Cafe Hayek

Fuller Bellies With Freer Trade

My GMU colleague (and, of course, Marginal Revolution's own) Tyler Cowen explains, in yesterday's edition of the New York Times, how freer trade could fill the world's rice bowl.

Fake news

At first, it seems like a very depressing story (HT: Drudge)

Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions.

Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks.

Well, of course. With unemployment in double digits, incomes falling and the economy spiralling ever-downward—

But wait. Unemployment is low. Incomes are rising. The economy is doing well. That doesn't mean  that everyone is doing well. But is really likely that the working poor in America are suddenly doing so much worse than before that food pantries are noticing long lines of hungry people that they weren't prepared for?

Maybe the executive director of a group of food banks isn't the best source of unbiased information. Is government help really down? When did that happen? Food donations down? Why? How did this story get written in the first place? Did a reporter call up a few food banks curious to see how it's going? Or did Lisa Hamler-Fugitt send out a press release?

And if the story did originate with a reporter, can you imagine the food bank director responding to a question about the state of hunger with the answer--"We've got plenty of food. People are doing great. With the economy going so well, demand for our services are down. Have a great holiday season."

I think giving away food is a really good thing. I'm proud that my son and his classmates delivered home-made lasagnas to a local homeless shelter yesterday. I didn't get to talk to him about it yet, but I suspect his insights into the current state of the hungry are about as reliable as those in this story. I'll let you know after we talk tonight.

And Think of the Horrors Unleashed by Penicillin!

Here's one of the most absurdly ridiculous lines that I've read in a long time; it was penned by Alexander Cockburn, writing in the November 5, 2007 issue of The Nation:

Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World.

Shameful, on so many levels (one of which is that this sentiment drains credibility from the bulk of this article by Cockburn, which attempts to expose Al Gore's hypocrisy).

(HT: Joe Mann)

By the way, Gregg Easterbrook, in his tribute to Norman Borlaug (from the January 1997 issue of The Atlantic) wrote that

Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975!   The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

And here's an earlier entry from here at the Cafe about Dr. Borlaug.

Reed This

My friend Larry Reed, President of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for  Public Policy, is one of the most energetic and able activists for a free society.  The New York Times -- yesterday and today -- profiled Larry's important work.  (I believe that these links are free.)

Two things of special note.  One is this comment, from yesterday's report, about people such as Larry who understand the power of markets to create widespread and lasting prosperity:

“Their philosophy encourages selfishness and greed,” said Iris J. Lav, who runs the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, a network of 29 liberal state-level groups organized in part as a countervailing force. “If you have problems, they don’t care — just too bad.”

Of course, this accusation is nonsense.  We market advocates might be mistaken, but it's an old and shop-worn -- but still galling -- allegation that we "don't care."  People, such as Ms. Lav, who level this accusation cannot seem to see beyond the immediate and the visible.

It's interesting that few people would accuse Ms. Lav of not caring, despite the fact that, if we market advocates are not mistaken in our analyses, the policies that she endorses will lead to more and deeper poverty and hardship.

It's much easier -- and probably more viscerally gratifying -- to accuse those with whom you disagree of moral failings than to grapple with the content of their arguments.

The second thing to note is from today's article: I cannot understand why Jeffrey Sachs seems to learn nothing from the works of William Easterly and Peter Bauer.  If Africans are to become prosperous, they'd better follow the lead of James Shikwati rather than that of Professor Sachs.  (Africans can also learn a thing or two from my wife's recent work there.)

Easterly, by the way, recently defended Hayek from Sachs's utterly misinformed reading of The Road to Serfdom.  Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of Bill's superb essay:

Scientific American, in its November 2006 issue, reaches a "scientific judgment" that the great Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek "was wrong" about free markets and prosperity in his classic, "The Road to Serfdom." The natural scientists' favorite economist -- Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University -- announces this new scientific breakthrough in a column, saying "the evidence is now in." To dispel any remaining doubts, Mr. Sachs clarifies that anyone who disagrees with him "is clouded by vested interests and by ideology."

....

Mr. Sachs is wrong that Hayek was wrong. In his own global antipoverty work, he is unintentionally demonstrating why more scientists, Hollywood actors and the rest of us should go back and read "The Road to Serfdom" if we want to know what will not work to achieve "The End of Poverty." Hayek gave the best exposition ever of the unpopular ideas of economic freedom that somehow triumph anyway, alleviating far more national and global poverty than more fashionable Scandinavia-envy and grandiose plans to "make poverty history."

Tonight at dinner (at a Liberty Fund conference on property rights) I'll raise a glass to the memory of Milton Friedman and Peter Bauer, to Bill Easterly, to James Shikwati and June Arunga and Karol Boudreaux and Larry Reed and to everyone working to slay the superstitious belief that force, rather than freedom, is creative.

Monsanto Saves Lives

Want to know one way that a multinational corporation and the profit motive combine to save the lives of many Africans?  You can find out here.

Unnatural Oblivion

Someone forwarded this article to me yesterday.  Its title is "Poverty and the Environment."  Its author is Anup Shah.

When I read such stuff, I don't know if I should chuckle or weep.  This article is so unscientific, so unhinged from fact, so devoid of serious argument, so unaware of the real case for global capitalism, that it is a comic spoof of itself.  But it also seems to be written by a serious, concerned person -- and to reflect the opinion of many serious and concerned (if intellectually lazy) people.

The most glaring problem with this article is its unquestioned acceptance of the notion that the earth's resources are fixed in quantity -- so the more resources used by rich people, the fewer are the resources available for poor people.  It also assumes, in the spirit of a cartoon aimed at six-year-old children, that global outcomes are the planned results of masterminds -- if the outcomes are good, the good masterminds (the superheroes) are ascendant; if the outcomes are bad, the bad masterminds are ascendant.

