Netflix have filmed an interesting foodie series, “You are what you eat”. The story line is supplied by an ingenious experiment at Stanford to test the difference a vegan diet makes to health. To rule out genetic causes, they recruited pairs of likeable identical twins (they learn very young how to play to the gallery) and fed them different diets. Yup, vegan is healthier. The documentary producers threw in polemical diatribes against intensive livestock and poultry rearing, deforestation from beef cattle, polluting fish farms, etc. The programmes are watchably polemic, not even paying lip service to the conventional journalistic bothsides convention of giving the bad guys a minute to defend themselves. Three disparate comments.
1. Netflix have produced a vegan manifesto, not a vegetarian one. The programme doesn’t say much about eggs, but takes a few swipes at dairy products. It’s probable that Americans eat too much cheese, and the wrong kinds, made from fatty cows’ milk. But humans are mammals, designed to live their first few months entirely fed on maternal milk, which is roughly as fatty as that from cows, less than that from sheep and goats, and much less than milk from reindeer and – the record-holder at 62% fat – Arctic hooded seals. The least fatty is mare’s milk, at only 1.3%; try your neighbourhood Mongolian grocery. Anyway, milk is part of the ancestral human diet, and we ought to be adapted for it. How, I wonder, is this compatible with the very high rates of lactose intolerance - up to 90% - found in East and South Asian populations, which is presumably of genetic origin? Anyway that will end when they figure out how to re-engineer our intestinal microbiome. https://biology.indiana.edu/news-events/news/2019/foster-lactose-intolerance.html
2. Intensive factory farming of cows, pigs, and chickens is a moral disaster. It is also an ecological one, for instance in the nauseating disposal of liquid manure by spraying it untreated on to neighbouring fields, and anybody unlucky to live nearby. In the UK, chicken manure regularly finds its way “accidentally“ into rivers. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/10/factory-farming-british-river-sewer-wye-chicken-factories The difference is that unlike our deeply rooted taste for meat, the manure problem is very easy to fix. Manure is feedstock for biofuels, and we are going to need a lot of these to run long-distance aviation and shipping. Here’s a proposal to turn pig manure – the UK alone produces 10 mt a year of the vile stuff - into biodiesel: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c04382
Biodiesel can be burnt as is in ships. This particular proposal would also produce syngas, which is currently used in steel production, and could be burnt in gas turbines for electricity. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has to be mostly the lighter fraction kerosene, implying additional processing and cost. Importantly, there is a fast-growing biofuel industry, with pretty much assured demand, on the lookout for cheap feedstocks. All you have to do is stop mollycoddling agribusinesses and strictly prohibit them from putting any untreated liquid waste on farmland or rivers, on pain of serious fines (I suggest $10,000 per day for starters). Or you could impose a Pigovian tax, and ratchet it up every year. Farmers would quickly find the biofuels people in the phonebook, and sell the mountain of manure to them for $0 per ton, or even a negative price. (This standard scheme needs a lot of tweaking to fit fish farming.)
3. The Netflix series has many examples of vegan entrepreneurs talking about “plant-based food”. It looks as if a conscious rebranding effort is under way. Understandable: “vegan” makes you think of “long-haired hippie in sandals”, “plant-based” is superficially objective and neutral. But it’s scientifically quite wrong.
Vegans, vegetarians and omnivores grow, sell and eat conflict-free mushrooms, and make bread, beer, wine, and tofu fermented by yeasts. Rightly so. Since they don’t photosynthesise, fungi can easily be grown indoors. The cultures or mycelia are immortal as well as insensate, and you don’t have to bother with seeds for reproduction. They are saprophytes, breaking down dead bits of plants and animals, very plentiful and cheap. There are only a few domesticated yeasts, but a huge number of edible and nutritious species of mushrooms, with a wide range of textures and tastes. I’m all for eating more of them. Besides, there is a near-magical spaceship technology of precision fermentation https://peakbridge.vc/precision-fermentation-a-guide-for-endless-opportunities-to-reshape-traditional-foods-using-microbial-factories/ under development, which aims to GM the industrious critters – bacteria, yeasts, or algae – to produce à la carte a potentially vast range of specific products, edible or not.
The problem is that fungi are *not plants*. Aristotle and Linnaeus did group them together, but the merger became increasingly untenable as knowledge increased over two centuries. Whittaker dealt the coup de grâce in 1969 with a popular five-kingdom classification of life: monera (prokaryotic microbes), protists (eukaryotic microbes), plants, animals and fungi. Professional high-order taxonomy is a complete mess, but the disputes are all about organising the bewildering variety of single-celled organisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology) Everybody now agrees that plants and fungi are distinct “kingdoms” (though even that label is contested).
