Mashed, fried, boiled and roast, a humble tuber changed the world, and free-trading globalisers everywhere should celebrate it.(See also: "Llamas and mash" and "Wonder-food", the other potato stories in this week's edition).
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Odd Economist
The Economist has a strange leader this week that celebrates, of all things, the potato. Specifically, the potato's role in the development free trade - it turns out the Irish potato famine (caused by the failure of the potato crop due to blight) led to the scrapping of the infamously protectionist Corn Laws and thence to free trade generally. In fact, The Economist itself was founded in 1843 by James Wilson to advance the cause of free trade and get the Corn Laws scrapped. Concludes the leader:
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There's a nice story, which I haven't checked, about Samuelson using the potato as an example of a Giffen good (and so an inferior good, in the economic sense) in his famous textbook. Apparently some potato grower's association (in Maine maybe) commissioned a study which found that this wasn't the case and so they sent a letter to Samuelson asking him to find a new example for later editions. (I know the story from a Hal Varian comment on Brad DeLong's blog after some articles refering to potatos. I'm not going to bother to locate the link.)
ReplyDelete-John
Yeah, the potato is the textbook example of a Giffen good. I've heard it's somewhat controversial whether it counts as one, but I hadn't heard the Samuelson story. Pretty amusing.
ReplyDeleteI got the apostrophe wrong above (I'll quickly point out before anyone else does). It's still a nice story...
ReplyDelete-John