Category Archives: Economic growth

On Social Tables, Inequality and Pre-Industrial Societies

“Towards an explanation of inequality in pre-modern societies: the role of colonies and high population density”

by Branko Milanovic (City University of New York)

Abstract: Using the newly expanded set of 40 social tables from pre-modern societies, the paper tries to find out the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality have the elites pushed the actual inequality). We find strong evidence that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated countries exhibited lower extraction ratios. We propose several possibilities linking high population density to low inequality and to low elite extraction.

Distributed by NEP-HIS on: 2016-11-13

Guido Alfani (Bocconi University, Milan)

Given the recent increase in the availability of good-quality data on pre-industrial (or pre-modern) societies, there is much need for works of synthesis aimed at discovering the factors shaping long-term inequality trends. Branko Milanovic has been particularly active in this field, with the publication of a recent book on Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (2016, Harvard University Press) [see the reviews here – Ed]. In this new working paper, Milanovic tries to move forward, using a large database of social tables to single out the potential causes of differences in historical inequality levels and in inequality extraction. He focuses in particular on institutional factors (inequality in colonies vs other areas) and on demographic factors (population density). The results are very interesting and represent a useful step forward in our understanding of inequality change in preindustrial societies.

This paper was distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-11-13. It makes use of a relatively large collection of social tables for preindustrial societies, including overall 40 social tables for about 30 distinct countries/world areas over a very long time: from Athens in 330 BCE to British India in 1938. As is well known, social tables allow us to roughly estimate income inequality. They are particularly useful in situations of relative scarcity of data and although they have been in use for centuries – the first example is Gregory King’s social table dating 1688 – many new ones have recently been produced for a variety of preindustrial societies across the world (see Lindert and Williamson 2016 for the U.S., Saito 2015 for Japan, Broadberry et al. 2015 for England, and Alfani and Tadei 2017 for Ivory Coast, Senegal and the Central African Republic). Although estimating complete distributions is the better option (see for example the accurate reconstruction of income distribution in Old Castile around 1750 by Nicolini and Ramos 2016, the impressive work by Reis 2017 on Portugal from 1565 to 1770, and finally, the estimates of wealth inequality in the period 1300-1800 produced by the EINITE project for a variety of Italian pre-unification states and other European areas: Alfani (2015, 2017); Alfani and Ryckbosch (2016); Alfani and Ammannati (2017), this is not always possible or feasible and social tables must be considered a good alternative especially when there is a relative scarcity of data.

As rightly argued by Milanovic, the recent accumulation of new evidence has not been accompanied by equal advances in the work on causal factors driving inequality change in preindustrial times. The seminal article by Van Zanden (1995), in which long-term inequality growth in the Dutch Republic was explained by long-term economic growth, has later been nuanced by works demonstrating that during the early modern period, in many parts of Europe inequality grew also in phases of economic stagnation, or even decline (Alfani 2015; Alfani and Ryckbosch 2016). The role played by large-scale mortality crises, particularly plague epidemics, has been underlined and the Black Death of 1347-51 has been shown to be the only event able to produce large-scale and enduring inequality decline in the period from ca. 1300 to 1800 (Alfani 2015; Alfani and Ammannati 2017). In a very recent book, Scheidel (2017) has taken this line of reasoning further, arguing that all substantial declines in inequality recorded in human history are due to catastrophic events (epidemics, wars, revolutions…).

Milanovic’s aim is to find further regularities, looking for possible economic, institutional or demographic drivers of inequality change in preindustrial times. He adopts the theoretical framework of the Inequality Possibility Frontier (introduced in Milanovic, Lindert and Williamson 2011), arguing that we should focus not only on how unequal a society is, but also on how much inequality it manages to “extract” compared to the maximum inequality it could achieve given that everybody needs to reach at least the subsistence level. Hence, as an economy manages to increase the per-capita surplus produced, it also acquires a potential for becoming more unequal. A first relevant empirical finding is that colonies tend to be exceptionally extractive, especially at low levels of per-capita GDP. As Milanovic points out, this is not surprising and can be explained by colonies being more exploitative, i.e. being pushed closer to the inequality possibility frontier by rapacious elites. This is apparent when looking at inequality extraction (being a colony raises the “inequality extraction ratio” by almost 13 percent points), but not necessarily when looking at overall inequality as measured by a Gini index.

Branko Milanovic

Branko Milanovic

A more novel finding is the negative correlation between population density and both inequality and inequality extraction. In fact, a “high number of people per square kilometer seems to be a strong predictor of relatively egalitarian economic outcomes” (p. 16). Explaining this empirical finding is not easy and Milanovic resorts to two conjunctures: 1) in a less extractive economy, the poor enjoy relatively good living conditions and this might lead to greater population growth; or 2) a particularly dense population might be better able to make the position of the elite/of the ruler relatively precarious, enjoying de facto some sort of control over the actions of the elite and forcing it to adopt less extractive policies. As is clear, the direction of causality is the opposite in the two explanations – which are probably to be considered not mutually exclusive. Other correlates of inequality and inequality extraction include per-capita GDP and urbanization rates, which turn out being borderline significant (per-capita GDP) or positively but non-significantly correlated (urbanization rate), coherently with what was found by other recent comparative studies (Alfani and Ryckbosch 2016; Alfani and Ammannati 2017).

Undoubtedly, Milanovic’s new article helps to fill in a real need for more comparative research on preindustrial societies. The findings, albeit provisional, are very interesting and either they provide useful confirmation of what has already been argued by others – for example about the inability of per-capita GDP to explain preindustrial inequality growth in a satisfying way– or they lead us to think along new lines, especially regarding the impact on inequality of demographic variables. In fact, as urbanization rates proved to be a far poorer explanatory variable for inequality change than we expected (see in particular Ryckbosch 2016; Alfani and Ryckbosch 2016; Alfani and Ammannati 2017), demographic factors came to be perceived as probably relevant, but also somewhat puzzling (exception made for mass-mortality events like the Black Death, whose inequality-reducing effects now stand out very clearly). Population density offers us a novel perspective and in time, might prove to be the right path to follow.

