Pie and policy: recipes for a tastier world.

Presidential Pie

2012-01-30T23:46:00.001-05:00

A numbered pi plate helps you slice this pie for maximum effect.

Approximately four years ago, then candidate Obama challenged a crowd to produce a sweet potato pie that is better than his mother-in-law's. There were no takers. This is not a sincere attempt to win, although it does represent all of the lessons learned in five years of weekly pie making. Indeed, your pie maker doubts that his President is impolitic enough to choose any stranger's pie over his mother in law's, especially since she lives in the White House. No one would hold fair contest in those conditions unless they were epically bad at relationships, and would have trouble securing his party's nomination, much less the Presidency.

The story of this effort begins with pie crust dough that had been left in the refrigerator for about a week. This has little impact of flavor, but does tend to activate more of the gluten in the flour, so you have to be careful not to handle it too much lest it become tougher than an aluminum pie plate. Turns out the crust will shrink quite a bit, although this is not a problem if you make an upstanding ridge. It's a serious problem if you try to make a checkerboard crust for a Hoosier Sugar Cream Pie. The net result is that 1/3 of the filling from Ken's Sugar Cream Pie had to be left in the pot.

From that mistake, the Presidential Pie was born:

While the crust is ~~shrinking~~ pre-baking, place a pan with

3 sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

to soak in the extra heat. Once they are tender, about 2 crusts worth of pre-baking, pull them out and scoop 2 cups into a food processor and reduce the oven temperature to 350F. Add

2 eggs

3/4 cup whole milk

2/3 cup light brown sugar

3/4 t ground ginger

3/4 t ground nutmet

4 freshly ground cloves.

Adjust spice amounts depending on their age; these amounts are too much for newly purchased spices.

Process the mix until there are only split-pea sized pieces of sweet potato. Around the outer edge of the partially pre-baked crust, place

8 dried apricots

and in the middle, arrange a circle of

8 preserved figs

Pour the mix into a partially pre-baked crust (with an upstanding ridge!) and bake until the center only jiggles a little bit, roughly 45 min. Once the pie is out of the oven and cool enough to touch, scoop about

1/2 whole milk yogurt

into the leftover Sugar Cream Pie filling over low/medium heat, stirring continuously until it has a yogurt-like texture. Pour and spoon this over the mostly-cooled pie and then let sit over night.

PMCIN Pie

2012-01-28T12:54:00.000-05:00

Grain Production: You don't need to irradiate homemade pies.

Fruit Production: Access to transport means access to good food.

Animal Husbandry: Sometimes, a subsidy is well hidden, like in the clean up costs of nitrogen pollution.

Housing: A weak government and iffy property rights leads to epic poverty. And, as the Top Gear guys love to remind us, there's isn't a good mobile solution.

Health: The NRDC takes on "Human Security" from a health perspective.

Transportation: NATO's got a webpage on piracy that should help remind us how important Navies are to our way of life.

Energy: The cheap oil is mostly gone, will there be enough of an economy to left to pay for the transition to other sources?

Security: It's prime time for the Navy, maybe not for scientists, but maybe there is hope for us yet.

Epiphany Pie

2012-01-16T11:44:00.001-05:00

Last week, the Fuzzy Wups B^n staff celebrated the Solemnity of the Epiphany, sometimes called Three Kings' Day. We celebrated with friends, and, of course, made a pie.

As is becoming the P&P standard, symbolism to celebrate the priest, prophet and king was baked in. The crust used flour and wine vinegar. While your pie maker is interested in entomophagy, locus are hard to come by this time of year, and so had to make do with a honey sweetened cottage cheese pie from Simply in Season (an excellent book for everyone interested in a sustainable kitchen). Not shown in the picture, there was a rough attempt at the Natal Star using a broiled crust with the background darkened with homemade mulberry syrup, itself good enough to be served to royalty.

First PCMIN Pie of 2012

2012-01-10T08:20:00.000-05:00

Grain Production: Even in the US, food is getting expensive.

Fruit Production: The vision of the urban farm is getting closer.

Animal Husbandry: Local meats need mobile processing, apparently.

Housing: Who's got a claim ?

Health: How to game a study, lawsuits pending.

Transportation: Driving isn't as cool as it used to be, and private infrastructure funding is no balm in India

Energy: Optimism is bad. Waste disposal is often the most hazardous part of production, but helping clean up is a great job creator

Security: Australia is recruiting to build up their navy as the USN and RN downsize. Meanwhile, Mexico's recent history shows us that it's possible to set up multiple warring governments with the profits of the drug trade alone, as long as you don't mind pretty bad services.

Pie-in-the-sky: It starts with wealthy adventurers, then proceeds to iron men in wooden ships. Well, crazy men in leaky ships until we come up with something more poetic.

Bankruptcy in a No Credit Risk world

2012-01-07T07:47:00.001-05:00

This is a bit out of date, but with Kodak about to do something very similar, it's topical again.

The AA bankruptcy deal is a great example of "No Credit Risk" in action. Their bondholders will generally have to accept lower rates of return, but given that any leveraged bondholder probably as access to near-zero interest loans, that's not really a big deal. Anyone holding tons of AA stock without a diverse portfolio is pretty dumb, and the recent move by central banks to flood markets with cash have probably offset most investors' equity losses. Customers won't get stranded, or even bothered, by the deal. With the exception of stock options, this won't even touch executive pay.

So, who gets hurt? AA's union workers, retirees and small cities. This is very bad, and makes very clear that managers are welcome to negotiate in bad faith with unions and municipalities because current bankruptcy law protects their personal assets and even their compensation, while their counter-parties have no recourse but to accept further reduced pay and services. The union's primary recourse, striking, is effectively against the law and they cannot go to court to petition for redress because the institution that's harming them is under the judicial branch's protection. In other words, there is no legal redress except to quit, and unless there is a substantial upturn in employment, that option exposes its takers to legal liability for negligence in the care of their families and at a minimum places their own assets at risk to their creditors. Small municipalities often rely on one or two major carriers to provide their business community with access to the outside world, and a major factor in the location of new factories, call centers and offices is airport access. This type of consolidation further reduces the geographic distribution of opportunity to locales near major cities that are more expensive, further decreasing the profitability of labor-intensive manufacturing jobs and requiring that they be done in places with higher cost of living, further increasing workers' reliance on credit cards thus perpetuating the cycle of wealth concentration.

Your pie maker is not opposed to large profits, only to sustained economic profits or those obtained by ignoring their externalities. This is not an obscure question of justice, it is a question of which enforcement mechanism we want to endure under the immutable "Law of Zero Long-term Economic Profits." If there is an industry that is inherently more profitable than any other, a market economy guarantees that people will move into it until it is no longer more profitable than its next-most-profitable competitor unless there are sizable barriers to entry or coercive restrictions that protect the current beneficiaries. In that case, the non-benefiting set must either develop cultural norms that allow them to accept a permanent lower status or pursue efforts to erode the barriers to entry, legal or otherwise. The first is antithetical to idea of an American Dream, and the second explains a lot about the TEA Party and Occupy protests, since the major banks can only hire so many people.

So how do we get from here to what National Academies Sustainability Forum participants refer to as "small 's' sustainability"? The President has offered his Clintonian vision of higher taxes on wealthy households to fund infrastructure spending, and thus increase the velocity of money and explicitly redistribute income. It is generally true that US infrastructure needs help, and that a large number of the unemployed are in the construction trade, so this idea has some merit. However, past experience with substantial increases in government funding [[stimulus]] is that they do not pay for physical infrastructure but instead ship money to preserve existing government contracts with service workers, and so it's hard to call this campaign promise credible. Indeed, attempts at social engineering through the tax code, whether inspired by Robin Hood or Ayn Rand, typically incentivize unexpected behaviors and lead to calls for greater regulatory intervention that creates employment for lawyers and accountants, at least until those markets saturate because there isn't enough economic activity to merit further regulation. The GOP vision of protecting "job creators" from tax liability is laughable on its face, as the main product of their last serious effort to do that is a massive oversupply of unsustainable housing, Depression-level private debt and the highest unemployment rate since WWII.

According to most business owners, customers create jobs. Rich people make the best customers if they feel they can get more out of buying something than they can out of Investing it. Put another way, the best way to create jobs is to convince rich people (i.e. those with disposable income) that the best return on an increasing percentage of their money is to pay someone to do something tangible instead of depositing it with an investment firm. In economics-speak, this means increasing the marginal product of labor relative to capital (in the Basel-III sense, not Adam Smith's). For that, redistribution from wealthy to poor is only marginally effective today as much of the income will simply flow from the industrial executive to the financial investor, often enough the same person, after a finance executive takes a cut. Instead, think of ways to reward people for making and maintaining stuff, for providing services in person that improve quality of life and reduce cost of living.

PMCIN for Real?

2011-12-27T19:05:00.001-05:00

Apparently, there's a field known as "Human Security", which sounds suspiciously like PMCIN, but not as tasty. With that in mind, here's the biweekly qualitative version:

Grain Production: There's an attraction to tangible productivity that a monetary economy can't, and shouldn't be expected, to match.

Fruit Production: Food provides an excellent opportunity for communities to explore the relationship between utility and value.

Dairy Production: What's interesting about this story is the Food Democracy Now calls it "Obama's Tax on Small Farms," while they used to use the Secretary of Agriculture as their boogie man. 2012 is going to be fun.

Housing: Immigration restrictions, rising sea levels and lack of affordable housing in coastal cities got you down? Blueseed is here to help.

Health: Your pie maker may take this example and start labeling his pies with their approximate bike mileage. This story isn't exactly health related, but it makes one feel good.

Transportation: Vindication. Also, a small step in technology, giant leap in private space infrastructure.

Energy: The Durban talks ended with a mild deal, but the best energy plans will probably be local, since it's hard to say sometimes if changing administrations has any impact on environmental or energy policy.

Security: From now on, I may just link to Robert Hadick's column, although this article on manipulating the mechanics of legitimacy is interesting, too. In other news, the Air Cavalry model has a new thoroughbred.

Pie-in-the-sky: Sustained exploration would actually be cheaper than the current half-measures, at least according to this guy, and toys like the Kinect will make it even cheaper.

Weekly news outline

2011-12-09T16:15:00.001-05:00

Your pie maker has taken to using this type of post as a convenient frame for his thoughts when they start to wander at a computer.

Grain Production: NOAA's studying a lot of the factors that play into growing foods.

Fruit Production: Organic fruits are a desired luxury. A much better status symbol than shark fin soup, and suggests that we can make labor more lucrative without environmental harm.

Dairy Production: Even in modern, wealthy economies shortages will follow changes in weather and diet patterns.

Housing: Is David Cameron trying to help bring down the marginal product of capital, and thus mean house prices, Europe and world-wide?

Health: Free market economic theory assumes both buyer and seller understand their own interests, end of life health care often fails that check.

Transportation: The FAA's long term funding bill is alive and kicking.

Energy: The amounts are small, but this fuel program suggests there's progress to leverage.

Security: Lacing Europe with tripwires right after talking about this being the Asian century? This is either a very deep and interesting story or bureaucratic inertia at its finest.

Pie-in-the-sky: Projects like this offer an opportunity to motivate the next bunch of kids to reach for the stars. Hopefully, this will turn out to be the most important discovery of the 21st century.

In a previous PCMIN-Pie, I suggested the "Romans" had a steam engine. A better way of putting that would have been to say: The Hellenistic world had examples of a steam engine, intricate clockwork and jars with interchangeable lids, all of the power, mechanical and craftsmanship required for an industrial revolution. Hopefully our descendants won't tell the same story of our space program.

2011-12-04T08:45:00.001-05:00

Energy: I wonder if this is making Oracle's CEO think.

Transportation: Okay, most "green" gains are building and fixed plant efficiency, but transport is the second biggest.

Security: Overstressed is how you describe an army that represents a people who believe they can both project force and enjoy a very high standard of living without engaging in looting. Illiberal is how you describe an economy in which the penalty for outright fraud is limited to less than half the damages you cause, if you have the right connections.

Grain Production: Better uses of grains? Honestly, I should not be looking at farm and ag. specific sources instead of mainstream sources for this.

Fruit Production: The growing season is over, but we can get a start on next year.

Dairy Production: English farmers mproving efficiency with IT. Interesting how we're replacing, or at least supplementing, tribal knowledge with the global hive-mind. Also, this is a cute story, which means it's probably more fluff than news.

Housing: Still too cheap for a portfolio, but not quite affordable.

Health: This is an almost elegant duck of fundamentally difficult questions.

Pie-In-The-Sky: The latest Mars rover weighs more than a pop-up camper.

2011-11-28T21:07:00.000-05:00

Another "PMCIN Pie." Suggestions are always welcome.

Energy: Leading by example.

Transportation: There's still no permanent FAA funding. But for this, your pie maker would approve Congress for its functional laziness, described below.

Security: A grand bargain has, in fact, been achieved, but no one wants it.

Grain Production: New and more interesting ways of making bread, with thanks to On Being.

Fruit Production: We do, in fact, export tasty things from Virginia.

Dairy Production: As always, it seems, this is the hardest one to find referenced in mainstream news.

Housing: LA's low rent district might be closing down. It's tempting to tell them to "get a job", but who's hiring young graduates without strong programming skills?

Health: Interest trumps ideology in rural California.

Pie-In-The-Sky: This sounds like fun, but it's a depressing reminder that the Romans had a steam engine and viewed it as a toy because it didn't fit their economic model.

Make Pie Not (Class) War

2011-11-26T19:54:00.001-05:00

Full disclosure: Your pie maker has and seeks funding from the US federal government and all of his portfolio assets are protected from credit losses by the FDIC. Thanks ~~Shelia~~ Martin!

Your pie maker was recently asked a question about the so-called "class warfare" in which the US President seemed to be engaged. This seemed odd, given that this is the same President who has introduced new tax cuts and, despite promising to take the Great Deleveraging out on the "rich" it's hard to say that anything actually changed on the fiscal front in January 2009. However, this warfare narrative is emerging, at least among the President's critics, and it deserves attention.

To begin, it's interesting to see the Wall Street Journal, and not the Washington Post, editorial page describe what the President is currently doing as "class warfare" since it so clearly benefits a very small elite in the finance industry. Warren Buffet wants to protect his dollar assets, so he's happy to kick in a few extra million to keep inflation down for the rest of the decade. Dodd-Frank and his administration's vigorous enforcement of Sarb-Ox are almost explicitly designed to limit the number of banks that can compete with the 13 biggest, and all but require that they hire those firms' or related contractors to manage compliance. The Treasury Dept. and White House is staffed by major banks' alumni and financial institutions have literally never done better. If President is a class warrior, he should be clutching the Baroness' handbag.

If we want to make pie instead of (class) war, it's important to understand what allows people to benefit from the hostility while current policy effectively gets cast in concrete. An important component is the elimination of credit risk above a certain size (TBTF), which has helped lower interest rates and spur economic growth, and allowing the USG to achieve both bank and pension fund stability through a combination of regulation and loose monetary policy. Unfortunately, it's also spawned the Shadow Banking Industry (next Bond villain?) whose efforts have of late seemed to focus on regulatory arbitrage and using the No Credit Risk (TBTF) guarantee to force governments and central banks to make their pools of money larger. Meanwhile, the "real" economy is not doing well because there are credit risks on things like factories and merchandise stocks.

Indeed, as long as there is a class of people who do not fear asset losses, there will be massive inequity. Today's mechanism for this is investment banking, which has become a game of basis points and hedging, where the word "bet" is used almost interchangeably with "investment." Losses on those bets, at least over a certain size, are prevented by governments seeking to maintain their legitimacy in the eyes of citizens who depend on large employers and unsecured bank loans like checking accounts. The cleverest predictors of basis point shifts get rewarded by the wealthiest for growing their wealth faster than is possible in a truly free market (where they might get wiped out completely) and eventually they dictate policy to elected governments. Now that he's retired, George Papandreou would probably be happy to explain how that works in great detail.

The reason this is so intractable is that addressing this potential source of real class warfare means getting rid of what has apparently been Priority 1 for the duly elected government of the United States. Ridding ourselves of "Crony Capitalism", of which TBTF is a major component, is one of the only points of agreement between the Occupy and Tea Party types, but it's not clear that either understand what exactly that means. Does it mean returning to the era of bank runs? Does it mean putting nationalized institutions in the hands of civil servants, as is to happen soon at Freddie and Fannie? This is not a step to take lightly, and the consequences of taking it will be quite bad.

If we don't want a rigid class system in the US, the kind that encourages genuine class warfare, or simply genuine warfare, we need to allow credit losses in a way that doesn't threaten the social stability of the country. The route that we are currently following has the US federal government effectively owning the vast majority of debt in the US as the Treasury directs failing institutions and the Fed monetizes debt, all to the tune of Turning Japanese (I really think so). Meanwhile, asset and land ownership becomes concentrated in relatively few private hands that are forced to cooperate with the central authority. Perhaps this isn't a bad thing, feudal systems are nothing if not sustainable for long periods.

"Class" is a squishy concept in the US, while warfare requires defined sides and hostile intent. A shouting match over "taxes" vs. "spending" does not define a class struggle, but rather highlights the absence of a real discussion of what should be taxed, what services should be provided, and what can be allowed to face genuine risk. This is a very difficult discussion, but it lets us talk about our interests, goals and fears instead of abstract concepts where agreement cannot be reached. It's the kind of thinking and discussing that requires patience and energy. The kind best done over a slice or two of pie.

Piece out.

A weekly PMCIN pie

2011-10-28T21:58:00.000-04:00

A while back, a post suggested an 8-slice model for the Pie Making Capacity In Nation metric. Actually computing it would be a great task for someone with a love of econometrics, but your pie maker prefers the narrative aspect as a frame for looking at what's going on in the world.

Security: Mitt Romney loves the Navy. This is something he and your pie maker have in common.

Transportation: The Eclipse small biz-jet is back from the grave. Perhaps this means we'll see a real air taxi service at some point.

Energy: Solar is getting cheap enough that subsidies for it are threatened. Next year, your pie maker plans to explore this with an outdoor solar PV and thermal kitchen.

Housing: Have "home prices" become a modern cargo cult?

Health: An interesting concept that highlights how health can't be treated in isolation.

Dairy Production: The EPA does a pretty good job explaining modern dairy production.

Fruit Production: Sin trabajadores, no hay frutas.. It is a sad day when misguided attempts to preserve Americana hurt pie production.

Grain Production: It's very important.

With a special topping of optimism:Pie In The Sky (Space): Really big starships might not be as hard to build as we think.

Baptismal Pie

2011-10-17T21:21:00.000-04:00

With apologies for the delay, here's the recipe for your pie maker's first commissioned work, in celebration of the baptism of his first nephew. In Roman Catholic Church, the sacrament of baptism is the very real act of dying to sin and being reborn into Christ. Following the pouring the of the water, the new Christian is clothed in a white garment and firmly instructed to bring it unstained to the day of judgment. The Amish have a tradition of offering the family of the recently deceased a pie made from reconstituted grapes, known as a Funeral Pie, and if P&P is nothing if not willing to borrow good ideas from where ever they may be.

Baptismal Pie

Combine in a medium, preferably non-reactive saucepan:

2 cups raisins (don't use golden, the texture is all wrong)
1 cup water

Start a low flame or medium electric heat and stir occasionally.

Meanwhile, whisk together in a small bowl:
1 cup water
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 t cinnamon
3 T cornstarch

Once the mix in the pan is bubbling, stir in the stuff from the bowl and stir constantly as it bubbles for about 2min. Then remove from heat and stir in

1/2 cup chocolate chunks

Preferably, chocolate that advertises itself as "sinful." Decadent will do in a pinch.

Pour the somewhat cooled (but still easily flowing) mix into a 9" unbaked pie shell and place in an oven at 400F for 35min. Do not add a top crust! (you're not supposed to go before Jesus clothed in a golden brown and sugar dusted garment!)

Let the pie cool thoroughly, then combine in a cold bowl and mix with cold beaters:

1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1 cup heavy whipping cream

Spread the prepared whipping cream over the cooled pie and serve immediately.

Obligatory "jobs" post, part 2

2011-10-10T12:49:00.000-04:00

To hear most economists explain it, the problem today is that we have too little demand. Whether that is because the government isn't spending enough or people are afraid to invest because the government is spending too much is a topic for yak shows and other blogs. The fundamental problem is that people who have the capacity to increase their spending are not because there is simply nothing that they want, can afford, but can't find.

For simplicity, we'll use "rich" to refer to "people who have the capacity to increase their spending." This is not meant to be pejorative, being wealthy is, always has been and by definition always will be pretty awesome. The hazard, of course, is that because this group of people are the ones with the capacity to make life better for their fellows, there's a lot of implicit, or explicit, pressure on them to do so. In individual-celebrating America, the idea of being one's neighbors' keeper is frowned upon as much for our collective desire to not be "kept" as anything else. As a result, we get these periodic generational swings in which policies favoring the accumulation of wealth result in a small population collecting a rather huge portion of it, and rest find themselves facing essentially no prospect for increasing net worth. Nations have faced this challenge throughout history, often with prodigious bloodshed. Before we reach that point in the US, your pie maker proposes we ask the question from last time in a more focused way:

How can we convince the "rich" to spend more of their money on things that require people to work?

The absolute easiest way to do this is for the US federal government to authorize spending on public sector wages. The "rich" buy US Treasury bonds, and people go to work. If we buy into the idea of efficient markets, especially for "savvy" (i.e. very rich or institutional) investors, then the organization that is currently being judged best able to generate acceptable returns on capital is the United States Treasury. This shouldn't be surprising given the number of former investment bankers working there, and Treasury people on Wall Street, but let's not go there today. More to the point, recently this approach has lost favor with much of the political establishment, both here and abroad.

