Promoting Marriage is a Conservative Issue. Period.

Rob Portman's recent turn towards supporting gay marriage is further indication of the coming change of the GOP. While there will be bumps along the way, it's obvious that there's already an intellectual framework in place from moderates within the party. Take, for example, Jon Huntsman's recent article in The American Conservative. As he writes,

It’s difficult to get people even to consider your reform ideas if they think, with good reason, you don’t like or respect them. Building a winning coalition to tackle the looming fiscal and trust deficits will be impossible if we continue to alienate broad segments of the population. We must be happy warriors who refuse to tolerate those who want Hispanic votes but not Hispanic neighbors. We should applaud states that lead on reforming drug policy. And, consistent with the Republican Party’s origins, we must demand equality under the law for all Americans.

While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens. I did so not because of political pressure—indeed, at the time 70 percent of Utahns were opposed—but because as governor my role was to work for everybody, even those who didn’t have access to a powerful lobby. Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of.

That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry. I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.

Liberals might scoff at the idea of changing the Republican Party's policies simply for the sake of attracting more votes, but this is much more common than our partisan political landscape when lead us to believe. Fiorini's research, for example, points out that that ideological positions tend to be quite flexible. This shouldn't surprise anyone, since America isn't that ideological to begin with. The members of the two main parties are sorting into more clearly defined groups, not becoming more extreme. While the actual effect on Congress is slightly different, its obvious that the mainstream discussion about "polarization" is clearly off the mark.

I think identity issues could remain separate from this sorting process. We already have a prominent group of gay Republicans in Washington, proving that gayness is not a prohibiting factor for having strong conservative inclinations. Huntsman's gutsy statements deserve accolades because he shows that Republicans can focus on these factors and stop being a party defined by a narrow set minority interests: those of old, religious, wealthy white men. I think our political process will be substantially improved once this happens, and I don't think a wave of moderation is all that far away. Enough influential people (including guys like Karl Rove) have seen that firebrand conservatism is a huge liability for any major election. The process is not all that different from what Democrats did in the 80's.

The agent of all this change is vote chasing. Deride it all you want, but a politician's primary job is to get people to vote for him. They can't stay employed otherwise. Competition has the added benefit of making politicians more responsive to the demands to the public. Political scientists have seen this a lot already. The ideology of parties and politicians can be successfully shaped by forces that can get them elected. In the past, private and public organizations - businesses, unions and advocacy groups - did most of that work. The more participatory system provided by broad-based action committees show the way in the future.

We should obviously be worried when this process begins to favor uncompetitive practices (like gerrymandering) or when diversity of organizations diminishes (when was the last time you heard of an influential American union?). But at the same time, we should be celebrating politicians who are committed to getting as broad a number of supporters as possible, embodying the very best of the democratic process. Even better when they go against the broad positions established by their party, since it can lead to organizational change, increased competition and an even greater number of people included in the political process. And for that, I'm now a huge fan of Jon Huntsman.

Learning to Love the Bubble

I just got back from vacation, where I did a lot of reading. (You can check that out here, if anyone cares)

I've been taking a break from explicit economics and politics books for a little while, since the debate has been feeling a little stale since the election. I think a lot of people are feeling the same way about domestic issues and fiscal issues in particular, and I don't think that it will last very long. But despite my efforts, I keep getting drawn back into that old aphorism: you can talk the boy out of the economics, but you can't take the economics out of the boy.

So, you can't imagine my delight when, after going through books on the evolution of technology and nonlinear systems, I stumbled across this gem, a conversation with "practicing theoretician" Bill Janeway. While the speech covers some liberal standards like the role of government, it also has some wonderful points about financial instability, speculation and complexity.

Here's the basic message: an economy is structured around its technologies.* That technology is supported by basic scientific research. Since much of that research does not show any short- or medium-term economic function (number theory took 55 years to lead to Google), some major institution, either the government of state-supported monopolies, has to provide it. While this kind of research is a public good, it can be considered relatively wasteful from a short-term, profit-oriented economic standpoint. There's not many opportunities for profit-seeking firms in competitive markets to make this investment.

