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Some of my less visible roles as an academic are that of associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and at Food Policy and that of referee for a number of journals in any given year.

I made a list of my 20 rules for refereeing a few years ago; I still stand by most if not all of those rules (as an associate editor, I especially emphasize the first three rules!), and I am planning on writing a post discussing what I have learned from handling manuscripts as an associate editor sometime in the near future. For now, however, I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to three refereeing resources, which my friend and grad-school colleague Gabriel Power passed along a few weeks ago:

Let’s consider the nature of nonindustrial animal agriculture, bringing the same level of scrutiny to those operations that we bring to factory farms. Do this, and two damning realities begin to emerge. Together, they emphasize the consequences of the movement’s failure to follow the logic of its own findings and to promote, as it should, the end of animal agriculture as a revolutionary path to agrarian reform, one with the potential to meet the movement’s most passionately articulated goals.

Continue readingThe Fuzzy Ethics of “Humane Meat”

A few weeks ago, I published a post in which I announced that my paper titled “Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest” (click here for the version that was accepted; a version devoid of typos and which includes missing prepositions will be published) had been conditionally accepted for publication at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the top journal in my field.

As has been the case every single time I have posted on the topic, this generated a number of tweets, retweets, direct messages, and so on. On this more than anything else I have worked and written on, it was fairly easy to tell what kinds of prior belief people were bringing to the table when they commented, and it was interesting to see confirmation bias do its thing.

The reactions I got to my core findings that “rising food price levels cause social unrest, increases in food price volatility do not appear to do so” were usually of the following varieties: