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I’ve been doing some thinking about the possible impact in the coming months of events in Ukraine. I tried to talk to my sister about it, and it was sort of odd, because she said a lot of things about how consumers react to shortages that felt like she wasn’t even remembering the last couple years.
I’m personally trying to figure out how to get people to NOT buy extra and then waste it, in rich regions / countries, so as not to make the probably food insecurity / famine elsewhere on the planet any worse than it has to be. When people encounter shortages / outages, they stock up. They don’t buy All the Things All at Once, necessarily; but they will shop more often, and buy extra of the stuff that doesn’t go bad right away, and if they have freezers and so forth they will fill them. And that’s mostly fine, except when there isn’t enough to go around. Also, it’s _not_ mostly fine if we are looking to reduce our impact on the climate, which I am also thinking about long term.
I mentioned the beef shortage and waste associated with it, and ultimately rebought Rathje’s _Rubbish_ on kindle so my sister could read it, after finding a contemporaneous with publication article in WaPo about the beef shortage. Then I got curious about what _caused_ the initial beef shortage (which wasn’t that big of a deal, and which was materially worsened by crisis buying or panic buying in the wake of extensive news coverage of the shortage).
I’m reading https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1973/06/1973b_bpea_schnittker.pdf, which is somewhat hair raising, especially if you take some of those numbers from 1973 and run them through the CPI inflator. Going _into_ that thing, soybean meal was double the price it is now, and at the peak, it was the same in nominal dollars as now, 50 years later. Horrifying. That’d be like, if soybean meal cost $2600/ton now. I just can’t even think in those terms. But when I look at the causes, a lot of them are awful familiar.
I’m personally trying to figure out how to get people to NOT buy extra and then waste it, in rich regions / countries, so as not to make the probably food insecurity / famine elsewhere on the planet any worse than it has to be. When people encounter shortages / outages, they stock up. They don’t buy All the Things All at Once, necessarily; but they will shop more often, and buy extra of the stuff that doesn’t go bad right away, and if they have freezers and so forth they will fill them. And that’s mostly fine, except when there isn’t enough to go around. Also, it’s _not_ mostly fine if we are looking to reduce our impact on the climate, which I am also thinking about long term.
I mentioned the beef shortage and waste associated with it, and ultimately rebought Rathje’s _Rubbish_ on kindle so my sister could read it, after finding a contemporaneous with publication article in WaPo about the beef shortage. Then I got curious about what _caused_ the initial beef shortage (which wasn’t that big of a deal, and which was materially worsened by crisis buying or panic buying in the wake of extensive news coverage of the shortage).
I’m reading https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1973/06/1973b_bpea_schnittker.pdf, which is somewhat hair raising, especially if you take some of those numbers from 1973 and run them through the CPI inflator. Going _into_ that thing, soybean meal was double the price it is now, and at the peak, it was the same in nominal dollars as now, 50 years later. Horrifying. That’d be like, if soybean meal cost $2600/ton now. I just can’t even think in those terms. But when I look at the causes, a lot of them are awful familiar.