Is it possible for an econ professor to commit malpractice?

[MRT144]

My milk costs like half that and is totally fine and I can't taste the difference between it and the "organic" variety. It's like a $30,000 bottle of wine but less egregious. People buy it to feel good about themselves, not because it's actually good.

6/3 = 30k/30

I pray for your educational future.

Good milk tastes better than standard milk. I know this because I have taste but not means to enjoy it all the time.

[regexcellent]

I'm saying just like a $30k bottle of wine doesn't taste better than a $300 bottle of wine, and is purely a veblen good, $6/gal milk does not taste better than $3/gal milk. It's just like when people buy Priuses even though they drive like 6 miles a week. Some stupid vague notion of saving the environment. Then again, Priuses have at least in principle value over other cars and the milk doesn't.

[DaShi]

It's hard to believe they are real people, right?

[giblets]

The notion that an "economist" can't figure out the benefits of trade in her OWN PERSONAL CONSUMPTION is dispiriting.

I think she has, or else she would be trying to grow her own food and make her own clothes and chopping firewood for heat instead of teaching ****heads like you and doing research for money that can be exchanged for goods and services she actually needs.

[regexcellent]

Minor nitpick, but she doesn't do any research. Most professors here as far as I know don't. They are purely teachers.

And I didn't say she rejects trade, I said she fails to understand its benefits.

[DaShi]

Why don't you educate her then?

[regexcellent]

What worries me is that I possibly could.

[Fake Boris]

So do you think that:

a) she doesn't understand the definition of "comparative advantage"
b) she wants to introduce other concerns into her teaching of economics

[Elok]

Skipping over the pages of name-calling, there are some advantages to local produce--within limits. While food can be transported great distances (and I don't know enough to judge the economics of it), food tends to be bred specifically to tolerate the strain of shipping, rather than to taste good. The laughably-named "red delicious" apple is the most egregious example, but there are others. Produce from a farmer's market is somewhat pricey, but it also tends to taste quite nice. Also, you can sometimes get more variety with local produce, since groceries tend to focus on those few major strains that ship well. Finally, nothing tastes as good after flying thousands of miles as it does right off the plant. So, if you can get it grown close, you might as well.

Now, of course not everyone can live locally, etc. But the idea of local food isn't total rubbish.

[DaShi]

Then do it. Don't whinge on an internet forum about how much smarter you are then your professor. That makes you look like a tool. Tell her what you think. If she's open to it, you'll have an interesting debate and hopefully both of you will learn something. If she's not, then it's her loss, right?

[Al B. Sure!]

I had some pretty liberal economics professors as well.


And lawyers can have PhD-level degrees. It's called a J.S.D. My father has one from GWU Law

[MRT144]

if YOU can't tell the difference between fancy milk and pedestrian milk, that's on you, peon.

[Aeson]

Honestly, why do you want more people in New Jersey to eat New Jersey produce? Will that increase the number of farms built in New Jersey? What are they being built at the expense of? What else could we do with that capital/land/labor? The amount of all of the above necessary to produce anything useful would be very high compared to doing it in the food basin in California, or in Mexico, or Chile, or any of the numerous other places that are very good at farming due to coincidences of climate and land. Why take land that would be better suited to a car factory, or a oil refinery, or a Costco, and turn it into barely sustainable farmland that costs a mint to get a few heads of lettuce out of it?

Greenhouse production is actually extremely efficient and environmentally friendly for most crops. A push towards local foods would increase the likelihood of changing production over from environmentally damaging practices (even in the US, but especially in developing nations) to high-tech, high-value and very environmentally friendly ones.

For instance, there are greenhouses in Alberta that grow 22kg/sq m of peppers on a year round cycle. They use virtually no sprays. (I think occasionally they have to spray for whiteflies.) They use zero till methods because they don't even use soil (sawdust from lumber mills IIRC). They make use of extremely efficient forms of irrigation and fertilization meaning they use exactly the right amount of water and fertilizers. They use high-tech equipment which creates high-value, high-tech jobs.

We would do very well to move as much of our food production as we can to such models. Eating local could definitely be a beneficial impetus in this regard.

Ask yourself, when thinking about an environmentalist plan: "What would the native americans do?"

