Congratulations to British funnyman David Mitchell on his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court:
That green clarinet that causes people to reveal embarrassing truths should come in handy during oral arguments.
iPad Bag Recommendation
Apr 26, ’10
10:52 AM
So everyone seems to be having trouble finding an appropriate bag for their iPad. I certainly haven’t yet seen anything that looks good. Bags meant for laptops are too big (and my experience is that many of them actually depend on the presence of a laptop of a certain size to hold their shape), and everything else is essentially a purse.
I imagine that this is a problem even for the ladies, because the demographic that will tend to own an iPad right now is the demographic that’s likely to be carrying a purse that’s far too small for the thing.
My solution, for now at least, is the Healthy Back Bag. Mine is actually from LL Bean, but they don’t seem to sell this particular model any more. I have the microfiber bag in black, size Small. It does not look like the iPad should fit in there, but it does, and without squeezing.
There are another four pockets outside and seven pockets inside that are good for headphones, cameras, my little folding keyboard, pens, notecards, etc., etc., etc.
Click on these pictures to see bigger ones.
The iPad itself first goes into a homemade leather sleeve that Nicole made me. This provides some minimal cushioning from some thin foam on the flat parts, and from the seams on the edges.
The Healthy Back Bag isn’t what you’d call handsome, but it’s extremely light weight (when you’re going to be carrying something that’s itself fairly light, it pays to not waste most of that savings on the bag itself). Because it’s not a purpose-built computer bag, it also has the advantage of not shouting EXPENSIVE GIZMO to everyone who sees it. This may not actually be an advantage for you, depending on your outlook.
My original plan was just to use this until some decent Official Solution came on the market, but the improvisation is working so well that any O.S. will have to be very good indeed to pry me away from this.
Two Confusing Things About Publishing
Apr 25, ’10
2:55 PM
From a recent, much-linked New Yorker article on the e-book business:
Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books. The industry produces more than a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of which will not earn back the money that their authors have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty advances are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.
There are not many businesses where you can be wrong 70% of the time and stay in business.
Returns — the publishers’ biggest expense are entirely eliminated by e-books. That must be why they insist that e-books should cost as much as, or more than, hardcover books.
The Supposed Gender Gap in Education
Apr 21, ’10
9:36 AM
If you consume any quantity of news at all, you will already be aware that right now The Gender Gap is one of those stories that’s just bubbling under the surface, with its proponents trying to spin it up into the National Crisis Of The Week some time soon.
The Gender Gap, this time, has to do with young men not graduating from high school, or going to college, at the same rate as young women. The graduation and college-attendance rate of young men isn’t falling; in fact it’s rising; but the women’s rate is rising faster.
There are a whole lot of annoyances here. The first is that there’s this underlying assumption, never explained or even directly stated, that Of Course this is some sort of Problem. Why is should be a problem is never really expressed; ‘collidge ejuhcashun’ is just taken as an a priori good, for everyone, all the time.
Second, and somewhat related, is that I don’t think the real story is being told. Private and good public schools have been sending a high proportion of both sexes to college for a good long while now. What has changed is that a lot of people from the kinds of schools that graduate a lot of students who aren’t strictly literate are now ‘going to college’. And in this community of barely literate scholars, women are very, very strongly overrepresented. It’s not that women are stupid; but that, these days, stupid (or at least mis-educated) women tend to go on to something called ‘higher education’, while stupid or mis-educated men tend to just get jobs digging ditches.
But because the associate’s-degree program in Word Processing at Bongwater State U. is ‘college’ in the statistics in exactly the way that Harvard and MIT are, people are panicking over the ‘gender gap’ in education. What they really should be worried about is the amount of money and time these women are wasting on what amounts to very expensive vocational training for low-wage jobs.
Seriously: I looked at the ‘areas of study’ web page for a state university not far from here, and found, among other things:
- Administrative Assistant (certificate)
- Child Care & Guidance
- Child Development
- Child Life Services
- Child Studies (apparently there are differences between these)
- Coaching
- Communication Disorders
- Companion Animal (presumably training them, not being one)
- Corporate Video (not to be confused with Communication Disorders above)
- Criminal Justice
- Exercise Science
- Family Life
- Family Studies
- Fashion Merchandising
- Fitness & Exercise Science (different from plain Exercise Science above apparently)
- Head Start
- Health Promotion
- Outdoor Adventure Leadership
- Recreation
- Retail Management
- Sustainable Energy Systems Management
This kind of thing isn’t education. It’s vocational training, at best.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with vocational training; but it’s not like studying Philosophy or Physics or Math or Literature. The chief difference is the specificity of the courses. The Head Start major includes classes like “U.S. Political Systems” — showing that they understand what Head Start is really about — and “Relationships in the 21st Century” and “Guiding Alternatives” (seriously, that’s the name of a required class), and so on and so forth. Vocational. Training. But it comes with a bachelor’s degree at the end.
