Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
It’s Thanksgiving in the United States this Thursday, so I am enjoying all this “free” time to catch up on things unrelated to teaching. As a consequence, there will not be any new posts until November 26.
In the meantime, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I was recently reminded of John Donne‘s famous Meditation 17:
The One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages — simply dropping off tablet computers with pre-loaded programs and seeing what happens.
The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
Food Prices, Meat Consumption, and Paternalism
I took part it a Triangle Institute for Security Studies event at NC State last week on the theme of “Energy and Security,” where I briefly discussed my work on food prices and social unrest.
At the end of my talk, I mentioned a few policy options that global policy makers could pursue if they want to keep food prices down: