Mark Kastel and his colleagues at the Cornucopia Institute in Wisconsin are keeping a close eye on how factory farms sneak into organic agriculture by exploiting loopholes in federal regulations. Writing in the Nation, Felicia Mello comes up on the same problem from the workers' point of view.

As anyone who's tried it knows, growing plants organically involves subsituting labor (weeding) for capital (a bottle of herbicide). Mello gives the figures for Grimmway, a California megafarm growing baby carrots: "In a conventional field, one worker can spray weeds with pesticides at a cost of $30 per acre . . . .  Organic farming requires crews of laborers for weeding that can cost up to $1,000 per acre."

Are the workers at least better off for not having to deal with pesticides?  Yes, but not as much as environmentalists such as myself would think.  Between 1990 and 1999, almost half of the major insurance claims (i.e., more than $5,000) paid to California farmworkers were for strain injuries.  Just 1.5 percent had to do with pesticides. Cesar Chavez knew what he was doing when he made outlawing the short-handled hoe a cause.

Organic growers aren't much more likely to favor farmworker unions than are conventional growers. Mello does profile one grower who's making a go of it with a union contract, but more typical is the single mother farmworker who told her, "I buy food grown with chemicals so I can save to buy something else."

Read the whole thing.

FYI: Industrious Gristmill blogger David Roberts asks if there are ways to get people to "care about the broader food system," but suggests only flavor or distance-traveled labeling. Mello reports that there is already an organized effort at some kind of social labeling as well.

"In the summer of 1997, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted what seemed a harmless offer to join a panel of eight other scientists investigating the safety of the common weed-killer atrazine."

If you get to read anything longer than a paragraph this week, read the whole thing at Harpers.org. 

I'm no fan of the American Enterprise Institute, the D.C. policy shop that harbors Michael "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business" Ledeen.  But as far as I know, AEI's Nicholas Eberstadt is trying to understand reality, and his latest article aims a powerful destructo beam at the way the U.S. has defined poverty since the mid-60s.

The poverty line, which is now built into all kinds of government helping programs, was drawn up by a woman, Mollie Orshansky, who had first-hand experience with hunger. The line is essentially three times a minimum food budget, a level below which "everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity." Though adjusted for inflation, it's meant to measure absolute poverty (eating vs. not eating), not relative poverty (eating hamburger vs. foie gras). A War on Poverty wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

The percentage of Americans in poverty, as officially defined, dropped sharply during the 60s, but since 1973 it's either leveled off or risen a bit. "We have had a generation with basically no progress against poverty," the University of Michigan's Sheldon Danziger told the New York Times in 2004. "The economic growth is not trickling down to the poor."

Well, that's what the official definition would lead you to believe. About one American in eight (12.7 percent) lived below the official poverty line in 2004, compared to one in nine (11.1 percent) in 1973. So all those people must be just as bad off in real terms as they were three decades before, right?

Well, embarrassingly enough, no. They're better off. Eberhardt writes:

• "According to the National Pediatric Surveillance System of the CDC, the percentage of low-income children under five years of age who were categorized as underweight (in terms of BMI for age) dropped from 8 in 1973 to 5 in 2003."

• "In 1970, almost 27 percent of poverty-level households were officially considered overcrowded [i.e. more than one person per room]. By 2001, according to the AHS [American Housing Survey], just 6 percent of poor households were 'overcrowded'--a lower proportion than for nonpoor households as recently as 1970." Since 1980 the average heated square footage per household member among the poor has risen from 371 to 472.

• In 1972, about 40 percent of households in the bottom fifth of income had a car; in 2003, more than 60 percent did. "For all forms of motor transport, U.S. poverty households' ownership levels in 2003 matched overall U.S. families' auto ownership levels from the early 1960s."

• In the early 1970s, 60 percent of poverty-level adults had untreated cavities; by the late 1990s, the rate was 40 percent.

If the poor were really just as poor in 2004 as in 1973, none of this would be happening--and it's easy to imagine an alternative present in which it hadn't been. The poverty line isn't measuring what we think it is.

As Eberstadt firmly states, none of this implies that everything is fine, or that relative deprivation doesn't matter. It does imply that our yardstick for measuring absolute poverty is badly broken.

He suggests several reasons why it isn't doing the job Mollie Orshansky had in mind.  The most interesting is that people's incomes are a lot more variable than they used to be, especially at the low end. A Census Bureau survey found that "at some point during the four years 1996-1999, fully 34 percent of the [non-institutionalized] population spent two months or more below the poverty line. On the other hand, just two percent of the population spent all 48 months of 1996-99 below the poverty line."  (That rate was over five percent for blacks and Hispanics, something Eberstadt probably wouldn't mention if he were acting as a shill for conservative policies.) Since almost all the blog posts I can find on this subject are conservatives jumping to conclusions and yukking it up, note that this bit of evidence might well argue against lifetime limits on welfare assistance.

Anybody know of any evidence that the poverty line really is measuring what it's supposed to be measuring?

• Boeing's new plane emits no CO2, only water. Of course, it's a two-seater that maxes out at 70 MPH.  Treehugger picks up on a Sunday Times report. Scientific American has more.

   

• There's fantasy everything--even Texas high-school football and dog shows, reports Mental Floss.

• Baby math. "Babies ranging from six to nine months old looked at incorrect solutions 1.1 seconds longer than correct ones." Check it out at Seed magazine.
  

• Bitch. Ph.D. offers parent hacks: "3yo can be a pest, especially if she knows there is a big trip coming. Mrs. Nym bought a cheap calendar, and we're x-ing off the days. 3yo can count them down. We also draw little icons for events we're planning, which gives her a sense of what will be happening. Net result: much less pestilence. On that subject." More here.

• More porn, less rape? So claims Northwestern law prof Anthony D'Amato. Well, he has a correlation anyway.  (Hat tip to Undernews.) Ann Bartow and commenter Patrick Seamus ask some hard questions at Feminist Law Professors.

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• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

• Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to "keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives--or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces." (Hat tip to kottke.)

• Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he'd learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: "First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, 'Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.' Just say, 'Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'" (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

• Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: "I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex--even though that might be true." Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant's sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

• Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: "The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

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Last year the journal Social Research had a special issue on "busyness," in which Robert Levine, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, wrote:

"Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like 'the time of a rice cooking' (about half an hour) or 'the frying of a locust' (a quick moment).  Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying 'the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted' (less than fifteen minutes).  Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term 'pissing while'--not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability."  (It's in the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites usages as far back as Shakespeare.)

Does anyone have personal experience with marking time this way, rather than clockwise?