However, there is also some space for constructive criticism. A first point to underline is that, differently from what Milanovic argues, the time might not yet be ripe for the kind of definitive and encompassing comparison that he seems to have in mind. The data available is still relatively scarce, including for Europe, which is the world area that has attracted the greatest amount of recent research. Additionally, social tables, albeit easily comparable, are not perfectly comparable – for example because they can include a greatly varying number of classes/groups. In some instances, classes are very few and we have no hint at within-class inequality. These are two reasons why, as argued above, complete distributions are strictly preferable to social tables. Finally, in the current version of Milanovic’s database, for the vast majority of countries only one social table is available, whereas multiple social tables for the same country at different time points would make for sounder statistical analyses. There are ongoing projects, especially EINITE and related projects, whose aim is to provide comparable state-level information on wealth and income inequality for large areas of the world at different points in time in the long run of history, but these projects are heavily dependent on new archival research and require time to be completed.

Secondly there are other possible common factors shaping long-term inequality change which Milanovic cannot consider in the context of the current article. Some of these have been underlined by a recent comparative paper by Alfani and Ryckbosch (2016) which, although focusing on “only” four European states during 1500-1800, nevertheless had the advantage of having recourse to inequality measures produced with a common methodology and covering all states continuously in time. This study underlined two factors common to all the areas covered: 1) “proletarianization”, i.e. the progressive disappearance of small peasant ownership, which occurred throughout Europe during the early modern period, and 2) the inequality-increasing consequences of the rise of the fiscal-military states from ca. 1500. These factors might have played a role also in other world areas, from the broader Mediterranean to East Asia and maybe elsewhere – but at present that is no more than speculation.

Obviously, such criticism in no way negates the considerable usefulness of Milanovic’s new paper – which is also a further demonstration of how his relatively new concept of the inequality possibility frontier allows for a deeper understanding of the actual conditions and consequences of distribution. It does, however, indicate that we are still a long way from being able to identify without ambiguity the main causes of inequality change in preindustrial societies that so many international economic historians are now attempting to discover.

Selected bibliography

Alfani, G., Ryckbosch, W. (2016), “Growing apart in early modern Europe? A comparison of inequality trends in Italy and the Low Countries, 1500–1800”, Explorations in Economic History, 62, pp. 143-153.

Alfani, G., Ammannati, F. (2017), “Long-term trends in economic inequality: the case of the Florentine State, ca. 1300-1800”, Economic History Review, forthcoming.

Alfani, G., Tadei, F. (2017), Income Inequality in Colonial Africa: Building Social Tables for Pre-Independence Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, IGIER Working Paper, forthcoming.

Broadberry, S., Campbell, B., Klein, A., Overton, M, Van Leeuwen, B. (2015), British Economic Growth 1270-1870, Cambridge University Press.

Lindert, P.H. and Williamson, J.G., Unequal gains. American growth and inequality since 1700, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2016.

Milanovic, B., Lindert, P.H., Williamson, J.G. (2011). “Pre-Industrial Inequality”, The Economic Journal, 121, pp. 255-272.

Nicolini, E.A., Ramos Palencia, F. (2016), “Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre-industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century”, Economic History Review, 69(3), pp. 747–772.

Reis, J. (2017), “Deviant behaviour? Inequality in Portugal 1565–1770”, Cliometrica, 11(3), forthcoming (early view:

Ryckbosch, W. (2016), “Economic inequality and growth before the industrial revolution: the case of the Low Countries (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries)”. European Review of Economic History, 20(1), pp. 1-22.

Saito, O. (2015), “Growth and inequality in the great and little divergence debate: a Japanese perspective”, Economic History Review, 68(2), pp. 399–419.

The History of Professional Road Cycling

by Jean-François Mignot

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-10-02

Revised by: Stefano Tijerina, Ph.D.

[2] Ibid., 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 3.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 4.

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 6.

Debt forgiveness in the German mirror

The Economic Consequences of the 1953 London Debt Agreement

By Gregori Galofré-Vilà (Oxford), Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Chris Meissner (UC Davis) and David Stuckler (Oxford)

Abstract: In 1953 the Western Allied powers implemented a radical debt-relief plan that would, in due course, eliminate half of West Germany’s external debt and create a series of favourable debt repayment conditions. The London Debt Agreement (LDA) correlated with West Germany experiencing the highest rate of economic growth recorded in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper we examine the economic consequences of this historical episode. We use new data compiled from the monthly reports of the Deutsche Bundesbank from 1948 to the 1960s. These reports not only provide detailed statistics of the German finances, but also a narrative on the evolution of the German economy on a monthly basis. These sources also contain special issues on the LDA, highlighting contemporaries’ interest in the state of German public finances and public opinion on the debt negotiation. We find evidence that debt relief in the LDA spurred economic growth in three main ways: creating fiscal space for public investment; lowering costs of borrowing; and stabilising inflation. Using difference-in-differences regression models comparing pre- and post LDA years, we find that the LDA was associated with a substantial rise in real per capita social expenditure, in health, education, housing, and economic development, this rise being significantly over and above changes in other types of spending that include military expenditure. We further observe that benchmark yields on long-term debt, an indication of default risk, dropped substantially in West Germany when LDA negotiations began in 1951 and then stabilised at historically low rates after the LDA was ratified. The LDA coincided with new foreign borrowing and investment, which in turn helped promote economic growth. Finally, the German currency, the deutschmark, introduced in 1948, had been highly volatile until 1953, after which time we find it largely stabilised.

