Author: Tom Slee

Joseph Stiglitz is working himself up from simply winning a Nobel prize to being one of the leading critical commentators on all things economic and many things political. He doesn’t seem exactly shy, he writes well, he’s prepared to stir things up, and his credentials give him a platform that few others have. My prediction – watch him become more prominent and more controversial in the months to come. Go Joe!

Here are two examples.

Via slashdot, an editorial in the British Medical Journal about intellectual property rights, which is an issue that will only get bigger in the next few year. He not only lambasts the existing system, but actually has an alternative to propose (a medical prize to fund innovations). Here are some extracts:

… In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed. For example, a year’s treatment with a generic cocktail of AIDS drugs might cost $130 (£65; 170) compared with $10 000 for the brand name version.¹ Billions of people living on $2-3 a day cannot afford $10 000, though they might be able to scrape together enough for the generic drugs. And matters are getting worse. New drug regimens recommended by the World Health Organization and second line defences that need to be used as resistance to standard treatments develops can cost much more. 

 

                Developing countries paid a high price for this agreement. But what have they received in return? Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns. The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way … You can’t expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale." 

 

                Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way…A medical prize fund provides an alternative. Such a fund would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions,  and smaller rewards for drugs that are similar to existing ones, with perhaps slightly different side effects.

More here: Scrooge and intellectual property rights — Stiglitz 333 (7582): 1279 — BMJ.

For a second article, see his piece comparing J. K. Galbraith and Milton Friedman, quoted at Relentlessly Progressive Economics. It’s not so much aimed at the public, but more at economists, among whom Galbraith has a much lower reputation than Friedman. Stiglitz does a good job of arguing Galbraith’s case.

Environmental Economics points us to Boss Hog by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone. It is an article about Smithfield foods, the biggest pork processor in the world, and — well, let’s just say it makes me glad I’m a vegetarian. Here are the first few paragraphs, but really you should print off the whole article (8 pages). Just don’t read it close to dinner.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most
profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last
year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is
fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of
processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to
butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San
Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San
Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth,
Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville,
Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and
Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than
transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest
cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more
excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single
Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year
than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates
put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year.
That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the
many small pig production units that surround the company’s
slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4
billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that
if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do —
even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose
money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to
run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open,
untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it
into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims
a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution
is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit
is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig
shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to
radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic
is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds
of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a
prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do
it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented
concentrations.

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in
warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are
artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in
cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound
male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They
trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air
or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a
catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can
wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by
their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide,
antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit
through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain
closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good
expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts
out into a large holding pond.

Continued here.

Oh yes. Happy New Year.

Did anyone think that meat from cloned animals would make you sick? I didn’t think so.

The headlines following from the US FDA announcement (FDA Issues Draft Documents on the Safety of Animal Clones) are misleading. The headlines are all of the form "Cloned animals deemed safe to eat" (Nature) or "US regulator declares food from cloned animals is safe to eat" (International Herald Tribune), but that’s not the story here.

For the record, here is the sentence from the report.

meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals.

But safety of the meat is not the issue. The real story is towards the end of the announcement:

In the draft guidance, FDA does not recommend any special measures relating
  to human food use of offspring of clones of any species.   

That is, cloned food needs no labels.

The issue is that cloned animals (like genetically-modified crops) introduce many potential changes to the agricultural industry – changes in the balance of power within the industry, the spread of health conditions associated with high-producing animals, and others I haven’t thought of. So given people’s natural scepticism about what (if any) benefits there are to this move, many people will not want to eat milk or meat from cloned animals. Whether our suspicions are right or wrong, that should be our choice.

So the real headline here is, "FDA takes first step towards allowing unlabelled food from cloned animals". The labelling is the story. And like with GMO plants, the major companies involved will want to have their meat and eat it – they will want to avoid labelling because cloned animals are no different, but you can bet your shirt that they will be looking for ways to patent techniques associated with cloning.

Can you imagine reading "Apple Says Jobs Did It"? Me neither.

Steve Jobs, one of the tech world’s most iconic leaders, was cleared by Apple Computer Inc.’s board of directors of any wrongdoing in a stock options accounting scandal that has snared almost 200 North American companies and some of their top executives…

Link: Apple’s Jobs cleared in backdating probe.

I hand over a few dollars each month to Six Apart, who own Typepad, for this blog. There are free ones, of course (blogger for one) but when I started off I decided that Trackbacks were worth paying for. If you make a post about an entry on someone’s blog, then you can add a trackback, which is a link from their blog post to yours. It looked to me like a valuable part of the conversational aspect of blogs.

But it seems that trackbacks are doomed. I don’t think blogger ever supported them. And now many blogs have disabled them, because all you get is trackback spam which is a pain in the neck to deal with. I’ve noticed that they seem to be going the way of the dodo, and now I see that Trackbacks Are Dead. It’s a shame – one more victim of the plague of spam.

But this little corner of the web is quiet enough I still have trackbacks enabled.