Crude amateur classification tip: if it moves, try microbe or animal. If it gets its energy from sunlight, it’s a plant or prokaryotic cyanobacterium; from eating living things, try animal; if from rotting dead things, fungus. If its structural building blocks are cellulose and lignin, plant again; if chitin, fungus or animal (arthropods); if calcium carbonate, animal again (vertebrates, molluscs). Or just look it up.
The vegans really should switch to the accurate “non-animal food”. Promoting an antique mistake for PR reasons undermines the vegan claim to superior rationality. It is not a trivial error.
* Footnote: I have reluctantly complied with the house rule against vulgar language. The Germanic four-letter word is the right one to convey our fully justified disgust; and disgust is a major driver of public opinion. The Tory defeat in the UK election was exacerbated by widespread revulsion at increasing discharges of untreated human sewage into British rivers and beaches, a textbook demonstration of the consequences of parasitic privatised water companies and feeble regulation.
Word of the day: synopticon, the inverse of a panopticon, a coinage dated 1996; a mechanism for the surveillance of the few by the many. Example: "Even more than Louis XIV at Versailles, the celebrities of today are prisoners of the synopticon they have built round themselves using the technology of social media."
In response to Gregory McKenzie: Understandably because of the political emphasis on it, the effect of interest rates setting on housing policy has been the focus of most commentary today. What that ignores is all the other critical effects of interest rate policy, especially on currency stability. If international financial markets were to get the idea that Australian interest rates and therefore the relative value of the Australian dollar, had become subject to the whims of politicians, the risk rating of our dollar would jump and we would end up paying more for our debt, indefinitely. Every element of Australian society would pay for that.
So while superficially appealing, another illustration of H.L. Menken's aphorism that for every complex human problem there is an answer that is obvious, plaausible and wrong
Will the decline in neoliberalism lead to a decline in the financialization of retirement savings and a shift toward direct government funded pensions providing more security for retirees while addressing the economic and environmental risks associated with speculative investments and unrealized capital gains?
As a non-economist, I remain confounded by the failure of that profession to acknowledge that it really has no idea how to measure the output, let alone the productivity, of most workers in the service sector. What is the hourly output of a child care or aged care worker? What is the dollar value of what such people produce? Or police officers or nurses or ....? Do they actually produce anything?
What I am really asking is: has not the major transfer of economic activity into services made redundant the traditional concept of productivity, based as it was on widgets produced per unit of labour (or other inputs) . It seems every advanced economy is displaying signs of the same symptoms, so it's not just us. And while wealth soars into the coffers of the 0.01% we are assured there can be no increases in wages for those who keep the wheels oiled unless productivity rises.
Surely I must be missing something. It cannot just be a massive lie. Can it?
The independence of the RBA has been discussed in the corridors of federal parliament. As the main agent for monetary policy in this country, the RBA has the ability to affect, positively and negatively, many households. Their main weapon of policy action is the setting of the official interest rate for their loans to financial institutions. This can have a flow on effect on the mortgage rate and the long term saving deposit rate. Given that these two rates can significantly affect the net wealth of households, there is an argument for government involvement in this rate setting process. The argument against such involvement seems to hang on this concept of independence. But what does that actually mean in economic terms. An independent variable is one that is NOT influence by ANY other major variables. If this can be used as a working definition of independence, does the RBA pass the test of independence. We are not just talking about federal government influence alone. There is also the influence of bank and non-bank financial institutions. Because IF these institutions can be shown to, in any way, influence the RBA then there is NO independence. This, of course, is what the Greens are suspecting. They perceive there to be a lack of independence from certain financial institutions, especially the big four banks. If this is the case, then they are right and the federal government should exercise their dominant power of coercion.
Interest rates (and other monetary policy levers) are not "independent variables" under an independent RBA. They depend on the models/rules that the RBA use to keep inflation within some range, and the observable inputs to those models/rules, e.g. market predictions of future interest rates, unemployment rates etc.
Read my comment. I never said they were. It is the independence of the RBA from financial institutions that I was questioning. I thought that was obvious from my comments. If the RBA is NOT independent from influencers in the finance industry then they are truly not independent. The Greens have a point. The tools of Monetary policy are blunt instruments and should only be used to meet ALL the statutory duties of the RBA. They should not be used to make bigger profits for financial institutions at the expense of struggling households.
