Are There Price Asymmetries in the U.S. Beef Market? [pdf]

you speak too plainly ahahah, academics don't like it.

That's a reasonable summary of the motivation behind the literature. If we have this kind of asymmetry, it's because consumers are getting ripped off, is how the argument usually goes.

I think it's important to recognize that if consumers are temporarily buying lower quality beef, they're still hurt (but probably not enough that anyone cares).

That's right. It matters if you're talking about "price" as the price on the product or the price consumers pay.

Sorry. This is the only paper I wrote on the topic, and my coauthors had already constructed the data when they brought me aboard.

How long it takes a group of people to eat an amount of food depends heavily on the number of people in the group.

My friend's family did this when they had growing boys. They might have split w another family, down to 1/4 of a cow, and it still took them the better part of a year to get through it.

Deep freezers don’t cost that much to operate, and in cooler climates, cost even less to run in a detached/attached garage.

But yeah, you need the space.

I think it’s usually a bigger family that goes in on it and spreads it out across their kids/nephews/nieces, etc.

I know I’m happy that someone coordinates it and just asks how much I want and here’s the price.

Most of the cow becomes ground beef.

We split it among 3 families and it lasts ~6 months or longer.

My in-laws did this (think they got 1/4), but they ended up with a bunch of cuts they weren't used to/didn't like and ended up throwing away a significant amount.

Our family of 4/5 would buy a half cow every year

I think half a cow is like ~250lbs of beef, so with an 8oz serving sizer per person that’s 125 meals for a family of four so maybe a year eating beef every third dinner?

Form a small, informal coop with friends and family.

My grandparents were part of what they called the meat circle. It was a bunch of farmers that took turns slaughtering a cow of their own to share with the group so they didn't have too much meat to deal with at home.

It can vary wildly depending on numerous factors, but you can get a 1/4 cow online right now for $900, if you find a local supplier it can be less. I see prices of $5 a pound + $60 butchering fee.

Note that you get all the various types of meat, not just one type.

About 4.50 a pound packed.

> It's researchers accurately reporting their findings

In a low-confidence, hedged way. A "good" article has the balls to come in with a real question, and use statistics as tools to answer it. If the answer is messy or nuanced, so be it, but at least try.

Leading with the methods used and prior studies etc. etc. is the data equivalent of cowering behind cover.

>> Asking a question and finding that the answer is "yes, but not as bad as previously believed" is a contribution to our knowledge

Wait, that is not an accurate characterisation of the paper. "maybe yes, but maybe no" is more accurate:

Maybe yes:

    - BLS data supports the proposition, but possible BLS data flaws are highlighted.

Maybe no:

    - using other data instead of BLS allows a different interpretation
        - perhaps asymmetric in favour of feedlot owners ("this effect is negligible, or cannot be captured by our impulse response-based test")
        - perhaps symmetric ("Our preferred interpretation is simpler, with the relationship being symmetric").

>> It's researchers accurately reporting their findings. They aren't "pontificating". They are explaining the nuances of what they discovered when they tried to answer this question.

I'm not convinced that's what's going on here. Could it be that someone(s) has decided the existing literature weights too heavily in favour of a view they don't like. If the existing literature is broadly correct, one thing you could do is publish another paper which broadly agrees but leaves room for some doubt.

If it broadly agrees, could it be less likely to come under robust scruitiny - that could lead to outright public rejection by others.

Introducing a small amount of doubt with the broad agreement could have 2 effects:

    1. there now exists some doubt when summarising multiple papers on the topic, a contrarian view has now been injected into the discourse. The contrarian view is not backed up by hard facts, it's reasonable conjecture but nonetheless, when summarising the available papers on a topic, its views should be included in that summarisation, thus unfairly skewing the summarisation view. A view from conjecture is summarised next to views more directly evidenced in underlying data.
    2. you can count on someone misrepresenting your findings. In our conversation you said "yes, but not as bad as previously believed", something the paper doesn't actually give hard evidence for but does try to suggest.

To be clear, i don't claim that this is what's going on here, but going back to my original comment, the lack of weight of evidence for these findings does lead me to dismiss the paper.

>> our appetite for truth

I can only speak for myself here but my comment - misguided or otherwise - was in search of truth.

You'd be surprised what a conversation with someone who knows someone can yield. I used to cold contact authors and sources on interesting papers, including CRS, and had a better than 50% response rate.

Same with farmers. Whenever I called to talk about alternative crops to corn, wheat, and soybeans, once they realized I wasn't trying to get them to buy anything from me, they were happy to tell me about everything they were dealing with. Granted, it may have mostly been the coffee kicking in at 4 or 5am, but they didn't hold back about every pain in their ass from city hall to the capitol.