thought for food

Darwin Catholic makes a pointed Thanksgiving observation about how far removed most Americans are from the source of their food:

. . . we modern Americans would do well to recall that food comes from somewhere — and indeed that it either comes or it doesn’t. One may talk of rights to food and shelter and medical care and such all day long. But at the most basic, human level: our existence and comfort depends on those who till the soil . . .

And what I would like to observe is this: Farming is skilled labor.

When I read about the history of education, it seems like what usually gets published is the history of literacy. The underlying assumption is that if a child isn’t taught to read and write, he isn’t taught.

Don’t mistake me, I am enormously in favor of the widespread practice of literary skills, and have the bookshelves and the blogs to prove it. But at the end of day, I know two things:

-I can’t eat books.

-I don’t know how to farm.

And from this, I make two further conclusions:

– Farming is, on the list of human pursuits, priority #1*.

-Farming is a skill that needs to be taught.

This in turns tells me that all those generations of people who taught their children how to grow food, but never did get to the business reading and writing, these were people with their priorities in order. People to whom the rest of us owe an enormous thanks, for it is their diligence that gave us our existence.

I am concerned that my generation knows so little about the growing of food. The SuperHusband & I both have grandparents who grew up on farms; as adults though they practiced other professions, they continued to grow a significant portion of their own food. The same can be said of several of my neighbors — like my grandparents, they either have very large gardens in the yard, or else own a second parcel of land they cultivate for food.

But this skill and practice has not been handed down. My parents gardened occasionally — they knew how — but not so much that they taught us. Our generation wants to have a garden, and we’re pretty happy if we get a few tomatoes out of it. It is a skill we never learned as children, and don’t integrate into our lives as adults. We seem to always be finding some other activity is more important.

We aren’t starving as a result. Specialization of labor has done what it promises: those of my generation who do know how to farm, do it amazingly well — well enough to feed the rest of us with no apparent difficulty. And I’m all about specialization of labor — I haven’t got the body for farming whether I wanted to do it or not. (And I like doing other things anyway.) But still, I think we are, as a society, over-specialized to the point of being a bit impoverished by it. It’s a poverty we don’t notice, but I think it is there all the same.

*Alongside the worship of God, of course. The two seem to go hand in hand rather naturally . . . wow, almost amazingly joined as, say, the body & soul that make up a human being. Go figure.

Ridiculously tired today, and as I’m finally getting around to writing tonight, my head is about as foggy as I’ve ever known it. So rather than try to put together a good article for you (lost cause), I’ll just let loose on something funny I read during the last weeks of the presidential election campaigns.

So the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the editorial page comparing the two major candidates’ stances on various topics. Shoehorned into the ‘education’ category was the topic of volunteering. Working from memory, here’s the executive summary:

McCain: Tells people they really ought to volunteer more.

Obama: Plans to expand the Peace Corps and launch a handful of similar government-run, tax-funded volunteer organizations to target other areas of need (education, local community service, etc.). Encourage mandatory ‘volunteering’ by tying certain federal education funding to community service requirements for students.

Not to jump all over our president-elect (really, if this were his only fault, I’d be a very happy person), but what?! It’s volunteering. I have never, ever, in all my long life, had difficulty finding an outlet for my freely-offered labor. Hard time finding a paying job? Yes. Yes indeed. Hard time finding people willing to hire me for no pay? Nope. Not once.

And here we are, a government in debt, with expensive wars and corporate bailouts going on, and we are going to spend more money on more programs . . . so people can work for no pay? Um, really, they can do that without a government program. If you have to pay people to do a given job, it is not actually volunteering. It is a federal program that pays a very low wage.

(–> Now if what you want is a low-wage jobs program, just come out and say so.)

I expect the origin of this particular plank of the campaign platform came from two bad habits we’ve gotten into. The first, is thinking that if our country has a problem, or a perceived problem in this case, the president ought to have a plan for how to fix it. When really, some of the time, the president ought to look us sternly in the face and say:

Well, get your act together.

But I suppose that is not very popular with voters, and we have thus trained our candidates to pretend they can fix us.

And then from there, it is only a matter of what kind of fix the candidate is used to tossing out. As a democrat, a shiny new program, or a beefed-up old program, is just the thing. If a republican felt the need to propose a fix, it would be a tax deduction, a tax credit, or maybe a special law allowing employers in certain altruistic industries to hire workers at lower-than-minimum wage.

[Republicans are at an advantage in this particular example, because we already have the tax deduction thing in place. Now they can just smile and tell their voter base to go start a 501(c)3 and be done with it. I agree. But don’t kid yourselves, if republican voters were still itching for more help in the ‘volunteering’ department, I am sure, just sure, there is a way to make a corporate subsidy for the purpose.]

What significance for the junior economist? Well, a couple summary points:

Our candidates can’t necessarily add, it isn’t your imagination. I think ‘economic platform’ ought to be read as a kind of form of poetry, one of those genres that you must not read literally. Luckily much of what they put on their economic platforms would never pass through congress anyhow, so in the off chance they really mean what they say (the policy-platform equivalent of discovering that someone really does have butterflies in their stomach, or that cats and dogs truly are falling from the sky), there is still hope that it won’t come to pass.

Really smart people can still come up with dumb ideas. (Just ask my children about their mother.) As I mentioned in my ‘why economics is so confusing’ post, sometimes when something doesn’t make any sense to you, it is because it doesn’t make any sense, period.

If we voters actually want ‘change’, we are some of the people who are going to have to change. We can’t be pushing for a federal program or a new law or some other government action every time we see a problem, and then be surprised that our politicians are always trying to come up with new programs and laws for us. Do you want a shorter tax form? Quit asking for so many tax credits.

–> And so long as we evaluate a candidate’s stance on a given issue based on whether they voted to fund this or that special program, or put into place this or that new law, we are going to keep getting the programs and laws. It is entirely possible to be, say, in favor of helping the poor, without necessarily voting in favor of every bill that is labeled ‘help for the poor’.

And this last bit is tricky. Because if your representative voted against this or that social justice bill, how do you know whether it was because of an anti-social-justice bias, or just a disagreement with that particular bill? It means you have to know the candidate much better, over a much longer term. Which is not easy.

Don’t Make Me Take You To Nebraska

Like something out The Onion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that parents — even those from out of state — are taking advantage of a loophole in Nebraska’s new Safe Haven law in order to drop off their teenagers. Apparently the legislature wants to close the loophole.

I’m a bit mystified. On the one hand, I understand that when you set up a law intending to protect newborns from abuse and infanticide, it is disconcerting to discover that all the ‘wrong’ people are taking advantage of your law. On the other hand, if you’ve just uncovered a serious societal problem, covering it back over hardly seems like the solution.

–> And frankly, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The abuse, abandonment, and even murder by parents of older children is not exactly news. What is new, is that instead of waiting for the authorities to discover the abuse and take action after the fact, parents in Nebraska now have an option for coming forward for help before the problem reaches the danger point. I can see arguments for why the Safe Haven law is not the best mechanism for abuse-prevention of older children, but I don’t see why it is such a terrible thing. It seems to me that it is doing a valuable service.

The Journal reports that 19 children have been dropped off since the law went into place in July. Not an insignificant number [though nearly half of them apparently came from a single family – the father was feeling overwhelmed after the death of his wife – so take the total figure as not quite representative of the number of families involved], but given that the Nebraska foster care system is currently serving some 6,000 children, and the state is not reporting that the system is overloaded, this is hardly a dire emergency. It seems to me that rather calling a special session of the legislature to quick close the loophole, better to take the time to understand the situation and figure out how to best address the whole problem.

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