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Jayson has blogged about it already, but I just recently found the time to listen to UC Davis agricultural economist Dan Sumner’s appearance on Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcast.

For those of you who are not familiar with Dan’s work (and if you have any interest in food or agricultural policy, you really have no excuse for not being familiar with it), he discusses the political economy of agricultural policy.

Of specific interest to me (and, I suspect, to many readers of this blog), starting at about the 48th minute of the podcast, Dan talks about the international consequences of US agricultural policy. The link above also includes links to many interesting readings, to web resources, and to other podcasts on related topics.

My office on the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is in a building called Ruttan Hall. Our building, which until recently bore the awful name of Classroom Office building, was given a new name in 2010 to commemorate Vernon W. Ruttan‘s (1924-2008) contribution to agricultural and applied economics as well as to our department, of which he was head from 1965 to 1970.

I unfortunately never got a chance to meet Vern Ruttan, but I had heard of him long before I joined the department. Among other things, he became well known for his work on the induced innovation hypothesis. The induced innovation hypothesis goes something like this: When the price of a factor of production increases sharply relative to the price of other factors of production, making that factor more costly to use in production, ceteris paribus, society will innovate by developing technologies that economize on that factor of production–in other words, the change in the price of that factor has induced innovation.

On Friday, February 27, I will be giving a talk in the department of Food, Agriculture, and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph.

The title of my talk is “Was Sandmo Right? Experimental Evidence on Producer Attitudes to Price Uncertainty,” and this will be an occasion for me to debut a research project I am currently conducting with my PhD student Yu Na Lee and my frequent coauthor David Just.

If you are in the Greater Toronto Area and have an interest in applied economics, feel free to come by.