A Dozen Dino-Wings, Please

Just what is going on with chicken?  Having just come from the grocery store, I can attest that there are a confusing range of terms and types of chickens and eggs.  Does it really matter if my eggs popped out of pampered free-range chickens?  Does a drumstick from a “factory” chicken taste as good as one from a humanely raised chicken?

Since I’m a historian, let’s start at the beginning…. Well, we can’t because no one is really sure where the chicken originated, though it was probably somewhere in southeast Asia.  We know it absolutely wasn’t in the New World or Africa, chiefly because there were predators in those places that probably would have made the species extinct long before anyone perfected a recipe for buffalo wings.  (Have you ever considered that a chicken is more closely related to a tyrannosaurus than to a buffalo?  Would a name change help or hurt marketing?)

Nor do we know exactly when the chicken was domesticated but it was somewhere between 10,500 and 4,500 years ago—a spread large enough to be useless.  What we are fairly certain of is that the birds were kept primarily for their eggs, not their meat.  It would be centuries before carefully selected crossbreeding produced a bird big enough to supply a meaningful amount of meat.

For millennia, relatively few people ate chicken meat, as the cost was too high for most people to afford until after World War II.  In my grandfather’s day, people ate far more pork, mutton, and beef than we do today, and chicken was considered a delicacy.  Even the price of eggs was too high for most ordinary people.  Part of the reason for this was that relatively few people raised the birds and those who did usually kept the birds in barns, since specialized chicken coops were relatively rare.  The birds were expected to scrounge around for their food, augmented by the addition of occasional kitchen scraps that weren’t consumed by pigs or the family dog.   Those who did raise egg-laying chickens could expect to lose 40% of the birds a year to accidents (meaning that something ate them) or disease.  The birds that were lucky enough to survive only produced 80-150 eggs a year.  (And the eggs were small.)

It seems strange today to remember that just a century ago, people were far more likely to eat mutton or lamb than chicken.  I’m not even sure that there’s a grocery store in town that sells mutton.  Anyway, you would need a bank loan to purchase enough lamb to feed a family of four.  This changed, however, in the 1920’s with the discovery of Vitamin D.  During the cold months of winter, chickens rarely got enough sunlight to remain healthy until spring, but with the addition of cheap dietary supplements, more chickens survived the winter and produced healthier and larger chicks in the spring.

In 1923, Mrs. Wilmer Steele of Delaware bought 500 chicks to raise, not for eggs, but for meat.  Her gradual improvements in housing and feeding the birds led to the first real “industrial” production techniques with indoor caging and better feed.  While some today might call these innovations cruel, Mrs. Steele’s 10,000 birds had a mortality rate of only 5%…Until someone ate them for dinner, I mean.   Better feed and dietary supplements raised egg laying up to 250 eggs a year.

During World War II, such industrialized chicken production increased rapidly.  The large numbers of chickens being slaughtered for consumption led to the development in 1942 of the ‘online eviscerator’, a machine that removed the internal organs of the bird making it ready to cook.  Since this meant that the carcass cooled more rapidly, it was safer to transport to market and less meat spoiled.  Up until this point, gutting and preparing a chicken was considered a kitchen skill.  Since the process by hand was time-consuming, butcher shops charged extra for preparing the birds for the home, meaning that the mechanized process lowered the price of chicken.  For the first time it became common for butcher shops to sell butchered chicken, so that the consumer could buy breasts and thighs, separately, without purchasing the entire bird. 

Shortly after the war, chicken production grew dramatically, in part aided by the rapid introduction of home refrigerators, making the meat safer to keep and use.  (I can remember being told sometime during the Eisenhower administration that if uncooked chicken attracted flies, it was no longer fresh enough to eat.  I doubt if that advice is still being taught today.)

Ever larger industrialized ‘chicken mills‘ producing both table meat and eggs, quickly put the small family egg farms out of business, forcing the USDA to begin a grading system for eggs.  So much chicken was sold, that mutton began vanishing from the dinner table.  By the end of the century, chicken consumption surpassed that of pork and beef and all across the plains of Texas, cowboys (poultry punchers?) herded vast flocks of clucking chickens to market….  Well, no.