The second easiest way is to provide them, and so grow the "can afford" part until it includes enough additional goods and services that the unemployment rate drops. This is what central banks are supposed to do, but we appear to be at the limit of their control authority. Despite billions (trillions?) spent yearly on marketing, it's fairly hard to convince credit-worthy people to procure more stuff right now, even if they felt their employment perfectly secure. Expanding "creditworthy" to include more acquisitive types would be functionally similar to treating a hangover with whiskey, which might work but is far more likely to cause more serious problems in the future.

Another way is to intentionally alter the tax code and other policies to boost the marginal value of labor relative to capital. This suggestion is so completely radical that our bipartisan corporatist government (economist link) simply will never implement it, so it's hardly worth writing about. However, for as long as profitable securities transactions are taxed at 15% and real profits on sales taxed at 35% (less for companies with good connections), there's hardly any reason for an organization with liquid reserves to actually produce anything, except insofar as that production might induce some sucker to buy the holdings of the organization. As long as financial instruments are treated as more valuable than physical production, and governments insure their value while letting a market decide the price of goods, we will continue to see impressive wealth concentration and protests against the system that supports it.

Now that we've left the world of the politically possible, there's one step beyond tax reform that must be taken. As bad as unemployed life is right now, it needs to become worse or the minimum required marginal product of labor will continue to lag its marginal revenue in an environment of anemic economic growth. There are a number of ways to do this, and none of them are pleasant. One analyst suggested, possibly in earnest, that we restart the Byzantine option: six months of support in return for six months of hard labor. A less extreme version is the Georgia Works program, although for really hard, low-skill work, more incentive is needed on the supply side . Reducing our quality-of-life requirements will be an important part of any sort of new energy economy, and making clear that the floor is lower than a crappy apartment and bland food might just help that message sink in. Plus, it might make it easier for your pie maker to hire a full-time dishwasher and copy editor.

The bake sale as performance art

2011-09-27T07:35:00.000-04:00

As the GOP nomination fight rolls on and questions about the political appropriateness of the TEA Party continue to simmer, your pie maker found delight in the irony that the most controversy seems to center on those who sell baked goods. Now, is the bake-sale-as-performance-art a valid form of political expression? Are there valid non-verbal forms of expression about how the currently powerful should feel about threats to their status?

It's unpleasant to think so, but the alternative is that we self-police to an extent that people only discuss things when they know everyone in the room agrees with us. Oh, wait. Is it wrong to implicitly challenge the consensus that regulatory arbitrage is the best way to address society's ills? A "Town Hall" is likely to disintegrate into a shouting match or agreement-fest, depending on who attends, and there's so much more fun that we could have.

Anyone who seriously objects to this little protest has a very simple means of reprisal. Set up a bake sale of your own, find a woman with enough Native American to qualify for free goods, and sell the BCR's goods to raise funds for things they hate. Ah, but of course to do so points out what the performers were trying to say in the first place, that race-based arbitrage results in something seriously unpleasant, at least in the eyes of the BCR.

Instead, go for the "regifted fruitcake" approach. Use the same woman to collect all of the baked goods, but then sell them based on net tax rate (highly regressive when one includes sales tax), and require proof of legal residency (or a ~~bribe~~ campaign contribution). Keep a tupee handy in case someone tries to present a birth certificate. To keep the "fruitcake" door open, make sure there's a category of people, say relatives of oil company workers or defense contractors, who can get them free as a "credit." Extra credit would be to include a "bake sale to buy a bomber" reference.

There is no shortage of injustice in the world. There's an even greater abundance of ill will and tender feelings surrounding identity issues. Universities are where we should be able to discuss these realities, and art is an excellent tool when conventional language and forums fail. Engagement, uncomfortable or not, leads to understanding.

The Obligatory "Jobs" Post, p.1

2011-09-26T07:34:00.000-04:00

This is an economics blog, and your pie maker can't help piling into the great flood of "jobs" posts on other econ blogs. Despite all the bits shifted (as opposed to ink spilled), there is something unique to say.

If you're wondering about why the US, and indeed much of the developed world's, employment picture and economic growth looks so bleak, ask yourself this question: What do you want, can afford, but cannot find?

Odds are good that list is pretty small for most people. For your pie maker, the only example he can think of involves his preferred brand of bike tire. That being practically a commodity part, he will be trying a new brand, and thus rewarding a different set of employees and investors, but his net outlay will remain about the same. Utilities service, in particular wireline phone, TV and internet, is the only service your pie maker can think of off-hand that the average consumer has to wait for, but these are generally provided by monopolies with strong regulatory reasons to avoid pushing marginal profits.

In the US, and presumably elsewhere, the people who encounter this problem most often are entrepreneurs who want to expand what people want to include their new, hopefully better, product or service. They rely, largely, on credit issued by investors who think people will want these things, and up until 2008, on credit issued to consumers to expand the "can afford" criteria above.

Today, "simple(r) living" has become something of a virtue of necessity, shortening the list of what people want. Even with interest rates at historic lows, few enough investors are willing to expand consumer credit enough to increase the "can afford" category. Finally, our economy is keeping up with demand with up to 16% of the workforce sitting idle (your pie maker prefers U6, which includes "discouraged" workers). What are we to do?

Two natural disasters

2011-09-04T09:14:00.001-04:00

"No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." --From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.Instead of staying home and experiencing an earthquake and hurricane in the same week, you pie maker was called away to prepare his first commissioned pie (recipe coming soon). However, he couldn't help noticing a little bit of a media tempest surrounding a GOP candidate's suggestion that the paired disasters might be a warning from the Almighty. Of course, we know that God is not in the whirlwind. Don't we? While your pie maker's economic life is dominated by methodological naturalism, he's not one to shy away from a good narrative. This one begins with Exodus. If one actually reads the Mosaic law, the central theme is loyalty to the one God of Israel, who brought his people out of slavery in Egypt. Because of their loyalty to and love of the greatest emancipator, the Israelites were commanded to treat one another fairly, to not exploit the poor, the orphan or the widow, It is certainly possible to acquire great wealth while following the law, but it commands the follower to avoid and charges the tax-collecting temple to enforce a ban (through dispute mediation) on the gleaning of fields and exploitive lending or business practices. Centuries later, the Babylonian exile forced ancient Israel to wonder what went wrong. Some of their prophets had warned of idolatry and injustice (not so much sexual morality, except as related to idol worship), but were ignored. Sitting by the waters of Babylon, they decided to take such warnings seriously and were eventually allowed to return home. Once there, the temptation to exploit and seek power in this life without divine guidance cropped up again and again. And so, again and again there were prophets warning of disasters that would befall them if they did not. One of these was Amos, whom the reverend doctor famously quoted above. The Thursday before Hurricane Irene arrived, a 5.8 magnitude quake hit Virginia and rattled DC. The District partially evacuated, and all of the monuments were shut down, including Dr. MLK Jr.'s. However, the next day, it was the wealthiest man memorialized on the Mall whose monument was closed indefinitely, That weekend, the national press and government had planned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the speech quoted above with the formal dedication of the new Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.Instead, we are left to imagine the self-congratulatory speeches and pages about how appropriate it is that a man with an black African father should be President on such an auspicious day. About how far we have come as a nation from those bad old days, and how, while things aren't perfect, we are living out and up to Dr. King's Dream. Meanwhile, our gap between rich and poor grows. Laborers, when their work isn't simply offshored, find their livelihoods and safety threatened by an unraveling social safety, weakened unions and tax policy that favors the selling of debt by the very few over the production of goods by the many. That weekend, Irene rolled in with a lot of water and unleashed a mighty stream. Instead of putting a capstone on the work of the man who came to preach Amos to us, the story continues. If someone was trying tell us something, I doubt it had much to do with preserving the suburbs.

Chiffon Pies Are Slow Pies

2011-08-26T01:27:00.002-04:00

It's been a busy August for you pie maker, and a lot of interesting, non-pie related business needed attending. That's not to say he had forgotten about this effort, but it seemed that by the time he could get around to writing about something, someone had already written it, and odds were good it was available to the right of this text.

However, tonight your pie maker is attempting his first chiffon pie, and an important component of this process is allowing things too cool and set between steps. Given that your pie maker tries to practice at least some of what he professes, the kitchen is kept at roughly 10F (5C) hotter than the "standard" kitchen in Ken's book, and so cooling takes a bit longer.

Fortunately, this creates some blogging time. Before the watermelon juice starts to thicken around it's gelatin (should be tasty when it's done), there's some time to describe your pie maker's take on recent events.

First of all, the nearly unescapable news of the last month has been the precipitous drop in global equity prices. Apparently fearful of another recession in the US and Europe, investors have been selling stock shares and either parking the money as cash or buying US debt, or buying gold and other commidities on the assumption that Forex or futures contract offer safety "if things get bad." The political response has been lukewarm at best for the simple reason that the central question facing the leaders of those economies have to choose who gets screwed in the Great Unwinding (I'm sure someone's used that already), and every constituency with a tax break or subsidy is doing their best to preserve it. We've seen this before, I really think so.

By allowing the government to become the backstop for financial losses, it is inevitable that the firms that should have failed will instead tax the public coffers until the public can no longer keep its promises. Whether or not the failure to provide this backstop would have resulted in a larger loss of tax income because the prosperity of debt-fueled growth, public or private, is by nature temporary is a question for a different time. Your pie maker never expects to be able to afford a comfortable retirement, and is largely resigned to the fact that he belongs to one of the more easily targeted demographics in the coming realignment. Fortunately, he can also make chiffon pies now, so it should be easier to enjoy a slower pace of life.

It's a poetic weekend

2011-07-30T17:04:00.003-04:00

Triple A rating
Three days before a default
Makes sense to someone

In fairness, it's medium term (10-20yrs) debts that pose an economic problem for the US, so in normal times a AAA bond rating would be appropriate. Over the long run, AA+ is probably the most appropriate given the state of economic growth and "Alternative Fiscal Scenarios," but downgrading T-bills is almost as explosive as finding white, black, red and pale horses to ride through global financial capitals.

More Haiku

2011-07-29T22:11:00.002-04:00

Does the TEA Party
Belong to the GOP
Or the TFG?

To give credit where it is due, the TEA Party movement didn't get bought off with cheap social wedge issues the way your pie maker expected. Bully for them. Your pie maker grew up expecting something to see entitlements gutted before he was likely to retire, and now they are! Hopefully the rest of the government continues to function.

In other news, someone looking for a government he could drown in a bathtub should probably catch a flight to Mogadishu to see what it actually looks like.

Time for fiance haiku again

2011-07-28T21:43:00.002-04:00

This effort began right about the time of the TARP vote and quickly descended from mildly insightful commentary to cheesy narrative (with romantic subplots!) explanations of things to questionable Haiku about finance.

As of July 28th, 2011, every worthwhile thing about the state of markets and the US debt ceiling that could be written has been written, often at great length. Even Simon Johnson is getting a bit repetitive because, frankly, we ran out of new things to discuss sometime in June.

So, this time around the crisis block, your pie maker will skip the analysis and stories of how we got here and go straight to the poetry.

On Congress Today
Markets wait with baited breath
Or was that a yawn?

An interesting take on sustainability

2011-06-08T23:52:00.003-04:00

For all that this blog tries to avoid being the hair-shirt wearing prophet of sustainability, albeit with pies instead of locusts, it's a recurring theme.

Readers might find this post by Gail Fisher of Mendstate interesting, as it addresses the key differences between economic and governmental sustainability in Afghanistan.

Pie in the sky (er, space)

2011-06-04T10:29:00.002-04:00

Two bits of space news that caught the interest of your pie maker:

(1) One-way space exploration

The age in which exploration was the province of indispensable national heroes is over. The goals of developed nations appear to be limited to providing physical security for their citizens and economic stability for their investors, and the resulting safety culture in government drives up the cost of almost everything it does.

If, instead, we view space exploration the same way we viewed Western expansion or seafaring pre-1900, the costs fall dramatically. The number of deaths will certainly climb, but danger has not discouraged a booming trade in Everest expeditions or recruiting for the All Volunteer Force. With disgruntled youth movements sweeping the Middle East and Europe, and The Week and NYT publishing articles about how it could happen in the US, we're reminded that humanity needs more to live for than retirement.

(2) Space Solar Power

Space infrastructure to support colonization would have a lot of terrestrial benefits as well.

Mulberry Pie Season

2011-05-24T05:17:00.002-04:00

It's mulberry season in Virginia, and after about 30min of picking your pie making crew had enough for a pie and a batch of mulberry syrup. Yes, you should come.

This week's pie almost exactly followed the Mulberry Pie recipe on All Recipes, except that we used an 8", deep dish pie plate.

It's primary time!

2011-05-15T08:41:00.005-04:00

The original version of this was written shortly after the State of the Union address, but with the ongoing budget fights and GOP primary season filling the airwaves with talk about the size, scope and sustainability of government programs, now is as good a time as any to publish it.

The idea for this blog began when your pie maker was riding his bike to the farmer's market and contemplating the surprisingly complex web of connections required to support his pie-a-week habit. It's hard to imagine a more "progressive hipster" image than the twenty-something pedaling off to buy local produce while thinking about the environment and social justice. However, of the many things your pie maker has been called, "hip" is rarely mentioned and "progressive" hardly ever.

Instead, consider that this particular twentysometing was traveling on an unlicensed vehicle that requires no credentials to operate and for which he paid no special fuel taxes on a trail built with funds from leasing a public toll road (Public-Private Partnerships!). His objective was to conduct cash transactions with multiple small businesses, some with "employees" clearly under 14, many who were clearly related to the owner, and some who's documentation status was probably suspect. The purchased food had no FDA labels or any inspection beyond the seller's and buyers' (caveat emptor!). There was at least one case in which an offer was made to partake in the production of a highly regulated and subsidized product in a way that involved neither regulation nor subsidy, and yet was still legal, mostly (moo!). Your pie maker baked in a home rented from the owner on the basis of a contract they negotiated with no federal interference. A company doctor handled most of your pie maker's medical care (and did an excellent job overall). Far from seeking an abstract notion of equality or justice, his wandering mind was concerned with how to avoid interfering with the complex systems required to keep pie fixings available. PMCIN, it seems, expands with little government help.

Ah, but it's GOP primary ~~season~~ year. What would the "Republican" version of this story look like? Based on demographic data from the last couple elections, your pie-consumer would travel to the nearest suburban big box or supermarket in his pickup truck or SUV while trying to decide whether to buy a pie from the store's bakery, freezer case, or maybe one of the chain restaurants in the shopping center. He would contemplate the necessity to maintain current regulatory, economic and military policies to support his pie-a-week habit because between the mortgage and car payments things are pretty tight, and while the system is clearly unsustainable, the day of reckoning has clearly not arrived. Economic growth requires specialization, and time spent making pies at home is time away from working or more thorough relaxation.

Let's look for the "small government" in this Red State version: Sitting on a state-issued ID card in a registered vehicle with government imposed safety, pollution and materials requirements on a tax-and-debt funded road and fueled by a hydrocarbon that provides more money for socialism than George Soros, the transportation side of this story is a story of central planning. At the store, staffed by people whose documentation, demographics, health and retirement plans all must match imposed guidelines and buying products from subsidized farms with mandated labels, the body politic has clearly chosen regulation over markets to manage information. Even the payroll of the store and its suppliers, likely traded on the commercial paper market, has ~~implicit~~ explicit backing from agents of the USG. Meanwhile, it's a safe bet that this fictitious pie-eater's home mortgage was backed by the US Treasury in hopes of increasing his consumption potential, and thus economic growth overall.

Is it possible to have suburban prosperity without a coercive agency to ensure that the food is safe, that enthnic agitation is minimized, that the roads are in good shape (without disruptive toll collection), that loans (like Savings Accounts) are guaranteed and that, in general, any individual's capacity to do harm is kept to a minimum while their capacity for consumption is maximized?

History suggests not. A "small government" is usually seen as a weak government by its citizens (like Mitch McConnell, look up his comments on last year's oil spill), who generally demand security and prosperity before their basic Lockean rights (see Hannity on torture and detention of US citizens labeled "terrorist"). This forces governments to restrict individual liberties as technology and economic progress give citizens greater ability to expand into their neighbors' interests. The Tea Party's response to the State of the Union Address supports this observation: replace "freedom" with "purchasing power" and Rep. Bachman's statement makes a lot more sense. The reason six years of the GOP holding two branches of government lead to government's largest expansion in history is not due to moral failings or the 9/11 attacks. Very simply, suburbanism requires too many assumptions be and remain true (so that people can borrow against them) for any free or unregulated system to be allowed to emerge. Not, of course, that any of the candidates for office can say that . . .

Chocolate-fat crust

2011-05-13T17:25:00.002-04:00

If you come to the Fuzzy Wups B&B with a bar of appropriate chocolate, one of two things will happen. Either it will be chopped up and used to top a pumpkin pie or, if you're staying overnight, it will be heated and have the gooey sweet part separated from the white fatty bits.

The gooey part makes excellent crepes. Come on a weekend when your pie maker is not engaged in wind energy research, and he will make them for you.

The fatty part can be substituted for butter in pie crusts, and smells like good chocolate when heated. Highly recommended for any filling that tastes good with chocolate.

As your pie maker types, a new coconut, almond and pecan pie is baking with a crust with 1/4 chocolate fat and 1/4 cup butter. Yes, we are open for dessert this evening.

"Instant" Graham Crust

2011-05-05T23:13:00.002-04:00

There's a lot of important and interesting things going on in the world, so one can be forgiven for not having the time to make a good, flaky, standard or whole wheat pie crust.

Fortunately, your pie maker has stumbled across the perfect graham crust (not graham cracker, mind) for this season's chess pies, and it should hold work very well for wetter fruit pies, like strawberry. Like a good scientist, your pie maker will investigate this claim shortly, and is always seeking co-investigators.

The Recipe:

Pour, in order:
1/2cup whole milk
1/4cup vegetable oil
into a chilled glass measuring cup but DO NOT STIR! and place in the freezer for a few minutes while the oven preheats and you get the filling ingredients staged.

Combine in a medium, preferably very cold bowl:
1cup whole wheat flour
1cup all purpose flour
1T granulated sugar

Pour the liquid into the flour slowly, stirring very gently until it is just mixed. Spread a baking mat with whole wheat flour and place the dough on it. Roll it out to about 1/2" (1cm) thick, then fold it over and roll it out again, and do this once more. If the dough remains cold that will lead to a flakier crust, in a hot kitchen you can expect a more bread-like consistency, both are very good. Once ready, roll out to fill the pie plate. It can be rolled into a double crust for a 9" pie plate, but use it as a single, relatively thick crust for a deep dish pan.

The perils of development assistance

2011-05-04T08:05:00.004-04:00

Once your pie maker learned about William Easterly's work, he found a humanitarian expression of the ideas expressed by Hayek and other classical liberals. It comes down to this central thesis: it is difficult or impossible to genuinely help people without getting to know them well. As often as not, feeding one's self while getting to know them well requires that the potential benefactor get some economic benefit from the target population.

People respond imperfectly to any set of incentives, and so any bureaucratic approach to development aid, foreign or domestic, must be able to absorb substantial uncertainty about eligibility, duration and cost. If the goal is to cause a substantial change in the recipients lives, by definition the goal of most poverty alleviation programs, the uncertainty grows with the success of the program. As a result, program sponsors and administrators tend suffer a fair amount of bureaucratic paralysis because the penalty for a small program being late is minor (from the aid deliverer's perspective), while being wrong about the impacts of the program is often fatal.

Organizations that are extremely hierarchical, such as military forces, handle this uncertainty by declaring a qualified person, singular, to be the decision maker with both the responsibility and authority to seek the desired ends. Decentralized organizations such as markets do a very good job of allocating resources if specific conditions about information distribution and scarcity are true, and these are often enforced by the apparatus of a nation-state. Develop aid organizations fall into a middle ground, making them very frustrating to deal with, and possibly irrelevant.

This is an over-simplified version of a very complicated story, for which your pie maker highly recommends reading Reinventing Foreign Aid and The Economist magazine. However, one thing he has often found to be true is that the best way to really screw things up is to try help selflessly, but ignorantly. If you can't make what you believe come true (generally by force) or gracefully be wrong more often than not (markets seek the "least wrong" solution), then the best you can hope is that the situation you're trying to effect will remain static long enough for you to learn how to understand it.

This Week in Pie Making (22-29 April)

2011-04-29T19:59:00.003-04:00

Ted Rall's acerbic wit does a pretty good job explaining your pie maker's reaction to the current debate over the 2012 budget. He grew up in a generation that was more certain of intelligent extraterrestrial visits to earth than his chances to receive a state pension, and it's almost nice to see someone finally getting around to killing off those programs. Would the US Congress actually allow the potential lost of investment value right as Baby Boomers retire to make the system stable in the long term? Not bloody likely. Fortunately, your pie maker's commuting habits should keep his medical expenses in the realm of injury-recovery, rather than expensive, rationed, long-term care. Perhaps the Cohen brothers can make a movie out of the dark humor behind Rep. Ryan's Obamacare for Seniors.

In other news of good intentions, things aren't going well in Libya. Apparently someone's started laying mines discretely enough that EUFOR missed it, and as Chris Rawley points out, that capacity means bad things for the opposition. Meanwhile, the war is now spreading across Tunisia's border. North Africa might be moving towards a more stable and democratic future, but it's safe to assume that it's path will be as bumpy as Europe's was.

