Ajay Shah explains what’s hidden behind the economic term “elasticity” – people with empty bellies:
GDP growth yields fewer poor people who respond to higher wheat prices by purchasing less meat or wheat, i.e. we have less of a shock absorber. That generates a reduced elasticity of demand of wheat. So prices have to rise by more in order to clear a supply-demand imbalance than was required in the past when there were more poor people who would adjust.
All right, enough already. I’m tired of being hassled by The Man. I fixed it, OK?
Simon Donner today answered a bunch of questions I had about US food production numbers:
[T]he extra corn for ethanol has to be planted on productive croplands, lands with the right soils, and most of that land is being used. In 2007, soybean planting – the other major feed crop grown in the midwest US – went down 16% in the US to make space for more corn. Soybean exports and use remained the same, but the ending stocks were down 72%. In other words, we’ve been cleaning out the cupboards.
Food prices popped back up a bit over the last week, according to the Economist, but have remained relatively stable for the last month. Down 1.7 percent over the last month, up 58.7 percent over the last year. West Texas Intermediate is up 99.8 percent over the last year (that would be “double”), and gold, (which I’m told is “the new gold”) is up 29.1 percent year over year.
When we talk about energy independence here in the United States, there’s a sort of tribal subtext. We don’t want to be dependent on them for our critical energy needs. Listening to a Platts’ podcast today about pipeline production south from Canada made me wonder whether them in our collective mind includes Canada.
I don’t know about you, but personally I am terrified of the potential cultural hegemony of Bachman Turner Overdrive and Mike Meyers.
update: In the comments, a helpful reader (thanks, Kelsey!) points out there’s a t-shirt to go with this:
Diane Albert’s view of the city is different than the one you might get trapped inside a glass-and-steel cage on your morning commute.
Out along the Rio Grande bicycle trail on her morning commute, she sees the coming and going of ducks, the cottonwoods changing from green in spring to gold in the fall.
She sees other cyclists, who invariably wave, and she waves back.
“Instead of people flipping you off in your cars, you have people waving,” the 50-year-old lawyer said of her morning commute.
The Energy Information Administration’s This Week in Petroleum out today opens with a fascinating discussion of the decline in use of home heating oil in the United States. And, oh, yes, by the way…
The U.S. average retail price for regular gasoline jumped to yet another all-time high as the price increased by 10.9 cents to 372.2 cents per gallon. This was the seventh consecutive week where the price rose, with the cumulative increase totaling 46.3 cents.
That’s what we in the news business call “burying the lead.” Though, to be fair, if the exact same thing has happened for each of the last seven weeks, maybe it’s not news so much any more.
My new favorite blog, because anyone who can explain resource allocation conflicts using Scooby-Doo jokes is a truly formidable voice.
0.04 inch of rain overnight at my house (0.1 cm). First measurable precip since April 10. It looks from the COCORAHS map as though some folks down in the valley got a good soaking.
New Scientist has been banging the drum about wheat virus doom of late, but I wasn’t convinced that they were not being alarmist. (My key metric: no one else was writing about it.)
Oh crap. Other people are writing about it:
The fungal disease could spread to other wheat producing states in the Near East and western Asia that provide one-quarter of the world’s wheat.
The FAO warned stated east of Iran — Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to be on high alert.
(h/t Tim Haab)