But the quotation that most caught my eye and made my head shake with bewilderment is this one; here Shah is quoting favorably from a book by Vandana Shiva, entitled Stolen Harvest:

The gain in "yields" of industrially produced crops is based on a theft of food from other species and the rural poor in the Third World. That is why, as more grain is produced and traded globally, more people go hungry in the Third World. Global markets have more commodities for trading because food has been robbed from nature and the poor.

Talk about a fixed-pie view of reality.  Do people such as Shiva and Shah not realize that until very recently -- roughly the past three-hundred years -- the vast majority of the people in the world, as for almost all of human history, were routinely threatened with, and often actually victimized by, starvation?  Do people such as Shiva and Shah not realize that the earth's population today (at about 6.2 billion) is nearly ten times larger than it was a mere 300 years ago (at about 625 million)?  Given that today at least one billion of us spend our entire lives without worrying one minute about whether or not we will have enough to eat, how can anyone seriously argue that the amount of food now available daily to each of the more than one-billion citizens of western, industrialized societies is "stolen" from people living in less-developed societies?  Is it even remotely plausible that the vast increase in the amount of per-capita food consumption for the entire world -- a world today with ten times more people than were alive in 1700 -- is made possible by our stealing this food from the mouths of earthworms and other species?

Do people such as Shiva and Shah not know of the vast literature that shows a powerful and positive relationship between economic freedom and increased living standards?  Are they unaware of the arguments (and, frankly, the data) that resources are augmented and largely created by human enterprise, rather than moved from point or person A to point or person B?

Famine in Niger

In this essay, Thompson Ayodele puts his finger on the source of famine in Niger.

Enterprise Africa!

Since September 12, my wife, Karol, has been in South Africa.  She and GMU graduate student Susan Anderson are there until October 19th, leading the research effort for the Mercatus Center's Enterprise Africa! project.

(During this time, I'm lone parent to our eight-year-old son, Thomas.  It's quite an experience -- for Thomas and for me!)

Here's a link describing Enterprise Africa!

Is Niger's Problem Over-population?

Inspired by the sad plight of the people of Niger, letters today in two major U.S. newspapers -- the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor -- repeat the age-old myth that poverty is caused by over-population.

Let's look at just a few facts.

Niger's population density is 9 people per square kilometer.  Compare this figure to the population densities of much more prosperous countries:

France: 110 people per sq. km.

Czech Republic: 133

Switzerland: 181

Italy: 197

Germany: 236

United Kingdom: 250

Japan: 340

Netherlands: 484

South Korea: 493

Taiwan: 636

Hong Kong: 6641

Now let's cheat big-time in favor of the overpopulation hypothesis by counting as relevant only Niger's arable land.  If all Nigeriens lived only on Niger's arable land, the population density of this land would be 260 persons per square kilometer -- much denser than 9 persons per sq. km., but nowhere close to the population density (counting all the square kilometers, arable or not) of the likes of the Netherlands, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

(All facts reported above are calculated from data available at the CIA's World Factbook site.)

Where's the evidence for the apparently indestructible belief that over-population is a fundamental 'cause' of poverty?

The world needs more scholars of the likes of Julian Simon.

Africa: Who is to Blame?

If you live in the U.K., tune in on the BBC.  If you live elsewhere, do your best to find a telecast of this special television program on satellite.  It's entitled "Africa: Who is to Blame?"  It features the brilliant and eloquent June Arunga.

Bononomics

Julian Morris has this message for Live8 (and Live Aid) organizer Bob Geldof:

My message for Bob Geldof is get real. Look at the realities of the situation, look at how the very poorest people of the world actually live and what is preventing them from becoming richer. And if he looks at that, he'll realise that it's actually the governments who he wants to give aid money to that are causing the problem.

Julian is right.

Of course, Geldof and other practitioners of what might be call ‘Bononomics’ are mostly interested in their own moral posturing. My evidence for this accusation is the fact that their statements and proposed solutions range from the utterly shallow to the dangerously counterproductive. So all will dismiss Julian’s message.

Too bad for Africans.

Dogs at the Margin

For Christmas I bought my wife a puppy – a 10-week old soft-coated wheaten terrier. Karol named her "Molly."

Molly joins our nearly 14-year-old beagle, Priscilla. Priscilla – or "P," as we usually call her – silently tolerates Molly, except when Molly approaches P’s food bowl. This gentle geriatric beagle growls like a lion if Molly gets within 18 inches of P’s food bowl. Molly (wisely) gets the message and backs away.

But both dogs peacefully share the same water bowl. No growling, no sniping, no complaints. Both dogs drink happily from the same bowl, oftentimes simultaneously.

Why? After all, water is just as essential for life as is food. Indeed, because a dog can live a good deal longer without a meal than he or she can live without water, water arguably is more important than food.

My hypothesis is that natural selection gave dogs an (unconscious) understanding of the margin.

If historically for wolves (and dogs) water was more readily available than food, as seems plausible, then there was less to be gained by a dog being genetically programmed to threaten physical violence if another dog shared his water than there was to be gained from threatening violence if another dog tried to share his food. Put differently, each available unit of food was worth more to wolves and early dogs than was each available, comparably sized unit of water. Hence, dogs’ genes are evolved to prompt them to be willing to spend more – risking life and limb by threatening violence – to protect a food source than they are programmed to spend to protect an equally sized source of water.

Of course, I could be barking up the wrong tree.

.....

Apropos nothing: Priscilla the beagle shares a birthday with F. A. Hayek, May 8th.