What was actually developed were mechanized chicken and egg factories where birds rarely had enough room to exercise.  Antibiotics and hormones were added to the feed, making the birds grow faster and all but eliminating diseases.  Mortality rates dropped to low single digits and egg producers began striving for an egg a day.  These techniques also produced a backlash in publicity by people who believed that such practices were cruel and amounted to animal abuse.

In the last decade, a surprising number of people have begun to raise chickens at home again—and not only for food.  Pet chickens are now more popular as pets in American than either hamsters or guinea pigs.  Inevitably, people began pressuring stores to sell chickens and eggs that were more humanely raised.  This heralded the introduction of the free-range chicken.

Most consumers probably believe that a free-range chicken happily frolics among the flowers and trees while occasionally laying an egg on a velvet pillow.  This sounds suspiciously like the Happy Farm that parents describe to children to explain the sudden disappearance of a family pet.

The reality is that according to USDA guidelines, it means a free range chicken is a bird raised in a mechanized cage that has a ‘pophole’ large enough for the bird to stick its head through to observe the factory parking lot.  ‘Certified Humane Free Range’ chickens have it slightly better, since they are allowed two square feet of space per bird and are outdoors—weather permitting—at least six hours a day.  In practice, this means the cages have doors to access a fenced in yard, but the doors are open during good weather only.  While the word ‘range’ brings to mind vast open spaces, the math works out to a bird every seventeen inches in any direction.

If you factor in the size of a person versus the size of chicken, a free-range chicken is more crowded than a 300-pound man on a Southwest Airlines flight to Phoenix.  

But what about the taste?  Well, I’ve spent two days reading about taste tests conducting in America, England, France, and Italy.  Those tests boil down to this:  Of every kind of chicken you can name—including flash-frozen bags of breasts sold at Sam’s Club—each has won at least one of the tests, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that more humane treatment of birds produces better flavor or nutrition.  Well, there is one exception:  all of the taste tests done by the producers of chicken proved dramatically that their own product tasted wonderful and might cure cancer.  I disregarded those tests.  

Reading those widely varied tests, it was almost like those chickens had been selectively bred for thousands of generations for size, not brains.

I can summarize the taste tests for you.  First, the more people paid for their chicken, the more likely they were to believe it tasted better.  When these same people were presented with blind anonymous choices, they rarely picked the expensive chicken.  If you buy the really expensive chicken from Holey Moley Foods, you are buying a Veblen good.  (A Veblen good is something that the higher the price, the more people want to buy it.  You know, Ferrari, Cartier, and anything made by in China with a Gucci label on it.  This is why some bottles of wine sell for thousands of dollars a bottle despite not tasting as good as grape Kool-Aid.).   The folks at the store over charging you for a plain chicken raised in a wire cage want you to believe that it spent its life resting on a mink lined nest while an au pair read Proust out loud.  In French, of course.

The second bit of information gleaned from those tests is that fresh eggs tasted better than older eggs regardless of whether the eggs came from birds were living in “humane” factories or were living on a family farm where a ten-year-old boy chased them around the yard beating them with a stick.  Any remaining difference between varieties of eggs is most likely due to the chef.

When buying chicken or eggs, you should buy what you want, what you can afford, and what tastes best to you.  Keep in mind that there are almost no stories about chickens that end with the phrase, “they lived happily ever after”.  There is a name for a book with stories about chickens:  it is called a “cookbook” and the stories in it usually end with “season to taste”.

Creative Destruction

In 1574, Queen Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation requiring her subjects to wear knitted caps on certain dates.  This decree was one of eight sumptuary laws dictating what kind of clothing commoners were allowed to wear, the permitted colors, and how luxurious the clothing could be.  The laws were very specific, describing what kinds of fabric, colors, and furs were allowed, even limiting the choice of buttons.  Naturally, the upper class was exempt from such laws.

All of society was concerned with keeping the poor from spending too much money on clothing but the personal reasons varied from preventing peasants from falling into debt to the more obvious motive of keeping the riffraff from imitating their betters.  Shakespeare referenced the clothing restrictions in several of his plays, such as in King Lear when a nobleman insults a servant, calling him a ‘three-suited, … filthy worsted-stocking knave’.  (Act 2, Scene 2).

