And back to econometrics

Back in September of last year, I proposed an economic index with the playful title of Pie Making Capacity in Nation, with the acronym "PMCIN", pronounced "pumpkin". I laid out some suggestions early on about how to compute it, but never went any farther. Now to see if I can implement those, and give us a more objective measure of how "pie friendly" various policies are.

Rather than try to do it all at once, I think I'll take a lesson from my own craft and work in stages. First, the "crust": the basic necessity of food. The fundamental question of pie making capacity is this: is enough food grown, harvested and available for everyone to meet basic needs and have enough left for a pie each week?

A good source of such data is the USDA website. They issue a regular World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) that breaks down production of various types of food. From this, it's pretty easy to subtract a healthy diet for a standard population, and then divide up the remainder by the amounts needed for pie making. Once I'm in the "wait for video processing" stage of my dissertation, I will try to write the script that collects that information and put it up on the blog as a widget. People willing to volunteer IT help will be rewarded.