Lately, a lot of these stories on the Education page of the newspaper have been next to other stories wherein the local college is patting itself on the back for holding tuition increases down to a bare 6% this year. If the reporter is any good, the story might mention that while this year’s increase might be only 6%, the cumulative increase in tuition and fees over the past 20 years has been something like 400%.
The local college will rarely, if ever, be asked to comment on this.
What’s going on is that there’s an enormous bubble in higher education; everyone is told that they absolutely must consume this product if they’re to have any kind of future that does not involve grease under the fingernails (and grease under the fingernails is assumed to be a terrible thing), and further the product is heavily subsidized.
So people go to college in vast numbers, and because of this increased demand tuition rises even more, and the product seems even more attractive as a result, because if it weren’t something that’s absolutely necessary and wonderful, they wouldn’t be packing the dorms full every fall at $20,000 and up a head, would they? And so the demand rises even more, and the subsidies rise, and so on and so forth.
At the same time, the real market value of the product falls, because the world is over-supplied with bachelors of arts. The result is to spur demand for more specifically elite education, since the the Bongwater State U. degree has been so devalued in the university’s rush to accommodate more and more and more students, many of whom should not be there in the first place.
This cannot go on forever, and I think the ‘gender gap’ is actually a sign of the beginning of the end. I think it’s being seen as a ‘gender gap’ for two reasons:
- The people doing the studies of such things are typically academics themselves, and so are going to tend not to entertain the notion that the academy is perhaps going off the rails;
- Women are, comparatively, herd animals.
Now I know I’m going to get attacked for that last one there, so let me explain what I mean. For a variety of reasons, the average American woman seems to be less likely to be a trend-bucker than the average American man. I think that some of this results from women being taught from a young age to value security and predictability, and to go with the group. Before leaving angry feminist rants in the comments, you should consider that this is the flip side of the feminist trope that women somehow innately value ‘consensus’ and ‘community’ and negotiation and harmony over conflict.
Men, on the other hand, are taught from a young age to value self-reliance. Very few men are self-reliant, and a lot more men than women get themselves killed while doing things that the consensus has already determined is a very bad idea, like driving a hopped-up Honda Civic down the freeway at 120 mph.
But the same cultural baggage that causes Johnny Patchbeard to bolt a fart-pipe onto his car and then wrap it around a tree also results in him being more likely to question whether spending more money than he’s ever had in his life to become an official Companion Animal Technician is really worth it. After all, he could always set up his own fart-pipe-and-ridiculous-car-stereo installation company.
This is the guy who isn’t on campus. Four years from now, he’ll either be established in the fart-pipe trade, or possibly doing something else; his girlfriend will be deep in debt and eligible for the specific dead-end job she trained for at Bongwater State.
(And this is before you consider that the Women’s Studies/Women’s Center/Runaway bigotry calling itself feminism culture on many campuses pretty effectively communicates to men that their kind really isn’t wanted there.)
The same thing happens, I think, at all levels of education. I obviously haven’t been in elementary school for a very long time, and I’m aware of the dangers of trusting the accounts of journalists; but everything I read — in blogs from teachers as well as newspapers and magazines — suggests that every year the stuff the schools teach gets less and less relevant to anyone except education wonks. The cost keeps rising, and we constantly hear about the need to lengthen either the school day or school year, or both. Nobody ever says that maybe schools should be pared back to essentials; the closest you’ll see is people arguing for teaching only the essentials, but ten hours a day and eleven months a year.
None of this is never addressed in these stories, even in passing. Boys not doing well in school, and not going to college? They must be dumber! This is more or less what people said about girls and women a hundred years ago, and today you’d be savagely attacked for even hinting that females are in any way at a natural disadvantage.