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-09-04

Review by Natacha Postel-Vinay (LSE)

The question of debt forgiveness is one that has drawn increased attention in recent years. Some have contended that the semi-permanent restructuring of Greece’s debt has been counterproductive and that what Greece needs is at least a partial cancellation of its debt. This, it is argued, would allow both faster growth and a higher likelihood of any remaining debt repayment. Any insistence on the part of creditors for Greece to pay back the full amount through austerity measures would be self-defeating.

One problem with this view is that we know very little about whether debt forgiveness can lead to faster growth. Reinhart and Trebesch (2016) test this assumption for 45 countries between 1920-1939 and 1978-2010, and do find a positive relationship. However they leave aside a particularly striking case: that of Germany in the 1950s, which benefited from one of the most generous write-offs in history while experiencing “miracle” growth of about 8% in subsequent years. This case has attracted much attention recently given German leaders’ own insistence on Greek debt repayments (see in particular Ritschl, 2011; 2012; Guinnane, 2015).

Eichengreen and Ritschl (2009), rejecting several popular theories of the German miracle, such as a reallocation of labour from agriculture to industry or the weakening of labour market rigidities, already hypothesized that such debt relief may have been an important factor in Germany’s super-fast and sustained post-war growth. Using new data from the monthly reports of the Deutsche Bundesbank from 1948 to the 1960s, Gregori Galofré-Vilà, Martin McKee, Chris Meissner and David Stuckler (2016) attempt to formally test this assumption, and are quite successful in doing so.

By the end of WWII Germany had accumulated debt to Europe worth nearly 40% of its 1938 GDP, a substantial amount of which consisted in reparation relics from WWI. Some already argued at the time that these reparations and creditors’ stubbornness had plagued the German economy, which in the early 1930s felt constrained to implement harsh austerity measures, thus contributing to the rise of the National Socialists to power. It was partly to avoid a repeat of these events that the US designed the Marshall Plan to help the economic reconstruction of Europe post-WWII.

Marshall aid to Europe between 1948 and 1951 was less substantial than is commonly thought, but it came with strings attached which may have indirectly contributed to German growth. In particular, one of the conditions France and the UK had to fulfil in order to become recipients of Marshall aid was acceptance that Germany would not pay back any of its debt until it reimbursed its own Marshall aid. Currency reform in 1948 and the setting up of the European Payments Union facilitated this process.

Then came the London Debt Agreement, in 1953, which stipulated generous conditions for the repayment of half the amount due from Germany. Notably, it completely froze the other half, or at least until reunification, which parties to the agreement expected would take decades to occur. There was no conference in 1990 to settle the remainder.

Galofré-Vilà et al. admit not being able to directly test the hypothesis that German debt relief led to faster growth. Instead, making use of simple graphs, they look at how the 1953 London Debt Agreement (LDA) led to lower borrowing costs and lower inflation, which comes out as obvious and quite sustained on both charts.

Perhaps more importantly, they measure the extent to which the LDA freed up space for social welfare investment. For this, they make use of the fact that Marshall aid had mainly been used for infrastructure building, so that the big difference with the LDA in terms of state expenditure should have been in terms of health, education, “economic development,” and housing. Then they compare the amount of spending on these four heads to spending in ten other categories before 1953, and check whether this difference gets any larger after the LDA. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it does, and significantly so.

This way of testing the hypothesis that the LDA helped the German economy may strike some as too indirect and therefore insufficient. This is without mentioning possible minor criticisms such as the fact that housing expenditure is included in the treatment, not control group (despite the 1950 Housing Act), or that the LDA is chosen as the key event despite the importance of the Marshall Plan’s early debt relief measures.

Nevertheless testing such a hypothesis is necessarily a very difficult task, and Galofré-Vilà et al.’s empirical design can be considered quite creative. They are of course aware that this cannot be the end of the story, and they are careful to caution readers against hasty extrapolations from the post-war German case to the current Spanish or Greek situation. Some of their arguments have somewhat unclear implications (for instance, that Germany at the time represented 15% of the Western population at the time, whereas the Greek population represents only 2%).

Perhaps a stronger argument would be that Germany’s post-war debt was of a different character than Greek’s current debt: some would even call it “excusable” because it was mainly war debt; it was not (at least arguably) a result of past spending excesses. For this reason, one may at least ask whether debt forgiveness in the Greek context would have the same — almost non-existent — moral hazard effects as in the German case. Interestingly, the authors point out that German debt repayment after the LDA was linked to Germany’s economic growth and exports (so that the debt service/export revenue ratio could not exceed 3%). This sort of conditionality is strangely somewhat of a rarity among today’s sovereign debt contracts. It could be seen as a possible solution to fears of moral hazard, thereby mitigating any differences in efficiency of debt relief emanating from differences in the nature of the debt contracted.

Eichengreen, B., & Ritschl, A. (2009). Understanding West German economic growth in the 1950s. Cliometrica, 3(3), 191-219.

Guinnane, T. W. (2015). Financial vergangenheitsbewältigung: the 1953 London debt agreement. Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper, (880).

Reinhart, C. M., & Trebesch, C. (2014). A distant mirror of debt, default, and relief (No. w20577). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ritschl, A. (2011). “Germany owes Greece a debt.” in The Guardian. Tuesday 21 June 2011.

Ritschl, A. (2012). “Germany, Greece and the Marshall Plan.” In The Economist. Friday 15 June.

The Limitations of Correcting Data with more Data

Brazilian Export Growth and Divergence in the Tropics during the Nineteenth Century

The USA’s First ‘Belle Époque’ (1841-1856)

America’s First Great Moderation

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-03-23

Review by Natacha Postel-Vinay (University of Warwick)

Distributed by NEP-HIS on: 2016-03-17

Reviewed by Mark J Crowley

Where is the growth?

