Jessica Watson started out yesterday on an attempt to sail solo around the world. I hope she completes her voyage safely.
Meanwhile, Laura Dekker remains on land, waiting for Dutch authorities to decide whether she’ll be allowed to sail. We’ll see later this month if she gets to try to circumnavigate the globe, too.
Some locavores argue that the government should encourage local food consumption in order to create a more stable and sustainable economy. I’ve countered that a geographically diverse food supply is more reliable than any local food supply.
Today I have an example. The following entries are from Whole Foods’ Twitter feed:
Recent storms flooded CA central coast berry fields. Strawberries & raspberries to be in extremely short supply for the next 10-14 days.
Alternatives during the berry shortage – frozen berries, fresh mangoes, apples, pineapples and grapes. Thanks for your understanding!
Imagine if you lived in California’s central coast, and those berries were your local food. If you confined yourself to local food, a flood would mean no more berries. You couldn’t switch to frozen berries shipped in from somewhere else, nor could you eat apples or pineapples from another region. You would have to substitute with something that was grown in the area, that was either unaffected by the flood or harvested and stored shortly beforehand. And, because all the other locavores would turn to those same alternative foods, there would be an increase in demand for them without a corresponding increase in supply — meaning more shortages.
Limiting yourself to local food is not a sustainable practice, although I doubt this economic analysis will dissuade locavores — and that’s not the point. There are many reasons besides economics for people to buy local produce now and then, or even to adopt a full-time locavore lifestyle. But the idea that taxpayers need to contribute to the development of local food for the good of our economy is unsupported by evidence.
Missouri has a mountain lion response team, even though we don’t have any mountain lions.
Here is a Popular Science article about Quest to Learn, the game-themed charter school I wrote about last month (article link via the Quest to Learn Parents’ Blog).
I’m glad that Quest to Learn is the subject of media attention and debate. Unfortunately, this particular article leaves readers only partially informed about how Quest to Learn operates. Nowhere in the article is the word “charter” mentioned. The article lists both public and private sources of funding, but provides no information about who runs the school. The reference to “New York City education officials” may cause readers to conclude mistakenly that Quest to Learn is managed by the New York City Department of Education.
And this sentence gives an erroneous impression about Quest to Learn’s admissions (emphasis mine):
Select sixth graders can look forward to playing video games such as “Little Big Planet” and “Civilization,” as well as non-digital games ranging from role-playing scenarios to board games and card games.
It implies that Quest to Learn is exclusive, when in fact students are admitted through a lottery just like at other charters.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen reports on charter schools that portray them as regular district schools with special powers. That was something that bothered me in Outliers, when Malcolm Gladwell didn’t identify KIPP as a charter. Perhaps this journalistic tendency can be attributed to the newness of charters, and charter school coverage will become more accurate when the schools have been around longer.
While most states are giving parents a wider range of educational choices, Oregon is going in the opposite direction. From shutting down public school choice in Portland to threatening virtual schools with enrollment freezes, to holding up charter school applications, Oregon’s education policy blocks innovation at every turn. Consequently, the innovative programs that manage to survive in this hostile policy environment can’t meet parents’ demand.
An example in the news is early childhood language immersion. Several traditional districts offer immersion classes, which admit students through a lottery. Some are free; others charge tuition. There are long waiting lists, because many people who are interested don’t win a place in a class.
As you might expect in Oregon, some public school officials think choice is the culprit:
“Whenever you have choices, you have equity issues,” said Jane Stickney, deputy superintendent for West Linn-Wilsonville. “The truth is, some people will have access and some won’t. Not every school, not every kindergartner has access to this.”
When parents have choices, they don’t all do the same thing. But that’s not what makes the status quo inequitable. What’s unfair is the lack of choice for most people. Whoever has the good fortune to win a school lottery has a choice. Whoever can afford private school tuition has a choice. Other parents would like to choose language immersion for their children, but the school system doesn’t offer them any alternatives to their assigned traditional public schools. Charter schools could step in and meet the demand, if Oregon didn’t turn down one charter application after another.
Missouri’s education policy is relatively welcoming to new kinds of schools, but we still need to be vigilant to avoid Oregon’s mistakes. I hope we’ll never have to say, with regard to educational monopolies, “As goes Oregon, so goes Missouri.” (Thanks to David Stokes for informing me of the history behind that paraphrased quote.)
This week, Union, a town of about 8,000 people in Franklin County, became the second city in the nation to pass an ordinance requiring prescriptions for medications containing pseudoephedrine. Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in nasal decongestants such as Sudafed, but can also be used in the production of methamphetamine. Union’s new ordinance has renewed calls by sources such as the Riverfront Times to expand this regulation to the rest of Missouri. The Riverfront Times argues that the benefits of preventing meth production and use (assuming that the sort of regulation in question would actually accomplish that goal, which is a big assumption) far exceeds the costs of “inconveniencing consumers,” but the evidence points to costs far more complex than mere inconvenience.
