year, down 13% from last year, according to a Department of Agriculture report released this week.

Story here.

Now I have not been checking the prices of peanut butter lately, but my guess is that by the time this hit the news - in fact, way before - prices had already risen. 

Producers and retailers are no fools; if they expect higher prices in three months, they withhold supply today, thus driving the price up immediately. And despite calls of how unfair are the actions of peanut butter producers or retailers since they did not pay more for what is currently in stock, as consumers we want this to happen. The higher price today provides us better incentive to smooth consumption through time by cutting back on consumption today when we have a lot to transfer some to tomorrow when we expect to have less.

Nobody spends money . . .

. . . like they do when they're spending someone else's money.

The inspector general reviewed a sample of 10 Justice Department conferences held between October 2007 and September 2009 at a cost of $4.4 million, a period that included the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. The Justice Department spent $73.3 million on conferences in fiscal 2009, compared with $47.8 million a year earlier, according to the report.

The muffins were served at an August 2009 conference of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the beef Wellington was offered at a February 2008 meeting hosted by the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. A March 2009 conference of the Office on Violence Against Women served Cracker Jack, popcorn and candy bars at a single break, costing $32 per person, according to the report.

The muffins cost the government $16 each (Wow, thems good muffins!), and the Beef Wellington appetizer cost it $7.32 each. I guess the muffins were giving rise to the fiscal stimulus package.

 

Gender Wage Discrimination Or Socializing Young Girls To Train For Low Paying Careers?

The video below by Steve Horwitz on the myths of market-based gender wage discrimination is great. Steve does a great job of explaining how the problem is the different choices made by men and women when it comes to market-based human capital investments.

I emailed Steve with an explanation for why women earn less than men, something to which he alludes to in the video, and it's not based on market discrimination of women. Instead, we socialize girls from a very young age to develop and perfect skills in non market-based activities that might make them more attractive in the marriage market, but less attractive in the labor market. It's what I call the Happy Meal syndrome. Steve asked that I post this evidence on his YouTube site, but I'll do it here and link to his blog.

I took my kids to McDonald's about eight years ago and each got a Happy Meal. This was around the time Spy Kids 3-D came out and the Happy Meals contained toys with
a Spy Kids theme. On two sides of the Happy Meal box was a game for boys (again, Spy Kids), and on the other two sides was a game for girls (Bratz).

Here are the instructions included in the game for boys:

It starts out, "Your mission is to find a rival spy to play with. Pull this box apart and lay it flat. . . ."

"Your motion sensor detected a rival spy! Take another turn."

"You’ve hacked into the enemy's computer! Sneak ahead 1 space."

"Fuzzy radio signal! Skip a turn."

"You've tripped a security beam! Creep back 1 space."  

Now, here are some of the instructions included in the girl's game: 

"Hey girl! Find a friend to play with, pull this box apart and lay it flat . . ."

"OMG! You and your friend wore the same dress to the party. Dance back 1 space."

"You got a new do -"

"Without spending all of your trollars! Take another turn."

"Curling iron burnout! Lose a turn."

"Your new purse is 2 cool! Skip ahead 1 space."

Hmmm, what's the message being sent to kids? Boys should be adventurous, take risks, and solve problems, while girls should focus on their looks and not making fashion faux pas. Boys should invest in skills valued in the labor market while girls should invest in skills valued in the marriage market.

This is not wage discrimination in the labor market; it is socializing that leads girls to seek out career options with low pay and little advancement potential. This is not a market phenomenon, it's a social phenomenon. Unfortunately, this behavior is not limited to just McDonald's.

 

Serving Society's Needs In the Face of Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene is threatening the east coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts. It is projected to cause serious damage, which of course requires mobilizing resources to the affected areas such as plywood, generators, chainsaws, food, ice, etc.

Fortunately, there is a disaster command center and a separate Emergency Management Center coordinating efforts and directing resources to the areas predicted to be most affected by the hurricane.

Who is operating these emergency preparedness activities? FEMA? National Guard? No, it's Wal-Mart and Home Depot, motivated (possibly) by nothing more than self-interested profit seeking.  

Walmart is able to anticipate surges in demand during emergencies by using a huge historical database of sales from each store as well as sophisticated predictive techniques, Cooper says.

He says that with Irene on the way, that system is helping them allocate things like batteries, ready-to-eat foods and cleaning supplies to areas in the storm's path.

Walmart also has the advantage of having a staff meteorologist, Cooper says.

"When those forecasts come out, it's great to have somebody in-house that can evaluate that information so that we can give real-time information to our associates, not only here at headquarters but out in the field," he says.

Quoted in the story is the ever-insightful Steve Horwitz.

Incentives Matter - Beach Edition

While sitting at the beach watching the kids play in the waves, I watched a grandmother provide french fries to her granddaughter so she could feed two nearby seagulls. The girl tossed a fry toward the gulls and it was quickly scarfed up by the nearest bird. The little girl tossed another fry in the direction of the second gull; he too quickly ate it. 

A few nearby gulls realized a feast was happening not too far away and quickly swarmed in to partake in the feeding frenzy.

The little girl's sister joined in and the two broke fries in two and three pieces and gently tossed them among the swarm of gulls. A zero-sum game quickly developed. The feast began with just two seagulls each enjoying whole fries tossed their way and evolved into about twenty to thirty gulls competing for bits and pieces of french fries, enough to feed only a few - what one got, the rest lost.

The activity caused some people to move away just a bit from the fray, while others walking by had to divert their paths in order to avoid walking into the swarm of gulls. The frenzy didn't get big enough to force us to move further from where we were because, like humans, gulls too weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions and birds too far away wouldn't bother competing for the few bits and pieces of french fries. The marginal gull entering the fray is the one who expected the benefit of possibly getting a bit of a french fry to be greater than the cost of flying over to compete for it.

When the girls ran out of fries, the gulls flew away one by one until they were all gone, off looking for other sources of food. I'm certain their preference was for something easily acquired like french fries tossed their way by other beachgoers.

It was a great lesson in understanding incentives: When you give something away at zero price to the taker, there will be no shortage of takers. In other words, as long as the cost is less than the expected benefit, people will aways seek out opportunities where they incur the least cost, and those costs differ from person to person. It also demonstrated that when provided handouts, animals are encouraged to seek out more handouts, becoming dependent on others rather than fending for themselves. 

The "Fair Trade" Fraud

Today, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany's University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market "are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

"Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers."

Story here. 

HT: Mike Munger

Enabling the Alcoholic

I can be very sympathetic to the alcoholics discussed in this article, and certainly to their families. But I think when you reduce the cost of becoming and continuing to be an alcoholic, you simply beget more alcoholics.

No, I don't believe that people actively and consciously choose to become alcoholics. (As I've always said, an alcoholic doesn't emerge from a social drinker who one day realized to himself, "To hell with this amateur stuff; as of today, I'm turning pro.") But this program largely weakens the deterrent effect of drinking and effectively puts people in the position of becoming an alcoholic by encouraging more heavy social and binge drinking.