As for Queen Elizabeth, there is no reason to doubt that she supported the maintenance of class differences, and she was probably genuinely concerned about preventing the poor for going into debt needlessly from buying clothes in a useless effort to emulate their betters—but her primary motivation was to placate the powerful textile guilds.  The guilds supported the queen politically in exchange for her guaranteeing their market.  

Shortly after the proclamation concerning the wearing of caps, Reverend William Lee in the village of Calverton noticed a woman spending long hours knitting caps to comply with the new law.  Exactly who the woman was depends on which flavor of the legend you prefer:   it was either his wife, his mother, or his sweetheart.  Considering that, as curate, Lee only received a tenth of the salary paid to the parish priest, he was forced to live in a small house owned by the church.  (Since he couldn’t afford a wife and the house was too small to live with his mother, I think it was probably the last of the three options.)

Watching that single pair of needles slowly working in the dim light to produce coarse cloth, Lee suddenly had a thought.  Wouldn’t multiple needles working together produce cloth faster?  Whether Lee was interested in saving labor or improving his financial condition will never be known, but after a couple of years of hard work, Lee developed a working stocking frame knitting machine, the first practical machine to produce clothing, arguably the first step towards the industrial revolution.  

Lee spent another two years improving both the speed and the quality of the machine to the degree that several working models were in production, producing coarse cloth faster than was capable by human labor alone.  Seeking to expand his business, William Lee went to London and began commercial operations.  His new enterprise caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who visited the shop and examined the machinery for herself.  After she expressed disappointment with the coarseness of the cloth, Lee further improved the machinery to the point where it could produce fine silk cloth.  Lee presented the queen with a pair of silk stockings hoping for a patent and her royal patronage.

To his request, the queen answered, “Thou aimest high, Master Lee.  Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects.  It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”  Lee took his machines to Paris where the French King similarly rebuffed him.  Lee died in poverty, and the industrial revolution got off to a slow start.

While Queen Lizzie was probably more interested in keeping the guilds’ support than her having any fear that the machine might put workers out of work, this is still a great example of the fear of creative destruction—the fear that new technology will harm the economy by eliminating existing jobs.  Though this fear has always been irrational, it persists today.  At least once a week someone tells me they refuse to pump their own gas or use self-checkout registers in grocery stores because those actions eliminate jobs.

The fear of creative destruction is why the downtown department stores fought the building of malls, which in turn were against online retailers. It is the current reason why trains without coal or a firebox still have firemen (though still called firemen, they are usually engineers in training), why our major shipping ports are not modernized, and why many people fear the inevitable age of self-driving trucks on the highway.  That the low wages paid to checkers in grocery stores will be offset by the higher pay of designers, builders and repairmen of automated checkout computers is rarely considered—most people still fear that new technology will create poverty by eliminating jobs.

In the long run, however, these innovations lower the cost of goods for the consumers, saving them enough money that more goods can be purchased.   Increased purchasing power will power invention of newer, better goods, thus creating new jobs.  While thousands of current truck drivers will inevitably be replaced by computers in the coming decades, the driverless trucks will lower transportation costs, creating new jobs in the process.  The process will be painful for many of today’s drivers, but a half century from now, people will wonder why we were hesitant.

This process has been going on for centuries, but we just forget about it because we enjoy the new technology at cheaper costs.  I’m not typing this on my new IBM Selectric typewriter by the light of a kerosene lantern, my phone isn’t plugged into the wall, and I don’t take pictures on a Polaroid.  

Rent Control

Yesterday, I received a survey from a California university asking my opinions about the rent policy on some apartments I own.  From the obvious slant of the questions being asked, it was rather obvious what conclusions the researchers desired.  Some of the questions were so narrowly worded that no matter how I answered, I was confessing to being Simon Legree, gleefully raising the rent on widows and orphans shortly before I evicted them onto the nearest ice floe.

What I could not say in the survey was that in more than two decades of owning those apartments, I’ve never raised anyone’s rent, opting to impose only such increases after a tenant moves out.  (That policy may have to change, however, if the cost of utilities continues to skyrocket.)