Jeremy Rifkin is not a modest man. He entitles his books things like "Entropy: A New World View" and "Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century". I stopped reading his books after "The End of Work", which was very sloppy and so obviously wrong.

But here he is again, in today’s Toronto Star, arguing that the global movement into cities is responsible for the population boom.

The first sentence is typical Rifkin. Then he gets worse. Rifkin is completely, 180 degrees, wrong.

Link: TheStar.com – opinion – The risks of too much city in a crowded world.

The coming year marks a great milestone in the human saga, a development similar in magnitude to the agricultural era and the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings will be living in vast urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more, according to the United Nations.

We have become "Homo Urbanus." …

It’s no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild.
Rising population; growing consumption of food, water and building materials; expanding road and rail transport and urban sprawl continue to encroach on the remaining wild, pushing it to extinction. Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today’s children, the wild will disappear from the face of the Earth…

I don’t want to spoil the party, but perhaps the commemoration of the urbanization of the human race in 2007 might be an opportunity to rethink the way we live. Certainly there is much to applaud about urban life: its rich cultural diversity and social intercourse and its dense commercial activity.

 

But the question is one of magnitude and scale.

We need to ponder how best to lower our population and develop sustainable urban environments that use energy and resources more efficiently, are less polluting and better designed to foster human-scale living arrangements.

But increasing urbanization is the best hope for cutting the population boom. If you live a rural existence, children are a source of prosperity: you need children to work, to support you, and so on. If you live an urban existence, children are a financial burden. That’s why there is no population boom (quite the opposite, in fact) in industrialized countries. His examples – Chicago and New York – are not from a country that has a booming population.  Japan’s population (without the bonus of immigration) may shrink by 30% in the next few decades.

It’s not that urbanization is all good, but to link it to the population boom is completely wrong.

You may have noticed that my normally far-from-hectic posting rate has gone from snail-like to glacial over the last few weeks. Well, be assured that it’s going to stay that way for the remainder of 2006. I intend to have even less to say than usual.

Whether we like it or not, this is a season of consumption and so, for no good reason, here is a list of some of the best things I consumed in 2006.

Best fiction I read. Three Junes by Julia Glass. Not my kind of book at all, which makes it all the more remarkable that I found it unputdownable.

Best non-fiction I read. Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, who is my new intellectual hero. It was published back in 1991, but my interest in this kind of stuff is relatively recent. I was put onto it via Susan Blackmore’s excellent Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction. A book I’ll be reading again in the next couple of weeks, and one that changed how I look at life & death.

Best movie I watched. Hidden (Cache), directed by Michael Haneke. Watching movies or TV is usually thought to be a passive act. But with this movie you are absolutely engaged from the first shot, wondering what it is you are seeing. Are you the watcher? Are you watching the watcher? Are you a spectator watching the watched? It’s riveting. Then there is that one scene in the middle where, all of a sudden, everyone who sees it just gasps or swears. And to finish it off, there is the four-minute long final shot, which you scan from corner to corner for clues. Are there answers to the puzzles the movie poses? Who cares? Not me. Great stuff.

Best TV Series I watched. Intelligence. It’s unusual to be able to watch a Canadian drama series and realize that it’s not "good, considering" but just really really good. From the makers of Da Vinci’s Inquest, and shown on CBC on Tuesdays, the multiple plotlines, shady deals, double crossing, and excellent acting from the leads (Ian Tracey and Klea Scott) as well as from the big supporting cast make this the best series I’ve seen since Oz.

Best radio show I listened to. Continues to be Writers and Company, where Eleanor Wachtel does a great job of interviewing writers. She gives them space to talk, doesn’t get in the way, and as a result I’ve found several authors I like from this show.

Best restaurant I visited. Brars. Who knew that in the middle of the warehouses and  machine shops of the light-industry wasteland that is Brampton, in one of a million mini-malls scattered around Toronto airport, there is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that serves up to a thousand people in an evening, provides good value (it’s a buffet for $13), and the great atmosphere of many people enjoying their company and their food. Big tables, lots of rooms, and lots of food (and on the evening I was there, great company too). Being the only non-subcontinent people in the restaurant was a bit of an eye-opener as well – I guess I have some things to learn about this place I live.

Best food shop I bought from – The usual culprits in Kitchener Waterloo are the gourmet places, like Vincenzo’s, who are pretty good I must admit. But this was the year I discovered Onkar Food & Spices on Hazelglen Road in Kitchener. Good Indian ingredients at good prices. Plus I get to walk the dog through Monarch Woods when I go there.

Best other shop in K-W: J&J Cards and Collectibles on Weber Street, just south of University. Some years ago it was a place that sold Pokemon cards for the kids, Magic Cards and Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia for the teenagers, and so on. In the last couple of years it has expanded, and it now has a great selection of board games, chess stuff, and lots more. The Brothers J have done a great job with this place.

Best book launch of 2006 – No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, at Words Worth books back in June. Great that so many people came out (and bought books). A belated thanks to everyone.