Suggest today that the problem with educational consumption is some innate failing of half of the population, though, and you can be a respected education pundit — if that half of the population is the male half. That’s far safer than suggesting that extraordinarily expensive has limited appeal.
Ideal 'Minority' Participation
Apr 20, ’10
8:44 AM
A new bridge is being built across the Mississippi River in St. Louis. And some groups have a problem because, they say, there is not enough ‘minority participation’ in the construction.
Protesters gathered Monday at the ground breaking ceremony for the New Mississippi River Bridge project.
The group is concerned with the minority participation in building the bridge, said Troy Buchanan, task force chair for the United Congregations of the Metro-East.
“Shame on President Obama, and shame on Ray LaHood to build these projects in America without proper minority representation,” Buchanan said.
Buchanan said the Interstate 64 project had 27 percent minority participation, which he considers an ideal model. UCM is asking for 30 percent minority involvement in the New Mississippi River Bridge project.
Wait a minute, if 27 percent is ‘ideal’, then wouldn’t 30 percent be more than ideal, and therefore, you know, too much? Black people — the article keeps saying ‘minority’, but let’s be honest, this isn’t about Bosnians or Navajos or Mexicans — make up about 12% of the population of the United States, and about 18% of the population of the St. Louis metro area.
It seems to me that a project with 27% ‘minority participation’ means that African-Americans are already not just being included fairly, but in fact favored. The United Congregations guy apparently agrees with me, because he said this was ‘ideal’. But now it should be 30%?
“Investments in infrastructure should be shared by all Americans,” said Ron Trimmer, of UCM, in a press release.
With a slightly larger share, that is, going to Mr. Trimmer’s kind of Americans.
A couple paragraphs further down, there’s a clue:
East St. Louis is 95 percent to 100 percent minority, with an 18.4 percent unemployment rate, Buchanan said. He said UCM’s concern is creating opportunities for those that are unemployed in the communities surrounding the project.
Leaving aside the insanity of a place being ’100 percent minority’, there’s a problem of logic here. The Interstate 64 project, that of the ‘ideal’ 27% participation, was mostly in areas inhabited almost entirely by white people. If one end of a bridge being in a ’100% minority’ area means that there should be more ‘minority’ participation in the project, presumably the highway that was rebuilt through the richest part of town should have had a lot of Jewish and Ivy-League participation, no?
Apparently: no. Of course not.
I’m really of two minds about this kind of thing. On the one hand, it’s all ridiculous. If a black-owned or -staffed firm can do the work, and do it at competitive rates, they should not have any trouble attracting business. It’s in the government’s interest to spread this work around (if only because they are likely to net more in taxes from a lot of small companies than from one big company), and not to effectively annex a few big contractors (likely owned by white people) as arms of the government.
But in these articles, I only see people calling for ever-higher levels of ‘participation’ of people of a certain skin color, and never anything even on how much of a given area’s e.g. construction industry is represented by people with that skin color.
Libertarianism and Public Goods
Apr 18, ’10
11:08 AM
The other day, Jason Kottke posted a thing attributed to Reddit titled ‘I am an American conservative shitheel’.
This is similar to a bunch of stuff that was particularly popular while the ‘health care’ bill was being rammed through Congress, and I meant to write something then. It’s still worth looking at the suppositions behind it.
The simplified version of it is something like this:
You conservatives are against ‘socialist’ health care, so it’s hypocritical of you to drive on ‘socialist’ roads, benefit from ‘socialist’ police and fire departments, send your kids to ‘socialist’ schools, and hold your little teabagger rallies in ‘socialist’ parks!!!1
Really. You can go read the original for a more nuanced version from someone who doesn’t think that this is utterly ridiculous, but that’s the real message there.
The argument is: roads, police, firemen, and parks are all provided by the government though coercive taxation, and if you do not think that that’s a big problem, you shouldn’t think that it’s a big problem to provide health care the same way.
This is such an absurd straw-man argument that it’s not worth addressing in detail. It is worth noting, however, that this kind of thing does not actually address the real argument against more government. It merely charges ‘conservatives’ with hypocrisy because they are opposed to more of something that they don’t like in the first place.
In Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which takes place about fifty to seventy-five years in the future, one of the older characters says:
“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?” [...]
“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.”
So I am always a bit suspicious of charges of hypocrisy. In cases like this, I am doubly suspicious.