Mismeasuring Long Run Growth: The Bias from Spliced National Accounts

by Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Carlos III)

Distributed in NEP-HIS on 2015 – 01 – 09

Reviewed by Cristián Ducoing

Leandro Prados de la Escosura. Source:

Leandro Prados de la Escosura. Source:


45-54 year old woman treated with Tummy Tuck

This 47-year-old female was unhappy with her abdomen after having two C-sections. She underwent an abdominoplasty, minor liposuction of the abdomen and flanks to improve her cosmetic appearance.


Hong Kong Exchange Fund 1Q Investment Income HK$17.1 Bln

    The Hong Kong Exchange Fund posted investment gains of 17.1 billion Hong Kong dollars (US$2.2 billion) in the first quarter, down from HK$30.3 billion in the previous three-month period, the HKMA said. The fund had investment gains of HK$44.5 billion in the first quarter of last year.

    The fund's Hong Kong stock investments recorded a loss of HK$1.4 billion in the January-March period due to a 1.6% drop in the benchmark Hang Seng Index, while overseas stock investment income totaled HK$24.9 billion.

    The HKMA said bond investment income were HK$2.8 billion in the same period. Its foreign-exchange losses totaled HK$9.8 billion.

    Write to Chester Yung at chester.yung@wsj.com


Quality Magazine

Ultrasonic Material Analysis

February 1, 2008
Ultrasonic spectrum analysis with a focused immersion transducer is used to evaluate grain structure in a metal axle component. Source: Olympus NDT

Ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT) is a versatile technique that can be applied to a variety of material analysis applications. While ultrasonic NDT is perhaps better known in its more common applications for thickness gaging, flaw detection and acoustic imaging, high frequency sound waves also can be used to discriminate and quantify some basic mechanical, structural or compositional properties of solids and liquids. Ultrasonic material analysis is based on a simple principle of physics: the motion of any wave will be affected by the medium through which it travels. Thus, changes in one or more of four easily measurable parameters associated with the passage of a high frequency sound wave through a material-transit time, attenuation, scattering and frequency content-often can be correlated with changes in physical properties such as hardness, elastic modulus, density, homogeneity or grain structure.

Ultrasonic pulser/receivers are general purpose laboratory instruments that can be used with wave analysis software. Source: Olympus NDT

Ultrasonic NDT uses the range of frequencies from approximately 20 KHz to over 100 MHz, with most work being performed between 500 KHz and 20 MHz. Both longitudinal and shear modes of vibration are commonly employed, as well as surface waves and plate waves in some specialized cases. Because shorter wavelengths are more responsive to changes in the medium through which they pass, many material analysis applications will benefit from using the highest frequency that the test piece will support.

Sound pulses are normally generated and received by piezoelectric transducers that have been acoustically coupled to the test material. In most cases a single transducer coupled to one side of the test piece serves as both transmitter and receiver (pulse/echo mode), although in some situations involving highly attenuating or scattering materials separate transmitting and receiving transducers on opposite sides of the part are used through transmission mode.

A sound wave is launched by exciting the transducer with either a voltage spike or a continuous wave impulse. The sound wave travels through the test material, either reflecting off the far side to return to its point of origin (pulse/echo), or being received by another transducer at that point through transmission. The received signal is then amplified and analyzed. A variety of commercial instrumentation is available for this purpose, using both analog and digital signal processing.

An advantage of ultrasonic testing over other material analysis methods is that it often can be performed in-process or on-line. High frequency sound waves often can be successfully transmitted into and out of moving materials without direct contact, through the use of a water bath or water stream as a coupling medium. Measurements also can be performed within closed containers by coupling sound energy through the wall.

Because sound waves penetrate through the test specimen, material properties are measured in bulk rather than just on the surface. It is sometimes even possible, through the use of selective gating, to analyze just one layer of a multilayer, multi-material fabrication.

The relevant measurement parameters will typically be one or more of the following:

1. Sound velocity/pulse transit time. Sound velocity is usually the easiest ultrasonic parameter to measure. The speed of sound in a homogenous medium is directly related to both elastic modulus and density, thus changes in either elasticity or density will affect pulse transit time through a sample of a given thickness. Additionally, varying degrees of nonhomogeneity may have an effect on sound velocity.

2. Attenuation. Sound energy is absorbed or attenuated at different rates in different materials, governed in a complex fashion by interactive effects of density, hardness, viscosity and molecular structure. Attenuation normally increases with frequency in a given material.

3. Scattering. Sound waves reflect from boundaries between dissimilar materials. Changes in grain structure, fiber orientation, porosity, particle concentration and other microstructural variations can affect the amplitude, direction and frequency content of scattered signals. Scatter effects also can be monitored indirectly by looking at changes in the amplitude of a backwall echo or a through-transmission signal.

4. Frequency (Spectrum) content. All materials tend to act, to some degree, as a low-pass filter, attenuating or scattering the higher frequency components of a broadband sound wave more than the lower frequency components. Thus, analysis of changes in the remaining frequency content of a selected broadband pulse that has passed through the test material can track the combined effects of attenuation and scattering as described earlier.

In some applications ultrasonic data such as velocity can be directly used to calculate properties such as elastic modulus. In other cases, ultrasonic testing is a comparative technique, where in order to establish a test protocol in a given application it will be necessary to experimentally evaluate reference standards representing the range of material conditions being quantified. From such standards it will be possible to record how sound transmission parameters vary with changes in specific material properties, and then from this baseline information it will be possible to identify or predict similar changes in test samples.

Sound velocity is measured in material test samples with a portable ultrasonic flaw detector. Source: Olympus NDT

A variety of ultrasonic instrumentation can be used in material analysis applications. Sound velocity can be measured with simple handheld ultrasonic thickness gages, while velocity, attenuation and scattering effects can all be observed with modern digital flaw detectors. Pulser/receivers with appropriate auxiliary equipment and ultrasonic imaging systems with appropriate software can be used to quantify all of these properties, and to perform spectrum analysis, or frequency content, testing as well. ndt

The following is a summary of some specific material analysis applications where ultrasonic techniques have been used and documented.

