Crop Yields

Mark Thoma:

Why is food production slowing down? This is from Michael Roberts:

Is this because of changes at the intensive or extensive margins? That is, is the slowdown due to declining productivity on existing land, e.g. from bad luck with the weather for several years in a row, or a more permanent change like global warming? Or is it because world growth is bringing marginal, less productive land into production? Whatever the cause, Michael Roberts thinks it's likely a permanent rather than a temporary problem:

There are many reasons for high commodity prices. But recent data from FAO shows a pretty rapid slowdown in productivity growth. The price spike in 2008 occurred in a particularly bad year in which yields declined on a worldwide basis for three of the four largest food commodities. In 2009 all four of the majors saw yield declines, something that hasn't happened since 1974. 2010 couldn't have been much better and was probably worse, given how bad things were in the U.S, the world's largest producer and exporter (worldwide data for 2010 isn't available yet).

The yield slowdown comes at a particularly unfortunate time, with accelerating demand from emerging economies like China and subsidy-driven expansion of ethanol. Keep in mind: we need productivity growth to accelerate considerably to keep up with projected demand growth. FAO says we need 70 percent higher yields by 2050. (Although I'd like to do my own projections, and will one of these days...)

Graffiti Artists Strike Back

Awesome, via Balloon Juice.

More on Blowing Up Levees

The Army Corps does this more often than I thought:

Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh — the man ultimately responsible for the decision to go through with the plan- has indicated that he may not stop there if blasting open the levee doesn't do the trick. In recent days, Walsh has said he might also make use of other downstream "floodways" — basins surrounded by levees that can intentionally be blown open to divert floodwaters.

Among those that could be tapped are the 58-year-old Morganza floodway near Morgan City, La., and the Bonnet Carre floodway about 30 miles north of New Orleans. The Morganza has been pressed into service just once, in 1973. The Bonnet Carre, which was christened in 1932 has been opened up nine times since 1937, the most recent in 2008.

"Making this decision is not easy or hard," Walsh said. "It's simply grave — because the decision leads to loss of property and livelihood, either in a floodway or in an area that was not designed to flood."

Officials in Louisiana and Mississippi are warning that the river could bring a surge of water unseen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The corps has said about 241 miles of levees along the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the Gulf of Mexico need to be made taller or strengthened.


George Sills, a former Army Corps engineer and levee expert in Vicksburg, Miss., said the volume of water moving down the river would test the levee system south of Memphis into Louisiana.

"It's been a long time since we've seen a major flood down the Mississippi River," Sills said. "This is the highest river in Vicksburg, Miss., since 1927. There will be water coming by here that most people have never seen in their lifetime."

The 1927 flood is featured in the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America.  It features a lot of history of New Orleans and Mardi Gras, a lot about hydraulics and hydrology of the Mississippi River, a lot about the history of the Army Corps and levees, and a good bit about race relations in the Mississippi Delta.  Herbert Hoover makes an appearance, and a levee is blown up to save New Orleans.  It is a great book, and I highly recommend it.

Blowing the Levee, ctd.

So far, it's working.  From Minnesota Public Radio  (h/t KB):

Source, National Weather Service

Hopefully, the damage to the farms isn't as bad as it could be.  Also, hopefully the secondary levees hold.

Under the City of Cleveland

Salt mines:

Poker in the Old West

The History of Poker in the Old West:

 

Whether on a riverboat atop the Mighty Mississippi, or in the smoky dimness of a mining camp saloon, a lucky draw could turn a broken man into a winner. In the days of the frontier west, poker was king with the mustachioed likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, "Canada” Bill Jones, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and hundreds of others.

In the old west towns of Deadwood, Dodge City, Tombstone, and Virginia City, gamblers played with their back to the wall and their guns at their sides, as dealers dealt games with names such as Chuck-A-Luck, Three Card Monte, High Dice, and Faro, by far the favorite in the wild west saloons.

The exact origin of poker is unknown but many have speculated that it originated from a 16^th century Persian card game called As Nas. Played with a 25 card deck containing five suits, the rules were similar to today’s Five Card Stud. Others are of the opinion that it was invented by the Chinese in 900 A.D. In all likelihood, the game derived from elements of various gambling diversions that have been around from the beginning of time.

