Friday Fungus: On fungal economics - yeast or mushroom?

Or rather fungal metaphors in economics:

Arnold Harberger offered a nice metaphor thinking about this difference in his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association back in 1998, entitled "A Vision of the Growth Process" and published in the March 1998 issue of the American Economic Review. Harberger discusses whether economic growth is more likely to be like "mushrooms," in the sense that certain parts of a growing economy will take off much faster than others, or more like "yeast," in the sense that economy overall expands fairly smoothly overall. He argues that "mushroom"-type growth is more common.

Of course both yeast and mushrooms are fungus but the metaphor in question is made better still if we understand what's happening in the two processes. Harberger sees only the fruiting heads of the mushrooms - the visible manifestation of a symbiotic growing system:

Mycorrhizal partnerships are symbiotic, or mutually beneficial, relationships between plants and fungi, which take place around the plant's roots. While there are many species of fungus which do not form these partnerships, the vast majority of land plants have mycorrhizas (from the Greek mykes: fungus and rhiza: root), and many plants could not survive without them. Fossil records show that roots evolved alongside fungal partners and that fungi may have been crucial in helping plants evolve to colonise the land, hundreds of millions of years ago.

Broadly speaking, there are two main kinds of mycorrhiza: Arbuscular mycorrhizas penetrate the cells of their host's roots, and most plants develop this type. Ectomycorrhizas surround the roots without penetrating them. Trees may form either type, and some form both. In each case there is cell-to-cell contact between the plant and the fungus, allowing nutrient transfer to take place.

So not only is Harberger's view of growth correct - it's unpredictable in its location, mushroom-like - but when we look closer he has a fascinating metaphor for the way in which that unpredictable growth affects the wider economy (extending mycorrhizas) and the society that economy feeds (the tree symbiote of the mushroom).

The yeast analogy, on the other hand, is a managed, planned and controlled system. That yeast converts the sugars in the dough into carbon dioxide and alcohol making the bread rise (and rise again as we bake off the alcohol). When it's baked the yeast is dead and we must start again if we want more bread. There is no beneficial system - everything is the result of external intervention.

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Choice

It was never simple was it? They just pretended that bread was bread and cheese was cheese. That slightly chewy off-white stuff - Mother's Pride or whatever - married to a slice of something akin to packaging material but somehow just falling within the trades descriptions act definition of cheese.

And the only way to make it palatable was to toast it and add some sauce - brown, red or, latterly, chilli. The tangy, spicy, vinigary-ness made up for the total blandness of the bread and cheese.

Now there is choice! Wonderful, exciting, confusing and adventurous choice. Black bread made with rye (hopefully without its lunacy-making fungal pal), sweet Jewish white bread studded with poppy seeds and breads with spelt or oats mixed in to make them, well... more spelty or oaty.

And that cheese - once there was cheddar and, if you were posh, red leicester and stilton. Now the table heaves with cheeses of every kind imaginable - soft cheeses made to spread on the bread, crumbly ones that make your mouth water with anticipation and fabulous blue cheeses, that perfect entwining of fungus and milk.

So we choose - sometimes we go with what we've tried before. But now and then we take a punt, we try something different - listening to the man at the counter we dip our toe into explosive welsh cheddar and the bread lady persuades to to try some bread made from a Croatian recipe. And we combine them, perhaps with a pickle or other condiment from an equally bewildering array, another fantastic choice.

And they try to tell us choice is bad? That we don't really want choice? And that someone else knows better what is good for us!

Right now, in education, health and social care most people are getting that barely digestible bread and that chewy cheese.  And others - who can buy their way out from that absence of choice - tell us this is the right way, the only way. And that choice is a bad thing.

They are wrong. Bread and cheese tells us they are wrong. Bring on the choice.

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Why does no-one in the media ever question what these people say?

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The "salt is evil' lobby have found a new target - bread:

A third of breads contain more salt than recommended under guidelines being introduced next year, a survey found.

Most breads were within the current guidelines of 1.1g of salt per 100g - but this is being cut to 1g per 100g.
Campaign for Action on Salt and Health (Cash), which looked at 300 breads, said it was "outrageous" that bread contained even the current level.

This is more junk science - there's very little evidence that fingers salt as a cause of high blood pressure yet the  media and worshippers at the Church of Public Health persist in the 'salt is bad for you line.

People who ate lots of salt were not more likely to get high blood pressure, and were less likely to die of heart disease than those with a low salt intake, in a new European study.

The findings "certainly do not support the current recommendation to lower salt intake in the general population," study author Dr. Jan Staessen, of the University of Leuven in Belgium, told Reuters Health.

Perhaps one day we'll start looking at the science?

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In which I explain logic to lefties (plus a little bit on taxes and benefits)

There are a lot of welfare cheats. This isn’t me being some kind of rabid, right-wing nutjob but a matter of uncontestable fact. It may be only about 3% or so out of the total budget (although how on earth this is calculated , God alone knows) but that represents a lot of people fiddling the system.

Speak with anybody who works with poor communities and they will relate stories of families taking the benefits system to the cleaners. They’ll also tell you about people who the system seems to leave high and dry for no apparent reason. Quite simply the system doesn’t work and hasn’t been working since at least the mid-1980s when Carla Lane wrote ‘Bread’.

What fascinates me in all the debate around this issue is the tendency of some observers – let’s be frank, observers who learned their logic from the Ladybird Book of Marxim-Leninism – to instantly draw a parallel with tax ‘dodging’ (this term avoids the need to make any distinction between ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’). Now let me try and explain how this argument is crap (a technical term for ‘without any coherent logical basis’).

Let’s start with the premise that both fiddling benefits and dodging taxes are wrong. We’ll return to the tax point in a minute but right now we’re assuming that this is the case. Surely it is right and proper for Government to take action to catch wrongdoers – whether they are welfare cheats or tax-dodging businessmen? So criticising the decision to try and reduce welfare fraud on the basis that not enough is done to reduce tax fraud is plainly an utter nonsense. It may be the case that not enough is being done to catch tax dodgers – you might me entirely right to criticise the Government for this inaction. But this debate is entirely unrelated in any way to the debate about catching people who fiddle benefits.

It is possible to scope a series of possible ‘positions’ on the two subjects but they are not connected. The Government deciding to clamp down on benefit fraud does not result in a few hundred tax dodgers elsewhere breathing a sign of relief knowing they’re now off the hook! And it is perfectly possible for Government to clamp down on both tax dodgers and welfare cheats (they may or may not be doing this but it is perfectly possible).

And just for the record the taxman’s been getting pretty good at reducing routine tax evasion (which is very different from ‘closing loopholes’, the use of which, ipso facto, isn’t tax avoidance):

“The money gleaned from reluctant taxpayers, both personal and corporate, has risen from £1.13bn in 1991-92 to a staggering £9.17bn in 2006-07. The money has come from a wide range of sources: from individuals and companies who had simply failed to fill in their forms, to investigations of outright tax dodgers.”

If you’re going to criticise the targeting of benefit fraud, can you at least do it on the basis of logic rather than just shouty prejudice?

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