A lot of libertarians (these things complain about ‘conservatives’, but they’re really complaining about that part of conservatism that’s indistinguishable from libertarianism) actually are against public police forces to one degree or another, on the basis that, to judge from investigations of cops that hit people over the head, or zap them with Tasers, or shoot them dead, the members of the public police forces seem to be absolutely superhuman in the performance of their jobs in that they are almost never found to have done anything incorrectly. And what’s more, the ‘procedures’ — which are always found to have been followed — are not revised after it’s found that they lead to the police killing people wrongly. Amazing. And apparently the left-wingers think that’s great.
Because if you accept the left-wing complaint about non-statists being hypocritical because they drive on public roads and use government weather forecasts, the only conclusion that remains is that the real goal of the left wing is to have us all living in a totalitarian state, with everything provided by the government.
Which suspicion is part of the motivation behind opposition to things like government health care.
Three Things
Apr 15, ’10
6:27 PM
1: which is actually two things in one. Nicole bought some half & half the other day from our local artisanal food jobber. This is primarily a butcher shop, but they also sell local dairy products, eggs, etc., etc.
When she got home, she noticed that the sell-by date had already passed, by about 24 hours. She called the place, and they told her that the next time she came in, they’d give her a free quart of half & half. Additionally, the store now knows that either they’re not getting frequent enough deliveries from the dairy, or that the dairy is selling them nearly-expired products.
In a completely separate matter, Nicole took some olive oil back to the local grocery store the other day, because the stuff wasn’t actually olive oil. If you know what olive oil is supposed to taste like, it’s pretty easy to tell the stuff that’s 5% olive oil and 95% bean squeezings; and if you’re not familiar with olive oil, an easy way to tell is that olive oil turns solid when you put it in the refrigerator. This stuff didn’t.
Nicole didn’t tell them that she was returning this because it had been misrepresented, and was in fact not at all what it said on the label. Try explaining all of that to the bored teenager working at the grocery store: the only difference between that and not saying anything is that you will have done some talking, and you will have been looked at like you have lobsters coming out of your ears.
It’s virtually impossible for a customer to get a message (like: “You are selling counterfeit olive oil”) through to anyone with any decision-making authority at a company with more than about 20 employees. The end result? We’re probably not going to be buying olive oil at the grocery store any more.
2: At a different grocery store today — Wegman’s — I noticed an interesting thing. Most of the products are arranged not by function, but by ideology. Or by ethnic origin.
By this, I mean that there was one department full of nothing but hippie tea, from relatively ordinary things like Red Zinger all the way to Japanese roasted twig tea. Then there was another aisle full of ordinary tea, ranging from Bong Ho Industrial Tea Concern Ltd. Sachets Of Reconstituted Tea Sweepings (864 ct.) all the way up to Red Zinger, the hippie tea for people with jobs.
Then there was a huge aisle full of Coke and Pepsi and so forth; but if you were looking for Coke with sugar in it, you wouldn’t find it there. You had to look in the aisle full of Mexican food, where they had Mexi-Coke by the bottle or the case, next to twenty kinds of Tamarindo. According to Wegman’s, the Hecho en Mexico Coke is more like Tamarindo than like, say, Coke.
There were three separate selections of chocolate bars:
Yuppie chocolate, all of which is the color of tires, with oh-so-subtle labels promising that the things contain little more than cocoa stuck together with the absolute minimum of binding agents;
Normal candy, which ranges from the low end of yuppie chocolate down to Hershey bars and Nestlé Crunch;
Candy typically sold only in Exotic Lands like England and Germany and Canada.
Similarly the digestives are next to the English mustard, not next to the other cookies; the Radenska water is not next to the Perrier and the San Pellegrino, but next to the other German things (though Radenska is actually from Slovenia); and so on and so forth.
All of these things are widely scattered, so if you actually want to see your mineral water options, or the cookies available, you have to be prepared to wander all over the store. Which may be the whole point: but in my case the result of this kind of thing is that I always feel like I’m somehow missing the thing I’m really looking for, because my taxonomy does not match Wegman’s.
More annoying than that, the effect is to ghettoize this stuff, so that you’re not going to consider, say, the German mustard when you’re looking for mustard in general; you’re only going to see the German mustard if you are looking for German things in the first place. The most important thing about the mustard, Coke, digestives, etc., Wegman’s is saying, are not their food natures as mustard, Coke, and cookies, but rather their country of origin.