Poker in the United States was first widely played in New Orleans by French settlers playing a card game that involved bluffing and betting called Poque in the early 1800's. This old poker game was similar to the "draw poker” game we play today. New Orleans evolved as America’s first gambling city as riverboat men, plantation owners and farmers avidly pursued the betting sport.

There is a lot more there.  It is interesting what the roots of gambling are.  I find games of chance interesting, because they often are an entertainment which is similar to the game of life.  When the cards fall right, a guy looks like a genius, when they don't, people think he's a damn fool.  It is always fun to watch the poker tournaments on TV, because almost every show you see a guy just once get dealt the one card he needs when the odds are 92% to 8% against him.

I was thinking about Amarillo Slim and Billy Walters.  Both grew up in the south and started out as pool hustlers.  Listening to Slim, when he wasn't playing poker, he tried to trick guys to get the odds in his favor.  Billy Walters is trying to take as much knowledge as possible to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.  Neither trusts Wall Street, which is just another casino where the house has the odds in their favor. 

And yet none of those guys, not Slim, not Walters, nor the guys on Wall Street (when they aren't leveraged 30 times) takes as big of a blind risk as farmers do.  Sometimes I don't think farmers can actually understand the risks they are taking, but yet they manage to make a living, and one they love, doing it.  I think it is often like other small businessmen.  They willing take huge risks they don't understand very well, just so they can answer to nobody, and sometimes it just works out.  A lot of the time, it works out because bigger companies don't want to take on those same risks.  Life is funny like that.

Socialist America

Barry Ritholtz:

To those of you who irrationally fear the US is turning into a Socialist state, I say unto thee: YOU ARE TOO LATE! We’ve already turned into a red nation of commies!
At least, that seems to be how some folks see it.  It is a quite a bit more accurate to describe the current circumstances: “The deep recession left the US with a highly elevated long-term unemployment rate;  There are lots of families who currently receive government aid so they can buy buy food for themselves and their children.”
Most Americans seem not to want to admit it, but we have fairly Socialist, rather Christian tendencies as a country. You know, things like charity, feeding the poor, broad government assistance to reduce senior and childhood poverty, etc.

I'm not sure why people don't want to admit this.  Lots of people want to claim that the U.S. is a Christian nation, but they don't want the government to provide any social services.  They often claim that churches also provide these services, and better than government.  I would point out that the churches provide additional services, but they never will be able to carry the load the government carries.  How may people do you know that would donate to their church or favorite charity, all the money they would take home if the government wasn't taxing them as much?  I'll go with none.  How many people would give any more money to charity if they weren't benefitting from the tax deduction?  I'd guess very few. 

And really, what is so bad about trying to help people out?  I know, some people take advantage of the system and some programs make it economically rational for people to not work more, but a larger percentage of people only grudgingly take government help.  And when you add it up, there is a heck of a lot of governmental largesse being extended to corporations.  These bastions of capitalism are doing a pretty fair job of taking advantage of socialist policies.

That is one reason why I think Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is so out of line with American tradition.  Many conservatives like the idea that America is a Christian nation.  One of the big tenets of Christianity is altruism.  Many atheists are also altruistic, even though they are not Christian.  Ayn Rand hated both Christianity and altruism.  To her, selfishness is a virtue.  Many of her fellow-travelers like the idea of being selfish, but they also like the idea of a vengeful God who will strike down all the sinners.  I don't think that Jesus guy would go along with their message.

Canadian Election Results vs. Projections

ThreeHundredEight:

Well, at least I got the order of the parties right.

Clearly, the final projection was wrong. It under-estimated both the Conservatives and the New Democrats and over-estimated the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois. While I was not alone in making this error, I humbly recognize that of all the projections mine was among the worst.

Of the 308 ridings in the country, ThreeHundredEight.com correctly called 235 of them. That's an accuracy rate of 76.3%, which is absolutely unacceptable. (Note: I had incorrectly calculated the accuracy rating at 71.8% earlier this morning).

However, it was not the seat projection model that failed. The seat projection model actually performed very well - or would have had the popular vote projection model not missed the mark so completely.

That is a very tough gig.  Nate Silver looked really good in 2008, but trying to match polling and anticipate how much to weigh each poll by each pollster seems like a really thankless job.  Posting it for everyone to see makes it even tougher.