Vegans wrong on taxonomy and right on pig manure*
Netflix have filmed an interesting foodie series, “You are what you eat”. The story line is supplied by an ingenious experiment at Stanford to test the difference a vegan diet makes to health. To rule out genetic causes, they recruited pairs of likeable identical twins (they learn very young how to play to the gallery) and fed them different diets. Yup, vegan is healthier. The documentary producers threw in polemical diatribes against intensive livestock and poultry rearing, deforestation from beef cattle, polluting fish farms, etc. The programmes are watchably polemic, not even paying lip service to the conventional journalistic bothsides convention of giving the bad guys a minute to defend themselves. Three disparate comments.
1. Netflix have produced a vegan manifesto, not a vegetarian one. The programme doesn’t say much about eggs, but takes a few swipes at dairy products. It’s probable that Americans eat too much cheese, and the wrong kinds, made from fatty cows’ milk. But humans are mammals, designed to live their first few months entirely fed on maternal milk, which is roughly as fatty as that from cows, less than that from sheep and goats, and much less than milk from reindeer and – the record-holder at 62% fat – Arctic hooded seals. The least fatty is mare’s milk, at only 1.3%; try your neighbourhood Mongolian grocery. Anyway, milk is part of the ancestral human diet, and we ought to be adapted for it. How, I wonder, is this compatible with the very high rates of lactose intolerance - up to 90% - found in East and South Asian populations, which is presumably of genetic origin? Anyway that will end when they figure out how to re-engineer our intestinal microbiome. https://biology.indiana.edu/news-events/news/2019/foster-lactose-intolerance.html
2. Intensive factory farming of cows, pigs, and chickens is a moral disaster. It is also an ecological one, for instance in the nauseating disposal of liquid manure by spraying it untreated on to neighbouring fields, and anybody unlucky to live nearby. In the UK, chicken manure regularly finds its way “accidentally“ into rivers. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/10/factory-farming-british-river-sewer-wye-chicken-factories The difference is that unlike our deeply rooted taste for meat, the manure problem is very easy to fix. Manure is feedstock for biofuels, and we are going to need a lot of these to run long-distance aviation and shipping. Here’s a proposal to turn pig manure – the UK alone produces 10 mt a year of the vile stuff - into biodiesel: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c04382
Biodiesel can be burnt as is in ships. This particular proposal would also produce syngas, which is currently used in steel production, and could be burnt in gas turbines for electricity. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has to be mostly the lighter fraction kerosene, implying additional processing and cost. Importantly, there is a fast-growing biofuel industry, with pretty much assured demand, on the lookout for cheap feedstocks. All you have to do is stop mollycoddling agribusinesses and strictly prohibit them from putting any untreated liquid waste on farmland or rivers, on pain of serious fines (I suggest $10,000 per day for starters). Or you could impose a Pigovian tax, and ratchet it up every year. Farmers would quickly find the biofuels people in the phonebook, and sell the mountain of manure to them for $0 per ton, or even a negative price. (This standard scheme needs a lot of tweaking to fit fish farming.)
3. The Netflix series has many examples of vegan entrepreneurs talking about “plant-based food”. It looks as if a conscious rebranding effort is under way. Understandable: “vegan” makes you think of “long-haired hippie in sandals”, “plant-based” is superficially objective and neutral. But it’s scientifically quite wrong.
Vegans, vegetarians and omnivores grow, sell and eat conflict-free mushrooms, and make bread, beer, wine, and tofu fermented by yeasts. Rightly so. Since they don’t photosynthesise, fungi can easily be grown indoors. The cultures or mycelia are immortal as well as insensate, and you don’t have to bother with seeds for reproduction. They are saprophytes, breaking down dead bits of plants and animals, very plentiful and cheap. There are only a few domesticated yeasts, but a huge number of edible and nutritious species of mushrooms, with a wide range of textures and tastes. I’m all for eating more of them. Besides, there is a near-magical spaceship technology of precision fermentation https://peakbridge.vc/precision-fermentation-a-guide-for-endless-opportunities-to-reshape-traditional-foods-using-microbial-factories/ under development, which aims to GM the industrious critters – bacteria, yeasts, or algae – to produce à la carte a potentially vast range of specific products, edible or not.
The problem is that fungi are *not plants*. Aristotle and Linnaeus did group them together, but the merger became increasingly untenable as knowledge increased over two centuries. Whittaker dealt the coup de grâce in 1969 with a popular five-kingdom classification of life: monera (prokaryotic microbes), protists (eukaryotic microbes), plants, animals and fungi. Professional high-order taxonomy is a complete mess, but the disputes are all about organising the bewildering variety of single-celled organisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology) Everybody now agrees that plants and fungi are distinct “kingdoms” (though even that label is contested).
