Better cabs through innovation

From the Financial Times, an interesting article on the competition between the “Black Cabs” of London (with their legal privileges, tradition, and undeniable Knowledge of their drivers) and an upstart company, Addison Lee, that is challenging the Black Cabs on several fronts. For instance, the story opens with how Russians are working with Addison Lee to collect GPS data, the better to predict trip length, preferred routes, and fleet allocation.

We all no doubt tend to find confirmation of our prejudices wherever we can. Climate scientists claim corroboration in a winter weather pattern that coincides with global warming theory, but then, seemingly inconsistently, deny that a weather pattern to the contrary is evidence of anything. Heads, we win; tails, inconclusive.

So take it with a grain of salt however big you like that I find in this story evidence that if we regulate an industry, we should think very hard before granting it any outright monopoly. The innovation potential of allowing upstarts is especially prominent in this story. What if the regulators had crushed the upstarts, especially since they tended to be a bit shady?

Dare I think of this story even as being evidence of the virtues of policies that promote small-scale innovation so as to prevent even “free market” success from creating excessive concentrations of corporate power? (Most of our megabusinesses like Wal-Mart, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland and such, owe a great deal to cozy relationships with legislators and regulators – hardly examples of pure free market success. But that’s a story for another day.)

Greedy, but gratuitous, too

I’ve mentioned my antipathy to “too big to fail,” which notably included banks. But Grameen Bank interests me as much for the anthropology behind it – its view of human nature – as for its localist angle and “Small Is Beautiful” aesthetic:

Dr. Yunus came to realize … that all economic theory was built on considering only half of what men really are. It is built on the fact that men are selfish. And so they are. But that is not all that they are. Men are also unselfish, because without that, no social order—and no economy—would be possible or sustainable. So the good Dr. set out to found an economics, and a bank, built on the whole man, and not just the half-human.

Contingent Vegetarianism

“Premiss [sic; I guess the Brits spell “premise” with two esses] one: we don’t need to eat animals; premiss two: eating animals in the way we now eat them causes suffering on an unimaginable scale; premiss three: eating animals in the way we now eat them is environmentally catastrophic. Conclusion: we should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them.”

Thus a reviewer summarizes a recent book, Eating Animals, that argues for (or perhaps just bears testimony to the author’s) “contingent vegetarianism.” Contingent vegetarianism is vegetarianism that the author might reconsider if we raised and slaughtered our food animals differently.

Eating is about as basic an animal activity as there is. For humans – a unity of body and spirit – it is traditionally as basic a social activity as there is, and I admire those who live out that reality still today. I want no reductionist “refueling” metaphors to dominate my view of food and the fellowship that accompanies. How and what we eat is important.

The arguments for vegetarianism of late have focused on the current realities of what we used to call “animal husbandry,” which now frankly has become “factory farming.” That’s this author’s second and third “premiss.”

But there’s at least one other argument, current when I was a young adult, that is based on the inefficiency of turning sun, water and soil into concentrated food through the bellies of beasts. For instance, Diet for a Small Planet.

Going back another generation, one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, worried a great deal about the ethics of vivisection. When did you last hear anyone worry about that? How many of you need a dictionary right now? Frankly, I need one to remember exactly what that refers to, though I know generally.

It worries me a lot that something of keen concern to a man of Lewis’s stature isn’t even on our radar screen any more. On my radar screen. Dare I suggest that we have a great capacity for tolerating ethically dubious practices that are convenient for us, from vivisection to factory farming, abortion on demand and embryonic stem cell research?

I have a metabolic disorder of longstanding, currently under control with a lot of expensive medicines, whereby a diet of almost pure meat and other animal protein (i.e., a very low carbohydrate diet) is a very attractive convenient option. It’s hard and time-consuming for me to fashion healthy meals without animal products, as we Orthodox do in Lent. I actually tend to gain weight in Lent with my “fasting,” and I frankly don’t want a lipid profile done immediately after Pascha. But I’m convinced that I could do it if I would take the time. An Orthodox friend lost his taste for meat during Lent, and now is essentially vegetarian year-round.

I could. Should I?

Afterthought: Bound up in my discomfort with factory farming is my antipathy to megacorporations generally. Tyson is not just a great producer of chicken waste, but a major political player in Arkansas – at the very least. And as the linked article shows, the factory farmers have stripped terms like “free range” of any real meaning (through the very cozy relationship megacorporations develop with their putative regulators). I’m flirting with distributist economic thought – “not fewer capitalists, but multiple more” – and I am just plain angry at bailouts of “too big to fail” corporations. So I’m not all that interested in questions like Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods; give me CitiFoods, please.

Controlling health care costs

I came across this stimulating article on medical trade-offs. (No, I don’t routinely read the American Scientist.)

The question is why, since we buy good-enough furniture at Ikea (those lucky enough to have one around) and in other areas, why do we always go for the very best in medicine?

The concept of QALYs has been around for quite a while now. My biggest concern since first encountering it is that people with disabilities will get shoved by government edict into what the author calls “the southwest quadrant” where the cost is less but the benefit is less, too. But who can object to voluntary decisions to shop in the southwest quadrant?