But without these investments in fundamental research, technological growth stalls out.** We're seeing some of that right now, since we've become stingier and stingier about fundamental research since Reagan. During the Bush years, public funding for research universities declined by 20 percent. The current fiscal environment is obviously not helping anything.

Everyone here has heard this argument from me in the past. It's standard liberal boilerplate. But here's where this starts to get interesting.

The process of translating fundamental research to technologies, i.e. the basic economic process, is inherently nonlinear. An apt metaphor is phase transitions in a thermodynamic systems. For example, we can look at a piece of ice and say that it's going to melt, but we have incredible challenges when trying to predict the physical structure of the puddle of water that will emerge once that ice melts. What's more, basic substances exhibit all sorts of surprising behavior during phase transitions. Hydrogen is probably a superhot liquid metal on Jupiter. At certain levels of pressure and temperature, water (normally a non-conductive substance on its own) has incredibly high energy densities and conductive properties.

We can say similar things about entrepreneurship and its role in the greater economy. We know that technology drives economic progress, and we know that technology is essentially the application of fundamental scientific research to solving human problems. But it is nearly impossible to say what form that research will successfully take. It was not possible, in the 1960s, to see how cryptography will translate into America's largest online retailer, but that's exactly what happened.

Because of this fundamental uncertainty, economies must depend on speculation in order to spur the economic process of innovative entrepreneurship. This process is chaotic. Three out of four startups fail. Those that succeed offer returns that follow power laws instead of any sort of normal distribution. As Jack Altman explains, almost all of positive returns in the venture capital industry is concentrated among of very small number of firms. As he writes,

Venture capital is one obvious manifestation of power law distributions, but we see this phenomenon all over. In industries susceptible to the “superstar effect”, such as sports, movies, or politics, the outcomes of top performers tend to follow a power law curve. The best baseball player makes a lot more than than the 100th best player, who makes much more than the 1,000th best player. “A-list” actors do dramatically better than “C-list” actors, who do dramatically better than struggling artists in Manhattan. The president has much more power than senators, who have much more power than local officials, who have much more power than me.

When you take your time to think this concept, one conclusion is inevitable: bubbles are a natural part of financial activity. We've seen that in countless economic experiments already. Anytime there's uncertainty, people will become speculative. When they speculate, group psychology and feedback loops will cause asset prices to dramatically escalate from "fundamental value." People will fixate on their ability to buy and sell with the momentum, "flipping" assets instead of investing in a traditional buy and hold pattern. In fact, the appearance of bubbles are likely a necessary feature of reaching any sort of price equilibrium in the market at large. People need to get burned before they learn.

What's more, bubbles are an important and healthy part of the economy. They encourage innovation, as they flood emerging fields with venture cash. Even after they burst, the innovation they spurred remains in place, and the few companies that win the bubble race become mainstays of the economy for years to come. This includes Amazon and Google from the tech bubble, just as RCA, GE and IBM were important components of the postwar US economy. In both historical cases, speculation helped create the foundation of longterm growth.

Of course, this isn't meant to be an apology for all bubbles, as some clearly threaten the financial system more than others. But the inescapable fact is that speculation is an essential part of all market economies. We should be designing an economic system that embraces shocks instead of one that avoids them. In other words, we should be seeking ways of making economies robust. Recent research from the Fed mines this field, George Soros generated a lot of interest talking about something similar, and there's a field forming around "complexity economics" that essentially advocates the same thing.

Although complexity economics has been mostly hype for awhile, it has a persistent habit of reasserting itself into the national conversation. Maybe conditions are right for a better understanding of the economy as a dynamic system, with policies designed to encourage dynamism instead of surpress it. If not, at least complexity serves as a welcome break from the monotony of the current national economic debate.