No one can deny that meth production and use has a serious economic, legal, and social impact on communities. But the nasal congestion that drugs like Sudafed treat has an impact as well. Acute rhinosinusitis (or ARS, the technical term for nasal congestion lasting less than four weeks) affects approximately 32 million adults annually in the United States, or about 16 percent of the population older than 18. The effect on work and school absenteeism is predictably large, with 98 percent of workers citing minor illness such as colds and allergies (the primary causes of ARS) as a major cause of short-term absence.
ARS results in approximately $6 billion in annual costs, nearly 90 percent of which are associated with doctor or emergency room visits. In fact, ARS and other upper-respiratory illnesses are the leading cause of primary care visits after hypertension and routine checkups. Unfortunately, there is little that primary care providers can do for ARS, with treatment generally combining symptom control through over-the-counter decongestants with prescription antibiotics. Yet a recent study found that antibiotics provided little benefits for ARS, because bacterial infection complicates only 13–38% of ARS cases (compared to the 85–98 percent of cases in which antibiotics are prescribed; why doctors continue to prescribe a clearly ineffectual course of treatment is a topic for a separate post altogether).
Indeed, it appears that the only effective treatment is symptom management with decongestants, and currently decongestants containing pseudoephedrine remain the clear winner in terms of efficacy. Studies have failed to prove the efficacy of phenylephrin, the main alternative to pseudoephedrine that is used in formulations such as Sudafed PE.
So, with no effective alternative to treat nasal congestion, mandating a prescription for pseudoephedrine-based decongestants would leave ARS sufferers in a tight spot. Sufferers must opt to call out sick and stay home, find time to go to the doctor’s office (if you can get an appointment) or the emergency room, or just push through it and go to work unmedicated — and I hardly need to tell an allergy sufferer how little work generally gets done in that state.
The end results of this regulation are all unappealing: increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, or increased primary or emergency care visits. The last may not seem like such a bad thing, but hospitals and doctors, who are currently slammed by increased volume because of influenza, might have a different opinion. Increased volume leads to increased wait times for patients, keeping those with minor illnesses away from their jobs and lives (and in close proximity to contagious patients) and keeping those with serious illness from getting the treatment they need, especially since emergency rooms may be tied up by people with minor illnesses when primary care providers are booked up. And, as mentioned above, these visits already account for $5.4 billion of the $6 billion in annual costs associated with ARS; increasing the number of visits would cause those costs to balloon.
With the contagious illness season coinciding with the ARS season, we need to be empowering patients to manage their own symptoms whenever possible, rather than restricting that capability. Meth production and use certainly has its costs, but so does an overly restrictive regulation, such as Union’s. Balancing the benefits and the dangers of drugs such as pseudoephedrine is not an easy task, but an “easy,” all-or-nothing solution such as this one amounts to taking the easy way out.
Some residents of private communities have found that saving the planet conflicts with following their community rules. They want to conserve energy by hanging clothes outside to dry. But their neighbors dislike the sight of hanging laundry. At one time, people solved these dilemmas by moving west. Nowadays, they call their state legislators.
I hope Missouri won’t join the states that have enacted laws overriding private community clothesline bans. People joined these communities voluntarily, and they knew the rules up front. It’s not okay to ask the state to change the terms of your contract once you’ve already signed.
I’d like to share this editorial on the Tour of Missouri bike race from the Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal (link via John Combest). I am not opposed to the state having supported the race in the past, or perhaps for the near future (others at the Show-Me Institute might have differing opinions), but the editorial is right-on that the race needs to become privately managed and funded soon. It is a very good piece that I hope you consider.
Today the Wall Street Journal reports on the latest episode of eminent domain in the courts:
New York’s highest court is set to hear arguments Wednesday in a case that will decide whether the state government can lawfully seize private property for a development company.
The story is very familiar, although the actors are different. This time, the New York State Urban Development Corp., a government agency, assumes the role previously played by the city of New London, Conn. A chorus of concerned land owners reprise the role of Susette Kelo, the woman in the little pink house. Forest City Ratner Cos. replaces the New London Development Corporation in the role of the developer, and instead of building a Pfizer research complex, it plans to build an NBA stadium in downtown Brooklyn.
Stay tuned! If the Court of Appeals in Albany sides with the property owners and introduces additional limits on eminent domain, there will be a happy ending. If the court sides with the developers, there will be an unhappy ending, as there was in New London. This will mean that, in addition to other negative consequences, the property owners will lose their homes and the city will lose money on the project.
The city’s Independent Budget Office said in a report last month that the arena would cost the city nearly $170 million, nearly $40 million more in spending than it would generate in tax revenues.
Eminent domain is not reserved for East Coast cities like New York and New London — it’s a pukka issue here in Missouri, too. Last month, the Show-Me Institute released a study of the expansion of eminent domain in Missouri, and it also hosted Jeff Benedict to speak about the eminent domain abuse that occurred in the Kelo v. New London Supreme Court case.
