This is technically true, but has a couple problems:
1) This would require 1-in-10 households to take the *time* to do this. Tending a 1/2 acre vegetable garden is a lot of work!
2) It's true nationally, but not locally. And since 1/2 acre farmers are not likely to be able to organize or fund long-range shipping for their products, this means much of the country would rarely get vegetables.
3) Most of the US has similar seasonality anyways, so relying entirely in local vegetable production means relying on local seasons, which means no fresh veggies for large chunks of the year
4) Not all veggies grow everywhere, so this would dramatically reduce diversity of vegetable options
5) Returning to time: who would tend these gardens? Clearly household members with lower wage potential. You might think that means "household kids," but that's unlikely, since parents see childhood education/training as related to increasing wage potential.
In practice, the gardeners would be household members who already are nudged out of the labor force for other reason.

So who is gonna do the hours of work each week unpaid to provide community veggies a few months a year?

Moms.
Maybe that fits your vision of the good life, but IMHO releasing people from the requirements of subsistence agriculture has been a good thing, ESPECIALLY in terms of its effects on people nudged into domestic lives.
I think the more fruitful avenue (pun intended) is that more households should replace their stupid dumb worthless non-fruiting-trees with productive permanent crops. This requires surrendering the idea of a mowed yard for much of the year...
... but in principle after the first few years, permanent crops are incredibly easy for a suburban family to maintain. You can take care of a small grove of apple trees or fig trees or date palms (in some southerly areas) or pecan trees with virtually no work at all!
Okay this is a fair point: healthy retirees are a possible source of this work too!
Anyways, the 10 acres I grew up on produced the equivalent of about, *after the human labor of processing*, 250-1,000 kcal/day equivalent of walnuts, purely through *wild and untended trees*.
We didn't harvest because wild walnut is very bitter and walnuts generally require a lot of work.

But my grandma in Georgia had a bunch of pecan trees in her back yard. Zero work, lots of delicious and edible food.
In general, I do think more people should throw a tarp under their mulberry trees in the late spring, replace some vines and ivies with grapes, etc. But I think it's just silly to act like there's no good reason we don't do this stuff.
Yeah, pests are an issue. Fruit brings wasps or other animals. This is one reason I think nut trees are such a great option: they don't bring nearly as much trouble.
But yeah to make fruiting trees viable in principle you need lots of houses in an area to have lots of fences so that animals can't easily maintain a wide range.
There's a dude a few blocks from me here in Montreal who has only like 10 feet of "yard" between him and a 4-lane road, and he's set up like 6 trellises of grape vines right by the sidewalk right in that space, and it's the coolest thing.

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More from @lymanstoneky

Jan 28
This is a nice illustration of a little issue that is underappreciated:

The scale of "births to women who arrived in America while pregnant or conceived immediately upon arrival" is a whooooole lot bigger than "nonresident births" would imply.
This is sometimes called "birth tourism" but I don't think that's a valid framing. Often it's recent immigrants, often legal, having a child upon arriving. "We're Americans now, let's make an American!"
Or it'll be something like "I'm pregnant, we've been considering moving to America for a while, WE NEED TO DO IT BEFORE THE BABY IS BORN" etc
Read 5 tweets
Jan 28
i like to imagine the whole ukraine thing is actually: Putin planned a stupidly huge wargame as an act of intimidation with absolutely no plan to invade Ukraine, then the west was like, "let's make it a macho contest and see if we can get Putin to back down like a cuck"
what i like about this theory is it implies literally everyone involved is an idiot motivated entirely by prideful vanity with a cavalier disregard for the actual interests of their countries or ukraine

this seems like a very plausible read of the parties involved.
in this scenario, putin was like "hah, i will march large phallic symbols around ukraine's borders, and put my big boats in the big water, and everyone will know russians are manly men, and you should fear us"
Read 8 tweets
Jan 27
so giving moms cash didn't give their babies super magic brains after all?

shocking
SSC has a nice rundown on the various critiques. Basically, their only marginally significant result was *not* a pre-registered analysis, differed from all prior research, and also became insignificant after correcting for multiple hypothesis testing. astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that…
in other words, they did the study, then did the pre-registered analysis, found nothing, did an *extra* analysis, found something juuuust at the edge of significance, and despite their own math showing it was not sig. after mult-hyp adj., wrote an abstract saying it was sig.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 27
was reading a demography article a few days ago saying we live in times of "unprecedented uncertainty" and i feel like people just do not realize how unstable life before modernity was.
we do not in fact live in times of great uncertainty.

we live in times of extremely high expectations of stability, and a small increase in uncertainty versus the period when those expectations formed.
but even with COVID it's not like you were rolling the dice on if you'd live to see 30 or something
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
I have a dataset with something like 65 million rows in it, in a tab-delimited .txt file, with some extraneous quotation marks. I have been able to import a related dataset with 51 million rows and 2 columns without any issue.
But even when I suppress quote binding, Stata seems to be crapping out on importing it. It's supposed to be able to handle 20 billion observations. There's only like 50 columns too.
Now, it is eating up a ton of my memory while it imports. But what I'm wondering is: do I just need to leave it overnight and let it burn? Or do I need to fix a setting? Because doing the 51 million rows with 2 variables only took like 30 seconds to import.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 21
What's so dumb about this is that the EXACT SAME AUTHORS of the paper reviewed here ALSO did a paper studying ONLY ADOPTIONS, and find that the negative effects on women are EXACTLY THE SAME.
Here's the paper. They ask "Does biology drive the motherhood penalty?" and they find the answer is "No, not at all." aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
Adopted children hurt mothers' incomes just as much as gestational children.

What impacts mothers' career trajectory is child*rearing* more than child*bearing*, tho having a baby and putting up for adoption probably impacts as well.
Read 7 tweets

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