So we should reduce our population by ~90% via smallpox, and most of the rest via foreigners coming here to take our land and shoot us with guns?

I can tell you right now, what they would NOT do is try to grow food in New Jersey. They'd move to Kansas and grow corn there, or Virginia, or California. They'd recognize in a heartbeat that you can't grow 10,000,000 peoples' worth of food in New Jersey, and get the heck out of dodge - or, perhaps, TO Dodge...

I don't see why you think Native Americans wouldn't adopt efficient agriculture. They actually made very good yields (relative to the day) by using advanced techniques such as crop rotation, inter-cropping, and fertilization. The Native Americans on reservations that my parents help set up in small scale farming get very, very good yields using high-tech solutions such as drip irrigation and hybrid seeds.

With modern technology we definitely could grow food for 10 million people in New Jersey. Probably making it a much nicer place to live in the process (lots of high value jobs in clean industries). We won't do it ... but we probably should. (Not necessarily "New Jersey for New Jersey", but by moving agricultural production closer to centers of consumption by utilizing the high-tech solutions we already have available to us.)

A side benefit of doing so would be moving away from grain staples and increasing vegetable consumption. This would be beneficial for our health (as well as the productivity on a per unit of land basis).

[Aeson]

Honestly, why do you want more people in New Jersey to eat New Jersey produce? Will that increase the number of farms built in New Jersey? What are they being built at the expense of? What else could we do with that capital/land/labor? The amount of all of the above necessary to produce anything useful would be very high compared to doing it in the food basin in California, or in Mexico, or Chile, or any of the numerous other places that are very good at farming due to coincidences of climate and land. Why take land that would be better suited to a car factory, or a oil refinery, or a Costco, and turn it into barely sustainable farmland that costs a mint to get a few heads of lettuce out of it?

Greenhouse production is actually extremely efficient and environmentally friendly for most crops. A push towards local foods would increase the likelihood of changing production over from environmentally damaging practices (even in the US, but especially in developing nations) to high-tech, high-value and very environmentally friendly ones.

For instance, there are greenhouses in Alberta that grow 22kg/sq m of peppers on a year round cycle. They use virtually no sprays. (I think occasionally they have to spray for whiteflies.) They use zero till methods because they don't even use soil (sawdust from lumber mills IIRC). They make use of extremely efficient forms of irrigation and fertilization meaning they use exactly the right amount of water and fertilizers. They use high-tech equipment which creates high-value, high-tech jobs.

We would do very well to move as much of our food production as we can to such models. Eating local could definitely be a beneficial impetus in this regard.

Ask yourself, when thinking about an environmentalist plan: "What would the native americans do?"

So we should reduce our population by ~90% via smallpox, and most of the rest via foreigners coming here to take our land and shoot us with guns?

I can tell you right now, what they would NOT do is try to grow food in New Jersey. They'd move to Kansas and grow corn there, or Virginia, or California. They'd recognize in a heartbeat that you can't grow 10,000,000 peoples' worth of food in New Jersey, and get the heck out of dodge - or, perhaps, TO Dodge...

I don't see why you think Native Americans wouldn't adopt efficient agriculture. They actually made very good yields (relative to the day) by using advanced techniques such as crop rotation, inter-cropping, and fertilization. The Native Americans on reservations that my parents help set up in small scale farming get very, very good yields using high-tech solutions such as drip irrigation and hybrid seeds.

With modern technology we definitely could grow food for 10 million people in New Jersey. Probably making it a much nicer place to live in the process (lots of high value jobs in clean industries). We won't do it ... but we probably should. (Not necessarily "New Jersey for New Jersey", but by moving agricultural production closer to centers of consumption by utilizing the high-tech solutions we already have available to us.)

A side benefit of doing so would be moving away from grain staples and increasing vegetable consumption. This would be beneficial for our health (as well as the productivity on a per unit of land basis).

[loinburger]

There must be hundreds if not thousands of variables in the relation of "distance between consumer and food" and "resources expended on food production/transportation," so any blanket statement of "preference for a consumption of local food is good/bad" is retarded.

And any statement along the lines of "if 100% of everybody did X then X would be infeasible, therefore X is infeasible" is so stupid that I wonder how the person making the statement is able to feed and clothe himself. This is Slowwhand levels of idiocy.