Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
I am spending the week in Montreal for the Global Food Security Conference at McGill University.
I will be speaking at a session titled “Can High Food Prices and Volatility Be Managed?,” along with Evan Fraser, who co-wrote Empires of Food, one of my favorite books on food policy.
If you will be attending the conference, come by and say hi. If you are in Montreal and would like to go out for drinks, get in touch.
There will be few new posts over the next three weeks. I will be in Seattle from August 11 until August 16 for a bit of R&R and an NBER event on food price volatility.
I will then be in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from August 18 until August 26 for the triennial conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, where I will be presenting my work on food prices and social unrest.
I will be back at Duke on August 28 to teach the first of my two classes for the upcoming semester, but then I will be going to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans from August 29 until September 2, to take part in a panel titled “New Directions in Environmental Security.”
If you happen to be in any of those places at the same time and would like to meet for coffee or drinks, email me.
Where there are posted restrictions, most European countries take speeding very seriously and levy hefty fines. The latest case in point is a 37 year-old Swedish man who was clocked at 180 miles per hour on a motorway between Bern and Lausanne in Switzerland.
Unfortunately for this driver of a new Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, Switzerland doesn’t have fixed fines for speeding. Instead they use a formula similar to that in Finland where the fine is calculated based on the vehicle’s speed and the driver’s income. Back in 2002, Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki had to pay a fine of $103,600 for going 47 mph in a 31 mph zone.
A student in my Law, Economics, and Organization seminar mentioned the article quoted above last week when I was explaining the difference between the twin concepts of absolute and relative risk aversion.
In economics, risk is not so much about what most people call risk as it is about gambles over income. In other words, risk preferences are defined over income or wealth. See here for an excellent discussion starting on page 64 in chapter 6 of David Friedman’s Law’s Order. So why would Switzerland and Finland have speeding fines that vary with income?