convincible.org

A convincible.org reader points out an interesting report on NPR and an organization that exposes the abuse of science and statistics:

I would like the editors of convincible.org to be aware of the following media watchdog group: STATS. This morning on my public radio station, I heard Maia Szalavitz from STATS on Marketplace discuss Afghanistan’s “Poppy Problem”. (Hear it with this link.) She claimed that legalizing the opium trade by allowing Afghan farms to avoid the black market would reduce the effects of terrorism. According to her report, the U.S. could buy all of their 10,000 tons of crops for $600M. Much less than the $788M budgeted to destroy the crops.

Could this be true? Ms. Szalavitz claims that use of opium in prescription medicines have a very low addition rate. I personally have no interest in getting more drugs into the U.S. market, but the thought that U.S. free trade could help the Afghans and reduce the threat of terrorism is a strong motivator. How would our public policy makers debate this topic? Is it simply a static policy where “we will not yield on the drug issue”?

Who is watching the watchdogs? Is it possible that the figures from STATS are being misread?

Dave

“A typical cow in the European Union receives a government subsidy of US$2.20 a day. The cow earns more than 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.” Wow! This is a direct quote from Mark Vaile, Australia’s trade Minister. (The full text of his speech.)

One of my regular complaints is that our country worries too much about protecting our relatively rich working population. And that protectionism hurts poor people elsewhere. When we protect certain industries or jobs here, we sometimes prevent the poor elsewhere from being able to get work. Mark Vaile’s comment above is a fairly disjointed and not a completely useful argument. But it is certainly a riveting statement!

I found the gist of that quote in today’s New York Times in an article about subsidies for farmers. Apparently, technology has allowed food production to boom even in a year of relative drought. Despite the worse rainy season in 17 years, farmers in the US Midwest had the second largest harvest ever! And of course we have far more corn than we need and we subsidize the farmers. This all means we end up dump the extra food overseas to protect prices here. Unfortunately, this means farmers in poor countries have to try and compete with our cheap high tech government subsidized corn. The poor farmers don’t have a chance.
Even more frightening is the idea that the US farmers would probably prefer to produce less and net a higher profit on the grain they produce. Producing more costs them more. But the subsidies encourage them to produce more along with the high tech new seeds that make it relatively easy. So instead of letting the free market sort things out our system saves some farmers in the US, at taxpayer expense, and hurts the truly poor farmers elsewhere.
A side note, this is one of the things I do like about organic produce and apparently the farmers like it too: Organics crops are a good way to grow less for more money. In some ways it would seem like having expensive luxury organic farmers here in the US and getting the super high tech seeds to the poor farmers overseas would make more sense.

Carl

There was a great interview with Democratic Representative Murtha on NPR today done by Melissa Block. You can hear it on the NPR site and it’s fairly short: Murtha: Military Supports Call for Iraq Withdrawal. It is a good contrast to the opinion piece by Senator Lieberman that I discussed in my last post.
While Representative Murtha makes his point, he seems to duck every question from Melissa Block. It’s really frustrating. I also note he makes a show of not answering certain questions to protect the jobs of generals in Iraq. This seems completely bogus… he is protecting a couple generals’ jobs while troops are dieing?!
Ok, so radio is a certain type of media and Murtha was trying to make his point. So he ducked some questions and stuck to his message. And I do think he has some solid and important points! But the contrast with Lieberman’s well written WSJ opinion piece was like black and white. Maybe Murtha has written a better argument elsewhere, I’ll have to look.
Regardless, Representative’s Murtha’s question ducking was embarrassing. We need to expect better from our politicians.

Carl