There's also good news. Spring is here and the Alexandria Farmer's Market is open. The tastiest bike ride of the week is back. The Fuzzy Wups has completed its renovation and instead of barely being able to feed four and sleep perhaps three, we can easily feed ten and sleep four comfortably. You should come!

Debt Ceilings, Sustainability and Taxes

2011-04-27T06:48:00.003-04:00

Many years ago, in the early days of internet banking, your pie maker accidentally discovered how to cause a financial crisis while getting free services. It works in three steps:
(1) Sign up for a service with a month bill paid automatically from a checking account
(2) Set up "Overdraft Protection" on the checking account from a line of credit (LOC), aka "credit card"
(3) Set up the checking account to automatically pay the minimum payment on the LOC

Each month, the service provider (SP) permitted your pie maker to use their infrastructure in exchange for a small (but slowly rising) fee assessed after the service had been used. In other words, if your pie maker decided to be a delinquent, the SP was screwed unless it had some kind of recourse. Any resources expended on your pie maker's behalf were aquired with someone else's investment, hopefully at less cost than your pie maker's fees, otherwise the system would be unsustainable from the outset.

At the end of the month, the managers of your pie maker's line of credit issued a "cash advance" on which they charged interest and for which they deducted a fee. This "cash" was used to pay the SP for services rendered, and your pie maker was permitted to continue using the service the next month. A few days later, the LOC's managers again issued a "cash advance" with fees and interest to pay the minimum amount due on the LOC.

This only lasted a couple months before your pie maker's mail finally caught up to him and he promptly cancelled both the service and LOC. Following a Nassim Taleb-esque master narrative on debt, especially consumer debt, coupled with lessons drummed in from childhood, there seemed to be nothing good about having a "free" service that was going to force him into default or substantial reduction in quality of life in a predictable, if distant, time frame determined by the maximum allowable balance (i.e. debt ceiling). The SP's investors were unhappy to lose a revenue-generating customer and the bank was unhappy to lose a lucrative asset, but the beauty of our system is supposed to be that we can each work to our own best interest, and the service wasn't needed. Austerity is often good for the soul, and a PMCIN=1 lifestyle doesn't require many services.

The obvious regulatory response is twofold: (1) tax interest on rolling credit more heavily to discourage its issuance and (2) prohibit the use of rolling credit to pay for rolling credit. (i.e. once a checking account is "secured" by a credit card, it can't be used to automatically pay that bill or pay it all unless there's been a deposit equal to or greater than the credit card bill payment). This would lead to a much larger number of small defaults, fewer bankruptcies, and more stable economic growth.

Given the demographics of post-modernists, it's unlikely they'll try to hard to smash this anti-finance narrative, but let's give it a go. First of all, in this circumstance the cost of losing the service was a minor inconvenience to your pie maker, but what if instead it had been something vital, like, say health insurance. In that case, breaking the cycle would have required your pie maker to find additional revenue to both cover the cost of the formerly "free" service and the interest payments on the debt due to both the service costs and fees. So instead of putting all of his salary into the local economy, plus providing a conduit for global investors to do so as well, your pie maker would exert a deflationary influence that hurt not only local merchants and workers but also the SP's investors, the LOC issuer's investors and his own standard of living.

In fact, given your pie maker's excellent credit rating, loans to him could be highly rated and thus have tiny reserve requirements. If the employees of the bank who collected those fees deposited or invested their money in the same bank, 90-98% of the that money could have been immediately be reissued to your pie maker to cover the next month's expenses. Assuming the SP had covered all of its capital costs and was simply paying off its employees investors with your pie maker's monthly installments, those investors could turn around and reinvest those returns in CDOs, ETFs or other instruments that allow the bank boost its assets by lending yet more SP payments and fees to itself. Since the LOC is such a little money spinner, why not leverage it a bit and borrow against future payments that the highly rated pie maker is sure to provide?

In other words, the real problem here is not debt itself but the debt ceiling and "leakage" from the system. Your pie maker should absolutely not live a more austere life of baking and biking, instead he should maintain the LOC and "free" service, while devoting any income gains to the CDOs and ETFs that allow him to, effectively, borrow money from himself and collect interest on it. The bank needs to be allowed to have very generous capital reserve ratios, and taxes must be as low as possible to ensure that money issued as bonuses, disbursements or dividends can find its way back into the lending pool. The "pro-growth" policy response is absolutely not to limit consumer's ability to hurt themselves and bank bondholders, but instead to ensure that the circular flow of money has few leaks as possible due to taxes and payments to people outside the investing class. The optimism, the belief that any bank instrument will yield positive returns, underlying this system must be maintained at all costs. The growing rich-poor gap is a sign of this system becoming more stable, or at least entrenched.

Of course, the problem with this system is that some leakage is inevitable. At some point, your pie maker and his bank will have exhausted all of the optimism available, and some of those investors will want to realize their gains in tangible assets. At that point, either everyone, investors, banks, pie makers, governments, etc. suffers massive loss of wealth (since the circular flow meant there was never any real money involved) or someone steps in and buys your pie maker's debt with "real" money. Paging Uncle Ben . . .

Your pie maker abandoned the investor-funded lifestyle several years ago and now lives off the largess of people who want better robots. Most governments, however, have not made this choice, and instead find themselves constantly looking for ways to increase the assets of the currently wealth in exchange for the ability to provide services (like medical care and security) to their populations. By structuring their credit systems, labor laws and production systems to funnel consumer funds back into investment vehicles they have been able to close the loop pretty well, and since sovereign debt can be paid coercively (i.e. taxes), their "credit limit" is a very flexible concept.

However, this can't go on forever. Eventually, the optimist assumption about the quality of the debt, or at least the currency in which it was issued, will fade. But unwinding this situation will be incredibly difficult because most of the income that pays for the debt today is itself borrowed money, and liquidating those assets will reveal, as in your pie maker's case, that there is little or no real money, just a lot of promises (consider one's own bank account at an institution with a 10% reserve ratio). The next budget fight will be vicious, full of powerful buzzwords, and require the very best in careful accounting to parse its implications.

Update on North Africa

2011-04-25T21:21:00.003-04:00

A while back I suggested that the Libyan intervention was kinda half-baked. CDR Salamander has stuck the proverbial toothpick into the center, and pulled this out.

Highly recommended reading.

Republicans for Slow Medicine?

2011-04-14T07:07:00.002-04:00

As of the last couple of years, biomedical engineering has seen explosive growth. Almost every university in the country now has at least a few faculty and a score of grad students in traditional engineering departments with "bio-" attached to their titles. The needs of an aging population are frequently cited as the impetus behind this effort, as the percent of the US, Europe and Japanese budgets and economies devoted to late-life medicine continues to rise.

This is hardly inevitable. Do-not-resuscitate orders are gaining popularity as people begin to assess the quality, not just length, of their lives. In addition to living longer, there's hints that large parts of the population might be making healthier choices about diet, exercise and entertainment (e.g., not smoking). Medicare is even encouraging doctors to have discussions about this with patients before they enter the painful, and expensive, portion of end-of-life care, so that the decisions are made by the patient, not family members under considerable duress. Slow medicine is a philosophy that incorporates these principles.

The House GOP 2012 budget makes sense in one of two ways. Either, they expect their tax structure to create superlative retirement savings for all seniors, that effectively the stock market's capital gains can displace the $38Trillion unfunded liability, or that seniors will chose to purchase less care than the government would provide for free. In other words, by capping the growth of Medicare spending, it guarantees that there simply will not be funds for both quality of and end of life care for beneficiaries, and lets individuals make the choice. Do they have perfect faith in the private sector to do what the government could not, or did the GOP officially embrace Dr. Dennis McCullough?

At first blush, I thought the primary goal of the new GOP majority was to increase upper middle class consumer purchasing power while maintaining social funding for elderly supporters. I also expected them to quickly move away from fiscal discipline and into social wedge issues that inflame more passionate support than actually cutting spending would do. If this new program provides both fiscal restraint and reballances the economy to invest in productivity instead of retirement, perhaps there is something to like about the new Congress. Not that any of this will matter, as recipients of Medicare today will smell a rat as an excuse to cut their services and see to it that it does not happen. Still, your pie maker was perhaps too cynical in his early assessment, and they do deserve credit for putting their careers on the line for a significant, if inadequate and politically unfeasible, change. (I still haven't read the thing in detail, and will have more to say once I do.)

Voice-Enhancing Chocolate Walnut Pie

2011-04-10T19:11:00.002-04:00

Lots of things going on in the world, and your pie-maker has lots of things to say about them. So, to fortify his voice, he concocted the Voice-Enhancing Chocolate Walnut Pie.

Make one double-crust quantity of Louis Pipper's Oil Crust, but use the whole thing for the bottom. Roll it out into a 9.5" deep dish pie plate and prebake at 425F for 10min.

While the crust is pre-cooking, combine:
3/4 Cup light corn syrup
1/2 Cup dark brown sugar
3T butter, cut into small bits
in a small pot (I use a 1qt pot for this). Once the butter is melted, scatter:
2/3 Cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
over the mixture, let sit for a couple minutes to start melting the chocolate, then stir to mix thoroughly. When the pie shell is done, reset the oven to 350F.

In a large mixing bowl combine:
3 eggs
a pinch of salt
and measure, but reserve:
2 overfull cups of untoasted walnuts.

Whisk the eggs until they are just frothy, then pour the sugar/chocolate mix and walnuts in. Stir together just enough to coat the walnuts evenly, and pour the mix into the pie shell. Place in the oven and bake up to 40min or until the center puffs up and the edges solidify.

This pie has also proven to be an effective enhancement for singing voices if eaten with breakfast.

How to Help Libya

2011-03-15T10:12:00.002-04:00

A big question floating around the Internet in the western world today is this: How can we help Libya?

This being the season of Lent for most of those in the West, the first and most obvious answer is to pray for them. Beyond that, however, our options are a choice between bad and worse. It would be bad, terrible even, for the rebels to be crushed by an oil-funded autocrat with imported troops. Oh, wait, that's Bahrain. As Mark Mardell and The Conservative Wahoo point out, there is no compelling national interest for the US or any Western country to take the risks associated with, effectively, breaking a country with no transition plan in place, a history (and presumably culture) of involvement in a variety of anti-western groups and
at time when neither the United States nor Europe are in a position militarily or financially to take on rebuilding yet another country.

Instead, we citizens of the US especially can take a somewhat longer view of the Arab Spring and help our fellow humans lead pie-friendlier lives.

Step 1: Ride a bike (or telecommute, carpool, use transit or walk) more and drive less. The resource that pays for most of the autocracy in the world is oil. The less of it we buy, the more governments will have to rely on their own people's productivity which, in turns, means their governments will have to care about their well-being.

Step 2: Tell your Congressman to support domestic drilling for oil and gas. Not because it will do a bit for energy independence, but if our way of life demands that someone bear a resource curse, justice demands that we do so too. If seeing how nasty (link for the pictures more than the text) that is encourages people to consider sustainable alternatives in places where there is also money and incentives to invest, so much the better.

Step 3: Tell your Congressmen to bloody well pass a budget for FY11 and sign on to something like the play approved by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The dollar's reserve status has become our own resource curse, and if we want to have a military that can credibly deter threats to peace in the future and respond to natural disasters it is vital.

Two weeks in pie making (Feb 6-20)

2011-02-20T03:59:00.002-05:00

Last week: Maria's Carmel Nut Custard Double Crust Pie
This week: Butterscotch Nut Custard Pie

Quite a lot happening these past two weeks. In general, it's been a tough time for the current international system, as the governments surrounding the major resource choke-points suddenly find themselves facing populations that doubt their rulers' legitimacy. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, as unemployed young people facing rising food prices have very little too lose. Crushing despair and a growling stomach make batons, tear gas and even bullets not seem like such a bad idea. Eastern Europe had the promise of the EU and (for better or worse) hundreds of millions in aid to help them transition from Soviet Satellite to productive member of the global economy to give populations hope and leaders focused. Today's fledgling democracies were governed by clients of a system that has not fallen, and at least the French have powerful and lucrative ties between their top levels of government and recently toppled leaders.

On the domestic front, the great battles over state budgets have found their focus: Wisconsin. There's an interesting question here about the difference between public and private sector unions, although the President's recent push for manufacturing (and Rahm Emanuel's expressed view on the subject) suggests that at least some Democrats are looking for life after the SEIU, which, they hope, will look a lot like life before them. Best of luck! Someone needs to build the ovens and pie plates, and given the choice between organized labor or a planned economy, your pie maker will take the former.

Speaking of, it looks like your pie maker was wrong. In December, especially after the passage of a very iffy tax compromise, it seemed that the GOP had effectively agreed to stasis and would focus on social issues while conceding to a few minor program cuts. This could be very interesting, as injecting effectively $61billion in losses into the various government contractors and lenders to gov't employees around the country will have rippling effects. It's unclear how or if the private labor and finance markets would absorb such a loss. If it leads to the government actually exercising its resolution authority for a major bank, your pie maker will brew a cup of earl gray in tribute. However, the Democrats are hoping to replay 1995, and the biggest impact will likely be a two week vacation for your pie maker in March.

If that happens, expect to see the traveling rolling pin on the back of a bicycle, or maybe a kayak, as the rush to GPS-dependent NextGen is about to collide with GPS-jamming G4 wireless service. Tough times for the System, indeed.

Two weeks in Pie Making (Jan 29, Feb 5)

2011-02-05T11:22:00.004-05:00

Pie of the week: Coconut Cream Pie
Pie of last week: Chocolate Chess Pie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your new climate. It's the stuff of crop failures, higher food prices, and hubristic song parodies. Interestingly enough, while nature provides plenty of positive feedback mechanism for accelerating this process, like an amazonian drought and potential for major increases in the amount of methane released from the Arctic sea floor, our global political and economic system appears to have a built-in relief valve.

In other words, a long-predicted crisis of legitimacy in North Africa and the Middle East, in which oil money funded the extraction of water from non-replenishing aquifers to provide cheap food and employment, has finally come to a head. This has implications globally, as the system of socialized banking losses used to guarantee first-world prosperity is only as strong as depositors desire to keep their accounts denominated in dollars, and the populace is willing to accept inflation and lowering standards of living while debts are inflated away. However long this system lasts, the energy intense economies of world will slow down as commodity prices rise, and greenhouse gas emissions will fall. The "invisible hand" might be mother nature's relief valve. Speaking of energy, readers should check out this Economist debate on natural gas vs. renewables.

That's not to say the changing climate, unsustainable water management and its impact on food prices is the only threat to the Westphalian state system. The ongoing "war on drugs" is proving that markets are more powerful than governments more thoroughly than the Cato Institute ever could. The insurgencies that most directly affect US foreign policy are funded by US and European consumption of illicit chemicals, and now it's looking like southern Arizona, California and Florida could be caught up in the wave. P&P wants to know why we aren't taxing this obviously popular product line.

Fortunately, the GOP recognizes that its mandate is weak, especially since the Tories provided such a handy lesson. For those wondering how to assess the impact of large federal reductions, begin with this thought: for roughly every $200k in budget cuts, one employee is laid off. That means one mortgage isn't being paid, and the corresponding increase in the size of the labor pool and housing market both put downward pressure on the two main sources of perceived wealth, wages and home prices. If these cuts happen during a time of robust private hiring, as happened in the 1990's during the Gingrich/Clinton government, the net effect is generally positive since this helps hold down inflation and in some areas improves government efficiency.

Today's world is very different. Instead of the stinging reminder of the S&L failures and their slow process of receivership, national governments implicitly or explicitly own pretty much major bank losses today, while investors move money into safe t-bills, implicitly backed stocks and commodities that allow access to the incomes of non-investors in the way credit-based securities used to (leave a comment if you want citations). Perhaps this is a good thing, but there are doubts about the ability and efficacy of this ~~corrupt~~ fiscal/monetary GDP-growing system.

What's really interesting to see in all of this is how the more thoughtful GOP commentators seem to accept the inevitability of growing gov't intervention in the economy. The origin of "government takeover of healthcare" came from someone talking about how despite increased private market competition via insurance exchanges, inevitable increases in regulation would force us into a UK-esque NHS system (P&P aside: how bad would that be? I'm honestly interested in hearing), while Eric Cantor justified his vote on TARP by saying that one massive expansion of government to prevent a Greater Depression was justified because the alternative was even more gov't expansion via social and reconstruction programs. John Kyl's statement that taxes "don't increase the deficit" suggests he embraces a theory of wealth, popular in the late Roman Empire, that all assets belonged to the state (actually, they belong to God, and in Byzantium His vicar was the Emperor, who embodied the state), but were placed in private hands as a sort of conservatorship, until there is an emergency. Also, the reluctance to cut too deeply into science funding, particularly DoD funded research, might reflect an understanding that fundamental and applied research sometimes gets developed before its time.

On the plus side, the national debate about childrearing and culture continues, quite possibly with a new "Rosa Parks Moment." Of course, the fact that we have tie it, tenuously, to a past event speaks to the ambiguity of this situation, for all that it does reveal the powerful need for more Robinson Community Learning Centers. If Kevin Smith has his way, we'll see more opportunities for smaller community-backed efforts to compete with international companies, which should provide stable and sustainable social mobility than excessive mortgage supports. There is a real possibility that wireless broadband might compete with the big cable/telco dualopolies in enough regions to bring down prices and encourage more telecommuting, and OPM is totally on board with that. Things might get nasty for a while, but it does look like we're heading towards a pie-friendlier world.

Winter commuting carols

2011-01-26T22:37:00.003-05:00

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But these tires are so delightful
And soon by trails to work I'll go
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

I don't show signs of stopping
With this armor my tubes ain't popping
My lights cast a funkier glow
When it snows! When it snows! When it snows!

When I leave work for the night
How I love heading out in the storm
Trackless powder beneath my bike
When I get home I'll be warm

With gas prices slowly rising
On pies I am relying
To get me where I must go
Let the snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

Dear reader, the bit about the going out in the storm isn't actually true, at least when I can avoid it. On the other hand, while most of my colleagues have to choose between playing in the snow or going to work, I get to work by playing in the snow.

This Week in Pie Making, Jan 16-22

2011-01-22T21:26:00.004-05:00

This week's pie: Kahlua Fudge Brownie in a Yogurt Crust.

If the crust recipe works out, I'll post it. In other culinary news, your pie maker made calzones this weekend with goat's milk Gouda and a sauce made with rendered ham skin, tomato paste and onion. Cooking with animal fats is basically awesome, and your pie maker will soon be investigating grass-fed and organic farms in the DC area. Reports to follow.

Onto the news. It's been a big week for a lot of the major pie-related indicators. First of all, the Great Finger Pointing Game continues as attempts to impose bureaucratic stability on people who genuinely reject big government continues to falter. Speaking of, we got reminders from the capitals of the Western Hemisphere's richest and poorest nations that once a people have accepted the government as legitimate, they most want it to provide prosperity. Your pie maker gladly acknowledges this, and is simply trying to move the goal posts towards a pie-friendlier definition of it.

The Chua thing continues to percolate, and your pie maker loves it. This is the first time in his memory that there has been a national discussion of the relative merits of different cultures' norms without invoking mutual accusations of bigotry.

On the technology front, there were a couple of big stories related to sustainable pie making. The first is that research into car platooning took a big step forward in Sweden. It's more likely to be implemented on specially equipped trucks and buses than passenger cars, but since intercity bus travel is on the rise and infrastructure spending in the US is flat or declining, it's nice to see someone trying address the problem instead of just complain about it. On the defense side, your pie maker is very interested in developments in shipbuilding and armament, since it would appear that while we are moving towards more ships built to commercial, instead of military, standards, there is also a move away from kinetic and into electromagnetic weapons. The civilian take-aways from such developments include higher density power generation that really emphasizes efficiency and surge capacity. Coupled with the success of NASA's latest solar sail test, the long term future of humanity is pretty bright indeed.

On civility and parenting

2011-01-18T22:29:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately, your pie maker is not yet able to support his pie making with his blogging, and professional obligations delayed a planned post on the greatness of the United States coming from the fact that unlike the rest of the world we do not have a single "culture" portfolio in our government. Instead, we have a very robust and flexible culture that values, or at least tries to ignore, differences while generally focusing on the merits of productivity.

During that delay, the hype over Amy Chua's book (not her interesting one, tho) reached a crescendo. Ms. Chua is doing her best to make hay while the sun shines.

For many reasons, this blog has shied away from the subject of child rearing, but between this and the general calls for more civility, your pie maker can offer a suggestion: Do not let your children agree with you unless they can explain why they do. At one point during his misspent youth, your pie maker was loading manure into a bin and said to his father, "a dumpster full of [disliked policy proposal]." After a deep breath with the far-off look of a parent who wonders what went wrong, the father asked "Why?"

The lesson was profound. It was not acceptable to simply agree with the popular conclusion, and it is always important to examine one's beliefs. This message, constantly reinforced by parents (as both of mine did, hence this blog's moderate tone) and other adults is the best thing we can all do to ensure a vital and sustainable republic.

This Week in Pie-Making

2011-01-15T06:28:00.002-05:00

This week's pie: Maryland Road Pie, a molasses-sweetened pumpkin pie with a chocolate and marshmallow topping.

It's Saturday morning and the biegnets are rising, soon to be rolled out and filled with a carmel-butter sauce left over from dessert a couple days ago. Yes, dear reader, you are welcome to come visit, especially for events such as the League of American Bicyclists conference in March. On your way in, tho, just be sure to check that your charts have their magnetic declination correct, since the "north" pole is increasing its speed toward the Equator. The consequences of this are actually profound most importantly because of how runways around the country are marked, because unlike the DHS, the FAA doesn't want to rely exclusively on GPS.

