At long last, the city of Clevland, Ohio is getting a Wal-Mart. And the citizens are lining up. But not to shop there (at least not yet): they are lining up to apply for jobs, at a rate of 20 applicants per opening.

Cleveland's first Wal-Mart is about to open, and with it comes 300 jobs in a metro area that is struggling economically. The result, according to the Plain Dealer: 6,000 people applied, or 20 applicants for every one job. "We had to recount (the applications) three times," Mia Masten, Wal-Mart's director of corporate affairs in its Midwest division, told the newspaper.

Lest you think that everyone sees this as a good thing, think again:

Most of the jobs are lower-paying, lower-skills positions, and the demand for those posts disturbs some people. "That's Depression-era kind of imagery," Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio, told the Plain Dealer. "You can't have an economy that works that way. It speaks to the need to generate a different kind of employment in Cleveland."

Continue reading "The Ash Heap of Economic History" »

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"Take a number." "Please be seated and wait for your number to called." "Now serving # 4165." These are not phrases you are probably used to hearing in a hospital or a doctor's office. But according to a recent LA Times article, you will if the advocates of universal health care have their way. Entitled "Universal Healthcare's Dirty Little Secrets", two Cato Institute scholars describe the numerous "hurdles to care" experienced by patients in several countries whose governments provide health coverage.

Simply saying that people have health insurance is meaningless. Many countries provide universal insurance but deny critical procedures to patients who need them. Britain's Department of Health reported in 2006 that at any given time, nearly 900,000 Britons are waiting for admission to National Health Service hospitals, and shortages force the cancellation of more than 50,000 operations each year. In Sweden, the wait for heart surgery can be as long as 25 weeks, and the average wait for hip replacement surgery is more than a year. Many of these individuals suffer chronic pain, and judging by the numbers, some will probably die awaiting treatment. In a 2005 ruling of the Canadian Supreme Court, Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin wrote that "access to a waiting list is not access to healthcare."

But this is not news, really. Everyone has heard about the long waiting lists, about people dying waiting for care. What is news is that the underlying assumption motivating much of the debate doesn't have much empirical support:

You may think it is self-evident that the uninsured may forgo preventive care or receive a lower quality of care. And yet, in reviewing all the academic literature on the subject, Helen Levy of the University of Michigan's Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured, and David Meltzer of the University of Chicago, were unable to establish a "causal relationship" between health insurance and better health. Believe it or not, there is "no evidence," Levy and Meltzer wrote, that expanding insurance coverage is a cost-effective way to promote health. Similarly, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found that, although far too many Americans were not receiving the appropriate standard of care, "health insurance status was largely unrelated to the quality of care."

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Alicia Colon of the New York Sun writes about Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, who's fighting back against the Al Gore and the global warming lobby's attacks on the coal industry:

"Some wealthy elitists in our country," he told the audience, "who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived ‘global goofiness' campaigns."

Mr. Murray was a coal miner in Ohio who survived two mining accidents and built funds from a mortgaged house into a private coal mining company with more than 3,000 employees. He expresses concern about the proposals in Congress that will ration the use of coal, warning of much worse adverse consequences to Americans than those experienced after the 1990 amendment of the Clean Air Act.

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Tired of having the problem of childhood obesity laid at its doorstep, McDonald's is taking (the) steps to reshape its image: it is going to start offering step classes in its restaurant's playplaces.

Mcdonald's is getting serious about childhood obesity--to the point where it is considering replacing play areas in thousands of its restaurants with kids' gyms where young customers can burn off their Happy Meals. The new R-Gyms--where R stands for Ronald--would replace the slide-centric PlayPlaces with a setup offering sports-oriented activities such as stationary exercise bikes, rope climbing and other aerobic activities for kids up to 12 years of age.

While counter staff and fry cooks are not expected do double as aerobics instructors, they getting training in how to promote the R-gym concept: They are now to ask children under 12, "Do you want exercise with that shake? "

Continue reading "Taking the Steps" »

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Reuters is reporting that the poisoned Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko may have received his fatal dose in a sushi bar:

Police investigating the death of a former Russian spy from suspected radiation poisoning have found levels of radiation in a London sushi bar where he ate just before he became sick, health officials said on Friday.

"The police reported that they had found some radiation there (in the Sushi bar). We are assessing the level of that and the potential risk to people that might cause," Pat Troop, head of the independent Health Protection Agency, told the BBC.

The HPA said polonium 210, a radioactive isotope, had been discovered in the body of Alexander Litvinenko, who died overnight at a London hospital after wasting away during three weeks of illness.

Commentary

Some gruesome and public was the murder of Mr. Litvinenko that if I owned a sushi bar right now in London I'd be very worried. Logically, that the late spy may have been poisoned in one sushi bar should in no way constitute an indictment of all London sushi bars. And logically, no one who isn't on the wrong side of the Russian mob or other unnamed, revenge-seeking parties should have to worry about being deliberately poisoned anywhere at anytime.

Continue reading "Like Nobody's Businessman II: A Dish Served Cold" »

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Part I of "The Plural of Anecdote" is here.

Here is one of the claims made by Wal-Mart critics, in this case WalMart Watch, that is addressed head-on by economists Russell Sobel and Andrea Dean in their recently published working paper "Has Wal-Mart Buried Mom and Pop?: The Impact of Wal-Mart on Self-Employment and Small Establishments in the United States"

Wal-MartWatch, one of the largest Anti-Wal-Mart organizations, features an academic article claiming that in Iowa, Wal-Mart’s expansion has been responsible for widespread closings of ‘mom and pop’ stores, including 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building suppliers, 161 variety shops, 158 women’s stores, and 116 pharmacies.