3: I think that all of this points to a problem the United States has with the culture of eating. You actually see the same thing at work all over the place, but it’s much easier to demonstrate with food.
I started thinking about this again while watching that Jamie-Oliver-Feeds-The-Hillbillies show on ABC.
I shouldn’t really call it that, because Huntington, WV, where it takes place, is a small city, with trains, and an airport, and an Interstate, and a navigable river, and so on and so forth. True hillbillies are the result of the incredible isolation that a lot of West Virginia produces; you can easily have to cover 150 miles there to get 20 miles away from your starting point in a straight line. Huntington is actually a fairly nice place.
But according to the CDC, it’s also a fairly fat place, in fact the fattest town in America: Fat City U.S.A. And so Jamie Oliver has come there to teach them all to eat.
Oliver cooks meals, and tells them to stop deep-frying everything, and tries to get the schools to actually cook food rather than reheating frozen stuff, and that’s all fine and well. The most interesting thing happened when he cooked something or other in a school that required knives and forks.
And it turned out that a lot of these elementary-school kids didn’t know how to use utensils. I don’t mean that they weren’t very coordinated: I mean that they really had no idea what the heck they were doing. The strong impression is that they’d never used a knife or fork before.
And that seems likely, because they seem to survive on a diet of nothing but chicken nuggets and french fries. I have nothing against either chicken nuggets or french fries, mind you, but these kids really do seem to eat nothing else, unless it’s some other variety of state-fair midway food being served up for dinner. They inhabit a completely different food culture.
Think about what you eat at home, when you cook from scratch. If you never do this, think about what your mother or grandmother might have served. The meal that I’m envisioning is a smaller, non-gut-busting version of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner: you have some meat, and some vegetables that are recognizably vegetables, and possibly a salad (though salad is never, ever part of Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners for reasons I haven’t figured out), and so on and so forth. You sit down and eat most of this off one plate.
Now try finding that in a restaurant.
You can get a specific version of it in a steakhouse, from a fancy place with a special port-wine cellar all the way down to Ponderosa and its ilk. And you can assemble it at Old Country Buffet. But nearly all restaurants instead serve either some conspicuously ethnic food, or what I call stunt food.
Stunt Food is all branded and specialized, and mostly unrecognizable as anything other than its branded, specialized self. The Bloomin’ Onion® is a perfect example, as is anything that comes to you while sizzling in any manner, as is the entire menu at TGI Friday’s.
Some of this is just logical: the restaurant needs to offer you something that you can’t easily do at home for 10% of the cost, and there are some things that you can pull off in a restaurant kitchen at scale that are difficult or impossible to do at home. But people must like the simple meat-and-two-veg meal, or they wouldn’t go on making it at home so much. And it’s almost non-existent outside home kitchens. Cracker Barrel delivers things that are vaguely similar, but their enormous portions at least push them up against the Stunt Food line.
Why the hell is this? Why is our food culture so messed up? Why is the country of origin or the market segment more important than the basic nature of the food for organization at Wegman’s? Why are the things people eat in restaurants and at home almost completely different? Why does nobody seem to notice this?
Gift Guide For Nie-Blankes
Dec 9, ’09
10:59 AM
The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ‘smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.
And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.
Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.
What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:
- Children’s books about Barack Obama
- Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
- ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
- Gospel cruises
- Bindya scarves
- ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.
Pardon Me, Madam; Your Condescension Is Showing
Dec 6, ’09
9:52 AM
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
And while scores at Hanna Woods [Elementary School] have improved over the last few years, the gains have not been good enough for the federal government. The [No Child Left Behind] law, enacted in 2002, requires states to set testing goals that get tougher every year. By 2014, every student in the nation, including the poor, minority and disabled, is expected to pass all tests.
You will note that the decidedly left-wing Post-Dispatch more or less equates being a ‘minority’ with being disabled or with being poor — and certainly with being too stupid to pass the tests. Every student — even black ones — will be expected to pass the tests: goodness! The Post does not say so directly, but the tone of the thing makes it clear that they believe that reading and basic arithmetic is pretty much beyond the abilities of most ‘minority’ students. Lovely outlook, that.
From the Washington Post, in an article about the ‘digital divide’ and how it’s harming schoolkids:
But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels of the Woodrow Wilson public library in the Falls Church area. Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers.
