Last updated on June 10, 2015
This post is part of a continuing series on The Books that Have Shaped My Thinking.
It’s the summer, so I have time to read, both for work and for pleasure, and I have time to read books instead of just journal articles and blog posts. This made me realize that while a lot of my thinking has been shaped by things that I have read in journal articles (economics is an article-based field) and in blog posts (there is no better means of spreading important ideas quickly), a large part of my thinking has been shaped by books, which often contain more exciting ideas than journal articles–because they face less strict of a review process, books can be more daring in their claims, and thus have more chances of causing you to change how you view the world.
So I decided to write this series of posts on books that shaped my thinking. I talked about development books last week; this week I will talk about food and agriculture. Some recommendations are very general; others are eminently personal. I just hope you can find one or two that will also shape your own thinking. I’m sure I am forgetting a lot of important books I have read and which have also shaped my thinking, but I made this list by taking quick look at the bookshelves in my office. Conversely, some of the books in this list also appeared in my previous post on The Books that Have Shaped My Thinking.
Doug Allen and Dean Lueck, The Nature of the Farm. There are two dominant approaches to modeling contracts: the principal-agent model, and the transaction costs approach. Though I’m a fan of the former, Allen and Lueck offer a concise statement of the latter when it comes to agriculture, and this is a nice complement to Steve Cheung’s The Theory of Share Tenancy, who studied sharecropping from a Chicago perspective.
Chris Barrett and Dan Maxwell, Food Aid after Fifty Years. Most people know that the US sends food abroad during food crises, and most people that this is a good thing. Few people, however, know just how messed up and inefficient the US food aid delivery system is, or at least used to be until a few years ago. This book has taught me a lot about the self-interestedness of foreign aid and the political economy of development policy.
Bob Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa. Yes, this one was also in my development list, but the readers of that list do not necessarily overlap with the readers of this list. Why are poor food producers taxed and relatively wealthier food consumers subsidized in Africa? Why isn’t it the other way around? How is agricultural and food policy determined in most African countries? Bates had the answers as far back as 1980, and his book has become a classic for those of us interested in food policy in developing countries. And don’t let the title fool you: though his evidence is African, Bates’ analytical framework applies almost universally to all developing countries.
Warren Belasco, Food: The Key Concepts. This was one of the required books in the food policy class I taught in spring 2013. Belasco approaches food from a cultural and anthropological perspective. Why are some people’s ego so invested in their diet? Why do we eat three meals a day? Has it always been this way? What is a food culture? Is there such a thing as American food? For an economist interested in food policy, this is probably one of the most thought-provoking and mind-expanding reads out there.
TJ Byres, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers. Also a repeat from the development list. Two thirds of my dissertation were on sharecropping. When I began reviewing the literature for my dissertation in the summer of 2002, I decided to read as broadly as I could, which meant going as far back in time as Adam Smith (who did have a few things to say about sharecropping, it turns out) and going as far as reading what other social sciences had to say. This book is a very nice collection of essays on sharecropping throughout history and all over the world, from which I learned a great deal. It’s often in books like this that you can find new ideas for your own research.
Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World. How has the world managed to feed itself in the face of an ever-increasing number of mouths to feed? Federico has the answers, and he will likely cause you to become very skeptical of all the shrill neo-Malthusian “omg the world will run out of food!!!11” claims out there, as Ester Boserup did for me before I found Federico’s book.
Bruce Gardner, American Agriculture in the 20th Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost. If you are interested in agricultural and food policy in the US, how it came to be that we spend a great deal of money on subsidizing a sector of the economy that has dwindled in importance since the 1930s, and why is it that farm subsidies are lumped together with nutritional assistance in an omnibus bill, look no further. As a foreigner, this is where I got most of my understanding of US agricultural policy when I wrote this paper.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. Many people believe that the development of the agricultural sector comes first. New technology is adopted, which frees up workers who can then go work in the manufacturing sector, which develops cities, and so on. Jane Jacobs claimed the contrary: It is cities that drive the development of the agricultural sector, and she made a compelling case for it. I can’t say I am convinced either way, but Jacobs’ point of view struck me as heretical enough for agricultural and applied economists, and thus change the way I saw the agricultural development process. Ultimately, this remains an empirical question, but it is interesting to follow Jacobs’ argument.