A dip in gasoline prices brought back echoes of the car industry of 2006, while food and oil prices are starting to look more like 2008. Part of the problem is related to climate change, such as droughts in Russia and floods in Australia, but one has to wonder if there's a bit too much cash chasing returns instead of investing in production. Whatever we do politically, environmentally or economically, we now have a (specious) date for when we can realistically expect to start over on a different planet: AD 2200.

The developing world continues to pose challenges for Westphalian notions of governance, and the response of the developed world challenges international standards of acceptable behavior. The developing world in turn breaks breaking the economic models of the West. Not that Western models are perfect, as a debate about road vs. transit funding suggests.

Speaking of infrastructure and bad assumptions, the US oil sector might be in for a major overhaul, assuming Wall Street and the GOP approve. Across the Pond, the Conservative/LibDem government is warning their banking arm to be discrete about remuneration (clearly the public perception is that the banks are under government control, as they exist due to gov't largess). Meanwhile, the Belgians have started a protest your pie maker plans to join in solidarity with the people of Europe's contribution to the artificial country concept (and laziness).

Thanks, and an apology

2011-01-12T19:55:00.003-05:00

Two short notes before I get back to kitchen and put together a Maryland Road Pie, inspired by their use of molasses and salt as deicing tools.

First Thanks! are due to a reader who sent a subscription to The Week. I got my first issue yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Secondly Apology: In my last "This Week in Pie Making", I made a gross exaggeration of the GOP's ills, and cast them as similar to the most monstrous regime in modern history (by body count and capacity for destruction, anyway, the Nazis, Khmer Rouge, Maoists and a few others could make a case). That is not appropriate, and does a great disservice to both the memories of that regime's victims and the quality of political discussion today. For a blog whose posts frequently end with an invitation to stop by for dessert, breakfast, or even to stay the night, such commentary is even less appropriate. "Come on over, you Bolshy hypocrite!" is not a credible invitation. For a desert-bred pie maker, such inhospitality is shameful, and I apologize.

Yes, this is in part a response to the recent tragedy in Tuscon, AZ. But for a generous offer from my current employer, I would be in Tuscon right now, and Arizona is where I grew up. Personally, I tend to agree with the Economist's take on the events, Arizona has never lacked for crazy people or guns. Most heartening, however, has been renewed interest in the quality of mental health care in the US and some signs that we are actually going to Take It Down A Notch For America.

I will do my part. Even when I disagree with people and am uncomfortable with what they are saying or doing, I will endeavor to write about it such a way as to invite constructive commentary and those very same people for pie.

This week in Pie Making (Jan 2-7, 2011)

2011-01-08T07:07:00.003-05:00

The big news of the week is that the leader of the red states (not the Red states) assumed control of the US House of Representatives. He quickly promised to do things for the People, excised undesirable parts of the founding document his comrades found objectionable and ensured that enemies of the People would remain in isolated camps. Fortunately Mr. Boehner is not from Georgia, otherwise a satirist might go too far. Besides, he's more of a Trotskyist anyway (economic planning with debt-based international support, via la revolution!). This will make his job a lot more interesting.

In more mundane matters, it looks like the Consumer Finance Protection Agency has picked up a very powerful member: Mrs. Petraeus. Taken with the selection of Daley as chief of staff, it looks like we're in for the politics of making nice with powerful people over the next couple of years.

Continued pressure on oil supplies is leading to a quiet revolution in transportation and your pie maker's preferred mode of transport is getting additional support. Even gadgets are getting into the efficiency act.

The biggest international news is probably that a major oil exporter is about to split along racial and religious lines, with nary a mention on the Oil Drum. This split is worth keeping in mind as the issue of the Huck Finn edits floats around. It highlights how maintaining a cosmopolitan national identity is absolutely critical to the success of modern economies.

On the security front, things are very interesting. First of all, China's unveiled a new "stealth" jet. Despite this SecDef Gates will continue doing his thing, highlighting the general reduction in the national fear level in the US. We even have what appears to be terrorism in response to disquieting highway signs that barely made it to the front page.

Educating Pie Makers: College (part 2: The Stakeholders)

2011-01-04T21:33:00.003-05:00

In the previous post, we found that "ignorance" could buy a yacht and two trips around the world, while education gets one a piece of ~~sheep~~ paper. Currently, this cost is spread over four major sets of stakeholders: governments, charities, employers and students. Each has their own set of interests and expectations from a students' education, but it's important to understand the Opportunity Cost of college to all of them.

The Government: When a government contributes to undergraduate college education, it's looking for some combination of three things: (1) keep young people out of the workforce for a few years, (2) provide a better educated workforce to compete for higher value-added industries and (3) improve the quality of its public discourse. Historically, (1) has paid off quite well, and unemployment rates have been kept under control in societies with people living and working for longer periods. (2) is a bit more tenuous, given that highly skilled people can move to greener pastures, but often they send money if they do migrate, so probably better to pay for students than sailors. Unless, of course, the government runs a maritime nation with a shipbuilding industry suffering from lack of demand . . . (3) has been a manifest failure.

Charities and Foundations: These groups generally want to make experiences that they enjoyed or felt were formative available to others. Since many are directly tied to prominent alumni of various institutions with a strong interest in seeing their alma mater succeed, it's safe to say their role will remain to reduce the costs of, and possibly increase the benefits of, education for students at favored institutions. This situation will likely persist until your pie maker can endow Bake Around the World fellowships.

Employers: The cost/benefit analysis for employers heavily favors having a set of institutions that can handle professional training, mostly at the Master's level in the US. Meanwhile, many express dissatisfaction with the quality of Bachelor's graduates. If this continues, they may decide to use non-academic means of determine recruit quality, which would pretty dramatically change the calculation for

Students: The advice your pie maker gives to all students begins with this: do not pursue any degree until you have an idea what you want to do with it. If after starting you find you don't need it, stop, unless you both want to and can afford to continue. Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates are doing alright, and it's better to be broke and unemployed than heavily indebted and unemployed.

On the other hand, there are some strong personal benefits to being an alumnus of your chosen alma mater. There's no formula to assess the actual value of this, and assuming the student can afford the education, it comes down to a simple question of whether it is worth the Opportunity Cost to the student. Gut reactions are important for more than just pies.

To directly answer comment from the previous post, it's possible to come up with a formula that, assuming several uncertain things are known, can approximate the net benefit in terms of income:

if( (I_B - l_c)*p_F*p_E*d_B > I_HS)
Go to school
else
Go to work

Here, I_B represents the income potential with a Bachelor's degree, I_HS represents high school income after four years in the workforce. I_B must be reduced by the cost of servicing student loans, l_c. This quantity should be modified by three factors: 0 < p_F < 1, the probability* of student finishing despite risks such as lack of interest, mental or physical illness and uncertainty about finances; 0 < p_E < 1, probability of employment with one's chosen degree; and 0 < d_B < 4ish, how badly one wants to study in a particular field. There are far too many factors that play into each of those to give a more detailed answer, but anyone struggling with this decision is welcome to stop by the Fuzzy Wups to discuss. We have pie and just discovered the joys of grinding spices in with coffee.

*Quants: Yes, this is a flagrant abuse of probability theory and I fear someone will take this humble discussion aid and turn it into an AIG-risk-metric-esque tool to fool people into bad decisions. On the other hand, there's already plenty of such tools out there, and at least mine comes with this disclaimer.

Educating Pie Makers: College (part 1)

2010-12-19T15:54:00.004-05:00

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." --Derek Bok

Whenever someone points out the high, and rapidly increasing, costs of college education, Derek Bok's quote gets included in the open salvos of the argument. Often this leads to a round or two of competitive econometrics comparing employment rates, lifetime earning potential and even a "happiness" study or two which generally favor keeping high school graduates idle for another four years or so to give them a shot at a better life.

These statics make a compelling case for individuals, foundations and governments to provide large amounts of money for higher education. This has reduced the barriers to college entry to the point that a large percentage of the jobs available now require at least a bachelor's degree, and an increasing number require a masters' or PhD. For the student, between federal subsidies, family money, and private debt, the actual cost is generally hidden, and fear of the unknown, but presumably high cost of "ignorance" makes the choice simple.

What I haven't yet seen is someone actually trying to explain what one could do with the cost of a college education while remaining "ignorant." Any statistical approach is only as good as the assumptions behind the models they use to aggregate their data, often with the implicit narrative that there is a "generic person" of which we are all small variations. Here at P&P we harbor strong doubts about this idea, it sounding an awful lot like saying there is a "standard" pie. Your pie maker had a "standard" apple pie when he lived near Michigan's apple country and could buy them by the bushel for a few cents a pound. In different circumstances, he's moving into pumpkin and winter squash, and if the people to whom he's loaned pie plates do not return them, then he may be making a lot of form-free pies in the near future.* The point is, if we just look at econometrics, we're not fulfilling Mr. Bok's suggestion.

Instead, let's try ignorance. Or, to be more precise, let's imagine spending the cost of college on something else and see where that leaves us.

At first, that means defining our assumptions. For the "cost of college", this thought experiment will assume full tuition plus room and board at a private institution. This is significantly more than the "average" student pays, but it does cover the amount that is paid by states and private donors at other institutions. Based on College Board statics, $37,000/yr is a rough estimate if books and travel to and from campus are included. Over four years, that gives us $148,000 to work with assuming tuition doesn't rise at its typical 5% annual rate.

That's a lot of money. What if instead of college a hypothetical student bought a nice, seaworthy Beneteau 361 for $99,000? That could solve the non-student's housing needs, and allow precisely the sort of mobility that defines a modern career. With the rest of the money, it would be highly prudent to buy another ~$6000 worth of training (not education!) from a place like Sunshine Coast. That leaves $33,000 to provision a trip to sail around the world, at a cost of roughly $1250/month. Assuming the non-student takes it slow and completes one cirumnavigation per year, that allows 2 whole trips, with money left over for contingencies.

Now we can actually answer Mr. Bok's challenge. Putting a student through college costs the student, family, charities and government a really nice yatch and two trips around the world. Only a narrow definition of "ignorance" would describe the learning that would happen on such a voyage, and at the end the non-student would have a place to live, a global network of acquaintances and a better personal understanding of math, science and law than nearly every college graduate in the world.

What can a college offer its students that would compete? Comments are most welcome.

*If you currently have one of my pans, send a note and I'll bring you a free form pie in exchange. No, this is not meant to encourage people to "borrow" more of them.

This week in Pie Making (Dec. 17)

2010-12-17T20:29:00.003-05:00

This week in pie making is a good one. Last week, we saw that the US Congress is perfectly willing to hold its nose and dole out goodies to everyone for as long as credit markets will allow it to do so. In a way, this is good, because it means that if circumstances change for the worse, as long as everyone suffers, the will to solve serious problems does in fact exist.

The "conservative" narrative that all government activity is bad, even when it's proposed and promoted by "conservatives", continues. It would appear that the central players in the USG have accepted that the major banks and pension funds are themselves vital instruments of national power, but that's old news. Very interesting that the current crisis hasn't yet produced a Charles Keating, but maybe that's coming next year with the BoA data dump. You'll note the lack a reference to any Australian-founded websites here in the spirit of this brilliant piece of information management by the State Dept. that's related to why all of the milblogs have been tying themselves in knots this week. Unfortunately, they are not in Congress and so can't have their ~~pork~~cake and eat it too.

Interestingly, one of the preferred forms of pork (security) has hit the point where even in the DC metro area there is active resistance to committing substantial resources to the Metro system's security. In fact, the Metro proposal is pretty modest and very likely to not select stations randomly at all. A measured response to several serious threats (one suspicious package, one kid describing his pipe bombing plans and an FBI sting) is almost commendable. We'll have to see how it goes. Hopefully better than current anti-piracy efforts.

Meanwhile, your pie maker got to experience something very like skiing while riding home yesterday. He could have waited for a car to carry him home, but he has heard of people putting on warm clothes and subjecting themselves to high winds and wanted to give it a try. Also, one of the robots at work "attacked" him, and getting to an icy road seemed safer than giving it a second chance. Getting to watch two bald eagles, see trackless snow on a large meadow and the patterns of ice formed on the river more than made up for mild discomfort.

There seems to be a growing call for the President to fire the behavioral economists on his staff. This NYT article is a good example of them, essentially saying that the current administration is being too subtle about its means and objectives. The moment is clearly calling for something big to happen.

Sustainable taxation

2010-12-11T21:38:00.002-05:00

This Week in Pie Making awarded a "double face-palm" to a deal that could potentially buy your pie maker a really nice bike and all the cold weather gear he could want. What's wrong with that? Has P&P "gone lib", supporting Big Government for its own sake and a radical redistributionist agenda?

Hardly. It is entirely possible to live below US poverty line and still make a pie every week (especially if you can move in with family, friends or to a lower cost of living). Outside the US, a farming village that meets its basic needs is effectively a PMCIN=1 society, and the history of any attempt at large-scale wealth distribution from the rich to the poor generally ends badly. So, P&P does not have a strong stance on the merits of a progressive, regressive or "fair" tax code with one huge caveat: it must be fiscally sustainable.

What we saw two weeks ago, and are actively discussing this week (there's a few NYT op-eds by Krugman and Brooks that are also worth reading for those with subscriptions) is that fiscal sustainability is not even on the agenda. This is troubling for three reasons:

(1) The United States cannot leave the era of "kicking the can down the road." Despite passing "landmark" health care reform legislation, we're still kicking a massive pay-cut for doctors under Medicare down the road. There is chronic uncertainty over the research and development tax credit (and some other Dem-favored goodies) that makes it tough for any company to invest in long term R&D. Ongoing uncertainty over pollution, energy and climate policies prevents companies without government backed loans from expanding or maintaining generating and transmission capacity.

Whatever the reason for this, it encourages stasis in the domestic economy and acrimony abroad. It is generally better for business to have draconian, certain regulation than substantial uncertainties between years, except in finance, where regulatory arbitrage counts as innovation. Capital intense industries, such as heavy manufacturing, are almost guaranteed to move abroad to countries whose laws are more stable.

(2) The narrative of taxes as an unalloyed evil was strengthened. This is incredibly bad because taxes are how we as a country pay for the promises that we as a country make. Since we as a country decided to pay less in taxes, we've added two countries with their populations to the administrative burden of the US (is Iraq able to pay its own way yet?), passed the largest expansion of the Medicare program (and any comparable social welfare program in the nation's history) and absorbed substantial portions of the debts of almost every major financial institution in the world. The original tax cuts were unaffordable before those expenses, now we're supposed to believe another two years is okay?

Meanwhile, the "off-balance sheet" liabilities of the USG are growing. State governments in the US find themselves in a situation very similar to European states, now that federal stimulus dollars are receding, and it's hard to imagine a state default not impacting the Federal government. Even after the US presence in Afghanistan winds down, there will be billions in veterans' benefits to cover. Norfolk, VA is sinking, the Metrodome collapsed and the massive drought that's broken the assumptions about rainfall in California continues. The longer this attitude of stasis lasts, the less likely it is that the next generation will enjoy a quality of life comparable to our own.

(3) It encourages willful intellectual blindness. This is perhaps the most damaging aspect, since what gets lost is a sense of objective history and agreed upon facts. If James P. Pinkerton can continue to get paid for saying the GOP's goal is to "starve the beast", one has to wonder how he explains how the GOP-run Congress and Presidency presided over the largest ever expansion of government during their last tenure. Meanwhile, Obama's supporters argue, earnestly, that they "won" the negotiation with Senate Republicans because they got a numerically larger tax cut, in addition to the temporary extension of some key benefits. All seem to have faith in Technological Progress, suggesting that the massive productivity gains of the last twenty years will be sustained. Given troubles with immigration, network security and wildly inconsistent energy policy, this is a tenuous hope at best.

Will these groups, which actively resist the deficit commission's recommendations and facts, actually be able to address comprehensive tax reform? Your pie maker would not let such people into his kitchen lest he be liable for someone intentionally believing that knives do not cut or ovens can't burn.

Unfortunately, I think Grover Norquist is right, and that the current view on taxation will have exactly the effect he desires. Unfortunately, the mechanism is going to be unpleasant and directly opposed to many other ~~Redcoat~~ Republican objectives. The empirical evidence today is that the best way reduce the government spending is actually to allow a tax increase on one's own constituents while demanding cuts to another's spending, but that's a really unpopular viewpoint. Gonna be an interesting couple of years . . .

Chinese five spice pumpkin pie

2010-12-11T21:33:00.002-05:00

Your pie maker's loveliest assistant came home recently with not one but two sugar pumpkins. Your piemaker has already baked his way through Ken's supply of interesting recipes, so he borrowed the ratios from the "Libby's Famous Pumpkin Pie" recipe reproduced therein, with a few changes.

Start by rolling out a standard whole wheat crust into a standard 9" pie plan. I didn't this time, but you ought to partially pre-bake it (Ken's got great directions for this).

While that's happening, combine in a bowl:
1/2 Cup brown sugar
2 T Chinese 5 spice powder
2 Cup pureed pumpkin
3/4 Cup half and half cream
2 large eggs, gently beaten

Pour the mixed ingredients into a somewhat cooled pie shell and bake at 350F for about 40min, or until the sides are slightly puffy and the center jiggles like jelly.

Let it cool completely before serving!

Two weeks in pie making.

2010-12-07T10:12:00.007-05:00

Your pie maker was going to write a "This Week in Pie Making" last week about the non-fallout from the DoS document dump. The gist of it was that SecDef Gates caught the essence of problem in this quote:

Now, I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think -- I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

The reason for this indispensability is largely because of our very large and powerful economy. The same one that mortgaged its future to pay for benefits for current workers on the assumption that it could refinance that mortgage with future productivity growth. Well, it almost worked. Fortunately, the tax cuts passed right before we got into two land wars in Asia are going to expire soon, and we'll avoid the worst sovereign debt projections from the recent deficit commission. Oh, wait.

Interests in the US ranging from the largest banks to public service unions seem bet on busting-out the US credit rating. The President we elected with a broad mandate to be an Andrew Jackson or an FDR has instead turned out to be a Woodrow Wilson. Mark Lilla does an excellent job explaining the cultural economic forces that have pushed us into this corner.

Not all of the news is bad. The body politic seems to have a lost its sense of history, but GE seems to have found theirs. It is possible for a strong personality to ram through unpopular cuts in a state budget and keep enough popularity to continue to govern. GOP Senators publicly endorsed raising the gasoline tax (among other deficit-reducing items), and car-crazy California voted convincingly to stick with their carbon reduction plans. Heck, maybe this latest capitulation was a subtle export-boosting, emissions-reducing plan devised by expert economists.

Butterscotch Pumpkin Pancakes

2010-11-25T12:48:00.003-05:00

Here's why you should plan to stay at the Fuzzy Wups B^n next year:

Leftover pie ingredients become breakfast. Last night I made a Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie and a Butterscotch Pecan Pie (using my 12" pie plate and extra butterscotch and pecans). Also, I make several pies for the holidays. You should come next year.

Combine in a large bowl:
2 Cups white flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 Tbsp brown sugar
Pinch of salt

In a separate bowl, combine:
Leftover cooked pumpkin
Enough milk to get 2 cups milk & pumpkin
2 eggs

Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients, then stir in:
Leftover butterscotch chips

Cook like normal pancakes and serve warm.

Cider-infused Winter Squash Pie

2010-11-22T19:35:00.002-05:00

'Tis the season for winter squash and apple cider. Also, sweet potatoes, one of my favorite pie ingredients. I had leftovers after chopping for dinner, and some Trader Joe's spiced cider. This is a revision of one of Ken's that I made several years ago, but revisited since we're doing two new ones for Thanksgiving.

Ingredients:

Prebake a crust in a 9.5" pie plate.

In a small pot combine and boil until tender:
1/2 Cup diced sweet potato
2 Cups diced butternut squash
1 Cup spiced cider.

Once soft, puree in a food processor. Save the cider/squash-water mix and add enough milk to make 2 Cups
(1 Cup milk).

Bring it to a soft (not rapid) boil and stir in
1/4 Cup fine cornmeal
and stir continuously until thickened, like thin oatmeal.

Allow this to cool, then mix into a bowl with
1/2 Cup sugar
1/4 Cup molasses
3 eggs
1 t salt

Stir in 1.5Cups of the squash puree, then pour into the cooled pie crust. Bake at 350F until the sides get puffy and the center jiggles.

This Week In Pie Making (Nov. 21)

2010-11-21T22:16:00.003-05:00

Last week, your pie maker was dangerously close to the shadow of the Mouse for a conference devoted to the technical side of preventing very bad things from happening. There is nothing quite like being surrounded by hundreds of engineers, scientists and medical professionals who sincerely hope that the work they are presenting never sees its intended use. Actually, a guest speaker highly recommended that we find alternative uses for our ideas, lest the vagaries of politics and realities of economics cause us to lose work that could be the difference between a small incident and a major catastrophe. Also, the most effective response any society can have to most any type of terrorism is a very good public health system. It is very hard to kill healthy people who can be treated quickly and effectively.

This meant flying during the ongoing TSA-as-sexual-predator controversy. Your own pie maker was not subjected to any extra screening, which is good since his bike-shorts were in the wash, but it does seem odd that young women in slip dresses who did not set off the metal detector were selected. Even odder when men who are acting strangely (well, like irresponsible teenagers) were able to set off the metal detector, distract several workers and still not face any extra attention. In short, your pie maker finds himself in agreement with this Forbes op-ed, the staff of Digg, Ann Coulter and the ACLU. Anyone who can make financiers, internet junkies, populists and egg-head liberals agree must be a heck of a leader. Unless, of course, he's managed to unite them all against him.