It’s crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families. All those Indian anesthesiologists, Chinese engineers, Korean entrepreneurs, not buying computers for their kids even though they can afford it. Oh, wait, they do buy computers because they can afford it. Certainly many immigrants are relatively poor; but it’s interesting that the story equates being an immigrant and being poor. A better newspaper would have written that the libraries attract ‘students from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.’
'Hunger' in the U.S.
Nov 20, ’09
1:44 PM
The USDA released its annual report on Food Security (i.e. whether people can secure enough food to eat, not whether Chef Boyardee is an Al Qaeda mole) this week, and the media have temporarily stopped writing stories about the crisis of Obesity among the poor to write stories about how the real problem is that they’re starving.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith approaches his job of revising The Times to ensure that the government’s predictions always can be shown to have been accurate:
For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.
We seem to be living in a kind of strange mirror image of Oceania here, where everyone has a different pair of boots for every day of the week but where the newspapers are full of hand-wringing editorials about the boot shortage.
The New York Times reports on the USDA Food Security Report:
Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.
The important thing here is to note that the Times uses the common and easily understood word ‘hunger’ in the headline; but the lede backs off from this quite a bit, putting the actual thing being measured in quotes, and interjecting a ‘what it calls’. It seems to have occurred to someone at the Times that what is at an all-time high is not hunger, exactly.
A better headline, really, would be: Some People Too Stupid To Use Food Stamps because there’s absolutely no reason for anyone in the United States not to have enough to eat. If your income is $0, the government will feed you. If your income is greater than $0 but less than an amount that’s almost impossible to figure accurately, the government will partially feed you.
The Times again:
About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.
The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.
It falls to Tino to do the reporting that, for whatever reason, the New York Times won’t, and explain what these terms mean.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has four categories for ‘food security’:
- High Food Security
- Pretty much what it says. USDA says ‘no reported indications’ of food access problems.
- Marginal Food Security
- Basically: anxiety. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.’
- Low Food Security
- Poor. Buying store brands. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of reduced food intake.’
- Very Low Food Security
- USDA says: ‘Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.’
You are sorted into these categories based on your answers to the questions in this survey. The questions are like:
I worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more: Often, sometimes, never
I couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals: Often, sometimes, never
In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?
In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?
I relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed my child because I was running out of money to buy food: Yes, no
Basically, you get a point for each ‘Yes’, ‘Often’, or ‘Sometimes’ answer. So if you’ve worried, and eaten a small meal, and eaten what you think is an unbalanced meal, or relied on ‘only a few kinds of low-cost food’ to feed the kids at least once any time in the past year, you have ‘very low food security’. That might be a valid thing to measure, but it certainly is not ‘hunger’.
Incidentally, it’s notable that the people in the survey report markedly better ‘food security’ in the 30 days immediately prior to the survey than they do when asked the same questions about the past year. This strongly suggests that people are remembering things as worse than they really were. On top of the vagueness of the questions, this renders the survey almost totally pointless.
The official victim class (to which a lot of ‘food-insecure’ people certainly belong) would all be pretty skilled in being sure to always tell the government survey that everything’s terrible; this is, after all, the job of the professional victim.
In the United States, if you can’t afford food, the federal government will subsidize your eating, usually on the spot. When you apply for food stamps, unless something goes wrong you generally leave the office with your EBT card. In 2007, Nicole and I tried the food stamp diet to see whether it was possible to eat well on it, and the conclusion is that you need to know how to cook, but that other than that, it’s pretty damned easy.
What we actually did was the $21 per week diet. At the time, the average food stamp benefit came to $21 per person per week. You’re not actually meant to spend only $1 per meal; as your income rises, your benefit is cut. If you actually have no income at all, you got $155 a month, which is $38.75 a week. Given that it’s entirely possible to eat a healthy and tasty diet on $21 a week, $38.75 would be a piece of cake. Literally: on $21 you can only afford cookies.
The benefit has increased since then, and if you receive SNAP benefits (the actual name for the food-stamp program these days), any kids you might have are eligible for free breakfast and lunch at school.
The Times story goes on, eventually leading here:
Some conservatives have attacked the survey’s methodology, saying it is hard to define what it measures.
Considering that the statistics don’t make sense and that even the New York Times feels a need to distance itself from the weird terminology involved, I’d say that ‘some conservatives’ might have a point.