*The details of this can be found in The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur.
**This is a riff on Tyler Cowen's argument in The Great Stagnation. 

The Political Economy of Corporate Speech

David Weigel at Slate has a very nice article on how the NRA helps stir up conspiracy theories after each massacre. You can think of them as a bit of guerrilla marketing. As he explains,

But what’s the point of debunking any of this? The theories don’t spread because they’re credible. They spread in part because of the confirmation bias of worried gun owners. And that’s actually been egged on, multiple times, by the National Rifle Assocation. The gun lobby might be the only credible group, with real clout, with the ability to bring presidential candidates to its conferences, to endorse the idea that the government would engage in a “false flag” operation. In 2011, as the Republican House of Representatives dug in on the “Fast and Furious” investigation, the NRA’s professional flak magnet Wayne LaPierre speculated that the Feds planned the debacle, to build momentum for gun control.

“Over a period of two or three years they were running thousands and thousands of guns to the most evil people on earth,” he said. “At the same time they were yelling ’90 per cent… of the guns the Mexican drug cartels are using come from the United States.’ ” It wasn’t a wild theory. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

The idea that the government is one short step away from a gun ban is actually integral to the lobby’s pitch. It’s implicit when the lobby brags about ammo sales at gun shows or AR-15s disappearing from the shelves. And give the NRA this: It’s not entirely wrong about the momentum of politics. At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre warned that the first-term Obama administration’s “lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.”

To understand LaPierre's conspiracy speech, you need to understand the NRA. While ostensibly a grass roots organization that is supposed to look out for the interests of its members, the NRA, in practice, is the chief lobbyist for the gun industry. This change in organizational outlook is relatively recent, as Walter Hicky explains. Most of the organization's money now comes from corporate support. In turn, this means that most of the organization's activity is directed towards supporting the corporations' material interests.

The use of conspiracy theory to support private financial ends is not a new phenomenon in public speech. Look at what the tobacco industry did to hide the link between smoking and lung cancer, employing every last marketing and PR trick to sow doubt in the public mind. Even though they were aware in the 1950s that cigarettes posed huge health benefits, they kept that charade going for 40 years. This is just more evidence that a company will say whatever it wants when it comes to the bottom line.

The tobacco comparison is especially apt, since the gun industry is in a similar position. Despite the fact that gun makers got a law passed in 2005 that is supposed to protect them from class action lawsuits (love your lobbyist!), and despite the fact that the Supreme Court is working tirelessly to kill off class action lawsuits (love your lobbyist even more!), that's clearly the direction we're heading in. As Hank Cardello writes in Forbes,

To be sure, the 2005 law enacted by Congress makes it difficult for firearm companies to be sued over the misuse of their products. But successful challenges to that law have already taken place. Last October, a New York appeals court unanimously held that a gunmaker, distributor, and dealer could be held liable for selling 181 “Saturday night specials” to a gun trafficking ring, which shot a Buffalo high school basketball star. And in light of Newtown, the cries for Congress to appeal the law have begun in earnest. As Vice President Joe Biden met last week with both sides in the gun debate, President Barack Obama vowed to enact new restrictions, with or without Congress. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing for a ban on assault weapons and allowing police to confiscate weapons from the mentally unstable; Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy is also calling for new restrictions.

As the anti-gun movement begins to hone its strategy, the blueprint is already in place for activists who want to pursue big legal settlements against gunmakers, using the same playbook that was successful against the tobacco industry. But unlike that industry, which staved off efforts to ban or curb smoking for decades before getting socked with a landmark $206 billion fine in 1998, U.S. gunmakers don’t have deep enough pockets to survive such challenges. Their industry profit margins are much smaller—8.5% on annual revenue of $11.7 billion, according to market researcher IBISWorld.