The loudest voices in support of this policy come from the President, DHS Sec. Napolitano and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They argue that preventing any incident means spending considerable amounts of money everywhere because those sneaky guys will try just about anything. Stockholders in RapidScan and Smiths (like major Dem. donor George Soros and former SecHS Chertoff) agree that this is absolutely critical, and an important part of growing our economy through stimulus spending. The only other option is that we ask ourselves, honestly, what risks we are willing to accept as a society.

That is going to be a very difficult conversation. Issues like profiling and liability will come up, and we need to be ready to be civil and assume good faith on the part of the other. It's a conversation that gets to the heart of what exactly our government is supposed to do for us, and what we are supposed to do for our fellow citizens. As a first step, there's the National Day of Listening. That will take a lot of energy, and to refuel, P&P recommends the Rolled Date Pie with Honey Glaze. Recipe coming soon.

Sustainable plug: Hooray for AMTRACK! First-class seats, power outlets and no involuntary groping.

Sustainable Substitutions #2: The Blowtorch

2010-11-11T10:54:00.005-05:00

Disclaimers:
Kids: DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT PARENTAL SUPERVISION!
Parents: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS DO THIS!

We're getting into nut pie season. We might also be heading for much higher gas prices again, and your bike-commuting pie maker may have to celebrate with Schadenfreude Pie. This requires roasted nuts, and, given the price instability and unsustainability of fossil fuels, a natural gas oven is not an option.

So, how do we get nuts hot enough to carmelize some of their sugars and break down their bitter flavor? We need two things: A metal bowl and a butane blowtorch. Butane is a lot easier to make out of biomass than gasoline, and a lot easier to transport than natural gas.

Place the nuts in the bottom of the bowl and rapidly wave the flame over them. Those little balls of proteins and fats will burn vigorously if you're not careful, so keep that flame moving. Make sure you keep the flame moving, shake the bowl to get nuts from the bottom to the top, and stop as soon as the kitchen smells warm and nutty.

This approach will lightly char some of the of the nuts, giving your pies a more complex flavor profile. It does involve a bit more active labor, but significantly less total time than oven roasting, so depending on which econometric you use this process improves or harms pie making productivity. However, it does involve ~~playing with~~ carefully wielding fire, so the added enjoyment makes this a net positive from a PMCIN perspective. For more on making up convenient economic metrics, check out William Easterly's excellent Aid Watchers blog.

This week in pie-making

2010-11-06T07:41:00.003-04:00

Two pieces of news caught your pie-maker's eye this week, and it's hard to say which is more significant:

(1) We just witnessed our third "wave" election in a row.

(2) The Federal Reserve is going to print another $600,000,000,000 (that's $600billion)

Both are a reaction to the perception that the US economy is in terrible shape, and I think both will prove remarkably ineffective. Neither the Republicans nor the Federal Reserve have the authority or will to break the politics of stasis in which we find ourselves today. Both will warn of the dangers of large, continuous Federal deficits, but both rely on them for political support or policy tools, respectively. Both count on a large increase in consumer spending to make their economic models work, and all will be disappointed on that score.

Sustainable Substitutions #1: Coffee Grinders

2010-10-02T20:42:00.008-04:00

Sustainable Substitutions is a new feature devoted to making small changes in the kitchen to make pie-making more sustainable environmentally, economically and/or enjoyably.

First up: Coffee Grinders. There are pie recipes that call for coffee grounds, and, more importantly, pie making often keeps your pie-maker up late. Fresh ground coffee is enormously better than vacuum-sealed ground, and with this substitution we can extract the full flavor.

The antique grinder on the left was your pie maker's original device, until the frequently small repairs and ~1NPR Morning Edition story's worth of grinding time convinced him to go electric.

Two broken electric grinders later, it became obvious that electric grinding is not a sustainable solution. It turns out to be impossible to repair even a simple malfunction like the inevitable failure of the bushing that held the blade in place. So for want of a $0.10 part, roughly 1kg (2.3lb) of plastic, steel and copper is rendered useless.

The wood, brass and steel manually cranked version is very repairable. Both of those screws are probably replacements, and the entire unit can be dissembled with a simple toolkit. Some replacement parts will probably require custom machining, but nothing on it is so complicated a good art school won't have the right equipment. Additionally, because the distance between the grinding wheel and the wall can be set manually, it's possible to select exactly the size of the average granual. Your pie maker uses this to make a very fine powder for Austrian-style coffee, or a courser grind appropriate for a big mug from a French press.

An added bonus is that "grinding" is exactly what your pie maker does in his favorite non-baking hobby.

Satire, in good taste:

2010-09-27T21:51:00.004-04:00

As P&P contemplates how to respond to sublime satire, this is pretty good:

Thanks to my favorite Orthodox family for linking me to Pithless Thoughts, which linked to this. Also, anyone who will be in the DC area around the end of October is welcome to stop by for pie.

In (mild) praise of essentialism

2010-09-18T20:46:00.002-04:00

Essentialism in a social context refers to the practice of strongly identifying a person with a particular group. Often the definition of that group's identity is slightly ambiguous and the subject of truly nasty debate within the self-identified community. Is Barack Obama black enough? Too black (or not enough)? Who is a REAL conservative (P&P thinks it's the Tories), and who's just a RINO?

To outsiders, such debates are pedantic or silly at best and downright terrifying at worst. However, there's a deeper issue here that gets lost in our liberal (and I mean Lockean, P&P is very old school) norms of tolerance and liberty. The ability to define oneself as part of a group is absolutely fundamental to many people's happiness. If we can't define the boundaries of a group, does it really exist?

This point struck home for me when a friend declined a dinner invitation. He'd been joining us every month or so after he moved from a place with a very large Jewish community to semi-rural Indiana. There, without the social easy of a large group of that mixed Americana and Judaism fluidly, he had to chose whether to become "more" Jewish or just partake in Amaricana. His choice, and the reason he became the first person to decline one of my pies, was to strengthen the ties to his religious community. I can't begrudge him that, and in fact made a similar choice when my travels found me joining the Catholic minority in one city.

I think that it worthwhile sometimes to take a step back from the normative (classical) liberalism of modern life and consider ourselves as part of larger groups. The TEA Party is trying to do this for economically displaced middle class, primarily white (and thus lacking a strong alternative cultural identity) Americans who now realize that they are getting royally screwed by the system they supported most of their lives. As a social movement, it has a lot in common with other disadvantaged groups that have carved out space for themselves in the political landscape. Glenn Beck now makes millions as a sort of white Al Sharpton.

This is a good thing. When a group finds itself on the short end of changing political and economic conditions, its only hope is to unite and try fight for its interests collectively. The other option is individual repression, despair and even political violence by the voiceless. Americana as a culture is threatened, and while many parts of it are strongly anti-pie, a loud voice for those who are hurt by the changes in modern life is critical to the "security" slice of PMCIN.

So, has this out-of-power group figured out how to define itself? Not yet, and some of its elements are intentionally resisting that. But a definition is emerging (I think), and the sooner the better. Focused anger within the political space is much better than unfocused anger outside of it. As long as we don't abandon the best parts of our American classical liberalism, like the 14th Amendment, our political dialogue is much better for having groups honestly represent their interests collectively. The first step in dialogue is respect, and respecting each other's distinct identities is almost as important as respecting our mutual humanity.

Late Summer Pie

2010-09-05T10:14:00.003-04:00

In the late summer in Northern Virginia (hey, it might be its own state someday) peaches and plums are plentiful.

Preheat the oven to 400F

Crust: Basic whole wheat crust, single crust rolled into a 9.5" deep dish pie pan.

Filling:
Heat in a non-reactive pot until reduced by 1/2:
1/2 cup ruby port

Meanwhile, slice into a non-reactive bowl:
4 cups plums
3 cups peaches

Mix in the reduced port and:
1/4 cup tapioca
1/3 cup sugar
juice of one lime

Pour the filling into the crust and bake about 30min. Meanwhile make the biscuit topping by combing in a small bowl:
1 cup flour
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp yogurt

Cut the dairy into the flour until it resembles crumbs or dry biscuit dough. Remove the pie from the oven and quickly spread the topping over it. Return to the oven for 25min or until the juices bubble thickly at the sides.

The Eight Slices of PMCIN

2010-08-27T06:59:00.003-04:00

After my last post on how to define the physical pie making capacity, I realized that I was falling into the trap of most ecnometrics and baking-in a fairly narrow focus on information that's available rather than providing a tool to facilitate understanding and discussion. At their best, such numbers (like GDP) are useful for discussing constraints, but at their worst (US unemployment figures) are intentionally misconstrued to try and avoid discussion of structural problems.

Instead of trying to produce a single number, we're going to look at the problem in slices. Each slice will be broken into three parts: (a) the fundamentally important crust, (b) the almost-equally important filling and (c) the nice-to-have topping. If you disagree with any of them, please let me know. Several of these will be more subjective than a trained economist would prefer, but it's better to wear one's bias on the sleeve than to hide it in the formulation of "real" metrics.

The "filling" in most of these relates to the sustainability of the good provided by the "slice", but intentionally focuses on only a narrow aspect of that. My hope is to be able to compare technology and policy developments by looking at how they would impact the other dimensions of sustainability (economic, social, environmental, etc.), with the resulting change in the PMCIN "pie chart." Anyone who wants to contribute Java or spreadsheet calculations for any of these will get a fresh-baked pie the next time I see them.

Slice 1: Grain production.
Crust: (Total grain production)/(Population's caloric needs)
Filling: (Environmentally sustainable grain production)/( Population's caloric needs)
Topping: (Number of grain varieties grown today)/(Number of grain varieties grown before the industrial revolution)

Slice 2: Fruit production
Crust: (Total fruit production)/(Population's nutrition requirements)
Filling: (Environmentally sustainable fruit production)/(Population's nutrition requirements)
Topping: (Number of fruit varieties grown today)/(Number of fruit varieties grown before the industrial revolution)

Slice 3: Dairy production
Crust: (Total dairy production)/(Popultion's nutrition requirements)
Filling: (Environmentally sustainable dairy production)/(Population's nutrition requirements)
Topping: (Locally grown dairy)/(Total dairy needs)

Slice 4: Housing
Crust: (Total safe housing units)/(Needs of population)
Filling: (Median cost of housing)/(1/3 of median income) -->there's probably a better "affordability index" to use here
Topping: (Houses with good cooking facilities)/(Total housing units)

Slice 5: Energy
Crust: (Total power produced) / (Total required for society's standard of living)
Filling: (Environmentally sustainable power produced) / (Total required for society's standard of living)
Topping: (Locally generated power) / (Total required for society's standard of living)

Slice 6: Transportation
Crust: (Ton-miles of freight hauling capacity)/(Needs of the population at acceptable standard of living)
Filling: (Environmentally sustainable ton-miles of hauling capacity)/(Needs of the population at acceptable standard of living)
Topping: (Population with access to self-powered commutes)/(Total population)

Slice 7: Security
Crust: (People who feel their government can provide basic security)/(Total Population)
Filling: (People who respect their government as legitimate)/(Total population)
Topping: (People who feel certain of their standard of living)/(Total population)

Slice 8: Health
Crust: (Total population - disabled by injury/illness)/(Total population) -> would have to normalize this by "acceptable" ratio
Filling: (Number of people with access to non-emergency primary care)/(Total population)
Topping: (Average vacation availability per year)/(2 weeks)

Physical Pie Making Capacity in a Nation

2010-07-10T04:27:00.006-04:00

When I started this project, I thought it would be pretty straightforward to develop an automated means of computing how many people in a society could make a pie a week. Instead, this lead to a long and occasionally heated discussion about what exactly constituted "pie", how much work really goes into making one, and whether or not the data for such a thing exists.

About the same time, I stumbled across Dr. Easterly's Reinventing Foreign Aid, which is to econometrics what Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is to nutrition science. It's not a refutation, exactly, but a serious study of both the assumptions and practice of analyzing complex systems. Meanwhile, a global financial crisis was busy re-ordering the world's economy and making a lot of econometric data about incomes, trade and production obsolete. Meanwhile, serious economists are asking questions of their own field about the validity of counterfactuals and ex post storytelling.

What I've learned from this is not to reject all economic measures outright, but to be very careful to keep the metrics as simple as possible and with very clear ties to the hypothetical narrative. If the story I'm trying to tell is wrong, then my metrics are suspect. If my metrics do not reflect what is actually happening in the world, then my narrative may be wrong as well. In this sense, it is possible to develop metrics that can serve as an aid to examine potential policy options, but they are only as useful as the assumptions underlying their basic narrative. For more on this epistemological approach, see Nassim Taleb's body of work. In short, a simple metric with few assumptions helps inform discussions of the impact of political and personal decisions, while complex models often contain hidden assumptions that make them dangerous to use.

The title of this post has nothing to do with epistemology, but I wanted to be sure I including that disclaimer at the beginning. Now, on to the narrative and its metric:

Narrative (aka hypothesis): The physical pie making capacity in a nation (P-PMCN) depends primarily on its internal food production. This is a mildly controversial statement, since a globalized world can, in theory, rapidly move food from where is it efficiently produced to where it is desperately needed. However, this assumes a much freer market for food than actually exists, and that someone will always be willing to pay to feed foreigners. Because these assumptions are specious, and because the countries doing the best job of providing food security are the ones that ignore classical economic analysis, while those that tried to follow "free market" advice have relied heavily on food aid. This makes my job easier, because food production numbers for a given region are pretty easy to find, and all evidence suggests that a country will feed its citizens first, regardless of their economic position.

So, how to compute P-PMCN? The answer, I think, is to find the limiting factor in a given national production system. To make a pie each week, one needs:

(1) Roughly 2000 Calories/day of food, consisting of .84kg of grains (assuming 70% of harvested grain becomes edible) and .053kg of proteins (active, 180lb young male). Suggestions for improving this "basic diet" model are welcome, please leave a comment.

(2) Enough fruit to make the filling. My pies generally use about 1-2kg (2-4lb) of fruit each, but I'll assume that an even 3kg (6.6lb) are required to allow for losses in travel and "sampling" by the pie maker and family. I don't plan to make any distinction between the types of filling, but this may change with time.

(3) Sufficient fuel to bake the pie. I have used a shovel and backhoe as cooking implements in the past, so I'm comfortable saying that the only thing you need for pie production is heat. For now I will assume this means either natural gas or electricity, and for the developed countries I'll assume that it comes from either natural gas not used for electricity or electric power at 80% efficiency. Further, I'll assume that a pie must be baked at 205C (400F) for 1hr, and that its internal temperature must be raised from room temperature at 25C (77F) to 100C (212F) to bring the fruit to a boil. Assuming 3kg of fruit, which is mostly water, this "internal heat" requirement comes to 941kJ (892BTU), which is to approximately .89 cubic feet of natural gas or .33kWh of electricity. Simply keeping the oven hot for that long consumes roughly 2.5kWh (8530BTU, 8.3 cubic feet of methane). I'd like to independently confirm those numbers, sources and suggestions appreciated.

For the US, we'll use the USDA numbers for wheat, corn and rice production provides a good estimate of the grain available to the population. Using the assumptions above, the US produces about 409billion kg of grain per year, enough to feed 1.3 billion people (roughly 4x the population). Protein production from beef, chicken, pork and cheese comes to 49billion kg, enough to meet the needs of 2.5billion people. P-PMCN is not limited by basic food production in the US, at least as long as the fertilizer, soil and irrigation systems hold out.

Fruit crops are probably also overabundant, although the statistics for them aren't as current in terms of raw production (I welcome alternative sources). However, given that fruit production is largely concentrated in central California, it's availability nationwide depends on keeping transportation costs low.

In terms of energy production, it's important to remember that the US does produce a lot of its own fuel. However, it also uses quite a lot of that fuel for transportation, air conditioning and lighting. What I plan to do is grab the numbers for those three items and subtract them from gross energy production to compute the amount of energy left over for pie making. If you have any suggestions about sources and/or methods, please let me know!

Using uncertain science in public policy

2010-06-29T00:14:00.006-04:00

The relationship between science and society changed fairly dramatically in the 1970s, at least in the United States. Prior to that decade, almost all science served a notion of Progress. However, around that time, the consequences of progress could be felt by enough people and observed by enough scientists that the enterprise changed fundamentally. Instead of Making Progress Possible, a growing cadre found themselves in the role of ancient prophets, warning people they had gone too far.

Right now I'm listening to a fascinating discussion about carbon accounting by the CSIS, which has a great series of Energy and Climate Change. A big question asked right off the bat is how actually access how much carbon gets released, much less the impact of those emissions. It's a fascinating to hear a discussion of how to do things like determine the carbon footprint of a screwdriver.

This is a very important question,and any international agreement on managing the transition to a sustainable economy depends on getting this right. However, when science and policy collide like this, uncertainty quickly becomes wiggle room, and wiggle room quickly leads to acrimony by those genuinely worried and "junk science" accusations by those who are not. How is the non-scientist to approach this?

For a partial answer, I recommend reading Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food." In it, he quite aggressively attacks the practice of nutrition science, itself not much older than climate science, for pursuing molecules instead of foods, and in so doing allowing themselves to be caught by "regulatory capture" as food manufacturers use their work to selectively add or remove nutrients. We've known that the western diet high in grain-fed meats and highly refined grain products is the best way to encourage heart disease, diabetes and most cancers, but our "science based" policy on food has encouraged trying to find the right balance of molecules instead of encouraging people to eat the whole plant-based foods that kept generations healthier (well, until they died of infections before we figured out penicillin)

Likewise, I recommend a similar approach in discussing climate science and its relationship to public policy. Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation in the wavelength that the Earth radiates out into space, but does not affect the rate at which the Earth receives higher frequency radiation from the sun, resulting in a positive net heat flux, or, put simply, wrapping the planet in a blanket as it spins around its heat-lamp. The precise effect of this is hard to determine, but it's pretty well understood now that the climate is a "meta-stable" system, kind of like a marble on a rough surface. We know that we like were that marble is, and that we probably won't like any of the places it would roll to if we poked it too hard.

The goal of climate policy must be be to limit that poking. The gritty details of exactly how hard a poke we can stand, how to account for the carbon cost of a hammer, and who or what groups gain and lose in the trade off are worthless if we lose sight of that goal. We don't know exactly what will happen if we give the planet over to full-scale human modification, but given how we've treated out bodies, the answer is certainly not going to be good.

The joys of "stuff"

2010-05-23T23:50:00.002-04:00

Last post, I was riffing on the story of how commercial banking got replaced by investment banking. I implied that it was bad that this happened, and the great crash of the last few years has largely confirmed this model. Unfortunately, I wasn't clear on the real ontological problem: "stuff" and money have become disconnected in the financial world.

Consider bank capital. What is it? Sophisticated investors, regulators and scholars fundamentally disagree about what should be counted and how to count it. So the fundamental building block of bank, and thus finance, regulation is something that bankers try to inflate, regulators cannot measure and investors just have to hope is real.

Meanwhile, equity markets have fallen from their "assured 11% growth" that was promised to your piemaker by a man in a sharp suit in 2004. I was told that day that betting against the NYSE was "betting against America!" Turns out I would actually have been betting against algorithms playing arbitrage games with exchange order books and Congressmen with insider information (h/t to Dan Carlin). To this day I'm not sure if the man in the suit was foolish or disingenuous, but his passion and intensity convinced me that he did not work in a rational market.

Normally, when money and "stuff" go their separate ways, there's hyperinflation. Indeed, the price of gold (~$1200/ounce as of this writing) would seem to bolster this claim. Unfortunately for large debt holders, the rest of the economy is extremely deflationary. Housing prices are such that homes financed after 2005 (give or take a couple years depending on the market) cannot even be rented at a high enough rate to cover the mortgage. Those same houses are now unaffordable to the people who would buy them until three years ago, and people with highly mobile careers (essentially the whole upper-middle class) have been taught the hard way that equity can be an anchor instead of an asset.

Meanwhile, globalization's march to ever cheaper labor helps ensure that there will not be too many dollars chasing too few goods. Quite the opposite, as imports continue to hold steady or rise slightly and the effective monetary destruction of housing debt defaults and write-downs (Planet Money's "pet" Toxie tells this story well). So instead, too few dollars wind up concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and companies with declining incentives to invest in the face of uncertain regulation and government action.

Clearly something has to give. The question is are we Turning Japanese, or going medieval? I'm not sure how the world's reserve currency can hyperinflate when the second largest economy intentionally devalues itself, and the other major currencies face similar (or worse) economic pictures.

Is there a brighter future? Quite possibly. The loss-making rentals I mentioned aren't so bad when the Mortgage Interest Tax Credit is taken into account. There is simply not enough oil that can be extracted at $70/barrel to keep up with demand for the next several years, and so there will be innovations in transportation and infrastructure. Where and how that happens depends on the policies of various countries, but we have the cash and expertise to take the lead in the US. Support your favorite climate legislation and encourage investment in "stuff."

Hitting the limits

2010-05-21T07:51:00.004-04:00

Disclosure: The author has intentionally, and continues to, hold only assets that are either liquid or utilitarian. He does not own stocks or property and considers the mobility required to use his education to be of greater importance than financial investment.

I've had a lot of time to reflect on property management and economics over the past week, and the exercise has not been uplifting. It has produced, however, an interesting narrative that you readers might enjoy.

In my youth, I spent a great deal of time with bankers. As a result, the old small bank "rules of thumb" for income/loan ratios, price/earning ratios and some of the mechanics of commercial finance were drilled into me from the beginning. My reaction to events of the last twenty years is heavily influenced by that experience. The most interesting story, I think, has been the transition of commercial banking into investment banking.

