Pie Fight

Middle class myopia about the socio-economics of food

UPDATE: While my criticism of Blythman's article focused on the idiocy of her belief that public health policy can be based on middle class behaviour and assumptions, the article also deserved a right royal bollocking for its dodgy use of research. Adopting the faux objectivity characteristic of so much of the American press, it pretended to present two sides of the story by: A) offering accepted scientific evidence, then B) providing oppositional critiques of the mainstream science. See the trick here? It presents two sides of teh argument, but only lets one side critique the other. Thankfully, wiser men than me have called her on it. The best bit is the second letter, which points out that one of her key critics of putting folic acid in bread runs an online health food shop that sells - you guessed it - folic acid. Joanna, you got played.

This is one of the most egregious, up its own ass articles I've ever read. Joanna Blythman's normally pretty good, but in this piece she seems to be willfully myopic about the ways that socio-economic realities and the diets of the poor. Eg, she quotes, approvingly, this guy:

"It is noticeable that the FSA isn't proposing adding it to wholemeal bread because it already contains it. Why doesn't the FSA just tell people to eat more wholemeal bread?"

Um, because that wouldn't work, especially not with the mums who need this. (Hint: they don't have the same approach to food as you.)

Ok, that's one stupid question answered; how about another one?

The other main objection is that fortification is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The estimate is that adding folic acid to bread will save 120 babies in the UK every year from spina bifida, but for every baby saved, half a million people, male and female, will have to take the added folic acid. "Why not target potential young mothers rather than mass-supplementing the population at large ?" asks Holford.

Hey, toughie! How about 'Because the young mothers who need this don't respond to government messages on health and diet?' You do; they don't - wishing ain't gonna change that. Or maybe the poor all quit smoking when I wasn't looking.

Pathetic.

Via Ezra Klein, here's an american example of the genre, in which well-off journalists who work from home bash those who don't make the time to cook proper meals after a 10-hour day.

More money, less control

The very good Mike Baker of the BBC writes:

As Blair departs, many will hope for an end to "initiative-itis" and policy overload. No more targets. No more bully-pulpit politics. No more "modernising" of the comprehensives. But they will be disappointed. Gordon Brown is just as fond of targets. He will insist on a something-for-something return for every extra pound that goes to education.

In a recent interview, he told me education would be "my passion ... my priority". The big question for Brown is: why, after so much more investment, do teachers, lecturers and parents still feel dissatisfied?

I think Julian Le Grand's "knights and knaves" work answers that final question.

Miss, that little boy crumpled on the ground over there pushed me

At least once a week now, the Guardian has a column bemoaning the cruelty and arrogance of atheists, and the dire lot of the religious in this country. For example, Madeline Bunting recently railed against outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a bore. But when they criticism him and his anti-religion ilk, Bunting and the burgeoning religious crew writing inthe Guardian appear to operate under the fallacy that it's only the anti-religious lot who are attempting to impose their values, and that religion is a poor bullied weakling. Tell that to the gays, Madeline (famous apologist for homophobic Muslim clerics). And tell that to the 17-year-old girl in Ireland who the religious crew is trying to force to stay in Ireland and bring her baby to term, rather than go to England for a termination, even though the baby has no head, and is guaranteed to die within three days of birth. And tell it, Madeline, to the UK women unfortunate enough to have as a doctor one of the 40% of GPs who say they would refuse to refer a woman on for an abortion, on 'moral grounds'.

Religion has been imposing itself on the rest of us for thousands and thousands of years. Just because in a relatively enlightened country such as the UK it has less power to do so than before, doesn't mean it still isn't doing it all the time, and still trying to do it even more. Just because you take this for granted, Maddy, doesn't mean it isnt' happening. So enough with this silly notion that religion is the victim because a handful of verbal atheists are giving it a heckling. It's been bullying us for years, and isn't going to stop until we force it to.

