Gintis explains in a review of Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Everyone interested in economic and social policy should read this, and his other writings. Sowell is best as showing how statistics can mislead. For instance, he says "It is an undisputed fact that the average real income...of American households rose by only 6 percent over the entire period from 1969 to 1996...But it is an equally undisputed fact that the average real income per person in the United States rose by 51 percent over that very same period." (p. 125) Both are true because average household size decreased dramatically over the period, with more elderly couples and fewer children per married couple in the later period.

Nota bene: commentators who give the household change while ignoring the individual change are slimebags. You may say that they are well-intentioned, but that does not change the fact that they are liars out to mislead the uniformed. Sowell often manages to reveal the liars and slimebags for what they are. Moreover, this is a service to us all, for how are we to identify and solve social problems if we do not know what they are?

It's not a recent review, but the slimebag bit stuck with me and comes to mind whenever Krugman speaks.

Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. . .

How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy. . .

First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.

Slimebag.

You don't need any grain at all to produce beef. Cattle eat grass, something that people can't digest and so get no food value from. They eat leaves and other roughage too, such as the parts of grain plants that aren't grain, and the trash left over from grain processing. This is all fine food for cattle. No grain required.

Cattle can eat grains, though it's not good for them. It's too rich and lacks fiber. It screws up their digestion and can have serious health consequences since blood chemistry is altered. A common problem is bone loss due to acidosis. In the trade such a hot diet is referred to as blowing their feet off since foot problems are the first symptom of bone loss. But, they get fat quickly. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef fat. You can skip the grain and make the beef without much fat.

Krugman is a slimebag in the sense Gintis uses. He lies with statistics.

The rise of China and other emerging economies is the main force driving oil prices, but the invasion of Iraq — which proponents promised would lead to cheap oil — has also reduced oil supplies below what they would have been otherwise.

And bad weather, especially the Australian drought, is probably related to climate change. So politicians and governments that have stood in the way of action on greenhouse gases bear some responsibility for food shortages.

Slimebag. The beef lies weren't just a brain fart, he smells that way all of the time. Australian drought is related to the El Nino Southern Oscillation. I suppose you can call that climate change but it is natural rather than anthropogenic, and cyclical. In any event it is not remotely related to political action about GHGs, especially since those actions from the most vocal proponents have been nothing but empty rhetoric - their emissions rose significantly - while the USA made better progress.

Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels.

Mandates and subsidies for ethanol are dumb. But a more sophisticated thought experiment can be revealing. It wasn't that long ago that all of the leaking hearts were demanding an end to agricultural subsidies which made food too cheap and so made it hard for developing economies to export their grains into subsidized markets. They aren't cheap now but what is the result?

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

This is precisely what more thoughtful analysts predicted would happen if food prices rose. Poor people can't cope with high prices, and the poorest of the poor are net food importers even though they may have some exports. They consume more than they produce.

Biofuels, for the most part, are just dumb but we can still learn a good lesson here. Developing countries must become very much more productive - up to developed world standards - or they will face this problem due to population increase, biofuels or not. We won't have to worry about climate change since the streets will run with blood as the riots and food refugees disrupt societies near and far.