The last section of the survey asked my opinion about rent control.  Since none of the multiple-choice responses was suitable, I’ll answer here.  Rent control not only does not work, it harms the poor by raising the cost of housing…while making such housing scarce.  Additionally, in my humble opinion, it violates the “taking clause” of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  I’ll address each of those points separately.

Rent control is just another form of a price control—a universal stupidity where politicians believe they can somehow change reality.  Price controls have been around for more that 4000 years without a single recorded case of success, but politicians still regularly resort to the measure to placate the uneducated.  It is almost impossible to find an economist who supports the idea, but voters seem to like politicians who promise the impossible.

If the government arbitrarily sets a price below the market price, then the producers are left with few options:  they can lower the quality, sell on the black market, or cease production.  When price controls are placed on housing, the common response is for landlords to cut down on maintenance, to change the rental units into salable condominiums, or to shutter the property.  Far worse, cities that implement rent controls have far lower rates of development.  Or to put that more simply:  only an idiot builds apartments in a city where the government controls what you can charge for rent.  If you are going to invest millions of dollars, you are most likely to do it someplace where you can make at least some profit.

If no one is building new units, it won’t take long for a shortage to exist, forcing up the price of those units not on rent control.  The largest cities in the United States with some form of rent control or rent stabilization are New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Washington, DC.  This is not surprising when you consider that nine of the ten cities in the United States with the highest rents all have imposed rent control.  Not one of the cities with the lowest rents has any form of rent stabilization or control.  

Even as rent control keeps the price of some apartments down, the demand goes up while the available supply goes down.  You don’t have to have a Nobel Prize in economics to understand that this raises the price on all non-controlled apartments and increases the likelihood of controlled properties being converted to condos.

New York City has had a 41% price hike on a single bedroom unit in the last 12 months, even after the previous mayor made affordable housing his primary goal for eight years.  Despite more than half of the city’s apartments being rent controlled, available apartments for low-income people are scarce, with the average price of a one-bedroom apartment currently topping $3400.   Newspapers routinely report stories of prospective renters paying exorbitant bribes to landlords to secure a vacancy—a textbook definition of a black market. 

Despite the exodus of several hundred thousand New Yorkers, there is an urgent need for an additional half million apartments according to the city.  When asked, the most common reason developers preferred building in New Jersey or Connecticut was New York City’s policy of over regulation.   So far, both the city’s and the state’s response to the problem has been more restrictions on landlords and developers.

If rent control causes a dramatic increase in the cost of housing, it naturally follows that as rents increase, so does homelessness.  Of the top eight cities with the largest number of homeless people, seven impose rent control.  

A recent study by the Brookings Institute recently found that when apartments came off rent control, property values increased by 40%, creating a windfall profit for the city from property taxes.  The study also revealed a hidden problem with rent-controlled properties, that of “mis-matched housing”:  it’s the propensity of recent empty nesters to continue to live in apartments larger than their current needs because their current rent is cheaper than that of a smaller apartment.  Since tenants continued to occupy multi-bedroom apartments past their actual need, it created a shortage of units and raised the price for such units that were not rent controlled.

Lastly, there is a growing push for the Supreme Court to review decisions by lower courts that have upheld the constitutionality of rent control laws.  The “taking clause” of the Fifth Amendment states “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”  Since property rights include the right to sell your resources, it can be argued that the government cannot restrain your income from that property without compensation.  

This was exactly the argument used by the state legislatures in the thirty-seven states that have banned rent control.  Since such laws benefit only realtors and populist politicians, hopefully the other dozen or so will learn freshman economics.  

Yep, There’s a Precedent

In news that will no doubt sadden all of us, Warner Brothers has shelved the new Batgirl movie.  Despite having spent in excess of $90 million to finish shooting, the editing process has been dropped and the film permanently locked in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet stuck in a disused basement lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

Personally, I’m a little tired of the endless recycling of comic book hero movies.  The genre was interesting for a while, but the idea was getting stale long before Hollywood started making its movies politically correct (complete with warning labels about harsh language and smoking).  For some reason, Hollywood seems to think viewers will go into shock at seeing someone lighting up a cigarette, but have no qualms about depicting a psychopath with a chainsaw working his way through a daycare center.  The John Wick movies leap to mind…. 