  • Elastic moduli: Young’s modulus and shear modulus in homogenous, nondispersive materials can be calculated from longitudinal wave and shear wave velocity, along with material density. Use of waveguides often permits measurement at high temperatures.

  • Nodularity in cast iron: Both the concentration of graphite in cast iron and its shape and form can be quantified through velocity measurements.

  • Cure rate in epoxies and concrete: The speed of sound in these materials changes as they harden, thus sound velocity measurements can be correlated to the degree of curing. Concrete testing usually requires access to both sides for through-transmission coupling.

  • Liquid concentrations: The mixture ratio of two liquids with dissimilar sound velocities can be correlated to the sound velocity of the solution at a given temperature.

  • Density of slurries: The liquid/solid mix ratio of slurries such as drilling mud and paper slurry at a given temperature can be correlated to sound velocity or attenuation.

  • Density in ceramics: Uniformity of density in both green and fired ceramics can be verified by means of sound velocity measurements.

  • Polymerization in plastics: In plastics and other polymers, variations in molecular structure such as length or orientation of polymer chains will often result in corresponding changes in sound velocity or attenuation.

  • Particle or porosity size and distribution: Changes in the size or distribution of particles or porosity in a solid or liquid medium will affect the amplitude and frequency of scattered ultrasound.

  • Grain size in metals: Changes in grain size or orientation in steel, cast iron, titanium and other metals will cause changes in the amplitude, direction or frequency content of scattered ultrasound.

  • Anisotropy in solids: Variations in sound velocity, scattering and attenuation across different axes of a solid can be used to identify and quantify anisotropy.

  • Case hardening depth in steel: High frequency shear wave backscatter techniques can be used to measure the depth of case hardening.

  • Temperature measurement: Ultrasonic thermometry has been used to measure very high temperatures, over 3,000 C, by monitoring changes in sound velocity in a reference medium.


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What Race to the Bottom?

Op-Eds & Articles

What Race to the Bottom?

Osorio and Sahlgren Article for The American Spectator

Free trade creates new opportunities, jobs, and value for consumers. Now will someone please tell Congress? As it begins its new session, Congress's agenda includes ratification of trade deals with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. However, the Democratic majority has made no effort to push these through. And now their excuse is wearing thin.

Free trade allows nations to focus on those goods and services over which they enjoy a competitive advantage and can produce most efficiently at lower cost. This creates value for consumers by increasing their purchasing power. It also creates jobs as capital is directed to where it can produce the best results.

Yet for organized labor and their allies in Congress, this isn't enough. If they get their way, the days of trade agreements dealing with trade, and trade alone, will be long gone.

Hill Democrats, heeding the call of organized labor and environmental lobby groups, are demanding that any new trade deals include enforceable labor and environmental standards. Such provisions are included in the recently ratified U.S.-Peru free trade agreement.

Currently, all of the pending free trade agreements include the labor and environmental provisions outlined in the Bipartisan Trade Deal that the White House and Congress agreed to last summer. But now, that's not considered strict enough.

How strict is strict enough? And what price would trade critics be willing to extract to get their way?

Some Democratic lawmakers are prepared to scuttle the pending Colombia, Panama, and South Korea trade deals, even though they include enforceable labor and environmental standards.

WHY ARE ORGANIZED labor and its congressional allies so hostile to free trade agreements? The primary reason given by the unions is that countries would weaken their labor laws to obtain a comparative advantage. They contend that because capital is more mobile than labor, and because it seeks the highest profits possible, it will flow to wherever the standards are the lowest.

Similarly, environmental activists argue that poor countries will use laxer environmental regulation as a comparative advantage, which would force American companies to weaken their own standards in the U.S. to keep up.

Critics contend that stringent provisions in trade agreements are needed to avoid this "race to the bottom" in labor and environmental standards.

In the aftermath of the Bipartisan Trade Deal, this would amount to making the enforceable provisions even stricter, which in practice would require developing countries to adopt labor and environmental regulations similar to those applied to Western industrial nations.

This view of trade agreements is not only misguided, but dangerously wrong. Burdening trade agreements with so much additional baggage could well undermine the very goals of higher labor standards and improved environmental quality.

Free trade is one of the best tools to improve labor and environmental standards in the long run. It is with rising wealth, and rising productivity, that wages rise and labor conditions improve. Wealthier is also healthier; wealthier societies are better at taking care of their environment.

However, even with these labor and environmental provisions, scrapping these trade deals now would be a bad idea, since opportunities from increased trade would be lost.

It would also hurt U.S. national security. Colombia, a steadfast U.S. ally, faces deteriorating relations with the authoritarian, belligerent, anti-American government of Hugo Chavez in neighboring Venezuela. Likewise, the U.S.-South Korea trade agreement could bolster the relationship with that country, which faces a nuclear-armed Kim Jong-Il.

Open trade is one of the best tools to promote prosperity in societies both rich and poor. Of course, the road to a better future is often bumpy, and fraught with possible disruptions. Such disruptions should be taken into account, but to focus on them at the expense of the greater goal of liberalized trade is to lose sight of the forest for the trees.


Date: Jun 29, 2012 3:04 AM
Author: Jonathan Crabtree
Subject: Re: How would YOU simplify arithmetic?

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts.

BOB you ask a good question, "How does making school more simple help?" and later suggested my topic was a contradiction rather than a question.

In Australia four million adults out of 7 million of working age do not have sufficient numeracy skills to function in society. Every day thousands join the unemployment queue as manufacturing and retail jobs disappear. We are leaving the agricultural and manufacturing era and entering the information age.

STEM will increasingly be important if we are to solve problems that matter. The more children we help get though K-6 the more likely STEM subjects will be studied at tertiary level. However at the moment, there is a shortage of math(s) teachers in Australia. It is a downward spiral.