Here is Sobel and Dean's argument in a nutshell:

Wal-Mart is big enough to have significant macroeconomic effects. Hausman and Leibtag (2004), for example, find that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is biased because of the failure to specifically account for Wal-Mart. ... because of its sheer size, if Wal-Mart has a negative effect on small business activity, this effect should be discernable in aggregate U.S. data.

They continue by noting that if Wal-Mart is big enough to have the effect that critics claim, then the data ought to show it:

... because Iowa is a fairly representative state in the sample, an extrapolation would suggest that ...the overall size of the small business sector in the United States should have fallen by about one-third relative to days prior to Wal-Mart’s expansion across America. Has this one-third reduction in U.S. small business activity really happened? If so it should be clearly visible in the raw data on U.S. small business activity, and this is the first evidence we will examine.

In short, their results show that:

Continue reading "The Plural of Anecdote II: Wal-Mart's Impact on Mom and Pop" »

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The first article for Assignment 11 is entitled "Starbucks: To Drink or not to Drink"

Again we have an article which is especailly amenable to analysis using Baron's "Four I's". And again there is considerable variation in what you identified as belonging to the four major elements of the framework. Here is a sample of what you defined as the "Issues": "Globalization"; corporate social responsibility, labor and environmental standards, e.g. recycling, organic and sustainable agriculture; food safety, e.g. genetically modified organisms; economic and social justice, especially for coffee pickers and for cooperatives owned by them.

Your list of interests included: vandals, anti-globalization and anti-capitalist protesters, especially those at the 1999 World Trade Organization talks in Seattle; the Organic Consumers Association; Conservation International; Fair Trade & Global Exchange; and the Dead Dog Cafe.

Discussion of "Institutions" in the article is minimal. The only one that comes immediately to mind is public sentiment. That is to say, Starbuck's is concerned about its public image. What is not clear is whether the company is concerned only about its image with its actual and potential customers or for everyone. We are told that they support literacy programs and community projects in neighborhoods where they own stores. From that statement I might reasonably infer that they do not (materailly) support such programs in the neighborhoods where they do not own stores. If so, then even public opinion is not a major factor here.

Either way, Starbucks seems to be concerned in a way not shared by large coffee companies like Phillip Morris, Kraft, Sara Lee, and Folgers. The difference in how Starbucks has been treated by non-market interests is instructive: its good deeds and its desire to be seen as doing good make them a target of non-market action rather than protecting them from it.

What makes Starbucks a target of organizers? In part, people are reacting to those Coke and Disney aspirations, the threat that Starbucks is propagating cafe monoculture throughout a globalized world. In part, it may be the company's desire to be seen as a corporate good citizen. Writing in the Financial Times, Alison Maitland quotes Ronnie Cummings, director of the US Organic Consumers Association: "We target them because they're the only big coffee company that pretends to be socially responsible. It's better to start with them. Kraft is never going to do anything. When you're the grassroots with limited resources, you have to pick your targets carefully."

This gives new meaning to the phrase "no good deed goes unpunished."

Continue reading "The Human Costs of Coffee, II" »

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The second article for Assignment 11 is entitled "Children: The Other Side of the Coffee Tour." It seems ideally suited for a Baron's Four I's analysis. Still, there is plenty of room for discussion about what exactly are the "Issues", who are the "Interests", what are the important "Institutions", and what "Information" is relevant.

Defining Terms

Recall that the Four I's are defined by Baron as follows:

• Issues are "the basic unit of non-market analysis and the focus of non-market action."
• Interests include "the the individuals and groups with preferences about or a stake in the issue.
• Institutions include "government entities such as legislatures and regulatory agencies as well as nongovernmental institutions such as the news media and public sentiment."
• Information "pertains to what the interested parties know or believe about the issues and forces affecting their development."

Of those who used the Baron framework for thsi article, there was widespread agreement on the major issue. As shown below, almost every one mentioned the exploitation of child labor along with a host of other broader economic, social, and cultural problems.

• " the usage of child labor in very bad working conditions"
• "Malnutrition, safety and health problems, and wages..."
• "abusing children"
• "child labor"
• "pay, working conditions, and living quarters"
• "the usage of child labor to work in very bad conditions.
• "Child and old labor, low wages, poor living and health conditions"
• "child labor, low-wage labor, saftey and health conditions in the workplace."
• "Child labor; poverty, high unemployment and illiteracy
• "low wage labor."
• "Child labor-social problem"

There was less consensus, however, about who the Interests and Institutions are. At the end of the article were the names of four organizations. Given the above definitions, you should have been able to classify them accordingly:

Interests:

COFFEE KIDS: An international nonprofit working with local organizations to improve the lives of families in coffee-growing communities. Programs range from economic development to health care to providing scholarships for schooling. The website has links to project profiles, coffee facts, and community solutions.

US/LEAP U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project
A nonprofit organization that runs a variety of campaigns to support rights for workers in Central and South America. Their efforts largely support workers employed directly or indirectly by US companies. Click on the coffee link to find out how they are urging corporations to ensure that coffee growers who supply them are paying their workers a decent wage with decent working hours.

Institutions:

THE UN WORKS PROGRAMME
Its "Department of Public Information" has developed programs to "end child labor around the world."

THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION, International Labour Office
They are currently sponsoring IPEC (International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour) to help phase out child labor on Central American plantations. The program includes social rehabilitation and protection to help the region's 800,000 children working in agriculture.

Although there could be some discussion about whether or not the last two organizations might also be considered Interests, no one should have missed including these four groups in one or the other category.

Continue reading "The Human Costs of Coffee" »

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