Both of the previous examples illustrate a classic political economy problem, and they should be framed accordingly. Government is a forum for organizations to compete over resources. These can be material (tax breaks) or not (favorable regulation), but it is the presence and relative strength of these organizations that determines what policy is passed.

Take assault weapons. I know that there's a lot to be said for the statistics of the amount of deaths that they cause, but that's for a different time. More importantly, despite the fact that a majority of Americans support a ban, the chances of seeing one pass are very slim. Why? Just follow the money, my friend. As Abram Brown explains,

Any sort of ban on modern sporting rifles will greatly affect the closely held Freedom Group and also impact Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger, too. Modern sporting rifles are among the most profitable weapons that gunmakers produced, says Rommel Dionisio, a Wedbush Securities analyst, as well as one of its fastest-growing segments. Freedom Group has said that modern sporting rifles are a useful tool in driving youth interest in firearms.

These types of rifles account for 20% or so of Smith & Wesson’s sales, Dionisio estimates. It’s probably a slightly smaller amount for Ruger. Ruger’s recent explosive growth has centered on its new compact handguns, made to take advantage of expanded concealed-carry laws. The White House did not specifically mention whether high-capacity pistols would be affected. New York has already limited large pistol magazines. If that went nationwide, customers could stop buying bigger, higher-margin pistols. These more profitable guns are primarily bought for enthusiasts to enjoy the added capacity in the clips.

When the benefits are concentrated but the costs are diffused, expect the minority to usually prevail. The gun companies have a lot to lose in the increased regulation of their product, so we shouldn't be surprised by the extreme actions taken by their lobbying group to protect their industry. Among lobbying groups, the NRA remains an impressive exception. It can attract all of the negative criticism for the industry directly to itself, allowing gun makers to "make the sausage" in government with almost no direct criticism. 

Nonetheless, the underlying framework remains the same, as most politics continues to follow the Golden Rule: where there is money, there is action. We shouldn't expect the industry to remain an exception for long. Conspiracy speech is no different than any other speech; it's generation almost always follows the same financial incentives, allowing us to understand it the same as any other PR or marketing trick.

Unusual Times Call for Unusual Coalitions

There's some really amazing things happening in the House right now that defy the common sense rules about how a majority party should govern. While this trend, so far, only concerns two bills, both were major votes that might actually inspire some optimism in the future, especially since the House needs to somehow pass an unconditional increase of the debt ceiling to avoid causing an economic catastrophe.

You might of heard that Speaker Boehner had to suspend the Hastert Rule in order to get the final package of taxes in place to get out of the fiscal cliff boondoggle. In case this kind of stuff normally puts you to sleep, the Hastert Rule is an operating procedure in the House where the majority party refuses to vote on any bill that a majority of its members don't support. It's mostly a power play. If the Republican party is control of the House, for example, it has an organizational incentive only pass those bills that a majority of Republicans support. If you fracture your party by passing bills that the party itself doesn't approve of, you put yourself in the future for infighting and losing your majority. This tends to be the reason that people equate party strength with disciplined, unanimous votes.

But the most conservative wing of the Republican party is obviously not capable of actually governing. You don't have to look any further than their rhetoric about the debt ceiling to recognize that they have completely lost themselves in the throes of their ideology. Here's how Politico explains the current framework of the debate. As Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman write,

The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

Republican leadership officials, in a series of private meetings and conversations this past week, warned that the White House, much less the broader public, doesn’t understand how hard it will be to talk restive conservatives off the fiscal ledge. To the vast majority of House Republicans, it is far riskier long term to pile up new debt than it is to test the market and economic reaction of default or closing down the government.

While the crazies make up a majority of the Republican party, they do not make up the majority of Congress. The recent increases in taxes shows that Congress can actually pass bills without them. This is the vote breakdown of the American Taxpayer Relief Act, courtesy of GovTrack.

What's more, the full Hurricane Sandy relief package followed the same pattern. Only 21 percent of House Republicans voted in favor of this bill, and yet it still passed! Here's the GovTrack breakdown for that bill.

