Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Today marks the eighth anniversary of this blog, so on top of wishing Happy New Year to all, I am also wishing this site Happy Blog Anniversary!

The most popular posts of 2018 were, starting with the most popular:

1. ‘Metrics Monday: What to Do Instead of log(x +1)
2. Between the Introduction and the Conclusion: The “Middle Bits” Formula for Applied Papers
3. The Case for Writing Papers in Economics Using Fake LaTeX
4. ‘Metrics Monday: Causality and Copenhagen Course, Lectures 1 and 2
5. ‘Metrics Monday: Elasticities and the Inverse Hyperbolic Sine Transformation

Looks like there is a pent-up demand for econometrics, and so I will most likely keep writing about that topic, hopefully more frequently in 2019 than over the last few months, which have kept me busy with teaching. (On that, if you have any topic of an applied econometric nature to suggest, I’m all ears…)

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This has been another good year for me. In terms of research, I have published six new articles, including three on contract farming.

I have traveled internationally to Germany, Finland, Canada (three times), Denmark, Japan, and Italy; and within the US to Urbana-Champaign, IL, Phoenix, AZ, Starkville, MS, Berkeley, CA, Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC (twice), Ames, IA, Ann Arbor, MI, West Lafayette, IN, and Kona, HI (this last one for a family vacation, thank goodness!)

This year, I had the honor of being elected to the executive board of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. At Food Policy, my co-editor and I have seen our impact factor go up once again this year.

Finally, I have the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences’ 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate Faculty.

Again this year, the most wonderful part of all this has been to meet so many interesting people, old and new, and to realize further that we are all one.

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Whether you have been reading this blog since its very beginning or you have only started recently, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making time to read what I write.

Happy New Year! I hope 2018 brings you joy, health, and prosperity.

I was contacted last week by Alia Hoyt, who writes for the website HowStuffWorks.com, and who was writing an article about whether quinoa had gotten too popular for its own good.

Other than the usual question journalists ask me when it comes to quinoa–what did the quinoa price spike of 2013 do to the welfare of the people growing it?–Alia also had a few more questions that allowed me to share some thoughts I’ve been having about quinoa which I am not sure I have had a chance to share before.

Here is what she writes:

A few months ago, The Lancet Public Health published a much-ballyhooed article by Seidelmann et al. linking dietary carbohydrate consumption that is either too low or too high with an increased risk of mortality.

I first heard about that article when I saw an article about it on CNN.com which, as is often the case with popular-press pieces about splashy public health findings, played fast and loose with the passage from correlation to causation.

When I read the CNN article, I didn’t think much of it, but my Allegheny College colleague Amelia Finaret got in touch with me asking me if I’d be interested in writing a short piece commenting on the Seidelmann et al. study for submission to The Lancet, the gist of which would be about the difficulty posed by making causal inference from observational data.

After a few days of iterating on our manuscript, we submitted it to The Lancet. I was happy to see that it was published yesterday, alongside several other comments on the Seidelmann et al. study. Best of all is the fact that our comment is open-access, meaning anyone with an Internet connection can read it. (Thank goodness for the fact that the publication costs for comments are cross-subsidized by the authors of original research articles!)

Here is a link to the .pdf of our comment; here is a link to the web version. The gist of our argument is that because of the presence of unobserved confounders, one cannot make a causal statement about the relationship between carbohydrate consumption and mortality. In other words, not all that glitters is gold.