Tag: society

Vaclav Smil on why we need manufacturing, vegetarianism, and less innovation

When Bill Gates says:

I’ve talked before about my favorite author Vaclav Smil. He doesn’t pull any punches in this @WIRED interview

I know it will be an interview worth reading. So I head over and find an excellent interview with Vaclav Smil

Here are some excerpts:

Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why?

In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

and

Restoring manufacturing would mean training Americans again to build things?

Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts.

On food:

Your other big subject is food. You’re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people—if we eat less meat and waste less food.

We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals while feeding them antibiotics. And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.

Meat eaters don’t like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don’t like me because I say there’s nothing wrong with eating meat. It’s part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains. The problem is with eating 200 pounds of meat per capita per year. Eating hamburgers every day. And steak.

You know, you take some chicken breast, cut it up into little cubes, and make a Chinese stew—three people can eat one chicken breast. When you cut meat into little pieces, as they do in India, China, and Malaysia, all you need to eat is maybe like 40 pounds a year.

On “innovation” as the solution to all our problems:

“Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”

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The connection between nutrition and social status

Did you know that younger daughters-in-law in rural India have shorter children on an average? And that there is a perfectly good explanation for it?

A very interesting article in the The Hindu points to new evidence that the unequal social status of women plays a significant role in the fact that they’re undernourished.

Apparently, India has “inexplicably” high levels of under-nutrition.

For its per capita income, India has stubbornly higher than expected levels of stunting and under-weight among children and adults — the so-called “Asian enigma”

and

there has been a growing acknowledgement, including by Dr. Sen himself, that food consumption alone does not explain the scale of India’s under-nutrition.

The explanation is this:

A growing body of evidence is also now showing that the low social status of women — something difficult to capture statistically — could be a big part of the explanation. A new working paper by economists Diane Coffey, a PhD candidate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University; Reetika Khera of the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi; and Mr. Spears has shown that the younger daughters-in-law in a rural joint family have shorter children on average.

While this is no longer the typical Indian family, it provides a rare econometric measure of “social status.” Sure enough, the younger daughters-in-law “report having less say in a range of household decisions; they spend less time outside the home on a normal day than [the older] daughters-in-law; and, they have lower body mass index [BMI] scores than their [older] counterparts,” the researchers find, using official National Family Health Survey data.

This is a serious concern.

Recent research by Angus Deaton, Professor of Economics at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs and leading global expert on poverty and nutrition in the developing world, has shown that Indian women’s nutrition is undeniably not improving at the same pace as men’s. Mr. Deaton has found that Indian men’s heights are growing at nearly three times the rates of women and the gap is widening

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