Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
No Man’s Land Jankel Adler 1943
Breaking down the Burger
A Big Mac contains 60 separate “inputs”. Surprising that bread is a bigger component than beef!
Persistent divergences in Big Mac RER are evident.
Might the dollar be in the wrong place?
Source: The Economist
Water and Californian agrobusiness
In the early 1960s, agriculture accounted for approximately 5.5% of California’s GDP. By 2024, as the state’s economy expanded and became more diversified, this share had declined to 1.7%. At the same time, California agriculture remains highly significant at the national scale, contributing about 12% of total U.S. agricultural production. California agriculture produces more than 75% of the nation’s fruits and nuts and almost half of its vegetables.
California is a leading agricultural exporter, generating $23.8 billion in revenue in 2024. This was a 6.1% increase from 2023 and a 14.6% increase relative to 2014. California accounts for a disproportionate share of U.S. agricultural exports, representing 13.5% of the national total in 2024. Exports were concentrated in a small set of high-value commodities, led by almonds ($4.95 billion), pistachios ($2.93 ) billion), dairy ($2.60 billion), wine ($1.08 billion), and walnuts ($0.92 billion) in 2024. California agriculture has recently supported an average of 414,000 jobs, though this varies about 50% by season, from recent winter lows of about 315,000 jobs to summer highs of about 480,000. This represents about 2.2% of California’s total employment.
Orchard, vegetable, and vineyard crops tend to be labor-intensive, especially relative to field crops. The USDA Census of Agriculture reported 63,134 farms and about 24.2 million acres in farms in California in 2022, down from 87,991 farms and almost 28.8 million acres in farms in 1997. Over this period, average farm size increased from 327 to 383 acres, reflecting a general consolidation of agricultural production into fewer but larger operations. Ownership patterns also shifted during this period. The total number of family farms decreased from about 69,000 in 1997 to about 45,000 in 2022, while the number of corporate farms increased from about 5,500 to about 8,000.10 Of these 8,000 corporate farms, 1,539 (2.4% of the total number of California farms) were nonfamily held corporations, with an average farm size of 684 acres, roughly triple the size of the average non-corporate family farm. Farm sales data show that a relatively small share of farms accounts for most agricultural production.
In 2022, California had 10,660 farms (about 17% of the total number of farms) with agricultural product sales greater than $500,000 compared to 32,174 (51%) with sales less than $25,000 and 11,100 (about 18%) with sales less than $1,000. Many irrigated farms also generate relatively small sales volumes. In 2023, about 39% of California’s total number of farms with irrigation had agricultural product sales of less than $25,000.11 These farms irrigated almost 318,000 acres and applied a total of 766,000 AF of surface and groundwater.12 In 1960, an acre-foot of water generated an average of $650 in agricultural revenue; by 2022, that figure more than doubled, reaching approximately $1,400 per acre-foot. (in constant dollars)
Source: PACINST
American Rivers: A Graphic Peter Gleick and Matthew Heberger
Note the thinning of the Colorado River as it makes its way south, due to withdrawals for cities and farms. Also note the drying of some of the West’s main rivers—long stretches of the Salt, Pecos, Canadian, Rio Grande, and San Joaquin Rivers virtually disappear as their flow drops below 1,000 cfs as a result of withdrawals for human use.
Source: PACINST
The Mutilated, Jankel Adler 1943
How Algeria is exploiting the structural weakness of its neighbor, Mali. Fascinating this by Akram Belkaïd & Anne-Cécile Robert
Was introduced to the maps in Le Monde Diplomatique at my grandparents’ breakfast table. They continue to delight. Extraordinary visualitzation of Mali’s partition.
Source: Diplomatique
The history of the pocket, Freya Johnston on The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900 by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux. 2019
Like the novel, with whose origins it is contemporary, the pocket is a repository that promises to contain and disburse secrets. Pockets, like novels, can enclose a story about the lost and found. Just as characters in 18th-century fiction are often begged to provide the histories of their lives and adventures, so too they may be talked out of their possessions. ‘You do wisely ... when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you may with the greater Ease and Safety, pick their Pockets.’
In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum, a thief-catcher, surveys with Lockit the jail-keeper their cache of stolen goods, including ‘seven and twenty Women’s Pockets compleat; with the several things therein contain’d; all Seal’d, Number’d, and enter’d’. This criminal inventory imposes order on what was often a chaotic miscellany of things. The authors of The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900 quote a lawyer at the Old Bailey, cross-examining a woman called Margaret Jones in 1794. Jones’s pocket had been picked. He suggests to her that ‘ladies’ pockets are generally pretty full, they say there is no bottom to them?’
The witness bridles at the imputation: ‘I am very careful that I do not lumber my pockets with a parcel of litter.’ Like the pocket, the 18th-century novel is regularly accused of being overstuffed with random items of little value. One anonymous reviewer complained in 1781 that inferior novelists found ‘throwing together’ anything they might ‘pick up’ a ‘convenient method’ of composition. Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, women’s pockets usually took the form of a bag or pouch tied around the waist and beneath the skirts, worn quite independently of other clothing. They might contain (among other things) a work of fiction, a pocket mirror, a snuff box and a sewing kit, as well as money. Lucy Locket in the nursery rhyme ‘lost her pocket’ because it was detachable – by the owner, or by someone else.
Source: Vol. 41 No. 23 · 5 December 2019, LRB
HEY READERS,
THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day.
I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button.
Photo by Jakub Dziubak on Unsplash
If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $60. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to.
In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them:
For contributing subscribers only.
Reclining Nude, Jankel Adler 1940
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: