{"id":1936,"date":"2011-05-06T08:40:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T12:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1936"},"modified":"2011-05-06T08:42:18","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T12:42:18","slug":"did-goldman-sachs-cause-the-food-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1936","title":{"rendered":"Did Goldman Sachs Cause the Food Crisis?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, <a title=\"Goldman Sachs DID NOT Cause the Food Crisis\" href=\"http:\/\/greedgreengrains.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/goldman-sachs-did-not-cause-food-crisis.html\" target=\"_blank\">says my colleague Michael Roberts<\/a> at North Carolina State University.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, Tom over at <a title=\"A View from the Cave\" href=\"http:\/\/www.aviewfromthecave.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">A View from the Cave<\/a> asked me over Twitter what I thought of an <a title=\"How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis\" href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignpolicy.com\/articles\/2011\/04\/27\/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> in <em>Foreign Policy<\/em> that claimed that Goldman Sachs had caused the food crisis. I did not have a chance to respond immediately because I had a coauthor in town, so I saved the article for later. Michael&#8217;s post this morning reminded me that I had forgotten to address Tom&#8217;s question.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I am fully in agreement with Michael. Moreover, I think it is unwise to make a causal claim like the one made in the <em>Foreign Policy<\/em> article &#8212; &#8220;Goldman Sachs <em>caused<\/em> the food crisis, y&#8217;all!&#8221; &#8212; without solid evidence to back that claim.<\/p>\n<p>The author blames speculation? His conjecture is not much more than that.<\/p>\n<p>Social scientists in many disciplines work extremely hard every day to design research projects, collect data, develop new statistical methods, etc. that will allow saying &#8220;<em>x<\/em> causes <em>y<\/em>&#8221; instead of just saying &#8220;<em>x<\/em> is positively correlated with <em>y<\/em>,&#8221; but the author of the <em>Foreign Policy<\/em> article thinks he can just claim that Goldman Sachs caused the food crisis and magically make it true? I don&#8217;t think so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, says my colleague Michael Roberts at North Carolina State University. Last week, Tom over at A View from the Cave asked me over Twitter<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1936\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Did Goldman Sachs Cause the Food Crisis?<\/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":[18,55,26,49,34,14,12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-economics","category-food","category-impact-evaluation","category-macro","category-micro","category-policy","category-social-sciences","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-ve","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936","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=1936"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1942,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions\/1942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}