Levee Blown

NYT:

EAST PRAIRIE, Mo. — Ruben Bennett, his back bent and his fingers gnarled from a lifetime of labor, has lived all of his 88 years on an expanse of rich farmland here, just below where the Ohio River pours into the Mississippi. He survived his share of floods — including the record-setting one that swept away his boyhood home — but he has never run from one, until now.
For days he returned repeatedly, despite a mandatory evacuation, with the hope of riding out another major flood in his longtime home above his shuttered grocery store. But under threats from law enforcement officials, and the cajoling of his family, he finally agreed to retreat. As explosives tore open a protective levee Monday night, he waited for the news that his home has been destroyed.
“I can’t tell you how I feel, because there no feeling for that,” he said hours earlier, sitting in his daughter’s house — nearby, and safe from possible flooding — where he has been sleeping on the couch. “I hate it so bad.”
The Mississippi River, already at record levels here, keeps rising, fed by punishing rains. As the flood protection systems that safeguard countless communities groan under the pressure, federal officials executed a fiercely debated plan to destroy a part of the levee holding back the river in the area Mr. Bennett calls home for the greater good of the region.
With a flash of light and a massive rumbling that shook windows miles away, the Army Corps of Engineers set off explosives at 10 p.m. along the first of several sections of the earthen barrier, sending 550,000 cubic feet of water a second across the 130,000 acres of farmland known as the spillway. There were 90 homes in the spillway, but under the cover of darkness it was impossible to gauge the initial devastation. “This doesn’t end this historic flood,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, explaining that the river may rise again in a few days. “This is not the end, this is just the beginning.”
Col. Vernie L. Reichling Jr., commander of the corps’ Memphis District, said the blast was successful, calling it “historic as well as tragic.”
The move was a desperate effort to lower the river, which had climbed to about 61 feet in nearby Cairo, Ill., to head off calamity up- and downriver. In Illinois, the pressure on the levee created a geyser, forcing the evacuation of Cairo. In Louisiana, there was concern about whether levees could survive a record flood.
And it raised a new risk in this part of Missouri, which had challenged the plan unsuccessfully in court, because any water filling the spillway would put pressure on an untested secondary levee that protects more populous communities.
Some of the 200 residents in the spillway have argued that the young shoots of corn and knee-high carpet of wheat offered evidence enough that the area was worth protecting. Their claims will be soon be forgotten as the attention shifts downriver. But for these people, some of whom watched the blast, the flooding represents the beginning of a long process they say will drastically change their lives.

That is just a brutal situation.  I remember reading about how the river bottom fields were covered in 3 feet of sand after the Mississippi River topped levees in the flood of 1993, and how it would take a couple of years for those fields to recover.  It would feel worse knowing those fields were intentionally flooded, but that is part of the Army Corps job in maintaining those levees, sometimes they just have to be removed.  When you have a record flood, those choices have to be made.  It will look like a pretty poor decision if those secondary levees fail, but I assume the Corps believes that is unlikely.

Derby Week Horse Story

From the SI archive, a reflection on Secretariat's life, by William Nack, who wrote the book from which the movie Secretariat was based:

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse's vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.
"We were all shocked," Swerczek said. "I've seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I'd ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I'd ever seen. And it wasn't pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did."
In the late afternoon of Monday, Oct. 2, 1989, as I headed my car from the driveway of Arthur Hancock's Stone Farm onto Winchester Road outside of Paris, Ky., I was seized by an impulse as beckoning as the wind that strums through the trees there, mingling the scents of new grass and old history.
For reasons as obscure to me then as now, I felt compelled to see Lawrence Robinson. For almost 30 years, until he suffered a stroke in March of 1983, Robinson was the head caretaker of stallions at Claiborne Farm. I had not seen him since his illness, but I knew he still lived on the farm, in a small white frame house set on a hill overlooking the lush stallion paddocks and the main stallion barn. In the first stall of that barn, in the same space that was once home to the great Bold Ruler, lived Secretariat, Bold Ruler's greatest son.
It was through Secretariat that I had met Robinson. On the bright, cold afternoon of Nov. 12, 1973, he was one of several hundred people gathered at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington to greet the horse on his flight from New York into retirement in Kentucky. I flew with the horse that day, and as the plane banked over the field, a voice from the tower crackled over the airplane radio: "There's more people out here to meet Secretariat than there was to greet the governor."
"Well, he's won more races than the governor," pilot Dan Neff replied.

The article is excellent.