Crude amateur classification tip: if it moves, try microbe or animal. If it gets its energy from sunlight, it’s a plant or prokaryotic cyanobacterium; from eating living things, try animal; if from rotting dead things, fungus. If its structural building blocks are cellulose and lignin, plant again; if chitin, fungus or animal (arthropods); if calcium carbonate, animal again (vertebrates, molluscs). Or just look it up.
The vegans really should switch to the accurate “non-animal food”. Promoting an antique mistake for PR reasons undermines the vegan claim to superior rationality. It is not a trivial error.
* Footnote: I have reluctantly complied with the house rule against vulgar language. The Germanic four-letter word is the right one to convey our fully justified disgust; and disgust is a major driver of public opinion. The Tory defeat in the UK election was exacerbated by widespread revulsion at increasing discharges of untreated human sewage into British rivers and beaches, a textbook demonstration of the consequences of parasitic privatised water companies and feeble regulation.
Word of the day: synopticon, the inverse of a panopticon, a coinage dated 1996; a mechanism for the surveillance of the few by the many. Example: "Even more than Louis XIV at Versailles, the celebrities of today are prisoners of the synopticon they have built round themselves using the technology of social media."
Love it!
In response to Gregory McKenzie: Understandably because of the political emphasis on it, the effect of interest rates setting on housing policy has been the focus of most commentary today. What that ignores is all the other critical effects of interest rate policy, especially on currency stability. If international financial markets were to get the idea that Australian interest rates and therefore the relative value of the Australian dollar, had become subject to the whims of politicians, the risk rating of our dollar would jump and we would end up paying more for our debt, indefinitely. Every element of Australian society would pay for that.
So while superficially appealing, another illustration of H.L. Menken's aphorism that for every complex human problem there is an answer that is obvious, plaausible and wrong
Will the decline in neoliberalism lead to a decline in the financialization of retirement savings and a shift toward direct government funded pensions providing more security for retirees while addressing the economic and environmental risks associated with speculative investments and unrealized capital gains?
What do you think of this John?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-24/rba-relying-on-outdated-theory-about-inflation-and-employment/104384014?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link
I broadly agree. NAIRU is a useless concept - though Friedman rather than Phillips should get the blame for this.
On another subject altogether, if I may:
As a non-economist, I remain confounded by the failure of that profession to acknowledge that it really has no idea how to measure the output, let alone the productivity, of most workers in the service sector. What is the hourly output of a child care or aged care worker? What is the dollar value of what such people produce? Or police officers or nurses or ....? Do they actually produce anything?
What I am really asking is: has not the major transfer of economic activity into services made redundant the traditional concept of productivity, based as it was on widgets produced per unit of labour (or other inputs) . It seems every advanced economy is displaying signs of the same symptoms, so it's not just us. And while wealth soars into the coffers of the 0.01% we are assured there can be no increases in wages for those who keep the wheels oiled unless productivity rises.
Surely I must be missing something. It cannot just be a massive lie. Can it?
I've made this point repeatedly. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/11/australia-economy-inflation-growth-gdp
I've read none of it, but: https://www.pc.gov.au/ongoing/productivity-insights/services
The independence of the RBA has been discussed in the corridors of federal parliament. As the main agent for monetary policy in this country, the RBA has the ability to affect, positively and negatively, many households. Their main weapon of policy action is the setting of the official interest rate for their loans to financial institutions. This can have a flow on effect on the mortgage rate and the long term saving deposit rate. Given that these two rates can significantly affect the net wealth of households, there is an argument for government involvement in this rate setting process. The argument against such involvement seems to hang on this concept of independence. But what does that actually mean in economic terms. An independent variable is one that is NOT influence by ANY other major variables. If this can be used as a working definition of independence, does the RBA pass the test of independence. We are not just talking about federal government influence alone. There is also the influence of bank and non-bank financial institutions. Because IF these institutions can be shown to, in any way, influence the RBA then there is NO independence. This, of course, is what the Greens are suspecting. They perceive there to be a lack of independence from certain financial institutions, especially the big four banks. If this is the case, then they are right and the federal government should exercise their dominant power of coercion.
Interest rates (and other monetary policy levers) are not "independent variables" under an independent RBA. They depend on the models/rules that the RBA use to keep inflation within some range, and the observable inputs to those models/rules, e.g. market predictions of future interest rates, unemployment rates etc.
Read my comment. I never said they were. It is the independence of the RBA from financial institutions that I was questioning. I thought that was obvious from my comments. If the RBA is NOT independent from influencers in the finance industry then they are truly not independent. The Greens have a point. The tools of Monetary policy are blunt instruments and should only be used to meet ALL the statutory duties of the RBA. They should not be used to make bigger profits for financial institutions at the expense of struggling households.