If this trends holds, it will be the beginning of a coalition that is almost almost unprecedented in American politics: a majority party that passes bills with the majority of its members in dissent. Take some time to wrap your head around that.

Now liberals shouldn't start jumping for joy. This isn't a Democratic Congress, despite the need for the majority of Democrats to agree with any big bill that's going to become a law. This is a style of crisis politics that will be destructive even if every false deadline is met. This kind of coalition is highly unstable too; the House members crossing the aisle to form this bloc are pretty conservative themselves. The list of Republicans supporting the Sandy Bill includes people like Peter King, Eric Cantor and a bunch of rank files from the Northeast that have an obvious interest in Sandy relief. It would be naive to expect most of them to stick with the Democrats for more than just a handful of votes.

Even if 30 of these drop out, it would still be technically possible to pass a debt ceiling bill. While this is highly unlikely, it's still a strong indication of how much Republican dissent Congress will need to endure if it is going to get anything done. Any clean pass of the debt ceiling, the kind that the President is currently saying he won't back down on, is going to have a Yea column pretty similar to the Sandy Bill. That kind of vote would be a remarkable occasion, a clear sign that the inflexible ideological stance of the Tea Party will continue to force Congress to incredible extremes just to get anything done. We shouldn't be surprised if more seemingly possible coalitions emerge over the next few months.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 5

Many conservative websites are circulating the story of a mom who just stopped a home invader with a gun. As the AP reports,

A Georgia mother who shot an intruder at her home has become a small part of the roaring gun control debate, with some firearms enthusiasts touting her as a textbook example of responsible gun ownership.

Melinda Herman grabbed a handgun and hid in a crawl space with her two children when a man broke in last week and approached the family at their home northeast of Atlanta, police said. Herman called her husband on the phone, and with him reminding her of the lessons she recently learned at a shooting range, Herman opened fire, seriously wounding the burglary suspect.

It's an amazing story, and I can see why so many people are attached to it. But this is still perpetuating a common-held myth that guns somehow make you safer. The data point in the opposite direction. Having a gun in your home increases the probability of a person being shot by quite a bit. Having a gun in the home carries a high risk of accident, but it also substantially contributes to the number of suicides and the number of fatal domestic disputes. Since accidents and suicides alone make up the majority of gun deaths, decreasing these kinds of risks is the biggest area of gain that we can expect from gun control. Plenty of research points out that the presence of guns significantly increases the likelihood of a suicide being successful, and you can't even have gun accidents if there aren't guns in homes.

This isn't just limited to the home. The threat of escalating violence from carrying a gun is also significant. A 2008 study pointed out in The American Journal of Public Health that people that carry a gun are 4.5 times more likely to get shot and 4.5 times more likely to get killed than those that didn't carry. While this sort of survey suffers a demographic problem (who are the people carrying guns and getting shot), there's also strong evidence that having a gun around causes you to be more paranoid and aggressive, both obvious contributing factors to gun violence.

On the other hand, the likelihood of actually deterring a home invader is very low. I think people's attachment to this story is a result of the availability heuristic, what The Economist calls the anecdotal fallacy. We like little stories, especially those with drama where we can place ourselves in the protagonists shoes. But this appreciation of the emotional content of the story often leads us to dramatically overestimate the likelihood of their occurrence. It's not all different than the flip side of this heuristic, the irrational fear of rare events. You hear much more about people fearing flying more than driving, although the latter is much more dangerous than the former.

In a review of Atlanta police reports, the number of people that were shot by intruders who seized their gun was twice as high as the number of successful deterrences. In general (citing the same report), 

(a) genuine self-defense gun use is rare, (b) there are many ways that people defend themselves without a gun, and (c) many of these other methods may be as effective as selfdefense gun use in preventing injury. Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence does not indicate that having a gun reduces the risk of being a victim of a crime or that having a gun reduces the risk of injury during the commission of a crime.