The commercial bank model assumed that a borrower would provide a stream of revenue. The banker's job was to find new customers, arrange lines of credit, and then help those customers continue paying by arranging new credit terms or special deals with other bank customers. For instance, a bank with a large construction business as a client would be more likely to lend to a hardware store, since their original customer could use the goods in the new customer's warehouse if something went wrong. Thus, banks tended to be tied to a given industry, and rose and fell with one sector of the economy. Today, this is still done, but it's called "private equity." (there's a great story about a firm buying a fashion magazine and using it to promote "thin belts" as the new fashion item, boosting sales from another company of theirs)

The Investing Banking model assumes that any stream of revenue should be sold to investors. In the short run, this is enormously more profitable because instead giving out a bunch of capital and waiting for loan payments to trickle in, the banker "originates" the loan and sells it to an external investor as a Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) or Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). Thus, issuing loans doesn't affect the capital base of the bank, unless they do something like insure the value of the security, but that's an off-balance sheet transaction and so doesn't count. As a result, the amount of credit available, and thus money creation, is limited only by the amount investors can buy.

This approach also move innovation up the value chain. Instead of employing tens of thousands of commercial bankers to find relatively simple innovations (the builder helping out the struggling hardware store), now the world needs thousands of very smart "quants" to find statical arbitrage. Since banks don't need to keep industry experts on staff, and they have more money to lend, interest rates go down. If something goes wrong, instead of an "offer you can't refuse" to receive help from another bank customer, it's much easier to get an extra bridge loan. As long as there's someone to buy that next security, life is good.

But what happens when the market for iffy debt saturates? Well, either everyone goes bankrupt together or we go find another sucker. With TARP, the US government promised to be the Sucker of Last Resort, and now the EU's large Eurozone economies have promised to do the same thing for sovereign debt. Is this "find another buyer" model sustainable? I'm starting to doubt it.

Equity markets, social security and Chinese purchases of US Treasury bonds all represent wealth transfer mechanisms that count on relatively young people giving money to their elders. Middle managers at the Chinese central bank and treasury are typically fans of Currency Wars, a book that makes very a clear case that the Politburo's export-subsidizing policies are effectively a huge tax on them. The loudest advocates against any changes to Social Security in the US come from people who also demand no new government revenues, and so the SSA will turn to statical tricks to keep payments reasonable. Stagnating real wages and rising unemployment, especially among people under 30, chokes off the flow of money into 401ks, and so depletes the order books on the NYSE and other exchanges.

I'm thinking that this is actually very good news, net. Moving innovation away from the "real" economy and into finance has encouraged manufacturing and physical R&D to leave the United States. If the most profitable move for a pension fund is to build a wind farm or factory instead of buying the bad mortgages, that has to be good for the country as a whole. The next few years will be rough, but I think we'll emerge with a better world for it.

Improved Applesauce Pie

2010-05-12T19:55:00.002-04:00

Week Of Pies, Day 3

Roll out a Whole Wheat Pie Crust and get it into a deep-dish pie pan, preheat the oven to 400F.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine:

3 eggs at room temp
1/3 Cup brown sugar
1/4 Cup granulated sugar

Mix until combined. Then add:

2.5 Cups homemade applesauce (much better this way)
1/4 butter, melted
pinch of allspice
~1T lime juice

Pour the mixture into the crust, place on an upper rack and bake for ~50min. Let cool and serve.

Simple Carmel-Apple Pie

2010-05-09T08:10:00.002-04:00

Day 1 of the Week of Pies.

I have a bunch of Fuji apples, which are delicious in pies, pancakes and plain. I also had about a cup of caramel sauce left over from a party. The solution:

Simple Carmel-Apple Pie

Ingredients:

1 Whole Wheat Crust

~6C peeled, cored and finely sliced Fuji apples

~1C caramel sauce, heated for easy pouring

Proceedure:

(1) Roll out crust to 13", place into a deep dish pie plate. Trim and reserve the overhanging crust

(2) Place sliced apple into the crust, cover with caramel.

(3) Arrange the reserved crust in two concentric rings on top of the fruit.

(4) Bake at 400deg for 45min or until bubbling. The bubbling is key.

(5) LET COOL COMPLETELY! There's no cornstarch here, so the fiber in the fruit has to set up to hold this thing together.

The coming Week of Pies!

2010-05-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

Craziest idea I've had in a while

2010-04-28T18:10:00.002-04:00

The US exported the idea of televised debates to England, and they might have found a way to make for much better political theater. Cleggify them. Not at that national level, but for state and local offices with much lower interest and stakes.

The truth is that our two major parties have a lot more in common than they do differences. However, there's a host of local "consensus" challenging discussions that would be very helpful. Drug laws are the obvious one here, since they turn a potentially valuable tax source into a cost center. However, there are others, like over-broad sex offender registries, zoning laws, tax incentives for new employers and other civic initiatives that don't fit either party's ideological bend.

These issues will not be brought up if the only two candidates in the public eye are looking towards their careers with the parties. However, a flamboyant or pragmatic third candidate who has little or no hope of election can at least force discussion of them, and make for much better television. If the younger GOP and Dem activists have to defend the things on which they agree, that would be better for bipartisanship.

I'm only looking to change local televised and radio debates, not Presidential ones. Igniting interest in local politics would be good for national politics in general, ideally breaking some of the focus on social "wedge" issues. Multi-candidate primary debates are more fun that two-candidate ones, but they are generally only trying reach a narrow part of their party's base. Someone who's only a mild risk to upsetting the system could force a more interesting political scene at the local level.

Official pie loving

2010-04-24T13:44:00.006-04:00

To borrow from the Huffington Post: For Reagan, it was Jelly Beans. For Clinton, it was McDonalds. W loved his BBQ. For Obama, it's pie.

Sadly, this doesn't mean I'm likely to end up working at the White House, seeing as they have both an economics advisor and a pastry chef.

Optimism!

2010-04-23T10:27:00.004-04:00

These days, the dismal science of economics is producing quite a lot of bad news. If you can find the time to read this 5-part piece, it's a great explanation of what to expect over the next couple of years (full disclosure: I don't own property and have a very cash-heavy portfolio). Meanwhile, Greece has officially gone the Bear Sterns route, meaning the next country up gets to play Lehman Brothers. Oh, and don't forget about this year's Social Security shortfall.

What does this mean? At first blush, it seems like the death of modern prosperity, capitalism and possibly civilization as we know it. It will certainly seem this way for many, and I do not want to minimize the pain that is to come in any way. But does this really mean the beginning of a long, dreary future?

Hardly. We will, as a society, be considerably less wealthy going forward, but also less busy. Easy credit encourages ever-increasing productivity, requiring a constant increase in the time required to work off the debt. A new computer with better editing software lets everyone write a paper or legal brief faster, giving the authors more time to write more briefs. Not surprisingly, the burn-out rate in the creative professions has been growing steadily. Anxiety and depression are now so common among students that faculty know their department's procedures for handling it better than the fire escape routes.

In an easy credit society, every marginal unit of labor competes with any capital or process improvement that reduces labor. When interest rates are very low and the cost of employment, in the form of wages and mandates such as health care and unemployment insurance, grows steadily, automation always wins. It wins out on farms, producing vast amounts of infertile corn. It wins in factories, with fewer people required to operate the robots that do all the machining, assembly and clean-up. It even wins in retail, replacing mom-and-pop clerks with shelves that force customers to do much of the labor.

The coming years of deleveraging will be bad, and despite enormous spare capacity there will not be demand for much new economic activity for several years. The "new normal", however, ought to be a more pleasant place. Mechanics, plumbers and handymen will find plenty of non-tradable work keeping up houses and cars that people cannot afford to replace. Climate and environmental pressures will ease as people replace 300-1000W desktop computers and TVs with 30-100W laptops. Bicycle commuting will rise as more people buy up depressed "urban infill" housing, with accompanying benefits to health, traffic and national security.

The new normal will be smaller, more Aldi than Walmart, and more labor will move from the factory and fast food kitchen to the home. The future may be hot, flat and crowded, but I think we're heading towards a pie-friendlier world.

All politics are national (updated!)

2010-04-19T07:01:00.003-04:00

[realized that I've got three arguments tangled together here, so I'll try and unwrap them]

This story brilliantly shows how "cooperative federalism" can co-opt civil society in favor of a central authority:

Court to hear arguments on campus Christian group

Central questions:

(1) Does a group have a right to define its membership?

The issue here is whether the group has the right to demand voting members sign a "statement of faith" declaring that they believe only certain things to be morally right. Failure to include this kind of statement opens the group to the possibility of having its charter overridden by activists who can assemble a crowd in time for club elections.

This approach has been suggested to "tame" the British National Party and helped get McCain the GOP nomination. With both progressive and Tea Party activists able to assemble large, relatively motivate crowds, groups that oppose either would do well to limit access to its membership. Is a statement of political belief fundamentally different from a statement of moral belief?

In pie-centric terms: Should I be required to admit pie cabinet members who don't believe in sustainable homemade pie making? Actually, it's not that hard to imagine such people. They argue for continuing to underfund massive social programs and punishing political cooperation. I am happy to talk to such people, but do I have to open my group's identity to them?

(2) Is this a form of federal "regulatory capture", giving it effective control of civil society?

The implicit imprimature and improved access to potential members that come from recognition and subsidies guarantee that groups that comply with the central authority will grow faster than those that do not. In this environment, control of government means control of the rules of civil society. Once civic groups such as churches and clubs or states and municipalities become dependent on a special subsidy or tax status, they get co-opted by the taxing authority. At that point, a change in tax or recognition rules becomes an existential threat, and so every group must choose between its sense of mission and keeping its lights on. China's ham-fisted censors could learn a lot from this more subtle approach.

Want to see women in the Catholic priesthood? Don't appeal to Rome, appeal to Washington and demand they pay full taxes on discriminatory seminaries. Don't like abortion? Mandate that insurance companies not include such coverage in subsidized plans. Want to make helmets mandatory for motorcycles and bicycles, mandate seatbelt use and force the creation of bicycle lanes? Tie them to highway funding.

Well intentioned efforts to support civil society inevitably result in unhealthy relationships. Internationally, this happens when NGOs get funding from governments and effectively become tools of their sponsor's policy. What are civic organizations supposed to learn from ACORN's demise at the hands of edited video tapes? How about this: if you take federal money keep your group's views as close to mainstream as possible.

(3) How do we make politics local again?

"Values based" politics unite people nationwide who share a sense of identity. Media sources that pander to their audience's ideology. Heavily gerrymandered districts and seniority rules that reward federal and state legislators for long service guarantee that the extremes of both parties make the leadership more nervous than voters in the middle.

I have some ideas for future posts, but that's how I'd like to frame the question. Can we make a more respectful civil society by disaggregating control of it? If so, how? If not, what is the correct path?

Carbon accounting is tricky, and the wrong approach anyway

2010-04-13T16:54:00.003-04:00

I just came from a talk by a guy affiliated with the CO2PE group about accounting for the carbon cost of manufacturing. The speaker presented a novel means of accounting for the carbon cost of manufacturing parts in terms of tonnes of CO2 equivalent emitted. It was very technical, and highlighted the enormous significance of location (and thus source of grid electricity, with coal burning places the worst and those with large hydroelectricity and nuclear power the best).

However, the discussion afterword quickly fell into "What about X?" questions in his accounting. After a couple "we will have to consider that", mostly related to water, the answer became "we have to start somewhere, and tweak the accounting later." The major difference between his formula and the 54 wildly divergent "carbon footprint" surveys is its transparency, which is good. However, I doubt anyone left the room satisfied that that this was a good method. That is was also the best most of us had seen (indeed, the only formula), highlights how difficult it will be to have carbon trading schemes that involve manufacturers directly.

He did, however, make a subtle point that there's an enormous amount of inefficient equipment in use today. Getting rid of this equipment will require two things: (1) a rise in energy prices due to something like a carbon tax and (2) functional credit markets. Given the state of finances in the Western world, we're looking at a combination of higher taxes, cut services and high inflation. A tax that encouraged investment, by say, covering the Social Security Deficit with a carbon tax (~$4.74/ton this year), could potentially shore up the fiscal situation and ease a lot of fears worldwide.

The trouble, of course, is that realizing that future savings requires investment in real things today. I think this is a big part of why so little progress has been made, especially in the US. Our economic policy since 1982 has heavily encouraged, through gov't guarantees, Federal reserve action, tax incentives and "degregulation" (aka regulatory capture) financial investments (housing, 401K's, IRA's, etc) at the expense of infrastructure and physical capital. Changing that requires a fundamental shift in how we view retirement, wealth and the role of government.

The concept of "too big to fail" and the S&L crisis heartily confirmed that our economy would be structured to favor financial instruments. Problems with unions and energy supply in the 1970s probably had a lot to do with that, but basically the federal government has been quietly moving downside risk away from private investors and into the public purse since Lockheed's debacle with the L-1011. This form of economic planning is largely invisible to the average citizen. They are invited to join in the benefits with tax-deferred savings, higher property values, and access to a society that "feels" wealthier. Now that the blush is off the rose, we've seen a few groups that would like less economic planning, but still plead for government action that will give them jobs.

However, the kinds of policies that will result in a clearer, more efficient economy will be visible. You can't ignore a wind turbine or a solar rooftop, and rising energy prices will hit everyone. Getting there will require credit markets that are actually healthy, not relying on clever debt-hiding schemes. Given where we are now, and how all major markets now rely on some kind of government guarantee or subsidy, an explicit move must be made. Using a carbon tax to cover entitlement shortfalls is my personal favorite, since it fixes a temporary shortfall with a temporary revenue stream. It also puts a very powerful lobby on the side of clean technology and physical-plant investment. However, actually getting the metal bashed will require successful financial reform.

Hopefully those of us in the metal-bashing world will bear in mind the lessons of Greece, Enron, Madof, Lehman Brothers and the failure of Sarbanes-Oxley to prevent the financial crisis. Accounting is good when there are no places to hide or fudge numbers, but "off balance sheet liabilities" are especially common when the rules are vague and incomplete. Open standards for carbon footprints are a huge step in the right direction, but at best they tell us how much trouble we're in. Getting out of it means creating incentives and allowing investment.

New feature! A blogroll

2010-04-12T07:25:00.002-04:00

I haven't been able to post as often as I'd like, and when I do I'm often rehashing the arguments from one of the authors on the right.

Today I'd like to highlight Simon Johnson's (former head of the IMF's) Baseline Scenario and Arms Control Wonk. Dr. Johnson's recurring theme is that no institution is too big to fail, but in his experience (and with 2 exceptions all of human history) many are too big to succeed. There's a lot of nuclear security talk these days, and the team at Arms Control Wonk do a great job of boiling it down.

Best Beignets Yet

2010-04-04T09:31:00.002-04:00

I once heard that there were no good beignets in South Bend. Chicory Cafe, a fine establishment that all you South Bend readers ought to patronize (they give away bags of coffee grounds to customers who garden), does a passable job. However, for a real Beignet with real depth of flavor, read on:

Ingredients:
1.5 Cup warm (100-120F) pasta or potato water
1Tbsp dry yeast
4 cups all purpose flour
1 cup evaporated milk
2 eggs
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses

1/4 cup butter, melted
3 cups whole wheat flour
Oil for frying
Confectioner's sugar for dusting

Combine the first two ingredients in a large bowl and let the mix get frothy.

Stir in the a.p. flour, cover and place somewhere warm.

Take your time (~20min) mixing up the ingredients in italics

Combine the early dough with the sugar mix, then add the butter.

Stir in enough wheat flour to make a soft dough.

Now chose "Make Soon" or "Make later"

Make Soon: Place bowl in a warm place for about 1hr until it approximately doubles in size
Make Later: Cover bowl and place in a cool, dry place like a refrigerator until 30min before you plan to start frying

Punch down the dough and roll it out on a well floured baking mat (or counter top) to about 1/4" thickness

Cut into 2" squares with a pizza cutter and fry in hot (350F) oil. Fry 3-5 at a time and flip once, ~2min per side or until golden brown.

Sprinkle with powered sugar immediately, ~1/2t per beignet. More just causes a mess.

Drill, 'Bama Drill!

2010-04-01T06:48:00.001-04:00

I make no secret of the fact that the policy goal of this blog is to find the set of incentives that will lead to a sustainable economy that provides a minimum level comfort to as many people as possible. As such, the opinions expressed here are generally opposed to activities that encourage greater use of fossil fuels. For the moment, however, I'm all for this: Recharging Debate, Obama Expands Offshore Drilling

I do not, however, believe that it will make a noticeable difference in US oil imports. I don't expect there to be any real impact on the price of oil, given the cost of extracting deep-water reserves and the years of work required to bring this stuff to market. This will do very little, if anything, for US employment. In other words, I doubt there will be any significant positive benefit from this decision, and it will likely be regarded by history as mistake.

That is precisely what I hope to see. History suggests that energy extraction is extremely bad for the local community, bringing environmental degradation (and loss of tourism dollars). It draws corruption like flies, the only thing worse is foreign aid or Federal pork-barrel spending. If the money doesn't get siphoned off, its effect on civil society is about what one would expect from people spending money they didn't earn and don't have to (or can't) maintain.

Nothing will defang the argument that "we're not exploiting our national resources" in the energy debate like actually exploiting them. Nothing will hurt oil's image in the public mind quite like a big spill, or even unsightly oil rigs, off formerly beautiful beaches. The political fight over issuing permits, arguments over subsidies will become political footballs that will increase uncertainty and make everyone involved look bad.

In short, this is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory for the extraction industry. Inshoring the problems of energy extraction over the objections of a large number stakeholders will highlight those problems. The only way this decision will impact energy security is if it is matched with enormous efficiency improvements and little regard is paid to environmental concerns. According to the CSIS, we're looking at a period of stagnating energy demand, meaning it may never be profitable to use a rig off the coast of Florida or Virginia.

If this move provides the political cover to pass a climate bill that creates a stable regulatory environment, it will be an unqualified success. If it changes the tone of the debate away from simply rehashing old arguments, it will be moderately successful. Alone it will do as much for energy security as Diet Coke has for obesity.

Hot drink parties

2010-03-29T07:51:00.002-04:00

My Ode to Modernity ended with an oblique reference to the Tea Party movement. A comment on the post suggested I look into the Coffee Party counter-movement, I think with the implication that I host one.

Obviously, I'm an academic. My first economics book was Hayek's Road to Serfdom, and I identify strongly with the Austrian School of economics. I simply don't believe that any bureaucrat can know enough to successfully manage the economy. Unfortunately, some eighty years of government backed private debt (fan though I am of Sheila Bair) and regulatory capture have created a system that generates wealth a lot faster than a free market ever could.

Now this system is breaking down. The past three years have seen something unprecedented as a financial crisis in a highly indebted nation led to a vast increase in the number of people buying that nation's debt. This is not a sustainable system, the deficits that helpfully created all that debt to buy cannot be sustained. The Navy, whose services many of those foreign investors are effectively buying, is overstretched and does not have a coherent shipbuilding plan. Deficit reduction in the US will require both cutting services and raising taxes, but the political will to do so does not exist. Meanwhile, our recent attempt to stop one sector of the economy from dragging down the rest can be described, at best, as a halting step towards making a bad system slightly less unpalletable (a tee shot, in a previous post).

We are now having an internet-style national philosophy debate. Tea Partiers seem to believe most strongly that our best days were in 2003-2005, when the economy was growing strongly on the back of gov't backed bad mortgages (including pension funds buying non-FHA stuff). The Coffee Parties are generally more "progressive", seeking smarter regulation to tame the business cycle and more equitable wealth distribution. The first have already been captured by the neoconservative wing of the GOP, the second probably host a lot of Howard Dean supporters and may find themselves backing democratic candidates this fall.

As the former head of the Pie Cabinet, I will not host either in my home. Historical irony might inspire me to turn up at a rally with a bundle of sticks tied together, or perhaps a sign warning "Beware the Red Tide!" (oh, so many meanings!). However, I remain committed to asking simply what is the best way to incentivize a sustainable economy that provides at a minimum the capacity for each family to make a pie every week. Come on over, I've got plenty of tea and a brand new coffee grinder.

Growing Stronger STEMs

2010-03-18T16:00:00.005-04:00

I'm a frequent critic of appeals for more STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education. I am also an engineer with a PhD who teaches both grade-school and college students. I don't see this as a contradiction at all because I didn't learn to be a successful engineer in a STEM classroom.

I learned the basics of mechanical and systems engineering under the hood of a dozen or so cars and trucks that my friends and I decided we could fix. My most successful friends learned to program computers, rewire stereos and generally perform all of the "STEM" tasks because they tinkered at home. Our curiosity wasn't awoken by grades, but rather a desire to learn that our parents encouraged and our lax (by modern standards) schedules allowed. We were simply interested in making a change in the world, and as Tycho points out, no-one of any sense has ever bet against the . . . resourcefulness of young men."

An AP Economics class gave me the tools I needed to start forming economic models of the behaviors I read about in the newspaper. This, along with long discussions with my parents, led me to ask "what's the underlying dynamics here?" When confronted with organizational challenges, this education provides me with the tools to navigate them. On technical issues, knowing what the instrument really measures is the difference between a failed experiment and a PhD.

The problem with my path through STEM education is that it does not fit well into an NCLB/TAKS/Iowa Test model. At what grade level should one be able to check oil, inspect a brake pad or replace an intake manifold? Since most diagnoses take several tries, how do you test a student's ability to find "the underlying dynamics?"

In addition, the facilities required for my education spanned several cooperative households, took the time and flexibility of school administrators and a community that felt young people ought to be engaged with their world, not sheltered from potential harm. Today's education debate seems to accept as first principles that learning can only happen in a classroom, is only official if it can be tested and that there is one standard of capability to which all should be trained.