The old new American two-party system

Earlier today I posted a John Quiggin bit to delicious - I thought it was a great piece of political analysis. Yglesias agrees:

John Quiggen makes an important point. An awful lot of the recent changes in American history can be understood as efforts to graft a proper two-party dynamic onto a country that thanks to both an unusual institutional set-up and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one. The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system, at which point it became devastatingly effective because the opposition was still behaving like one half of the old, more fluid system. Much recent progressive activism has centered around trying to turn the Democrats into "the other party" of a two-party system.

Patience capital and non-cognitive development

Download patience_capital_and_the_demise_of_the_aristocracy.pdf

I'm not sure I buy the premise of the above paper on 'Patience capital and the demise of the aristocracy', but it's an interesting one, and some of the arguments are interesting. For instance, there's a good point about the fact that urban artisans had a life characterised by a steep income slope (making nothing as an apprentice, pretty little as a journeyman, and hopefully a good deal more as a master) that encouraged long-term planning and financial discipline; this in contrast to those (both poor and rich) in rural areas, for whom the land was worth basically the same when they were 20 as when they were 60. For the latter, lifetime income had more of a tendency to be flat from year to year; thus notions of investment in the future and the accumulation of capital would have been less salient - or so goes the theory. (See bottom of page for data on the landed aristocracy's attitude to business.)

Most interesting for my studies, though, is the notion of patience capital (think the Marshmallow Test, and the ways in which parents strive to teach their children patience and other key non-cognitive skills) is an interesting one.

It may be particularly related to positive outcomes for low-income children who attend decent daycare programmes, argue some. Remember, these kids - eg in the Abecedarian or Perry High Scope project - tend not to show greater cognitive development than their peers over time, but they do show better outcomes. Here's a snippet:

Heckman (2000)
and Heckman and Krueger (2003) review the evidence from a large number of
programs targeting disadvantaged children through family development sup-
port. They show that most programs were successful in permanently raising the
treated children’s non-cognitive skills, turning them more motivated to learn,
less likely to engage in crime, and altogether more future-oriented than children
of non-treated families. On the other hand, the programs were less successful in
raising cognitive skills as measured by IQ test scores.3 The most effective pro-
grams where those targeted to children at a young age, although positive effects
are also documented for programs targeting adolescents. These studies show
how important family transmission is in this particular form of human capital
accumulation, of which the notion of patience discussed in this paper is a com-
ponent. Similar conclusions are reached by a number of studies in child develop-
ment psychology (see e.g., Goleman 1995, Shonkoff and Philips 2000 and Taylor,
McGue, and Iacono 2000). Coleman and Hoffer (1983) argue that the emphasis
on patience and self-discipline is the key of the effectiveness of Catholic schools
in the US. [p 8]

There's also an argument in there that would be useful for understanding cultural transmission, eg through engaging in Lareau-ish analysis of parenting styles:

In our model, in contrast, parents invest in their children’s patience. In this re-
spect, our paper is related to the growing literature on cultural transmission (e.g.,
Bisin and Verdier 2000 and 2001, Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002, Saez-Marti and
Zenou 2004).5 In this literature, parents evaluate their children’s life prospects
from the standpoint of their own preferences, and actively try to manipulate chil-
dren’s preference to induce choices that parents regard as desirable. As these
papers, we argue that economic incentives are crucial in determining the effort
parents exert in affecting their children’s preferences. [p 10]

OK, up above  I promised data on the landed aristocracy's attitudes to business.  (it's really worth having a look at the table in the pdf; for some reason I can't seem to paste it into this post.)

Table 2 reports the professional choice of Cambridge graduates during
the period 1750–1899. The vast majority of students at Cambridge during this pe-
riod were sons of members of the landowning class, so their professional choices
(other than landowning) give us a good idea of which professions younger sons
entered. Strikingly, until 1850, not a single graduate got involved in banking or
business (widely defined as any “profit-oriented activity”), and even after 1850
the percentage remains surprisingly low.