Lumber markets going boom

Found this April 2021 article on lumber prices post COVID. Prices in 2021 are the highest they've been, probably ever:

CNBC's website is obnoxious, but it does have some good information. A quote: "The surge in lumber prices in the past year has added $35,872 to the price of an average new single-family home and $12,966 to the market value of an average new multifamily home, according to the NAHB." Home prices are high, and low availability is raising the prices of new homes. Curiously, Baltimore is one of three markets noted to have the least inventory (with San Diego and San Francisco). Not sure what's going on in Balmer- not a crowd we usually hang with!

Update: this article, also from April, is about the growing market for wood pellets, which we touched on briefly in class.

Mammalia

 True confessions: found this via Twitter, but check it out on Our World in Data: only 4% of mammals are wild animals. Fully 1/3 are humans, and most of the rest are cows and pigs. I wonder what that balance was like 100 years ago?

Cultured meat

Ezra Klein is a journalist formerly of Vox media and now at the New York Times. While he tends to talk about himself a little too much in interviews (instead of focusing on the person he's supposedly interviewing) he makes a number of good points in this Twitter thread based on his NY Times article. He thinks that Beyond and Impossible are the first entrants into a new group of meat substitutes, and he wants Biden to pump investment into the category. Someone else attached this document on cultured meat, which contends that scientists can make a much better product much more efficiently, most notably avoiding the miserable CAFO situation. That would sure be great! Unfortunately (gross out warning!) I have heard that basically cultured meat relied on amniotic fluid as a key input, and I can't imagine that scaling very well. I hope I'm wrong!

Which energy source is best?

 Ok, true confessions: I was scrolling reddit when I came across this interesting chart. (The first two columns are from Our World in Data.) It makes natural gas look pretty good, no? 

Citations

Everybody lives in Asia

That's the title of a post on Slate referring to the idea that more than half of the world's population lives in a pretty tight circle. A Reddit user first posted the idea and then a professor did the math: it turns out that the tightest version of the circle excludes not only most of Japan, but also Java, an island in Indonesia that is home to more than 150 million people. If we expand to include these places, I wonder what % of the world's population really does live in Asia?

Climate change is cutting into agricultural productivity

In class we watched a video about climate change, and one part talked about how crops will be less nutritious after climate change. In today's news, we are learning that we are getting fewer crops altogether. Sobering news from Prof. Ortiz-Bobea!

Vox on Meat

I don't have a lot at "steak" in the culture wars around meat: I grew up loving ribs and steak, but became a vegetarian in college. I have since done some backsliding and I do occasionally have a little meat, but it's just not a large part of my diet.

On the other hand, for a lot of people meat is life, or at least meat provides the seasoning for life. I totally get this! I'm an economist and it's easy for me to think of life in terms of incentives and prices, but believe it or not I do understand that there is more to life. 

This article from Vox is about the struggle to just have meatless meals in a very meat-oriented part of France. The point is very well taken: issues of identity and diet are not something that is very price-sensitive!