The US government’s diet guidelines are starting to catch up with reality. As I noted here, the official Food Guide Pyramid is disastrously wrong, misinforming people about what to eat. Well, the pyramid is about to get an overhaul, based on new diet guidelines just released, as the New York Timesreports.
Of course, it would be simpler for the US Department of Agriculture simply to adopt the Healthy Eating Pyramid already introduced by Walter Willett of Harvard.
Economics is often called “the dismal science.” But as we’ve mentioned before (e.g. here), a handful of dismalscientists are taking a closer look not at what makes the economy hum, but at what puts smiles on our faces.
Research on moods and well-being has traditionally been in the domain of psychologists. But economists are increasingly drawn to these topics because, as this this Financial Times (UK) article details, traditional measures of economic output (including Gross Domestic Product) have become almost wholly decoupled from our sense of well-being. To wit:
Economic output as measured by GDP has risen steeply in recent decades in the developed economies but people have not been getting significantly happier…If the link between GDP and happiness no longer exists, one of the key objectives of government policy in keeping GDP on an upward trajectory is called into question.
And interest in the topic is spreading beyond academia. The Gallup Organization, one of North America’s top polling companies, is developing a phone survey to measure national well-being, based on the the work of happiness researchers. According to one of the economists working with Gallup, “If all goes well, we should be able to implement the method a year from now. I hope it could, years from now, become as important as GDP.”
Now that would be something to smile about.
The important thing in this Oregonian article is what’s left unsaid.
So here’s what is said: lumber production in Oregon last year surged to a 14-year high, fueled by the US homebuilding boom. For timber workers, that meant a little bit of good news: "The industry produced a rare, if tiny, employment gain statewide." Likewise, the previously torrid pace of mill closures slowed. But despite the high volumes of timber being harvested, there are still 20,000 fewer timber industry jobs today than there were in 1990. And even in last year’s boom, the industry used new technology, moreso than new employees, to meet demand for more two-by-fours. Worse, Oregon’s timber industry faces global competition from hundreds of timber companies in dozens of nations, and global price competition will continue to put the squeeze on Oregon’s timber producers.
So what’s left unsaid? Just this: the importance of the timber industry to the state’s employment picture has been steadily waning. And given current trends, that fact is not likely to change anytime soon.
Yesterday’s New York Times Sunday magazine has a terrific article on contaminants in human breastmilk—a subject that’s obviously of greatinterest to us.
It’s beautifully written, and a great overview of the topic. Definitely worth a read.
Update: Here’s one thing that I wish the author had stressed more: testing breast milk for contaminants is a good way of finding out what a baby might have been exposed to while still in the womb. The developing fetus is particularly sensitive to the effects of toxic chemicals—which makes many researchers far more concerned about prenatal exposures than about what’s in breastmilk. And as the article points out, research suggests that despite the presence of contaminants, breastfed babies still do better than their bottle-fed counterparts.
The Anchorage Daily Newshighlights a photo feature in the December 17 San Francisco Chronicle that we missed.
It shows before and after pictures of various Glacier Bay, Alaska, scenes. The effects of climate change are stunning.
See all the photos here.
Here’s one pair, both by the US Geological Survey.
Muir Inlet, 1941:
Muir Inlet, from the same spot, 2004:
As the Seattle Timesreports, the mayor of Seattle has proposed increased density in downtown, by changing zoning codes to allow taller, skinnier buildings. This step is welcome and long overdue. Pop a cork!
Two observations: Seattle’s vision for downtown is still modest compared with Vancouver’s, as I noted here.
And Seattle’s problem isn’t in vision but in implementation, as Parke argued here. The city says it wants downtown development but doesn’t make it very easy for developers to actually build downtown. The proposal doesn’t do much about that.
UPDATE: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a fuller piece today, January 10, by Jennifer Langston.
Today’s news that the Samish Tribe of northern Puget Sound is likely to regain fishing rights, reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is a case in point of the continued importance of the 1855 Treaties—which I discussed here.
Also, a Cascadian editor who knows his history reminded me that Leschi signed the 1855 Treaties for the Nisqually and has both a school and a neighborhood named for him. Are there other Indian leaders from 1855 who have been accorded the respect they deserve?
It looks as though the Washington Department of Ecology has taken another step towards banning PBDEs, the toxic flame retardants that now contaminate the bodies of Northwesterners at alarmingly high levels. They’ve just published an interim plan that recommends that the state legislature officially ban the manufacture, distribution and sale of some forms of PBDEs by 2006. Of course, those are also the forms that are already being phased out nationally, so that isn’t a particularly innovative recommendation.
More daringly, the plan calls for the departments of health and ecology to put together a list of products from which deca-PBDE, the most widely used form of the compounds, should be banned. While this is a far cry from an outright ban on deca-PBDE, which environmentalists had argued for, it’s controversial stuff: deca-PBDE is used in airplane manufacturing (paging Boeing…) and a bunch of consumer and office electronics. Of course, there are alternative flame retardants on the market for many of these products, and some companies are already looking to remove the compounds voluntarily. But this is one more step nudging manufacturers in the right direction.
A modicum of good news for Oregon’s economy: the state’s top economist believes that by spring Oregon will finally recover the number of jobs that it lost in the aftermath of the 2000 recession. That is, barring energy price spikes, surging interest rates, or stock dives. So it’s a cautious prediction.
But even if the prediction comes true, the state’s unemployment rate will likely remain higher than the national average for the foreseeable future. In fact, the most recent stats (November 2004) show Oregon with the highest unemployment rate, 7.1, of any state besides Alaska.
Oh, and one other caveat. In the four-plus years it has taken Oregon’s economy to (nearly) regain its 64,500 lost jobs, the state’s population has grown by around 164,000. A growing population—and its corollary, a growing labor force—means that Oregon must add jobs just to keep unemployment rates steady, let alone make up for lost ground. And there’s a lot of ground to make up: in 2000, for instance, Oregon boasted an unemployment rate of just 4.9, just a tad higher than the national rate.
Real estate prices are rising quickly all across British Columbia (as this Vancouver Sun article mentions). In the past year alone, the total value of assessed property in the province grew by 17 percent. Demand has been fueled by a hot economy and low interest rates.
Not surprisingly, luxury real estate—waterfront property and the like—appreciated fastest, with rises in some areas of 50 percent in a single year. But perhaps more suprisingly, the value of residential properties in downtown Vancouver—including the sky-high condos—also grew faster than the provincial average. Downtown condo and townhouse prices increased by 24 percent. In contrast, the price of upscale homes in West Seattle west Vancouver suburbs grew by 16 percent. In percentage terms, at least, that makes downtown real estate the better investment. [Note: edited to correct typo.]
