Omega-3 Pigs

Yesterday's NPR and today's New York Times has this piece of news that some medical researchers claim they have successfully created cloned pigs that contain their own Omega-3 fatty acids, a chemical typically found in fish, that potentially reduces the risk of heart diseases. The catch is that now you can stay healthy even though you eat junk food such as bacon. I am no expert in the field of medical research, but I do have a few instincts to share as to why I think this research could be a waste of time. Here are a few things to think about:

First, even though there is a negative association between Omega-3 and occurrence of heart diseases, no solid medical research has established the causal relationship between consumption of Omege-3 and reduced risk of heart disease. It could very well be a third factor that is somehow linked to Omega-3 and yet the cause of reducing heart disease. I can think about a few at the top of my head. For example, life style – people who have healthier life style tend to eat fish and exercise at the same time; they end up with more Omega-3 and healthier hearts. Cloning pigs that have Omega-3 but missing the quintessential ingredient will not do anything to reduce heart problems.

Second, apart from taste preferences, people who do not eat enough fish and get Omega-3 needed for their bodies may simply be price conscious, i.e., fish is too expensive for them. The new cloned pigs, although rich in Omega-3, will be expensive, I assure you. Medical R&D is costly and fixed cost of R&D will have to be reflected in the sale price of bettered pork products. If price is a driving factor of people not consuming fish right now, there is no guarantee that the new pork products will sell well.

Third, it is far into the future that the cloned pigs will actually enter our food chain. The cloned pigs will have to go through the approval of FDA, which is years of waiting really. In the meantime, many downside risks can pop out. For example, people will move towards healthier lifestyle and put fish on their weekly dinner table; new studies will disconnect Omega-3 with heart disease prevention… lots of side tracks ahead.

It is great that researchers are providing our society with so much diversity and catering to the tastes of different people, but my question is: before spending millions on this project and getting entangled with bureaucracy, is the market large enough to support such products?

Chinese Farmers

Lately, there has been much debate in China on the country’s widening income inequality that economic reform in the past twenty years has brought out. I read a few articles online. I thought they made interesting points, although I did feel suspicious that debates regarding fundamentals and national identity erupt like this. It is an interesting coincidence that the National People’s Congress is convening this week; that a draft law with regards to property rights protection was being submitted and expected for passage, and now the legislature requires more “revision.”

One piercing issue regarding income inequality is the poverty of rural population compared to their urban counterparts, especially the coastal cities. More than half of China’s population is rural, so this is a problem. Conservatives use this as a teary example that market economy left the majority of Chinese population behind, that capitalism is deeply flawed.

For their claim to be at all valid, we must compare how Chinese farmers fared before the economic reform. After the Chinese Communist Party liberated our nation thanks to the farmers’ massive support in the 1940’s, China followed the Soviet Union’s economic policies in trying to build up an industrial economy. Investment goods were heavily subsidized. As a result, agricultural products were under-priced, leaving the Chinese farmers poor as the dirt they stood on. This trend continued even during the Great Leap Famine in 1958-1962, and history sees Chinese farmers the first dying from starvation—talk about irony. At the onset of Cultural Revolution in the early 1960’s, the government shoveled young urban population to rural areas. From an economics perspective, the industrialization was really not working out, and agriculture was expected to absorb urban surplus labor. I have not read about the productivity of the urban young, but I cannot imagine a sudden large influx of labor is productive. Honestly, farmers were at the short end of the stick then, too. It is hard to argue market economy is the culprit.

Land is the fundamental of agriculture. It is thus ironic that rural poverty is somehow used to argue against property rights legislation. If anything, granting farmers property rights to the land they sow on would boost their enthusiasm and increase their wealth, but I can understand this proposal too infringing to the fundamentals. How about giving them usage rights? In urban areas, people have usage rights to their properties. Government more or less respects usage rights, and treats the owner of such rights as rightful leasee of a perpetual rent. If the rent were to terminate, the leasee would be compensated at the market rate. This is one way to circumvent the ideologies and give people energy to participate in economic activities. Maybe it would help if the government respects farmers’ usage rights too? It seems short on that so far.

When farmers do not have property rights of land on their belt, labor is their entire wealth. In the past 10-15 years, urban areas see a large influx of rural labor coming to work in the most grueling, murkiest sectors. Most of them just want to earn higher wages in the cities to subsidize folks back home. Unfortunately, China has immigration restrictions that work like the green card in the US, except that the restrictions are on our cities. Without the “green card”, rural workers cannot settle down in urban areas, cannot switch to better jobs, have no access to public health for themselves or educational system for their children. They are literally second-class citizens, working hard but earning little and prejudiced against. To me, this is another source of widening income inequality. Such labor immigration restrictions, if anything, are antithesis of market economy. If socialist intellectuals want to call off economic reform and set our country back on their high horses, please remove those immigration restrictions at least—they are neither products of market economy nor should be associated with socialism.

The government is now worried about social unrest in the rural areas and conservatives are blaming everything on the income inequality index. I do not think a large urban-rural income ratio will necessarily cause social unrest. In general, people look at how their neighbors fare when their own lives are stagnated, but when they are moving forward themselves, they do not give a damn about their neighbors. As long as the government provides protection to the rural population and maybe a little economic stimulation, the farmers will be happily living forward. Chinese farmers are the simplest, kindest and most peace-loving people you will meet on this planet. Duly protection will go a long way.

New Laptop

I am writing this blog from my new laptop, which I finally decided to get after weeks of hesitation. Part of me has been attached to my old one. It has served me well and is still functional. On the other hand, I cannot do much else when my programs are running. In the end, I rationalized that a faster computer boosts my productivity, which is probably untrue because multi-tasking most likely gives away to web browsing and online chatting.

It has been over three years since I last set up a computer. The transition process turns out much easier than I thought. Windows operating system disk allows me to transfer all my files and settings between computers within a local network. I still need to install software, although the installation process is much shorter. Windows file transfer wizard already copied most of the system files and the users pretty much just need to enter the license keys to get them running.

I also noticed it is easy to switch products. For instance, during the installation, both Eudora and Mozilla Firefox transfer all personal settings, address books, bookmarks, etc., from their Microsoft counterparts, so we can use them in no time. This makes sense, especially for fringe products, as often times, the cost of switching products can be inhibiting to average users even though the new ones may actually be better.

Often in defense of Microsoft, I have argued with my computer geek friends that, to average users, software products are like cigarettes: habit, habit, habit. Many end users freak out at the smallest changes to the software they use daily. This is not my conjecture. I can back this up from my personal experience: I worked in computer support before and have been around and observed people who need computers every day for their jobs. Habit is the source of momentum, the root of a large royal customer base. Microsoft is thus a natural monopoly, I would argue.

Habit is why it is a good idea for fringe products to transfer settings from the market leaders in the software industry. I must say I still miss the Internet Explorer interface a bit, but Mozilla interface is not so different. I can live with it and gradually get over my addiction to IE. After all, Mozilla is a safer browser. By the same token, it is not a bad idea to follow suit on the interface, although one is treading on a thin line here – you don’t want to start infringement lawsuits.