As a STEM educator, and one who holds a PhD in a mechanical field, I'd much rather teach math to studets who know metal than metal to students who know math. It's cheaper to teach and easier to to test algebra, geometry and calculus than auto mechanics, baking and philosophy. Traditionally, the latter subjects have been learned at home, and I don't want to suggest we put more of the education burden on schools. How we encourage stronger STEMs at home that will bear fruit later?

Pie making abroad

2010-03-17T16:31:00.004-04:00

We recently took a longish trip to Europe. It was amazing, and I owe special thanks to our wonderful hosts who drove us all over the place. Really, I cannot thank them enough for everything, perhaps most of all giving us a chance to step back from our cluttered lives in the US and give us a chance to soak in a more relaxed culture.

While there, we went to a farmers' market where I bought a couple kilos of apples and a kilo of pears to make a pie. When we got back to the house, I realized how dependent I had become on the array of kitchen gadgets I use to reduce pie-making time. We brought along a dough blender at our hostess' requests, but my apple peeler/slicer, baking mat, multiple sets of measuring tools, giant rolling pin and food processor were an ocean away. Our host's kitchen was beautiful, clean and very well stocked, but I learned my "gadget-neediness" to my own chagrin.

More helpfully, this led me to think about what the real "minimum equipment list" is for making a pie. This list is important because it bears directly on the industrial capacity required of a PMCIN=1 society. I believe it consists of:

(1) A good cleaning cloth and a supply of clean water (~5L/pie)

(2) A very sharp pairing knife

(3) 75cm x 100cm countertop for crust rolling

(4) A large (3-4L) mixing bowl

(5) A measuring cup and spoon (scales also work)

(6) Pie plate

(7) Minimum 50cm x 50cm x 50cm oven.

Sorry for the metric units here, but these reflections happened in Europe, and Google, the generous host of this blog, offers a fantastic unit conversion service.

Interestingly, the largest industrial need, and thus environmental impact, of pie making consists of clean water. The electricity for the oven came, at least in part, from a wind farm about 2km away from the house. The water, on the other hand, had to be pumped from a well, treated, pressurized and piped to the house. After use it had to be piped to another treatment center, cleaned and discharged into a suitable environment. Unlike the wind turbine, knife, dishes and oven, this has to happen with every pie. Nothing like international travel to give you an interesting look at life. Also interestingly, with only a pairing knife, I wound up peeling more apple off the outside. However, I saved considerably more fruit by not throwing away hole cores, as I do at home, instead cutting away only the inedible segments near the seeds.

Also, European fruit, at least in the market we bought it, is much denser than American varieties. It's very important, therefore, to cut it up much smaller than comparable American apples and pears. It may also be necessary to pre-cook some fruit, as Ken suggests in his "French Apple Pie" recipe, which is an adaptation of a French apple tart. Note that this adds a skillet and stove to the list above, but does not substantially change the water requirement.

The next place I need to go is an undeveloped rural community. I will do my best to bring along items 1-6, ovens being a bit hard to transport, but I may have to add "shovel, metal box and charcoal" or "large pot and cooking fire." I wonder if there's a Fulbright for culinary adventures . . .

An ode to modernity

2010-02-12T07:49:00.005-05:00

My first experiment with free verse:

A man holds cash, seeking transportation
A dealership, stock full of cars, his likely destination
"This cash, you see, for that car there, and let me drive away,"
Says the man to dealers who must want the cash he holds.
"Oh no, good man, your cash, you see, is not the way to pay.
For the products that we truly sell do not go by 'Olds'
But rather notes and loans and leases too,
Relationships that reach beyond
This simple car I'm selling you
Pay with cash and you'll abscond
From whole industries, it's true
Sign this contract by our lawyer Frank
(That's one, in case you're keeping score)
And send monthly payments to our bank,
(That's two, twice more than before)
While slickest brokers write up SIVs
(And three, but wait there's more)
bought by pensions, who wisely do insure
(Holy cow, now we're up to four)
Against losses you may cause them to incur
And so my friend, you see it clear,
With this simple car we may
Keep many fed for many years.
That's how things work today.
Peering at his wad of bills, and knowing well the cost,
He looked upon the dealership, and told them all "get lost"

Professor Russ Roberts, one of my favorite economists and host of EconTalk, makes this point very well: "Self sufficiency is the road to poverty." However, this brings up an inherent question that should occupy the mind of any policy wonk (and, by extension, voter): how much of this mutual dependence should we encourage? What is the right balance between prosperity and robustness, and how does one shape incentives to achieve it?

Right now, violating the system by simply paying cash for a car sounds like a subversive act. As for me, I'm gonna fix by bicycle, change the oil in my car and bake my own pies. Yes, I'm being rebellious by living out an episode of Leave It To Beaver. Stop by for pie and tea, we'll make it a party.

Oats brule'

2010-01-30T09:48:00.002-05:00

This is such a bastardization of the proper dessert I fell no need to use proper characters in the title. It is, however, delicious.

As of yesterday, I received the butane for my Chef's Torch, itself a Christmas gift from my wonderful mother. Not having time to actually make a Baked Alaska or any marangue pie this week, I went to town on oatmeal. This is best served in steep-sized bowls on a really cold winter morning.

"Filling":
3cups water
1.5cups rolled oats
1T sugar
2T butter
1/3cup sour cream

"Topping":
enough brown sugar to cover the filling

Procedure:

Boil the water, stir in the oats and reduce heat. Let cook until thick, then allow to cool for a couple minutes before stirring in sugar, butter, and sour cream.

Transfer to bowls and cover with brown sugar. Use a Chef's Torch to carmelize the sugar, and serve immediately. Note: an oven broiler can be used instead, but the small flame thrower is a lot more fun.

This is big

2010-01-29T14:25:00.004-05:00

If anyone reading this knows anyone involved with this: Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes, I want to bake these guys a pie.

The goal of energy policy today, in my humble opinion, should be to "bend the curve", and direct resources to cleaner and more efficient sources. This looks to do that, and along the way builds a viable case for commercial lunar operations. It won't solve all our problems, and isn't an excuse to delay other good ideas, but the future is bright. The future's so bright I gotta wear a welding helmet.

Cookie crust, attempt 1

2010-01-17T16:46:00.002-05:00

I got a batch of home-made cookie mix for Christmas this year, and when I made the first batch they spread out enough to cover the whole cookie sheet, looking a lot more like a pre-baked pie crust than the cookies I hoped to make.

Like most progress, what began as failure is on its way to becoming a very delicious success. Like most progress, success is the result of learning what not to do.

Lesson 1: Pre-bake the crust

Lesson 2: This is not a good bet for fruit pies, and maybe only appropriate for no-bake types

More to come!

Once again in Peggy's thrall

2010-01-11T19:51:00.003-05:00

I'm an unabashed fan of Peggy Noonan, and once again I feel like there isn't much to say besides, you should read her latest column.

The frustration she expresses with the national leadership of both parties is palpable in the writing and in meetings with many senior policy wonks and senior civil servants. Whether you're Taxed Enough Already or a fan of Michael Pollan, there's plenty to dislike about the House and Senate versions of the health care bill, but it's only the latest example of how many institutions seem to have lost their way.

And now I need to get back to work, doing my part to improve my institution.

Butternut squash does not freeze well

2010-01-11T12:40:00.001-05:00

The flavor is fine, but the texture is all wrong after about a month.

Winning a war of attrition

2010-01-07T11:17:00.005-05:00

Most of the drugs used to treat viral infections are, effectively, immune system suppressors. Noses run because that allows the body to clear out infected material. Increased metabolic activity, also known as "fever," is an important immune system booster. Fatigue, achiness, chills and other symptoms happen because the body does not have the capacity to both fight the infection and engage in normal activities. By taking these steps firmly and quickly, the body's own defenses can typically kill off the disease before it damages enough tissue to be a problem. Sometimes, as with the youth-skewed deaths from H1N1, this natural response goes overboard and kills the patient.

This is how I look at issues like terrorism. The relatively small number of people directly involved with AQ know that they have no chance of directly destroying the US. The strategic depth of the country is far too great for that to be a serious threat, much as the vast expanses and large nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union guaranteed that its enemies could not threaten it directly. Instead, Bin Laden and company are playing their old patron Reagan's game, knowing that a small escalation on their part leads to a dramatic and expensive response on our part.

The "system" worked on Christmas Day, 2009 just as well as it did with Richard Reid in 2005. A man who, like many young hot-headed fools, had known links to AQ boarded a plane in a manner that's not unheard of for wealthy expats. He inexpertly attempted to damage the aircraft and was stopped by alert passengers and crew. In other words, the only people who slip through the cracks in the intelligence system are the least dangerous. Without irony, Go Team!

Placing additional loads on our security apparatus in this environment is like a fever that causes brain damage. Fighting AQ and its derivatives is a war of attrition, and one in which we hold a considerable advantage if don't allow small problems to grow into large ones. Today we're being asked to put aside dignity, get cooked slightly by microwaves and pay a lot of money so that our underwear can be inspected. Drug dealers and would-be assassins of Saudi princes know that there are places microwaves can't see, and we'll have to choose between accepting that risk or cancer-causing x-rays when the next young fool slips through the cracks. (Actually, one did, but US media kind of ignored it since the target wasn't American, so our prostates are safe for now.)

What we need nationally is something to suppress the fear response that leads to swelling in our budgets and feverish talk on cable news. Pie making can serve as that anti-histamine. Rolling out a crust is a great confidence builder, not to mention being good for the shoulders in the highly unlikely event you have to throw that elbow. Sharing pies with friends, family and neighbors pulls attention away from the strident talking heads, and hopefully calms everyone down a bit. We in the US are the safest and most prosperous people in history. Let's enjoy that instead of fretting about rich fools who are trying, and failing miserably, to ruin it.

Not coming up: "pie for all"

2009-12-26T12:40:00.004-05:00

Normally around this time of year I start thinking about progress on the "Six Delicious Years" of pies from Ken's awesome book, as well as planning new any interesting creations for the new year.

However, this year I think it's important to begin with a recipe that will not be posted on this blog: "Pie for all."

In a previous post I suggested that I'd make a pie that all people, regardless of food allergy, food philosophy or food restriction could share. I thought I was onto something with a diabetic-friendly apple pie in a vegan sorghum crust, and then I discovered the concept of fructose intolerance. Meanwhile, stricter interpretations of "locavore" and "Kosher" create incompatible restrictions for anything but a purpose-built farm. And, committed to pie-making as I am, No.

Also, that generally unoffensive apple pie would probably be very bland. With the ingredient list determined by what it cannot have, it's likely that the filling would include only apples, cinnamon and cornstarch. Because any allergy or rule gets a veto, no one's personal interests or taste could make much a stamp. Stifling creativity and accepting a "good-enough" pie is very much opposed to the goals of this baking blogger.

I think I've found the deeper lesson in all of this: hospitality is a deeply personal thing, and my "pie for all" plan is impersonal by design. Rather than asking what a guest wants and needs, my hope was to eliminate consideration of the specific guest in favor of a generic "one size fits all" dessert. Instead, discussing likes, dislikes and restrictions should be viewed as an important part of the process itself. A tasty dessert should be an end in itself, but a means of facilitating engagement and discussion. This process need not, and should not, have to wait until the pie leaves the oven.

There is, perhaps, a larger lesson in all this. Any attempt to make a "universal" rule is bound to fall into either blandness or get caught up in incompatible restrictions from various quarters. Consider the UN Anti-Blasphemy Resolution, to a Western audience such ideas are patently ridiculous, such ideas are throwbacks to the days before the Enlightenment made us aware that mixing church and state is bad for both. But to countries that base their legitimacy on a particular faith, blasphemy is no less a threat than corruption and authoritarian movements are to Western democracies. Personally, I fall on the Western side of this debate, but the larger point is that one rule is not sufficient for the entire world.

New Tire Sonnet

2009-11-15T20:15:00.002-05:00

Be what you are, loyal commuting bike
And wear that thin racing rubber no more
Slick and fast and thin but indeed unlike
The touring tires your frame truly adores
Enjoy, embrace, and roll with new Michelin
Ignore foolish poets who might conflate
Absent friction with love to their chagrin
One two five psi will oft deflate
A Trek seven hundred yearns for a trail
With rack and panniers for food and for tools
Fast commuting instead just seems so pale
The province of lazy, dimwitted fools
Poor Jack sang quite well of living your call
My bike, take heed before we take a fall

I recently gave up on the tube-eating 700x23mm tire I've been using since the spring. On a bike with a lighter frame, or if I didn't have my panniers above it, or . . .

The point is, there are almost always reasons to continue to pursue a solution that doesn't quite work. As an engineer with academic ties, I see it most often in young students who feel they have to enter the field because they are "smart", and who spend their undergraduate years miserable because they are overworked and uninterested. Worse yet are the graduate students who do the same. Should I ever be directly responsible for such poor lost souls, there will be a periodic viewing of The Nightmare Before Christmas, or at least Poor Jack, to drive home the point that there are things you should only do because you're called to them.

Also, I'd been hoping that a couple recent shifts in my professional situation would lead to a "I AM THE PUMPKIN KING!" kind of moment. Alas, nothing ever works out like it should. So until then I'll transfer my existential angst to my favorite mode of transportation.

Apple-raspberry mini-pie

2009-11-10T08:55:00.002-05:00

Technically, a "mini-pie" is a tart, but this is a pie blog. However, instead of a traditional extra-thick tart crust, this one had a very thin rolled whole wheat pie crust. It's a good one to serve for the mildly gluten intolerant, since there's no top and the filling can be easily separated from the crust.

Ingredients:

1/4 recipe whole wheat crust

2 large apples, peeled and chopped
1 cup raspberries
1/4 cup sugar
1 T cornstarch

Procedure:

Roll out the crust until it's very thin, then line a tart pan, preferably heart shaped, with it.
Preheat the oven to 350F
Combine fruit in a small bowl.
Mix the sugar and cornstarch in a smaller bowl.
Stir the sugar mix into the fruit.
Scrape into the crust-lined pan.
Bake 20min, or until the raspberry juices bubble.

Tee shots on a log par 5

2009-10-28T07:44:00.002-04:00

There are two major issues fighting their way through Congress right now that have the potential to substantially reshape American society. The first is Heath Care Reform, which has become Health Insurance Reform, with the almost solitary metric being number of people covered. The second is climate legislation, which is being predictably watered down.

Many bemoan the perceived loss of the opportunity to engage in truly wholesale reforms. Certainly, no one would design our current health care system from scratch. It's hard to see how anyone could defend a distribution network that forces people to stay with employers for fear of bankruptcy if/when something goes wrong. Especially when that system is pretty likely to bankrupt people anyway. Unless, of course, they are over 65 and happen to fall ill in the ways that are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America. Of course, one of the fastest growing industries in the US and Japan involves producing more health care options for this lucrative set. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but her father is profit.

Clearly, it would be in society's interest to change the incentives. Pay doctors salaries, instead of fees, and award bonuses for the number of days their patients are healthy and able to work. Ban, or at least heavily restrict, prescription drug advertising to help funnel drug company profits into research, not television. Set prices for medical procedures so insurance companies have to compete on quality and efficiency, not hospital networks. Set malpractice limits so that doctors and hospital administrators have an incentive to do autopsies and further develop best practices.

However, one man's waste is another's income. The "fee for service" model employs legions of billing clerks, and I dare anyone to push for reforms that reduce employment today. Prescription drug adverts pay for a lot of what's left of today's new television programming, and if you think newsrooms are shrinking now, just wait until they don't have Merck and Pfizer as sponsors. The struggles between hospital networks and insurers has generated a market which the established players can easily dominate. And seriously, find a Democrat who will stand up for actual tort reform.

On the climate side, the story is much the same. The current system digging up and burning our fuel has an impact similar to wrapping a refrigerator in cellophane while someone else plays with the thermostat. It's hard to say how big the effect is, especially over short time scales, but it's noticeable in the long run. Ocean acidification, on the other hand, is a very real and easily measured problem. So are the health impacts of mountaintop removal, smog and the odd coal ash flow in a river. Never mind that entire civilizations are built on a set of resources that might last another couple hundred years if we don't need too much more of them.

Alternatives exist, but no one will pay their capital costs until there is a clear and consistent policy that makes it worthwhile. This is not hard, a simple $.01/ton carbon tax on fossil fuels, especially one that was indexed to inflation, would be enough to get things started. But in the US especially we try to cajole good behavior without directly imposing costs, mostly through building codes and the CAFE standards. It does look as though the current bill before the Senate might start to change that. Maybe.

The point here is to remember that big changes happen slowly. We're dealing as a country with a few systems that developed mostly accidentally over the last century. We've finally begun to face them in a serious way, but that century for habits, beliefs and interests to become ingrained will not change overnight. Today's legislation is the tee shot on a long par 5. A hole in one would be nice, but aim for the fairway. Make sure the next debate is about how to finish out, not whether or not to play.

Blog action day!

2009-10-15T21:32:00.004-04:00

So it's Blog Action Day, and this year's topic is climate change. Okay, there's an issue with serious pie-making capacity implications. Honestly, nothing else really matters if we screw this one up too badly.

There's a great article over at Grist about why this debate is so often portrayed as a liberal/conservative fight rather than one over science and other policies. Short version, climate is the ultimate externality. In modern society, EVERY transaction involves a carbon cost, even reading this blog, and so EVERY transaction must be subject to external regulation to insure that the cost of that transaction is born fairly.

As such, there will be an impasse for as long as people can get away with it. That day, however, seems like it might not be far away. Galhran points out that quite a lot of "gun butter" is about to go into making the Navy a more sustainable force. The Coast Guard, looking forward to being called into help with the flooding, changing storm patterns and general humanitarian disaster that is a changing climate, is actively engaged with the global community on the subject.

There are a lot of small things we can all do to help out, whether we're worried about changing temperatures, ocean acidification or just saving money (and thereby sticking it to the current US administration!). You can support the Pickens Plan, and help ensure that the US "poops where it eats" in terms of energy generation (note, I think this is a very good thing). Ride a bike to work, the store or, especially, the gym. Turn lights off, and replace old bulbs with CFL's and LED's when possible. Look into Smart Grid efforts and see what you can do to support local efforts in this direction.

The scientific debate on climate change, and carbon emissions in general, is over whether the status quo is only McDonald's every couple days, or as bad as a diet of hot dogs and slurpees. Either way, we could do better, and there are plenty of good reasons to take these steps for personal and national economic gain. So, think Green! Or, if you prefer, think Cheap! The world you save will be your own.

Guns as butter?

2009-09-28T07:58:00.003-04:00

First of all, I should begin with a thanks to Oppenheimer, von Braun, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and others for their efforts to build and field weapons that have finally ended major war between nation states. Despite ongoing and widespread civil wars and border conflicts in the developing world, there is a growing list of countries that do not fear invasion or even widespread bombing because they can provide a credible threat of nuclear retaliation. That is no small thing, and those of us who live under a comfortable nuclear umbrella should be thankful.

However, that does not mean large military forces are unnecessary. ICBMs and nuclear bombs might keep major combat to a minimum, but they do nothing to prevent, as former Marine Corps Commandant Krulak put it, the "stepchildren of Chechnya" from reaping havoc. The solution to this problem is often referred to as finding a Comprehensive Approach, one that integrates the military, diplomacy and economy of a state or international body to direct the course of a nation or state abroad.

This is known as "armed social work", in the 1990's as DIME, more recently as COIN, and here I'll call it "Guns as Butter." In the typical guns vs. butter model, social work, economic development and primary education are social goods that compete with the military for public funds. Most conservatives argue heavily in favor of buying "guns", as these provide security, as opposed to the wishy-washy notions of a Great Society. However, the primary application of our "guns" since WWII has been to try and spread "butter" across the rest of the world. The irony of this is not lost on organizations such as the Center for Complex Operations, but the magnitude of the problem prevents much laughter.

To be fair, this model has its domestic applications as well. The recent fight over the F-22 is a great example, as almost every defense of the program included the word "jobs" and only a resolute few claimed there was a military need for thirteen more of the jets. Most defense contractors publish advertisements citing how widespread their sourcing is for major weapons systems, clearly to encourage Congress spread a little "gun butter" around their districts. Militarily, a supply chain that stretches across CONUS is much more vulnerable to attack, or even natural disaster, than a centralized one. Socially, this is invaluable for providing demand for technology workers around the country.

This post is not a criticism of this arrangement. Certainly, I have and continue to personally benefit from it to a large degree. However, we're in a bad fiscal position, and this is unsustainable. David Brooks suggests that this is The Next culture War. I certainly hope so.

Looking back on a big year

2009-09-10T20:40:00.002-04:00

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." --Philip K. Dick.

This is my 100th post, and it's about a year since the "Firing of the Bazooka", when Secretary Paulson pulled Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into federal receivership. Seems like a good time to reflect.

Marketplace from American Public Media has a great series of stories about what we learned from the collapse of Lehmann Brothers. They highlight the fact that an almost blind faith overtook much of the world, and especially the United States, that assumed a steady and reliable rise in asset prices. Paul Krugman refers to this as Panglossian Economics, wherein we believed complicated mathematical models that showed we lived in the best of all possible worlds. As long as we believed, it worked.

But then we stopped believing that banks, their customers and other counterparties could meet their obligations. To save off disaster, the Federal Reserve "printed" $1.2Trillion in one day, and drove interest rates to zero. This wasn't enough, and the US Congress authorized the Treasury to almost explicitly nationalize the financial system by handing over $700billion to "save" the financial system. In other words, we stopped believing in the banks, but we didn't stop believing in the government or its money. And so we find ourselves engaged in a sort of "extend and pretend" period, were we hope that asset prices start rising again, and with it a return of the good days.