David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers refuses to go into specifics about why he axed Batgirl and the second Scooby-Doo movie (Was there really a first one?), but did use the word, “quality” a lot.  He didn’t specifically say that Batgirl was horrible, but declared that the movie would never be seen in theaters, on a streaming service, or released on DVD.  This was just weeks after he had shut down the fledgling CNN+ streaming service after spending $300 million on the startup.  While it will never be a movie, I’d buy a ticket to watch a video of Zaslav explaining to his board of directors why they just flushed half a billion dollars away.  What exactly does a CEO say under those circumstances?  “Sorry, I made a boo-boo?”

A rival studio exec, interviewed by Variety, claimed that axing a movie after spending such a large amount was unprecedented in Hollywood.

Well, no.  This is why Hollywood needs to hire more historians, and I don’t mean the current hacks who pretend to be consultants.  (I won’t mention any Tom Cruise movies by name, but no former Soviet bloc nations used the F-14, much less still have one functioning and sitting around fueled and ready to go sixteen years after they stopped making parts for them.) There is, indeed, a precedent to axing a movie like Batgirl.

In 1941, Howard Hughes was well on his way to establishing himself as a power in Hollywood and like everything else Hughes did, he started at the top, acting as both producer and director of movies.  Using the same publicists who had conducted a nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, Hughes conducted a similar search for a “busty” actress to star in a new movie about Billy the Kid, called The Outlaw.  Eventually signing Jane Russell, Hughes both produced and directed a western loosely based on the lives of Billy, Pat Garrett, and Doc Holliday.

In this case, loosely means they spelled the names correctly.  Though it is remotely possible that Doc Holliday and William Bonney both passed through Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1879, they were certainly not friends.  Other details, such as the years the men were alive or the dates they died, are wildly wrong.  My favorite scene in the movie is the closing scene, which shows Billy and his well-endowed girl sharing a horse as they ride off into a California sunset, complete with an automobile crossing in the background from left to right.

The movie, which you can watch above, is famous for Hughes’ obsession with filming Jane Russell.  He was particularly fixated on filming her in such a way that it would appear that the actress was not wearing a bra, even going so far as to design one that provided lift by using stiff underwire and stronger straps.  Though Russell assured her director she was wearing the custom bra for her scenes, in actuality she later revealed that she wore her own bra, but just tightened the straps and added a little tissue for padding.  Years later the bra designed by Hughes found a home in a museum, while Russell became a spokeswoman for Playtex.  Strangely, Hughes ignored the fact that, in the movie, Russell can be seen removing her nylon stockings 58 years before such a garment was invented.

Note.  If the movie above doesn't open on your device, click here.

When finished, the movie had some problems being approved by the Hollywood Production Code Administration, something that was hardly a surprise since Hughes had arranged that all of the publicity about the film emphasize Russell’s breasts.  Even the movie posters featuring sexy photos of Russell, such as the one at the right, depicted scenes not actually in the movie.  The media frenzy prompted one Hollywood writer to offer that the movie should be renamed, “The Sale of Two Titties”.

In reality, all Hughes had to do was cut 30 seconds from the movie to make the censors happy, and while those 30 seconds were milder than some of Russell’s later commercials for brassieres, Hughes promptly agreed and made the changes.  Then, Hughes announced that the Hollywood Production Code Administration would not allow the movie to be released.  No matter how loudly the Administration protested that they had not banned the movie, the press loved the bogus story and ran the Hughes version.

Hughes had his people contact newspapers, church leaders, and women’s organizations warning them about the “lewd movie”.  The resulting publicity created a demand for the public to see the movie, but Hughes kept the movie out of circulation for two years, only then allowing it to be shown in selected markets for a week before the movie was once again put into storage.  By the time the movie was finally released in 1946, the public could not wait to see it, making it a box office hit.

So a badly written movie, wildly inaccurate and directed by a man more obsessed with an unknown actress than with making a good movie, makes millions simply because the public is not allowed to see the film for years. 

If I’m correct, we will all be able to see exactly how horrible Batgirl is in about three years.  Right about the time Top Gun III comes out.