{"id":1463,"date":"2011-03-27T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2011-03-26T11:55:07","modified_gmt":"2011-03-26T15:55:07","slug":"a-new-method-for-measuring-hunger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1463","title":{"rendered":"A New Method for Measuring Hunger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller, who are famous for publishing what is perhaps the first paper credibly establishing the existence of Giffen behavior<\/a> a few years ago have devised a new means for measuring hunger in developing countries.<\/p>\n

From The Economist<\/em>‘s Economics Focus column<\/a> last week:<\/p>\n

“[P]art of the problem may lie in the way governments and international agencies count the hungry. This typically involves fixing a calorie threshold\u20142,100 calories per day is a common benchmark\u2014and trying to count how many people report eating food that gives them fewer calories than this number. Since calorific needs differ from person to person, a universal number is clearly only a guide. What\u2019s more, concentrating on calories ignores the important role of micronutrients such as minerals and vitamins.\u00a0But the economists argue that this approach to measuring hunger also does not accord with how people themselves think about it. They propose a new way to use people\u2019s eating choices to tell whether they are hungry.<\/p>\n

The economists argue that the pain caused by hunger will prompt insufficiently nourished people to spend a larger share of their food budget on staples like rice and millet, which are cheap sources of calories. But once people are no longer hungry, they do not need to spend their incremental cash on the cheapest source of calories but can base their choices on things like variety and taste. This means that the share of calories that comes from staples falls progressively once a person is no longer famished; and that an unusually high share of calories coming from staples indicates that a person is hungry.”<\/p>\n

This makes a lot of sense to me, and it reminds me of the “safety first” approach that applied economists briefly used<\/a> to study risk and uncertainty in the past and which I toyed with for a few weeks when trying to model reverse share tenancy for the first essay in my dissertation.<\/p>\n

(HT: Rachel Strohm<\/a>, via Twitter.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller, who are famous for publishing what is perhaps the first paper credibly establishing the existence of Giffen behavior a few<\/p>\n

Continue readingA New Method for Measuring Hunger<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,55,26,48,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-economics","category-food","category-methods","category-micro","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-nB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1472,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions\/1472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}