I got into a discussion the other night about China’s milk scandal. I was arguing that China’s dairy farmers were unlikely to be responsible for the contamination of the milk. As best as I understand it, China’s Dairy farm’s are all small low budget affairs. In my view, the types of people who run those farms are unlikely to have the accesses to melamine or have the kind of knowledge that it takes to understand how to use melamine to fool milk testing equipment.

This article from the New York Times strengthens my view. Especially this part….

Sanlu, which is 43 percent owned by the New Zealand-based Fonterra Group, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, controls the only milk station in Nantongyi village, giving it monopoly pricing power in the area. Every day farmers guide their cows to the village milking station, pump milk directly into the station tanks and then return home, waiting to hear how much they will earn, if their milk passes quality inspections.

In the first place this shows how poor China’s dairy farmers are. They don’t even own their own milking equipment. In the second place, it makes hard to understand how the farmers could have contaminated their own milk when they sold the milk straight from the cow to the company.

If the article is to be believed, third parity milking stations are quite common in China.

From the Economist….

But something fishy seems to be going on here. For one thing, melamine is not all that easy to dissolve into milk. For another, there’s been a worldwide shortage of melamine for some time now. Its price has shot up to more than $1,750 per tonne from $1,100 a few years ago.

So why use an expensive industrial chemical that’s in short supply to dilute a dirt cheap product like milk? The answer can only be that either some flaw rendered the melamine industrially worthless, or it wasn’t melamine at all. The first suggestion is scary enough; the second is even more ominous.

The only thing your correspondent can imagine that would render melamine industrially worthless is if it were reclaimed waste from the production process.

Industrially, melamine is usually made by heating urea in the presence of a catalyst. Because large amounts of ammonia and carbon dioxide are given off in the process, most modern plants now combine melamine production with urea production, which uses ammonia and carbon dioxide as feedstocks. As the two processes feed off one another, a combined plant is considerably more efficient than two separate ones.

But the final stage—washing the melamine and turning it into crystal form—produces lots of effluent that needs treating before releasing into the environment. The usual way to do that is to filter the waste water and pipe that away, and then dispose of the concentrated solids separately.

Those accumulated solids are around 70% melamine, with the rest being made up of various by-products, including our old friend cyanuric acid. As mentioned before, a mixture of melamine and cyanuric acid can be a nasty witches’ brew, especially when ingested by infants.

But what if it’s not melamine that’s being used to spike China’s diluted milk? Urea may be not as rich in nitrogen, but it’s certainly a whole lot cheaper (around $650 per tonne). Sprayed into the milk at the temperature used to create a powdered product for baby food and confectionery, enough of the urea would be converted into melamine to show up in tests.

References are made to the Great Depression everyday now. But few people seem to know very much about the Great Depression. This does not stop people from sagely declaring that we have forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression or blaming our current problems on the dismantling of regulations that were put into place during the Great Depression. It is for this reason we are making Great Myths of the Great Depression essay of the week.

This essay is not without its flaws. The biggest flaw is that the author is too much an ideologue. Also, the essay is too simplistic to satisfy those who already have a good understanding of the history of the Great Depression.

But these flaws are balanced by the fact that the essay is written in a clear non-academic language that is easily understood and it is full of facts about the Great Depression that everyone should know. For the majority of our audience, it will be something of an eye opener.

You can read the essay piecemeal in html format here if you want to (Clicking on the embedded hyperlink above will take you to a PDF of the Essay).

From the Washington Post….

It is the first time social scientists have produced evidence that large numbers of men might be victims of gender-related income disparities. The study raises the provocative possibility that a substantial part of the widely discussed gap in income between men and women who do the same work is really a gap between men with a traditional outlook and everyone else.

The differences found in the study were substantial. Men with traditional attitudes about gender roles earned $11,930 more a year than men with egalitarian views and $14,404 more than women with traditional attitudes. The comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week.

My first thought when I saw the headline was that they did not account for age. But they did. In fact they followed the same group of people from the time when they where children.

All the guys I know who have traditional ideas of gender roles are more ethical (taken as group there are exceptions) then the men who do not have traditional ideas of gender roles (again, granting there are exceptions). But working in a union environment where everyone with the same job is paid the same amount, it never occurred to me that this could lead to higher pay.

That may be wrong explanation based on my limited circle of acquaintances. It may also be possible that men with traditional attitudes towards gender roles may have higher testosterone levels on average. Testosterone generally helps/drives you to become top dog in any situation.

And last but not least, family background does not seem to have been taken into account. It is likely that the people who had more traditional attitudes towards gender came from more stable families then people who did not have have traditional attitudes towards family. Coming from a more stable back ground may have enabled them to be more successful even when they had the same job as other people.

I am not sure which if any of my explanations are correct. But they are both better then the explanations that the authors of the study came up with. They seemed designed to maintain a PC orthodoxy in the face of inconvenient facts.

Also, it seems that the authors of this study consider people with in similar jobs, working similar hours, and with similar education as being equal. I suspect that the did not account for how long people spent in the same job as opposed to moving around.

If this is true it would explain why traditionally minded woman make so much less the other categories even when doing the same work. On paper they might have the same qualifications, but I doubt they stay in the same field for as long.