Last month, Russ Roberts interviewed organic farmer Lisa Turner for EconTalk. Mrs. Turner is a civil engineer, and she and her husband are the owners of Laughing Stock Farm in Maine. Laughing Stock Farm sells to restaurants as well as to individuals through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) scheme and at farmers markets.
The conversation covers everything from the socialist aspects of CSAs to capitalism, and from a typical day in the life of Mrs. Turner to the federal government’s grab of the organic label in the early 2000s.
I have learned a lot while listening to it, and a lot of this might eventually inform my lecture on local and organic agriculture in my food policy seminar.
You can download or stream the hour-long podcast by clicking here.
HT: Jayson Lusk.
The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
When I left Rome to go to graduate school in 2001, one of the farewell gifts I received from an Italian friend was a copy of Carlo Cipolla’s Allegro ma non troppo.
Cipolla was an economist at Berkeley until his death in 2000; Allegro ma non troppo is a collection of his tongue-in-cheek essays.
The title can be interpreted in a few ways. The whole expression is often found in music, where it means “Fast but not too much.” “Allegro” can mean happy or cheerful, but it can also mean superficial or thoughtless, and I think Cipolla meant it in the latter sense, i.e., “Superficial, but not too much” given that the essays in the book are, for the most part, satirical.