For those who hoped the crash and last election would lead to fundamental changes, this is kind of disappointing. A sizable majority, however, absolutely depend on their 401k's, pension plans, and property value to continue living without family or charitable support. The historically minded are certainly worried that having watched one cherished institution fail, the strength of belief in others is weaker. Certainly, there were large increases in stock prices in the early 1930's, as investors badly wanted to believe that things were better, but people could still not pay their mortgages. Sound familiar?

The reality, such as it is, is that we aren't ready to stop believing in most of the systems that delivered prosperity since the 1950s, or 1980s. In some ways, this is very good, since the social dislocation involved in ending that belief is scary. In others, it blinds us to the need to move past "extend and pretend" to a discussion of what a sustainable future looks like.

I'm fundamentally an optimist. Means and opportunity occasionally meet to provide for interesting projects that show an alternative approach to our current lifestyle. Micheal Pollan is optimistic, cautiously, that we're on a course to start addressing problems in our food system. There's a robust and civil debate about the purpose and nature of the military at the US Naval Institute blog that tries to reconcile the US fiscal situation with its strategic posture.

Oil prices are rising again, and electric vehicles are all the rage. Michigan is trying to retool to make items for public transit (you may enjoy the irony). Farmer's markets are doing very well and bicycles are steadily gaining popularity as a commuting tool. Civility is breaking out in more and more quarters. And there's a new season of the FIRST Lego League underway. The future's so bright I've gotta wear shades.

Blueberry Jam Pie with Sour Cream Topping

2009-08-22T16:29:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, you don't have 5hrs to bake and cool a pie. So what to do? Well, you make some fresh blueberry jam, toss in a partly-baked crust, and then make a little sour cream topping and toss it in the freezer to quickly chill it, and then the fridge to cool it long enough for the whipped cream to set.

Ingredients:

1 whole wheat crust

"jam"
1.5lb blueberries
2T lemon juice
1/3 cup sugar mixed with
2T cornstarch

topping:
8oz cream cheese
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
1/2 cup sour cream
3 T granulated sugar
1/4lb blueberries

Preheat oven to 375F. Roll out the crust into a 13" circle and gently place into a 9 1/2" deep dish pan. Line the crust with foil, fill with pinto beans and place in the oven for 10min.

Toss the berries and lemon juice in a non-reactive saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the berries begin to simmer in their own juice. Bring to a boil stirring continuously, then stir in the sugar/cornstarch. Cook, stirring some more, for about 2min, and scrape into the baked crust.

Place the crust into the fridge while you make the topping. Whip the confectioners sugar and cream cheese together until smooth. Stir in the remaining sugar, sour cream and blue berries.

Cover the cooling "jam" with the topping and place in the freezer for 15min. Move into the refrigerator and let sit as long as you can stand, at least 45min, preferably 1-2hrs.

Summer fruit season and prosperity

2009-08-18T19:35:00.005-04:00

We're in the thick of summer fruit season, so there's plenty of baking going on, but the last few have been straight out of Ken's awesome book. There's not much pressure to come up with innovative recipes when so many delicious ones are right there.

As such, it's an interesting time to contemplate the financial crisis. The most recent Planet Money podcast featured a panel discussion of "financial innovation", and whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing. The most obvious answer is "it depends," although I generally agree the last twenty five years, generally the age of massive consumer credit, have been a net negative. Most interestingly, one of the members pointed out that just as there was a need for serious innovation, namely, as the predicted subprime collapse, there hasn't been any innovative way to turn things around. In fact, the rate of introduction of new products has slowed considerably (I think, but can't find a source).

Instead, we've got a lot of talk about new regulations. Just as in the 1930's, when the opportunities for financial innovations slacked off, the opportunities for government innovations rose. This actually teaches an important lesson about innovation: it follows opportunity, not need.

My most creative baking comes not when I am lacking time and resources, but when I have plenty of the first and interesting ingredients. This is why I post more recipes over the winter and early spring, during the sailing off-season, and when the normal fruits are supplanted by ones that I hadn't thought to use before. Financial innovation, and its attendant systemic risk, always has and always will follow the same pattern. Macro economists believe that good monetary policy can lessen the impact of this, and perhaps they are right, but central bankers are human, and no human is truly independent political pressure. Supply-siders will claim that regulation is itself the problem, ignoring the history of financial bubble bursts going back to the early days of modern banking. Keynesians and those farther left believe that if only regulation were done correctly, by the correct people, disaster could never happen. All ignore the fact that people are fallible, often greedy, and only work to the best of their ability when there is a clear reward, be it a massive bonus, the satisfaction of a job well done, or a delicious pie.

So, financial disasters happen because any system that provides prosperity for a lot of people relies on assumptions that are not always true. The same can be said of transportation, electrical grids, and fruit farms. Policy prescriptions that include naming a "systemic risk regulator" or otherwise trying to prevent disaster provide a false sense of security that encourages people to buy into systems whose risks they do not understand in the hope that some powerful, disinterested party is watching out for them. That party will never, can never, be as powerful and disinterested as the legislation demands, cf. Madoff and the SEC. Instead, let's try not to forget that to everything there is a season, and as individuals, companies and governments separately prepare for both a large harvest and a long drought.

Yes, this is much easier said than done. But at least I think it's saying the right thing.

Pie-friendly podcasts

2009-08-08T23:06:00.003-04:00

This is a shameless promotion and thanks to the producers of my two favorite podcasts, The World's Technology Podcast and Common Sense with Dan Carlin.

The first is the only tech podcast I've heard that really focuses on technology as a human endeavor, not a bunch of gadgets. Clark Boyd hosts and produces the show, which includes stories of interest from the BBC, PRI and longer versions of interviews than could run on the radio. It very intentionally doesn't cover things like new versions of fake-fruit company products, but if you want to know what people are doing to influence their world, and those actions affect others, this is the show for you. Also, it has bagpipes.

The second is a political commentary show hosted by the "moderately radical" Dan Carlin. As a former TV newsman at LA's ABC affiliate, he knows all about the absurdity that is big media today. As a student of history, with an excellent history podcast as well, his perspectives take the long view. Some of his policy prescriptions are a bit outlandish, but they are well argued and supported.

I generally listen while baking, but I'd be happy to replay them for anyone who comes over for a slice.

Do we need more STEMs?

2009-08-05T21:34:00.002-04:00

"Brakes squeak, and other stuff."

This was written by a customer at a bike repair festival where I was a volunteer. Most customers were asked to write their complaints on a card, or hang around and wait for the one or two people who were screening the bikes. Most customers wrote about a part that was causing a problem, such as a chain, tire or handlebars, or nothing at all. We had a couple people, myself included, who would answer verbal questions of those willing to wait for us, but these were generally people with very specific requests that involved high quality bicycles.

When I hear calls for more Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) teaching in grades 1-12, I often think of that day, especially that quote. I think the hope is that more of those students will be able to maintain their own bikes, or at least be able to explain what they need more clearly. Similar hopes haunt IT help desk workers, car mechanics, and others who make our complex economy work.

However, this is a blog about baking as much as policy. With the exception of mulberries, stems are just annoying compost once they've served their role attaching fruit to plant. As a professional "STEM" educator, I find myself very much in agreement with an Ohio State professor who put it well: "I can teach mathematics to someone with mechanical ability much easier than I can teach mechanics to someone with mathematical ability." One the best bike mechanics I know has a degree in anthropology. At the same time, it's hardly a safe bet that someone with a mechanical engineering PhD can change a tire or brake pads.

On top of this, we engineering professionals are not the only ones who wish students had a stronger background in our field before leaving high school. English programs around the country now sic graduate students on first year undergraduates to try and break them of habits learned on teh intertubes & txt msgs, and to teach basic grammar that was never learned. Text analysis, knowledge of history and even basic geography are all skills that are badly needed by all citizens of a republic.

To answer my question,"yes." But that does not mean we should flood the schools with math teachers, science text books and a battery of standardized tests. Mathematics is a language, not magic. Engineering is an art form that serves a purpose; its practitioners are not coldly rational so much as aware that reality can't wait to prove them wrong. Technology is often thought of in terms of gadgets, but it is the sum total of human endeavor, and must be understood in that context. Science, ultimately, is nothing more than that which we have not disproven yet.

The critical failing of most STEM education is that it teaches in terms of "right" and "wrong" answers to simple questions. The professional scientific and engineering world is full of "better" and "worse" solutions to very complicated problems. Ironically, this lesson is best taught in history, shop and home economics classes in high school. Good stems are needed to get good fruit, but it is important to remember that STEM is a means, not an end.

First Junket Report: CCO 2nd Annual Conference

2009-08-01T07:52:00.003-04:00

A couple members of the Pie Cabinet traveled to Washington, DC for the Center for Complex Operations 2nd annual conference. It was quite an event, and if anyone from that organization reads this, I'd like to have you over for pie.

There was lots of interesting material, consisting of singleton speakers and panel discussions, on the "3D's", Defense, Diplomacy and Development. I remember getting into aerospace engineering when the "3d's" meant dull, dirty and dangerous, the kind of work that should be handed off to unmanned systems. Had I any doubt that the passion for a Revolution in Military Affairs was dead, it's been settled.

Two broad themes seemed to emerge from all of the discussions: (1) the importance of adaptability and (2) the growing militarizarion of foreign policy.

These are not fundamentally opposed, actually they're quite complementary in our system. Militaries throughout history have been major sources of innovation, since the concept of "maneuver" applies to technology and doctrine just as much as the movement of engaged units. Today, the US DoD runs five undergraduate institutions (USMA, USNA, USAFA, USCGA, USMMA), four War Colleges (USN, USMC, USAF, US Army), and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA with satellite campuses nearly everywhere (this may not be a complete list). Not to mention the hundreds of rigorous academic courses taught by officers around the country in ROTC programs, and schools for everything an enlistee might have to do. Slightly outside the DoD are "Centers of Excellence" such as the Center for Naval Analysis and RAND corporation whose exact job is to keep smart people on call to solve tough problems. Also, and it was argued more importantly, all but its very tip-top is run by career professionals who are largely promoted on merit, regardless of administration. Obama got lots of kudos for keeping Gates, and the relative smoothness of DoD's actions vs. State, Treasury and other departments' speaks to the problems that come with the Spoils System (thanks President Jackson!).

On the civilian side, we have the US State Department and USAID. The performance of State tends to improve as an administration goes on, but every four or eight years its top people, and I think it's the same number of people as DoD despite having only ~10K people at Foggy Bottom, you get a fresh bunch of leaders who probably don't like the policies of their predecessors. The result has been a more ossified legalistic culture below the appointee ranks, since promotion depends not on ability and initiative but conforming to established rules. The middle and upper level management of State is run by former FSOs who've had to deal with this their whole professional lives, making it very difficult for them to culturally adapt to a changing world. On the other hand, Provincial Resconstruction Teams (PRTs) made up of enthusiastic youngsters with a clear mandate to do what is necessary to accomplish their "hearts and minds" mission are credited with a lot the success in parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. The resemblance to Roman military engineering teams shouldn't be overlooked.

As a result, USAID is trying to formalize this quasimilitary approach to development assistance. Specifically, several speakers spoke of a more "expeditionary" USAID; one that would relate to its grantee NGOs and in-country employees as a theater commander setting goals for deployed companies and batallions. Details of this arrangement, which scares the crap out of the NGO community, have not been finalized yet.

To the extend that US policy is designed to improve the capacity of states to exert their writ and for their people to become prosperous, this militarization is appropriate, according to several panelists. The chief obstacle to development in much of the world, especially the places where the US is deploying more aid, is security. Development projects have a mixed record at best, but they always fail when security fails. Whomever is officially in charge of the project needs to acknowledge that, and adopting cultural aspects from the most dynamic of government departments (scary, isn't it) can only help break a beaucratic logjam. Militarized need not mean jack-booted, but must include a fundamental recognition that "the enemy gets a vote, too." --paraphrased from a general during the COIN debate in 2005ish

Unfortunately, formally implementing these lessons will require action from Congress and an end to much of the Spoils System. On top of that, a paradigm shift is needed in the thinking about development aid and perhaps even the definition of prosperity, governance and security. Knowing that lots of smart people have decided to find solutions makes me hopeful that they'll succeed. But Mark Twain's commentary on the denziens of the Hill is as true as ever.

Berry delicious oatmeal

2009-07-23T08:31:00.002-04:00

The pies for this week (yes, two, there's that much fruit about this time of year) are Apricot-Blueberry, straight out of Ken's incredible book. One or both may find itself involved in chariable fundraising, I'll keep you posted.

However, an earlier recipe involved using less than a full can of sweetened condensed milk, and we've got a lot of berries on had. Following this blog's pattern of using pie leftovers for breakfast, here goes:

Berry Delicious Oatmeal:

Ingredients:

3 Cups water
1.5 Cups "traditional" oatmeal
.5 Cups black raspberries
.5 Cups blueberries
.25 Cup (I think) sweetened condensed milk

Procedure:

Bring the water to a rolling boil in a medium saucepan. Place the can of milk next to the burner, this will make it easier to pour later.

Slowly add the oats, stirring continuously.

Reduce heat, watching for boil-over.

After a couple minutes, pour in the milk and stir.

When the oats have about 1min to go, add the berries and stir.

Serve warm.

Deflationary stimulus and stimulating taxes?

2009-07-17T05:42:00.003-04:00

A friend recently send along a link to the latest quarterly review from Hoisington Investment Management.

The point it makes that of the conditions required for inflation, essentially that there is a desire to invest and increase economic capacity, we currently meet none. Meanwhile, empirical evidence cited (and yes, we're always a little suspicious of that) suggests that US government spending does not have a Keynesian multiplier significantly different from zero. In other words, most government spending does not increase economic activity so much as shift it from private to public expenditures.

How does this work? Consider the demographics of graduate school enrollment. It grew even during the boom year, as students with technical degrees were largely faced with the choice between grad school and investment banking (there were exceptions, like chemical engineers). Now, IB isn't much of an option, although government planning might bring it back. Goldman's sure doing well.

However, for most of those students, grad school has largely become industry R&D on the cheap. The government has piled into the game, and now quite a lot of projects that used to go on in places like National Labs, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc and at drug companies now goes to people making 30-60% for the first few years of their careers. Government sponsored research into the energy industry has, according to the President, reduced solar cell prices by something like 80% in twenty years. This shifts the aggregate supply curve to the right, making economic activity cheaper.

In normal times, that's a good thing. Productivity goes up, inflation stays under control. In times like these, government research spending is actually deflationary. Ask Japan. On the other hand, if the Henry-Waxman climate bill actually does anything to increase the costs of emitting carbon, it will spur private sector investment, since it will be cheaper for large companies to plow money into the private economy than the government.

Shifting the AS curve left is an inflationary move. We're entering a deflationary cycle. We've got simultaneous climate, energy and debt problems to solve, and we the taxpayers own a car company that we really want to make money selling small cars.

Wild black raspberry and zante current pie

2009-07-13T22:23:00.003-04:00

The day after we picked a whole lot of wild black raspberries, the local supermarket had a 1lb box of zante currents, basically tiny fresh seedless grapes on the clearance rack. The box was damaged, but the fruit looked fine, so home they came, visions of culinary adventures dancing in our heads. They taste kind of like extra-sweet concord grapes, and so blend very nicely with the tartness of the raspberries.

Ingredients:

1 whole wheat double crust
1lb zante currents
~1lb wild black raspberries
2/3 cup + 2T sugar
3T cornstarch

Procedure:

1) Roll the crust into a deep dish pie plate, preheat the oven to 400F

2) Mix the fruit and most of the sugar together. Stir the 2T sugar and constarch in a small bowl. Slowly and gently mix the cornstarch into the fruit mixture.

3) (If you have a pie bird, this is a good recipe for it) Pour the fruit mix into the pie shell, cover with the top crust. Poke a few holes near the edge to see pie juices bubbling through.

4) Bake for 25min, reduce oven temp to 375F and bake another 25min or until juices bubble thickly at the edge.

Grilled Wild Black Raspberry Pie

2009-07-08T11:45:00.002-04:00

This one stretches the definition of "pie" considerably. But, it is made from a pizza crust, it doesn't fit other categories well, and I, the pie maker, made it. More importantly, it's extremely tasty.

It started when I had one more pizza crust than toppings while making grilled pizzas last night (incidentally, if you have vegetarians at a BBQ, this is the way to go. Also, great way to make pizza during the summer without heating up the house). I also happened to have more wild black raspberries than I know what to do with, and a bit of brown sugar.

Ingredients:

on the grill:
1 roughly fist sized ball of pizza dough
1 cup wild black raspberries (other berries should work)
2-3T brown sugar

after grilling:
1T butter, melted
~1T powdered sugar for sprinkling
2 scoops ice cream

Procedure:

Let the grill cool a bit after grilling the pizza, so that you can hold a hand over the coals for about 7s. A good way to do this is enjoy the grilled pizzas and a tall beverage while the grill is covered.

Carefully mix the berries and sugar in a bowl.

Stretch the dough ball into a rough circle 12" across (probably best to use a rolling pin)

Place the berry mix in the middle, fold up the crust around it, and place on the grill. Cover, let sit about 5min, and roll onto the opposite side, wait 5min or so, and then cook the remaining two sides.

Place the baked pie-tube on a plate, pour and smear the melted butter over the top. Sprinkle with powered sugar. Serve immediately with two scoops of ice cream and two spoons or forks.

2009-07-07T00:05:00.002-04:00

Someone pointed out to me recently that I must have been busy, since nothing happened here for a couple months. Well, I don't know if I'm less busy, but there's some things going on in the world that I'm having trouble sorting out. Read on, if you wish, and swing by for a slice if you care to discuss.

Harry Shearer had perhaps the best insight into the recent Palin resignation on last week's "Le Show": "The crucial difference between . . . politics and showbusiness is that in politics you have to read your negative reviews and answer your critics." This, I think, is the real difference between those politicians who we say get bad press, and those who we think are media darlings. There's plenty of articles and opinion pieces critical of the current US president, but he's very good at elegantly ducking tough questions. Watch a White House press conference some time, this guy is good. Also, his team is good, and by spreading ownership of major initiatives around, it seems like half of the Hill is figuring out responses to criticisms as fast as they come out.

Consider, as an alternative to this rather elegant criticism anechoic chamber, the family-friendly sitcom. In these series, when offense is given, it is typically the responsibility of the offender to deal with the hurt feelings. If there is mutual offense, then per our Western Humanist value set, all parties are responsible restoring harmony. Occasionally, there are characters who come along to show that there are people who don't share these values, and they are roundly condemned and held as an example of what not to do. If you feel like I'm describing a Fox News or MSNBC broadcast, you may be on to something.

Is it terribly surprising, then, that a generation of people used to watching conflicts resolve themselves in favor of the character with whom they identify have problems with civil discourse? That they would have trouble believing that it's important for people with whom they identify (say, likable politicians who come on TV after the sitcoms) to engage with people who don't share those common values? These canned conflicts remind me of canned pie filling, overly sweet with all of the flavor beaten out of them. Other periods in history have had their problems, and you will never hear me say that any particular technology "ruined" humanity (although coal-fired power plants are doing their darnest right now). This, however, is the problem of our age in the United States today.

I could be completely wrong. Certainly, despite having an uncomfortably close view of the transition of the GOP from the "elites" to the "Right," I don't have all the answers. Ted Koppel put it well in a Talk of the Nation appearance when he described an "Age of Entitlement", all people have the ability to choose a news outlet that presents everything from their point of view. As a frequent reader of the BBC, Economist, and Reuters news services and NPR station member, I want my information presented with a Western Humanist slant that is extremely cautious about saying which side it "right" (with the exception of the self-professed "mouthpiece of global capitalism" that ironically argues very well for certain social programs). I will not get into the post-modern nihilistic navel-gazing and question if my view is necessarily better because, frankly, wisdom comes not from reinforcement of beliefs but questioning and learning the limits of them.

This is a painful process. Human history, and the fall of representative governments especially, is full of people turning away from the pain in favor comfortable mediocrity (read The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University for a lot good essays on the subject). It can't be made less painful, but a good pie makes it easier to sit down to deal with difficult issues, just promise to be civil about disagreements at my table.

Mulberry-Rhubarb Pie

2009-07-01T09:20:00.002-04:00

Mulberry trees are common throughout the temperate zones of the world, having spread from south and southeast Asia on the decks of British ships to many places around the world. Their fruit is very delicate, a bucket of mulberries will quickly crush the bottom layer into juice, which has severely limited their commercialization. They do show up in processed form as juice, wine or coloring extracts. However, if you are lucky enough to live near a stand of them, they are effectively free for the taking as long as they are bearing fruit, generally throughout the early summer.

Being very sweet on their own, it's helpful to add something tart to give a pie a more full-bodied flavor. Citrus might work, but that's a winter fruit, and we're all about being seasonally appropriate here. The obvious choice is rhubarb. The combination works remarkably well with the whole wheat crust.

Ingredients:
1 double-crust worth of whole wheat crust
4 cups mulberries
3 cups rhubarb
3/4 cup + 2T sugar
2T cornstarch

Procedure:

Roll out the bottom crust into a 13" circle and place into a 9.5" deep dish pie pan. Preheat the oven to 400F.

Combine the fruit and .75C sugar in a bowl, carefully stir to mix (the mulberries are delicate, so don't push them too hard). Combine the remaining sugar and cornstarch in a small bowl, then mix carefully into the fruit mixture.

Pour carefully into the pie pan, add a lattice top, and bake for about 40min. The pie is done when the juices bubble thickly, I've had to add an aluminium heat shield to the rim at about 30min.

Let cool thoroughly.