My two sons, now at uni studying science, scored 99. If they wanted to become K-6 teachers they would only have needed a score of 59.

ACER research shows correlation between teacher pay and student performance. Maybe teacher university entrance scores more reveal causality of PISA scores. the Asian countries generally require more academic performance before people can become teachers.

So "How does making school more simple help?"

Making arithmetic simpler may reduce the number of children failing math at school. It may increase the number of students studying math as the foundation of STEM subjects. Making arithmetic simpler will also make it easier for teachers to understand math.

Making arithmetic easier will also reduce the number of people who feel failures for the rest of their life and increase the number of people earning higher incomes and/or increase the number of people who lead happier lives.

India participated in PISA 2009+ and appeared second last to Kyrgyzstan out of 74 countries. So forget documentaries like 2 million minutes that portray India as a math superpower. This year India will not participate in PISA testing. As India created modern arithmetic (zero as a number) my goal is to help fix the problem of arithmetic in India first.

Anyway, why not make arithmetic simpler? Everything else gets updated and becomes new and improved! My agenda is not that of a department, union or mafia. It's just to see if a simpler arithmetic can be accepted.

I understand arithmetic differently and seek to explain it more simply then previously. As per my post, any changes I may suggest are natural and not pedagogical.

HAIM, perhaps you jumped to a false conclusion. I do not claim a linguistic blend of eleven, twelve, thirteen with an Asian approach of two-one, ten-two, ten three alone warrants a math revolution. That approach is only a part of the solution.

For example Finland is the current fashionable flavour for math, yet their language is truly atrocious for counting. The number 18 is kahdeksantoista meaning 8 of the second, which is perhaps sillier than our dyslexic eighteen. Ninety-eight is yhdeksänkymmentäkahdeksan.

I do agree with your statement Haim, "You should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." which as you know is Einstein's Razor morphed into ASAPANS (As Simple As Possible And No Simpler). As for not holding your breath for an arithmetic simplifier, it took me 25 years to arrive at just one good idea.

CLYDE you presented two great papers which my youngest son explained to me. What I am creating is like Peano logic yet operating at the integer level. If somebody has rewritten Grassman's work to include axioms, please share the link. Grassman proved the rule of signs (negative times negative is positive) inductively. I'm told Grassman defined multiplication inductively by:

"Any number m times 0 is defined as 0. If n is a positive number then m times n is defined as (m times the number preceding n) plus m.

If n is a negative number then m times n is defined as (m times the number following n) minus m.

Then Grassman proved proved the rule of signs inductively from that."

As some may know, I start from an integer set and explain arithmetic via bumps and holes. What I hope my next post my prompt, is formal 'math speak' that either proves or disproves the value of my approach. I am not optimistic any arithmetic simplifiers found will catch on in the USA as it, Liberia and Myanmar refuse to embrace base ten.

PAUL thank you for your post on fractions provided in response to a post by Wayne. I appreciated your thoughts as downunder in Oz, four out of three kids get mixed up over fractions. <joke>

DOMENICA my dad was the only teacher in a one room school in Bylands Victoria Australia in the 1960s. He was one of the first to use Cuisennaire rods. I believe much more of math can be taught in parallel than serial alone. Why wait until you are 13 to understand something a six year old can understand? My big sister hung around my Dad's school and learnt so much from the older kids. (She in turn taught me pythagoras in a tent on a camping holiday.) Kid to kid transmission can work, yet not when a system is involved. (Maybe I should ask more children how THEY would simplify arithmetic?)

JOE I hope to be able to share some research on PISA scores vs language to address the Gladwell theory. I define simplicity via ASAPANS (As Simple As Possible And No Simpler)

GS CHANDY provided useful tools to help solve problems and Cool Jessica provided a useful definition.

I see my contribution as an editor, seeking the minimal set of ideas that will deliver an outcome. My motivation is that I failed math at school, smashed my spine, was told I may never walk again, made a promise to fix math if I could walk, walked and have been trying to keep a hospital bed prayer/promise since 1983. I wield no power or status.

As a naive (amateur) explorer, I believe I have made basic math simpler and along the way have received positive comments from students in 70+ countries, several of whom are math teachers.

My next post will outline my framework for making arithmetic simpler. Then I hope subsequent ideas will be seen in context.

Thank you.
Jonathan Crabtree


Chapter 18-Summary: Past, Present, and Future

    Published: Jan 2001

      Format Pages Price
    PDF (264K) 8 $25   ADD TO CART
    Complete Source PDF (8.3M) 8 $214   ADD TO CART

    Ferritic/martensitic steels are considered for use in fast fission and fusion reactors. The viability of the steels for applications in the fast fission or fusion neutron environment depends mainly on its irradiation resistance. In the preceding chapters, the effect of irradiation on various properties was presented. In addition to the irradiation conditions (e.g., fluence, spectrum, irradiation temperature, etc.), steel composition and microstructure, which depend on how a steel is processed, are important in determining irradiation resistance. As shown in the previous chapters, many of these variables have been investigated in varying degrees for different mechanical and physical properties. In general, however, detailed, single-variable irradiation studies to comprehensively investigate these parameters have not been conducted. Because of space considerations in irradiation facilities and the expense of conducting such experiments, most irradiation experiments have been restricted to one steel composition in one condition irradiated over a temperature and fluence range that is limited by the conditions of the irradiation facility. Furthermore, space limitations in irradiation facilities mean that only a limited number of miniature mechanical property specimens can be irradiated, which can cause problems in evaluating the data. For example, only four to six Charpy specimens per irradiation condition are usually irradiated, thus possibly affecting the determination of an accurate Charpy curve; and in some cases, tension specimens have not been simultaneously irradiated with Charpy impact specimens, thus making a quantitative comparison between hardening and embrittlement difficult.