While it makes deductive sense that "you should fight back because the police won't come," the opposite seems to be true. Almost all situations where the victim tried to engage their attacker directly increased their risk. In a variety of different instances, the best thing you can do is call the police and run away. It's true across a variety of crimes, not just home invasion. Here's the US Department of Justice on rape.

Despite my predilection for regularly trashing conservatives, there are still good conservative ideas that can be used to make us safer. The Left should actively embrace the typically conservative ideas of building community ties, whether that's through churches or other local organizations. One of the strongest tools for reducing violence is community intervention, using "violence interruptors" to diffuse dangerous situations. In a more general sense, we've seen tons of success from active community policing projects. There's a lot of conservative ideas about reducing gun violence that are bunk, but this one isn't: we can solve local problems easily if we are willing to build strong community ties.

GMO's and the Naturalistic Fallacy

People that are particularly opposed to GMO's like to reference the original ideals of the organic food movement. As Stephen Barret, quoting Robert Rodale, describes it, organic originally means

Food grown without pesticides; grown without artificial fertilizers; grown in soil whose humus content is increased by the additions of organic matter, grown in soil whose mineral content is increased by the application of natural mineral fertilizers; has not been treated with preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, etc.

For the record, I think these are very worthy ideals. I just differ in how I think we can actually achieve them. Unfortunately, we can't actually feed ourselves using "purely organic" techniques activists advocate. This was already true probably 50 or so years ago. The modern organic industry admits this too. As it is defined in the US, organic amounts to little more than a label to make you pay more for a product that is essentially the same. It amounts to nothing more than a bunch of giant companies preying on your bucolic fantasies about food production. 

These fantasies can be effectively summarized as the "naturalistic fallacy." It is the insistence that anything grown in the "natural way," however that's defined, is somehow better for you. That's obviously not true. Plenty of things can be "natural" and incredibly dangerous. Thousands of plants are poisonous. E. coli is a naturally occurring thing and catching it is still a rotten experience.

Even though organic food companies love to play up the "natural" side of their products, It's a common myth that organic somehow means "chemical free." While many of the massive food companies peddling organic products prey on the fact that you think that, it's absolutely not true. Organic farming uses lots of chemicals, and many of them are incredibly dangerous to human health. The two most popular of these are copper sulfate and pyrethrum, both of which are highly dangerous neurotoxins. In a report to Parliament in 1999, the Committee on European Communities actually concluded that copper sulfate is more toxic to humans than any synthetic pesticide, and it provides no additional environmental benefits either. In fact, that toxic copper solution that organic farmers use as a pesticide is not biodegradable, staying within the soil forever.

By amount of food produced, organic farmers actually use more pesticides. This becomes especially true once you start considering the amount of pesticide reduction offered by the newest generation of GM products. The infamous Bt protein that Alex Jones rants about in corn is regularly sprayed by organic farmers. Since it's applied externally, you have to spray it a lot. In India, for example, switching to Bt cotton has cut pesticide use by something like 80 percent.

But that's just pesticides. What about fertilizer use, which is causing "eutrophication," the poisoning of our water supply by the addition of too many foreign nutrients? Organic fertilizers (i.e animal manure) are just as guilty as artificial fertilizers. We also know that these fertilizers are incredibly dangerous, since they contain things like e. coli and salmonella. The e. coli outbreak from organic bean sprouts that started in Germany is just one of many examples of the problems with organic fertilizer. So, no, in this regard we can't really consider the chemical agents used in organic fertilizer safer either.

If you go back to the Mark Lynas article, you'll see that land usage is not some trite issue. It's a fundamental part of the debate, as it is a direct measurement of the impact agriculture makes on the environment. And it's not just yields either. Organic farms use at least a third more land as conventional farms, since manuring means leaving unproductive fields to sit for long periods of time (and you need to have animals around to supply that). If we switched exclusively to organic farming, for example, pretty much all of the world's forests would have to be chopped down. How is this an improvement?

