30th June 2021. Numbers | Food
The trouble with numbers; world food price inflation
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A guest post by Peter Curry
What can I say? I like numbers. Watching numbers change holds a strange fascination for me. In a Scottish museum I once spent thirty minutes staring at a scoreboard estimating the world’s population, as it ticked ever upwards. I’m a big fan of sabermetrics, and of Moneyball, and of calculating whether football players should take inswingers or outswingers from corners.
But football leads a charmed life, because whatever you calculate, whether it’s how to retain possession from throw-ins, or where to shoot from, it still relies on a lot of randomness, and players continue to win games by doing things that the statistics imply shouldn’t work.
It’s difficult to model. In this way, football is like life, or at the very least much more important. But L. M. Sacasas makes the excellent point on his Convivial Society blog that baseball, a sport which can be modelled more precisely, has suffered from the numbers.
For instance, Alan Jacobs writes how the diversity of ‘style’ in baseball was destroyed by sabermetrics. Teams no longer bunt, they no longer sacrifice fly; instead the game follows strange patterns of statistically driven punch and counter-punch:
Sabermetrics has shown that batters get more hits, and more extra-base hits, if they pull the ball. In turn, the increased dominance of pull-hitting has led defenses to employ shifts that place fielders in the most likely paths of balls hit by any given batter. And then batters have responded to these shifts by realizing that it doesn’t matter where the fielders are if you hit the ball out of the park. So: more and more batters swinging for the fences, hitting more home runs than ever, and accepting historically high levels of strikeouts as just the inevitable collateral damage. Pitching, meanwhile, has taken note of those big swings and gone more and more to plus-95mph fastballs as the best defense against them.
(Baseball has been wrecked by metrics. Photo by Pierre Olivier Carles/flickr, CC BY 2.0
Sacasas points out that much of the logic of optimisation and quantification is about turning the qualitative into measurable:
Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it.
This is a point that I’ve seen consistently. For instance, from the Pull Request:
If your only metric for judging a worldview is its ability to predict empirical outcomes like lab experiments, then empiricist worldviews are all you’ll ever accept (and by the way, lab experiments are all you’ll ever be able to talk about).
Cory Doctorow makes a related point on his Pluralist blog:
Prior to the neoliberal revolution of the Reagan years, antitrust concerned itself with “harmful dominance," with regulators asking whether mergers and commercial practices were bad for the world. Obviously, "bad for the world" is hard to measure. Regulators evaluated claims from all corners: both political scientists worried about the outsized lobbying power of large companies and workers worried about monopolies' outsized power over wages and conditions got a say. So did environmentalists, urban planners, and yes, economists, too.
In Doctorow’s eyes, the problems began when:
The Chicago Boys - led by Robert Bork, a Nixonite criminal and a sort of court sorcerer to Reagan - demanded that qualitative measures be left behind in favor of a purely quantitative analysis of whether a monopoly hurt "consumer welfare."
There’s a clear parallel here with the world of "personal productivity", the world where meditation is a task to be done in the same way as dishwashing. As Melissa Gregg suggests:
Personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.
The logic is redolent of Scott Siskind’s essay, ‘Meditations on Moloch’, which points out that many systems which optimise for something (and especially those that use markets to optimise themselves), and end up with everyone at the same relative status, but with the absolute level being much worse than before.
So how do you escape the quant trap? Sacasas again:
As (Jacques) Ellul warned, technique here referring to quantised use of technology becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself. This may happen because we ourselves lose sight of the ends we were originally seeking or because the focus on technique itself gradually blinds us to those ends.
So the solution is likely to be systems that place emphasis on the ends instead of the means. A practical way of implementing this is suggested by Roman Krznaric:
One approach is to have Citizens’ Assemblies that focus on long-term issues, such as the management of nuclear waste, embedded into our democratic processes. Because all the evidence shows that Citizens’ Assemblies taken from random selections of a diverse range of people are much better at long-term policy focus than our current myopic politicians.
Thinking long-term helps to draw out qualitative values instead of quantitive ones, because we don’t have quantitive values for thirty years in the future. We are forced to think qualitatively, and to question what we actually want.
The IMF’s blog has some useful charts on global inflation in the food sector, which point out that inflation in the food sector pre-dated the pandemic, although the pandemic hasn’t helped.
They will also be pushed up further in due course by increases in shipping and fuel costs, although these have not yet worked their way into food prices:
Ocean freight rates as measured by the Baltic Dry Index (a measure of shipping costs) have increased around 2-3 times in the last 12 months while higher gasoline prices and truck driver shortages in some regions are pushing up the cost of road transport services.
And prices paid to food producers have increased sharply over the last 12 months, since April 2020. Producer prices overall are up by almost half: prices of stables such as soybean and corn have more or less doubled:
The reasons: mostly high levels of demand, plus global weather events:
There are three main factors behind the recent rally in producer prices: (1) Demand for staples for both human consumption and animal feed has remained high, especially from China, as countries have stockpiled food reserves due to pandemic-related worries about food security. (2) The recent 2020-2021 La Niña episode—a global weather event occurring every few years—has led to dry weather in key food exporting countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States... As demand has outpaced supply, US and world stocks-to-use ratios—a measure of market tightness—reached multi-year lows for some staples. (3) Strong demand for biofuels increased speculative demand by non-commercial traders.
In short: food price inflation is most likely here to stay for a couple of years.
j2t#125
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