Traditional butcher shops are making a comeback

PBS’s Market to Market program has an interesting story this week about traditional butcher shops making a comeback. There are a couple of points that have stuck in my mind. In the middle of the story several “meat lockers” are discussed and that brought to mind the meat locker we had in my hometown growing up. We raised our own meat animals but didn’t do our own butchering. We’d take the fattened calf or hog to the butcher and he would take care of the animal for us.

 

For a long time we didn’t have a large deep freeze in the house so after the animal was butchered most of it stayed in the “meat locker” in town until we had room for a few more packages in the small freezer in our fridge. Later we got a large deep freeze and we could store a whole butchered animal. Eventually everybody had freezers at home and the “meat locker” became simply a butcher. The people who were employed running the locker had to find new jobs but life for us on the farm was improved since we no longer had to deal every couple of days with getting meat in town from the meat locker.

The other interesting point in the story has to do with marketing lingo, as the presenter calls it. The term “artisan” is very popular today as a way of marketing products produced by small businesses. One of the butchers in the story said he didn’t know what an “artisan butcher” was. He was just a butcher. Yet, he’d been dressing beef, pork and other animals all of his adult life using traditional tools and methods. I think it’s a good idea to always pay attention to the words being used to sell to us. Remember that the whole idea of marketing is to differentiate the product from the mass market. Often these differences are not substantive. They are merely marketing lingo intended to increase the consumer’s willingness to pay for the good.

Near a recession with interest rates near zero and Hillary promising tax increases

The economic growth rate seems to have slowed enough to suggest we are near a recession. Usually the Federal Reserve would lower interest rates to resist the slowing rate of growth. However, the Fed Funds Rate has been near zero since January 2009 so that traditional tool has already been used … for over seven years already. To aggravate things the Democratic Party’s candidate for president is promising to raise taxes, a policy that is the exact opposite of what is usually done to increase growth. How many of you feel that at some point in the last eight years emerged from the last recession? Anybody?

Emphasizing academic skills at an early age can harm your child’s long term academic and intellectual development

Peter Gray writes in Psychology Today (1, 2)

Early academic training somewhat increases children’s immediate scores on the specific tests that the training is aimed at (no surprise), but these initial gains wash out within 1 to 3 years and, at least in some studies, are eventually reversed.  Perhaps more tragic than the lack of long-term academic advantage of early academic instruction is evidence that such instruction can produce long-term harm, especially in the realms of social and emotional development.

One interesting point in the second article, perhaps inadvertently, states that our brains are “designed”.

Our brains are designed to hold onto what we understand and to discard nonsense.

I don’t know the author. Perhaps he’s a creationist who believes in intelligent design in which case designing a brain makes perfect sense. However, if we look at the brain as an organ that developed, and continues to develop, as part of an evolutionary process then “design” is not correct. Design presupposes an intentional manipulation of something to achieve a purpose. Evolution’s purpose sole purpose is survival and intentional design within the evolutionary time frame makes no sense. I urge readers not to be sucked into the idea that everything is or can be designed. Much of our world is the product of chance.

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