Food activists are creating a false dichotomy by insisting that organic farming is somehow superior to conventional methods. All forms of technology, including GMO's, have an important role to play if we are to address the very real environmental challenges of the next twenty years. Using genetic engineering, for example, we will be able to develop staple the crops with the ability to fix their own nitrogen in the soil. This would be a huge environmental benefit, eliminating the need for most fertilizers. We will get even better at developing crops that do not need pesticides, respond better to droughts and provide much-needed nutrients to the world's poor. But getting there requires a much healthier attitude towards science. We have to drop our gut reactions to things that might seem initially scary, while conditioning ourselves not to fall for common myths because we find the labeling (like "natural" or "organic") to be emotionally satisfying.

GMOs and Waste

Waste is another red herring in the GMO debate that often comes up. That's not to say that food waste is not a huge global problem. It is. As Rebecca Smithers writes in The Guardian,

In the face of United Nations predictions that there could be about an extra 3 billion people to feed by the end of the century and growing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy, the IME is calling for urgent action to tackle this waste.

Their report, Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not, found that between 30% and 50% or 1.2-2bn tonnes of food produced around the world never makes it on to a plate.

In the UK as much as 30% of vegetable crops are not harvested due to their failure to meet retailers' exacting standards on physical appearance, it says, while up to half of the food that is bought in Europe and the US is thrown away by consumers.

And about 550bn cubic metres of water is wasted globally in growing crops that never reach the consumer. Carnivorous diets add extra pressure as it takes 20-50 times the amount of water to produce 1 kilogramme of meat than 1kg of vegetables; the demand for water in food production could reach 10–13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050.

It would be really nice if we could solve of the problems in the global food system using only waste reduction policies. And I would love to see more food saved as it would lead to more environmentally sustainable outcomes in general.

Unfortunately, there's a couple of problems with ending food waste as a perfect panacea. Both are economic in nature. A good portion of the food wasted was purchased and then spoiled, so there is no way to stop that. The food wasted due to farming practices might not have any use since you would expect farmers to sell this at any available market if they could.

Expanding the market is an option, but understand that this is hard with perishable things like food products. (Non-perishable food items, by definition, are not easily wasted so they have to be ruled out of this issue). Without expanding the market, you need to somehow alter behavior in the West. This would also be hard, since they derive no direct benefit from this (you're doing this to feed the poor). Look, for example, how hard it is just to make Americans recycle.

There is a second economic issue. It does not benefit people in poor countries much to have Westerners flood their markets with cheap food. This reduces their GDP, for example, and it probably ensures that they continue to suffer from poverty. Instead, you would want them to adopt farming practices that increase yields, as this leads directly to economic benefits for poor farmers. This is the primary benefit of using GM products, and we have seen this happen across a range of technologies. A report from PG economics has some of the impressive conclusions,*

• Mexico - yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybean of 9 percent.
• Romania – yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybeans have averaged 31 percent.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 15 percent with herbicide tolerant corn.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 24 percent with insect resistant corn.
• Hawaii – virus resistant papaya has increased yields by an average of 40 percent.
• India – insect resistant cotton has led to yield increases on average more than 50 percent.

This isn't to say that people concerned with food waste are wrong, per se. The West would benefit enormously from saving more of its food, as it would allow us to grow enough food to feed ourselves with the minimum amount of inputs (the very definition of sustainability). Sustainability will also be important in poorer countries too, since they will want to preserve as many of their resources and natural places as possible.

But most importantly, if you care about malnutrition in poor countries, you want to help them develop. GMOs are not the exclusive cure to this issue (institutions, trade and capital expansion are also crucial too), but it is a technology that helps provide that possibility.

*Although being in the biotech industry themselves, PG Economics has incentives to overstate the benefits of its products. Buyer beware.