    Paper ID: MONO10033M

    Committee/Subcommittee: E10

    DOI: 10.1520/MONO10033M

    CrossRef ASTM International is a member of CrossRef.

    ISBN10: 0-8031-2090-7
    ISBN13: 978-0-8031-2090-7


Electronic immobiliser.

Better protection against theft: the electronic immobiliser prevents unauthorized entry into your BMW and prevents it being started, unless your correct individual key code is properly provided.

The electronic immobiliser secures your car using a chip with an electronic code integrated in the car key. This code consists of a permanent personal code and a second code changed by the immobiliser each time you start the engine.
Whenever the ignition is switched on, the immobiliser first reads the personal code and then asks for the changing code. If both answers are correct, the immobiliser will send another coded signal to the Digital Motor Electronics (DME) to unlock the engine. Without which the engine cannot be started - not even by short-circuiting it.
This data is transmitted wirelessly via an aerial in the steering wheel lock and the key with integrated remote control. The key is equipped with a maintenance-free battery which recharges automatically while driving. And should you ever lose your key, you can have it deactivated by your authorised BMW dealer and receive a replacement key without delay.


Loans to farmers work.

When we started working with farmers in the Dominican Republic, we asked them how we could be of service to them. The most urgent need they identified? Access to credit to maintain farms before harvest. Most of the farmers had no access to capital at that time. And the ones that did were charged rates as high as 24 – 36% annually.

In 2010, after discussions with farmers, Liga Masiva tried to partner with a microfinance institution to get the farmers access to the credit they needed.  Yet after 21 different institutions, not a single one had terms were acceptable to either the farmers or us.

But we refused to believe the farmers were as “risky” as the microfinance organizations claimed they were.  So, we decided to try it ourselves. Thanks to an social enterprise investor, Rafe Furst, Liga Masiva raised the capital to launch a pilot project last October.

Again and again, we were told it wouldn’t work. The lawyers said we’d land in jail; the locals said the farmers would misuse the funds; and social enterprise experts said the loans would never be repaid. We went ahead anyway.

Right from the start, there were surprises.  Farmers were very careful about borrowing only as much as they needed for coffee maintenance. Even more heartening was that the farmers talked about the money as a mutual investment and commitment, since it came as part of our broader program.

Today, we are pleased to announce that the Socios program proved microfinance institutions, lawyers, and even community activists wrong.  By the end of the harvest, all of the loans were paid back in full.  The money was used for coffee related expenses, from planting seedlings to repairs on machinery and pruning.

Last week, we issued the farmers certificate sstating they paid the loans in full. We also issued letters showing payment records and “good standing” as borrowers. While a simple certificate may not seem like a lot, the farmers’ payment histories serve as credit histories, something they never had before. We designed these records not just as a point of pride for the farmers, but as a tool to allow them to access other sources of credit in the future.

Were there hiccups?  Absolutely.  Our original plan for repaying a percentage each time the farmers got paid did not to work for them.  Rather, farmers paid off their loan in chunks.  Arriving this summer, we were also informed that there is need for money during this season as well as just preharvest.  This information allows us to iterate on the program, making it more useful, applicable, and tailored to the farmers’ needs.

We’ll keep working with farmers to improve the program.  But so far, this pilot supports the idea that relationship-based business is a viable model for changing the way trade works for small-scale farmers.  Cheers to that.

The Laboratorio of Coffee

Like we’ve been saying, coffee is serious business.  Last week, Hilary, our chief of farmer relations, visited the office of the Dominican Coffee Authority, called the Consejo Dominicano de Café.  This office is responsible for checking every export of coffee that leaves the Dominican Republic, as well as promoting Dominican coffee more broadly.  At the office is the Raul Melo Coffee Laboratory.  There, specialists check every coffee leaving the DR for defects, color, humidity, density, flavor, color when roasted, cupping attributes, and a plethora of other characteristics!

Walk in, take off your jacket, and put on a white lab coat. No food or drinks, except well, the occasional jolt of caffeine from a small cup of coffee.  No nail polish for anyone checking coffee here (really, nothing that could contaminate the coffee).  This is a scientific laboratory, with stalls where coffees are analyzed by three to four different cuppers, where samples are roasted and brewed with specially calibrated water, and where coffee attributes are totally measured and understood.  If you want to know about Dominican coffee, the experts buzzing around this laboratory are the people to ask.  We were happy to do just that.

CODOCAFE maintains records of the blind tests of every export of coffee for five years.  This visit was to see the laboratory and get copies of the records for Liga Masiva imports since our inception in 2009.  Having these records, which include everything from cupping scores to density, helps us to measure our impact and changes in terms of coffee quality.   More information, more power.  And new friends at CODOCAFE.

The Depulper Overhaul.

Early Saturday morning, the Liga Masiva team walked the half-hour to meet our farmer-partners in Jarabacoa. The farmers, as usual, arrived early. Martin was there, and Rómulo, and they stood chatting in the morning fog. Soon, Carlos pulled up on his motorcycle, only the slightest bit wobbly from the giant, rusty, hand-cranked coffee depulper tied to the back. One by one, the other farmers arrived, gently carrying by donkey, hand, or motorcycle these bulky 50-pound machines that were up to 45 years old. As we waited for the last farmer to arrive, the others stood over their machines, chatting about different aspects of them. The mood was excited, and proud. These contraptions so crucial to the farmers’ livelihoods were about to get a complete overhaul.

Why? In analyzing the latest Liga Masiva coffee import, we noticed most of the damaged beans resulted from depulping: removing the fleshy fruit from the coffee bean.  Our farmers do this process on their farms with a despulpadora (see Martin with his below).  If there are issues with the despulpadora, the coffee that goes through it gets damaged.  That one moment negates the care the farmer took in the months and years before harvest, and means those beans can’t be used.

