Seeing Sarah Palin’s recent witticism:
It’s no wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody you need to breast feed your babies … the price of milk is so high!
I was reminded of Dan Quayle’s quip during the 1988 campaign:
The governor of Massachusetts, he lost his top naval adviser last week. His rubber ducky drowned in the bathtub.
And this got me wondering: how often do legitimate political figures–not talk show hosts, but actual politicians–communicate via schoolyard-style taunts?
I’m not talking here about dry wit of the Bob Dole or Morris Udall variety, or political gamesmanship such as Ronald Reagan’s “make my day,” or flat-out partisanship like Alan Grayson’s “the Republicans want you to die quickly” or James Watt’s line about “liberals and Americans.” It’s gotta be an actual joke.
There must be some other examples of Palin/Quayle style humor, but I’m not sure where to look.
I keep thinking of Veronica Geng’s hilarious story which includes the line:
In 1950, when Shaw died, his last words were “Don’t tell L.B.J. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”
P.S. In case you’re wondering, here’s the price of milk:
The price has declined since 2008 with a slight rebound during the past year. The monthly data stop in Dec 2010 but maybe there’s a big spike during Jan-Feb 2011. I did find this document saying that nonfat dry milk has increased in price by 8% in the past month, so maybe there’s something going on. Although of course this is pretty much irrelevant to choices of how you feed your baby.
P.P.S. The Daily News reports that Palin “made the crack during an appearance at a Long Island country club.” Country club Republicans, indeed.
If we follow Bradford Delong by calculating the price of a good as time to earn (the number of hours worked) for someone on minimum wage between 1995 and 2010, the price of milk was lowest in 2010.
The former Governor of California would likely be an outlier
Milk, like many commodities, is actually at a very high price internationally. The local liquid milk market is somewhat protected from this but that's not what you use as a breast-milk replacement, right?
Look at this to see that milk price increased from below $2000 per tonne to over $5000 before the recent crash and is currently back up around $4000. Palin's comments aside, this is very bad news for millions around the world…
Each of the candidates for Chicago mayor was asked to tell a joke. Here are the results.
http://www.wbez.org/episode-segments/2011-02-21/m…
Rahm Emanuel is smart enough to poke fun at himself.
Making the rounds: To make Chicagoans feel more comfortable, Rahm is changing his last name to "Daley". So, the list of Chicago mayors will read
Richard J. Daley
[people we've forgotten]
Richard M. Daley
Rahm E. Daley
David, why is that "very bad news"?
zbicyclist, the striking thing about those jokes is how bad the politicians are at telling them. Politicians are really good at both public speaking and small talk, so how is it they can't tell a joke? Bad timing, stumbling at just the critical moment…it's like they're rookies!
Phil, because milk is a basic food and people need food to live. If food is expensive, they can't buy it and living becomes difficult.
The spike in commodity prices has been cited as one of the causes of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (which may be good things in themselves but indicates people aren't happy).
Some of these jokes are about at the level of the late night TV comedians.
David,
There are lots of sources of calories that are much cheaper than milk.
Here in the U.S. milk is an important source of Vitamin D, but that's because it's added to milk here; I doubt that is the case in the places you cite, or indeed in most poor countries. The only other nutrient milk provides in substantial quantities is calcium, but calcium is also plentiful in foods like chick peas, leafy greens, fish, and many fruits…some of which are, in fact, staples in the areas you mention, much more than milk is.
If all food prices have gone up, and milk is just a useful benchmark for that, then I probably agree with your point: it's very bad news for a lot of people if food gets a lot more expensive. But if what you're saying is that it's "very bad news" that milk in particular has gotten more expensive, even if most other foods haven't, then I very much disagree, I think this isn't even "bad", much less "very bad."
Phil,
Yes, all basic foods spiked starting around 2007 (check out wheat). They are on their way back up now.
And I wouldn't dismiss milk so lightly as a food source. Historically it has been very important (look up the strong positive selection for the lactase gene) and in many cultures it continues to be an important source of calories, especially for children. The argument that a cheaper source of calories could be substituted applies to nearly any food and while it may be rational and efficient, it ignores, among other things, the enormous sociological problem of getting people to restrict and change their diets.
I think the exemplar is Australian Parliamentarian John Dawkins, in requesting a moment of silence be observed on the floor for one of his colleagues: "I heard his library burned down, and both books were destroyed … and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet."
Of course this has since crossed over to an academic setting, particularly with regard to football rivals.
David,
I'm no expert on world nutrition, that's for sure…but I think I do know enough to dismiss milk as a particularly important food in most cultures. I think of chickens, and to some extent goats and pigs, as being the predominant sources of animal protein in poor areas — that's been true of the few poor places I've visited, which is admittedly just parts of southern Africa and Central America. But milk and cheese are, famously, not important or even desirable in much of Asia, in part because of widespread adult lactose intolerance. Everywhere in the world, most poor people don't have refrigerators, and even the food stores in many poor areas don't have refrigerators. Some low-income farmers do have a few cows, but (in my admittedly very limited experience) I don't think these are usually part of a commercial milk market, though they might provide milk for the farm family (in which case the higher market price of milk is essentially irrelevant).
