Tag Archives: agriculture

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. This blog’s landlord, Chris Blattman, was on the Economic Rockstar podcast talking about Crime, Cocaine, Chicago Gangs, and the Colombia Mafia. (iTunes) And if you liked those projects, IPA has a job posting to work on projects like those with Chris and others in Colombia. This was fun – the Development Aid Project Jargon-ator is supposed to come up with nonsense development project titles, but so far all of mine sound pretty...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Snot corn! That’s crop scientist Sarah Taber’s nickname for the variety of maize native Mexicans cultivated that allowed it to grow very high in very poor soil. According to a genetic sequencing published by UC Davis researchers, the secret is in the mucus-like goop around roots that are out in the open. The bacteria in the goop allow the plant to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, effectively fertilizing itself from the air....

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I know this week for many of us it’s been hard to pay attention to what else has been going on in the world, what with the release of Stata 15 and all, but I’ll try to help with some stuff you may have missed: The World Bank’s Hedy Sladovich &Emanuela Galasso put together several very accessibly written one-paragraph summaries of recent findings on what works in early childhood development. It pairs nicely with this (mostly...

In one respect, it’s true there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy about welfare from big business, since wasteful corporate welfare is pervasive in our societies. On the other hand, some aspects of business welfare are actually sensible and justifiable, even in a social democratic nation. E.g., agricultural protectionism.It is well known that you simply cannot have a productive, stable agricultural sector in a true free market, because wild and violent swings in the prices of commodities destroy...