The meat industry is highly concentrated: could that be why the price of meat is rising so much faster than other food prices? It's certainly part of the picture, though probably not all of it. The ability to abuse market power is well known in economics, and the consequences are stated here by a rancher: "[the] vertical-integration model is abusive — to the animals, to the workers, to the consumers."
One secondary impact of the pandemic is turning out to be obesity. This Axios piece talks about how the pandemic is tied to a rise in eating disorders in the US; it also links to this CDC research, which shows a jump in BMI, particularly among children who were heavier to begin with.
I'm an economist: optimizing (or economizing!) is what is in my head a lot. That makes things tricky when I go to the grocery store because there are so many ways to conceive of what makes a good deal. Probably the first thing you would think of is a price reduction, but is even half price tuna a good deal? You'll want to check the "best buy" date, of course, but is it good for us? After all, tuna may be part of a healthy diet, but what about the amount of mercury it might contain? Finally, it's also a good idea to check the product's impact on the environment; the Monterey Bay guide can help you learn whether it casts your fish in a favorable light. So to sum up, in our shopping cart we need to optimize over different aspects of health, price, taste, and environmental impact. Get all that?
If we step back from the grocery store to think in slightly larger terms, we might start thinking in terms of food systems. In fact, the choices available to us in the supermarket are driven only partly by consumer choice: the food system makes a lot of choices for us. GAIN is an organization that's working at a high level to transform food systems, and they are preparing for the UN Food Systems summit in a few days. One of their goals is to produce an "IPCC for food," modeled on the tremendous amount of scientific resources that contributed to the Nobel Peace Prize shared with Al Gore. [***Update: this article is opposed to the idea, arguing that similar organizations already exist.]
One example of a way that food systems might change is this example of a reimagination of the diet of Indonesia. That country gathers lots of data on its diet, and this research team investigated how to optimize the country's diet across the many dimensions of health and environmental impact. Their plan calls for some serious changes, including eating less rice in favor of more animal products and/ or more pulses, nuts, and seeds. I wouldn't have guessed that more meat would be the way to go, but here's the figure!
It seems the lumber boom is over! Back in April I posted on the huge increase in the price of wood, driven in part by folks' desire to renovate their homes, build decks, etc. since they were stuck at home. Now, less than a year later, prices seem to be basically back to normal. That's good news for inflation; maybe it portends a drop in other markets as well?
Sorry, these aren't about resource Econ, but they catch my eye... and now they can catch yours too! The first few are from JP Morgan, as tweeted by Derek Thompson.
1) Vaccines & politics
I visited my family home in Reno, Nevada this past August: I don't think that the air quality ever dropped below the "unhealthy" level and spent most of the time in the "hazardous" range. The index, which tops out at 500, was regularly in the 200's and reached the 400's due to the Dixie fire and then the Caldor fire, which was still small when I left. Ash was visible in the air, like tiny flurries of snow, and accumulating on cars.
It turns out that I wasn't alone: the Washington Post reports that nearly 1 in 3 Americans has already experienced a weather disaster in 2021, including the fires but also storms like Ida. The New York Times reports that Ida dropped more in New York City in one hour than has even fallen there, at least as long as rainfall has been tracked. It turns out that hotter temperatures increase the intensity of storms. The below graphic shows the heightened intensity, but it may be hard to see; regardless, it's real!
I heard some stories long ago about why corn is so cheap: Michael Pollan and others talked about the giant system of subsidies.
Today Dr. Sarah Taber clarifies (in her usual, spicy way) that it's more about tax policy than about actual subsidies. She tweets, "You buy it, it appreciates with very little tax burden, you sell it later. Farmland is a piggy bank. That's why corporations are buying it now! Farmers legislated it into the best tax shelter in the world. But! You have to farm it for it to count as farmland & get the tax breaks! And that's why we grow so damn much corn, soy, beef, & other low-effort commodities. They're the shortest path to a tax break."
Update, Sunday August 29th: This morning's Washington Post includes this article about an outspoken British farmer responding to a new law there that will provide payments to farmers in a different way than it has been done before. It'll be interesting to see how this new law works out....