Peter Little and Michael Watts, Living under Contract. Development list repeat. The remaining third of my dissertation was about the institution of contract farming, or grower-processor contracts, i.e., production contracts between a processing firm and (usually) a (smallholder) farmer. Most economists love contract farming and agricultural value chains, thinking they can do no wrong. Little and Watts present several case studies of contract farming, many of which discuss situations where contract farming went wrong.
David Newbery and Joe Stiglitz, The Theory of Commodity Price Stabilization. This book, which I read when developing an explanation for why people entered reverse share tenancy agreements in my dissertation, set the foundations of my thinking and interest in food price volatility. This book has to be supplemented with reading the actual papers surrounding the issues (both the older ones, but also the newer ones such as the two or three I have on this topic), but it offers a pretty good overview of price volatility at the time it was written.
Rob Paarlberg, Food Politics. This was the other required book in the food policy class I taught in spring 2013, and it is the most policy-relevant of the two. Paarlberg, who teaches political science at Wellesley, offers a survey of the food policy landscape and explains what are the big issues, and what are the politics surrounding those issues. Oftentimes, the politics are heavily dependent on the economics, and so this is really a political economy book, but “Food Politics” is a much better titled than “The Political Economy of Food.” This can be read in a few hours, and it really will give you a quick overview of food policy that steer clears from NGO talking points and bogus advocacy claims.
Rob Paarlberg, Starved for Science. Rob Paarlberg’s stuff is so good that he figures twice in this list. This book is about how biotechnology is being kept out of Africa because European markets–Africa’s former colonial masters–have a dislike of biotech that borders on the irrational thanks to Europe’s extreme version of the precautionary principle, and about how this really keeps agricultural yields low in Africa.
George Rudé, The Crowd in History. A history of food riots in Europe since the 1500s. This was essential to my understanding of food-related social unrest (and social unrest in general) when writing my paper on food prices and food riots, and this is really what clued me in that it was price levels, not uncertainty, which drove food riots.
James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. A repeat from the development list, this book provides a different view of economic life in rural areas of developing countries, one that is a far cry from the Walrasian model where market clear cleanly. Though the theoretical framework is pretty outdated here (if you’ve ever heard of “safety-first” models, you know why I say it’s outdated), there is a lot to learn from the moral economy concept, and from the evidence Scott cites in making his case. Indirectly, this might have influenced my work on food riots.
Adam Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State. Contrary to the conventional wisdom surrounding the political economy of agricultural policy, according to which “it’s all the result of lobbying.” For Sheingate, lobbies oppose other lobbies, and the lobbying story is surfeit. The really cool thing about this book is its comparative angle: Sheingate contrasts the US experience with the experience of France and Japan.
Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories as well as Nina Teichholz, The Big Fat Surprise. These three books are what convinced me that the diet research-advocacy-industrial complex had misled people into believing that fat was the enemy, and it convinced me that sugar–not fat–is what makes us sick, and to change the way I eat. And it made me realize never to take my work too seriously, because some researchers eventually become so ego-invested in their findings that they start behaving like intellectual bullies, who try to deliberately quash and censor other people’s contradictory findings.
John K. Walton and David Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots. What George Rudé did for the period from the 16th to the early 20th century, Walton and Seddon do for the latter half of the 20th century by looking at the “IMF riots” of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s–which erupted as a consequence of the austerity measures imposed by governments who wanted to get IMF loans–primarily in Latin America, but also elsewhere in the developing world. This also crafted my thinking on food prices and food riots.