So my current belief is that a higher price of milk isn't really a big deal; people will just buy a bit less milk and a bit more of other things. I agree with you that if other foods get more expensive too, then there's a problem. But milk in particular, I don't think there's a problem. I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong on the facts — like I said, I'm no expert.
Phil, I'm no expert either. I'd agree that it is not the poor of the poor consuming milk products, though is significant in Latin America (surely you've noticed Brazil and Argentina have a lot of cattle beasts), India and North Africa. OK look at this article, in particular table 2 that shows the per capita meat consumption in developing countries (in 1997) was 25 kg vs 43kg of milk consumption. Sure, meat a kg of meat is much richer than the same of milk, but 43kg is quite a bit. These days about 800 million tonnes of milk is produced and consumed each year. That is a major part of the world diet and if it doubles in price, it'll force other food prices up — global supply of food is pretty inelastic. Of course, part of the increase in milk prices has been the increase of input prices that are often foods themselves.
This upsets people like me because it means that cheese becomes very expensive.
So I'm happy to stick by my claim that expensive milk is very bad news for millions (and probably just bad news or annoying for billions).
Part of the rise in price of milk is that the Chinese middle class has started consuming milk and developed a taste for ice cream.
In NZ I remember 600ml bottles of milk being delivered to the door for 4c. Now it's up around $4 for 2 litres.
David, it's funny that we can look at the same data and interpret it so differently. I look at 43 kg per person per year — the equivalent of about a glass of milk per person every three days — and think "See? Milk is clearly not an important part of the diet of people in the developing world." And of course, the "developing world" includes a wide range of incomes; by and large the ones drinking the milk (and eating ice cream, and putting milk on cereal, etc.) are the relatively wealthy ones.
Of course if the price of anything goes up, that's bad news for people who rely on it. If you're an ice cream manufacturer, and milk gets more expensive, that can be a disaster for you…but that's precisely because people do have other choices. They'll eat less ice cream and more chocolate cake, or whatever.
So, yes, Megan, to those of us (myself included) who enjoy tasty dairy-based comestibles, a price increase is unfortunate. But it's still not "very very bad", or even "very bad." And, importantly, if milk gets more expensive compared to other foods, that's bad news for the people who sell milk (and milk-based products) but it's good news for the people who make the products that people switch to.
So…thanks for looking up the data, David, but I think they bolster my case, not yours!
Phil,
When milk prices go up, it is good news for milk producers. Dairy farms are springing up all over because of these price increases and that puts huge pressure on local ecosystems (cows are hungry and messy). And it takes limited arable land away from more efficient uses (one reason why increasing the price of widely produced thing like milk will push up other food costs). Not good news overall.
You may be right it is mainly richer people who use milk products. It'll certainly be the case at these prices. For many, it must at least be a nice source of variety: that table I link to above has per capita consumption in India at 62kg of milk vs 4kg of meat per capita. Anyway, the poor can eat cake, right?
David,
I'm not sure if you're missing my point completely, or simply choosing to talk past it. Let me try making my point a different way.
WalMart is very important to poor people. Total Walmart sales last year were something like $420 billion…(boy, that's incredible, I truly had no idea). Does it follow that if Walmart doubled their prices, this would pose a crushing burden to millions of poor people? I think the answer is no. Although some poor people would probably continue to shop at Walmart, the vast majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, would switch to shopping at other stores. There is no question that this would be unfortunate for the poor: those other stores are either less convenient or more expensive than Walmart, for the people who would switch to them — that's those customers aren't shopping at those other stores now, after all. But it would be a stretch, I think, to say that it would be "very bad news."
If the price of milk goes up, but that of other foods does not, then people who are price-sensitive will switch from milk to other foods. That's a pity, because those people would clearly prefer to have milk (just as the hypothetical store-switchers in my example would prefer to shop at Walmart). But it's only "very bad news" if they can't get about the same nutritional value and about the same taste satisfaction for about the same price. And that's where I think you and I differ. You think that switching from milk to something else that is roughly equally nutritious and satisfying is not possible without spending a lot more. I disagree. Or, rather, I concede that you might be right, but I think you're probably not.
So, if you want a pithy Marie-Antoinette-type quote from me, here it is: "if the poor cannot drink milk, let them eat chana masala with a side of mustard greens."
Two final points: (1) about 1/3 of Indians are lacto-ovo vegetarians, and a much larger fraction eat no beef, so perhaps the high ratio of milk consumption to meat consumption is unsurprising, and (2) I agree that if _nutrition_ has gotten more expensive, that's very bad for a lot of people; what I disagree on is whether saying "milk is a lot more expensive" is the same as saying "nutrition is a lot more expensive."
Don't forget milk's value as a source of "good" microbes — when made into yogurt. Milk is much easier to ferment than other foods. Chinese food stores have little milk but have shelves and shelves of yogurt. They have far more yogurt than any other fermented food. After ignoring milk most of my life, I buy it day after day to make yogurt.