- Rice as cultural determinant? Did rice production create collectivism? Evidence from within China: Chris Blattman examines a study which contends that rice, requiring farmer cooperation through shared irrigation systems, leads to a different culture norm than wheat. From the paper: "China’s rice regions [also] have several markers of East Asian culture: more holistic thought, more interdependent self construals, and lower divorce rates. The wheat growing north looked more culturally similar to the West, with more analytic thought, individualism, and divorce." It is an interesting concept, to say the least, but even more interesting is Blattman's skeptical take on the study: "they use rice suitability estimates to instrument for rice production. This requires us to believe that the things that determine suitability (soil type, climate, temperature, etc.) only affect social and economic development through their effect on rice production. This seems like a stretch (what about disease prevalence? frequency of shocks? general agricultural productivity?) If you read an instrumental variables paper and they do not mention the words “exclusion restriction”, exercise caution."
- Unlocking the secrets of a nitrogen-fixing paddy cover crop (tangentially rice-related). Aquatic alfalfa: Finding the genome of an extraordinary plant: The Economist looks at a crowd-funded project on DNA sequencing of the Azolla fern. This sequencing may explain how the aquatic fern extracts nitrogen from the air and fixes it into chemicals such as ammonia, so that it is available to make proteins. It also may help us to understand how/if an Azolla bloom caused one of the biggest downward climate shifts we know about (49 million years ago). Bonus mentions of carbon and fossil fuels!