So… how do we fix it?

Collaboratively with the farmers, we decided on a mutual investment.  The farmers bring their depulpers down from the mountain (on a motor, on a mule, etc… no easy trick with an awkward machine that weighs 50 lbs!) We hire a repairman to diagnose each depulper. And together we get the parts repaired or replaced.  Finally, we collaborate on a system for using, cleaning, and maintaining the depulper so it doesn’t damage beans in the future.

The result was… a flurry of collaboration!  Farmers, the repairman, and us shouted out questions and answers:  How do you keep metal from going into the depulper and damaging it? Put magnets near where the coffee goes in!  How to make sure that the guayo (metal casing that removes the pulp) doesn’t degrade? Wash clean each time!  How to check the calibration of the machine? Insert a certain kind of leaf behind the pechera and it should go in easily (but not too easily)!

It’s important for our farmers to use these best practices, but they’re often hard to remember – especially in the midst of a hectic harvest. To make it easier, we’re creating a visual guide of the steps, ensuring our farmer partners have the information they need and that we have fewer damaged beans next year.  That means more money for farmers, better coffee for you… and a more sustainable, direct, and just trade system.

Tastes good.

We’re a B Corporation!

Liga Masiva is thrilled to be certified as one of the newest B Corps! What’s a B Corp? We’re a new kind of corporation that meets rigorous social and environmental standards and seek to harness the power of business to solve challenges on both fronts.

Why go through the process? Well, for you! Liga Masiva exists to create benefit for all of the people involved in it, from producers to consumers and everyone else in the value chain. Becoming a B Corporation allows us to legally build that commitment into our business. Certification represents our commitment to making trade just, sustainable, and direct … and bringing you delicious products that connect you with the people and place they come from.

We’re also thrilled to be a member of the community on the frontier of building stronger, healthier communities through better business practices. In creating their certification standards and evaluation, B Lab, the fine folks who set the standards for B Corp evaluations, have created a common language for these pioneering businesses to use as we collaborate in creating economic opportunity and beneficial environmental impact.

Coffee Cupping: The Basics.

For six weeks this summer, the Liga Masiva team is based in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic, partnering with our organic coffee farmers on a series of coffee excellence projects. As part of this project, we conducted the farmers’ first ever cupping of their coffee to introduce them to its smells and flavors.  In Part 1 of this series, we provide commentary on the tasting.  Part 2 outlines why coffee cupping might just revolutionize the way trade works for small-scale farmers.  Part 3, this section, will enable you to join the farmers in your own in-home coffee cupping.

So, we’ve been talking over the last few days about cupping coffee.  To many of us, this may sound highfalutin—something along the lines of evaluating different sea salts for their flavors.  However, the basics of coffee cupping can actually be fun to try, and can be as simple as you like.  Really, it’s just a tool to help enjoy your coffee more.

What you need:

  • One or more coffees, freshly roasted, that you would like to taste.
  • A number of cups and spoons equal to the number of coffees.
  • A grinder. *Important note:  You don’t absolutely need a grinder to do this sort of informal cupping.  You can do a cupping with pre-ground beans … but just as with most things, the fresher the better!

Coffee cupping has three phases:

  1. Smelling dry, ground coffee
  2. Smelling wet, brewed coffee grounds
  3. Slurping the brewed coffee into your mouth to evaluate flavor.  (Others talk about this in much more flowery language, but we are going for basics here.)

So, let’s go through it in phases.

Phase 1:  Smelling the grounds

  1. Grind 2 heaping tablespoons (medium coarse, too fine will make the coffee taste bitter!) of each coffee separately, and put each coffee in a separate cup.
  2. Smell them!  Get your nose into it!  Coffee can smell like anything from mandarin oranges and cocoa powder to rubbery, earthy or sour.  The SCAA wheel shown here outlines aromas and tastes.  (If you really want to train yourself, check out Le Nez du Café, a game where you smell essential oils that mimic coffee fragrances.)
  3. Write ‘em down!  Compare with friends!  See what you find!  Liga Masiva coffee scents typically range from chocolate to nuts to caramel and lemon, depending on the roast.

Phase 2:  Brewed coffee aromas

  1. Pour 6 oz. of almost boiling water over the coffee grounds. Steep for 2-3 minutes. The coffee should form a crust or cap on top of the water. While steeping, check the coffee for any sour smells. Sour smells are bad, and could indicate old coffee that has gone bad (technically called “rancid”).
  2. Using your spoon, break the crust by tapping the grounds, just like you would with a crème brulee.  Get your nose in it here too!  The brewed coffee releases a “puff” of different fragrances when it’s broken. The grounds will sink down to the bottom of the cup.  Use your spoon to circulate the coffee to release the fragrances.

Phase 3: Slurping!

  1. This is the tasting part.  Fill up your spoon with brewed coffee from the cup, avoiding the grounds.
  2. Slurp the coffee into your mouth, forcefully (see video below for appropriate noises to make during this process). This mixes air with the coffee and disperses it evenly throughout your mouth.
  4. Spit the coffee out and rinse mouth with water before tasting another (or if you are caffeine-addicted like yours truly, just swallow the coffee and have a sip of water between slurps.)

Here in the slurping you’re basically looking for four things:

  • Acidity – The sensation of dryness in the back and under the edges of your mouth. This is a desirable quality and not to be confused with sour (which is considered a bad quality of coffee). Acidity creates a lively, bright taste and some coffees have more acidity than others.
  • Aroma – The combination of all of those scents we were talking about earlier.  Since our senses of taste and smell are so connected, the aromas play in to how we taste the coffee as well.
  • Body – The way the coffee feels in your mouth. Imagine it is like comparing how whole milk feels in your mouth compared to water. Coffee with more body feels more like whole milk, coffee with less water feels more like, well, water.
  • Flavor – This is the overall perception of the three characteristics above. Flavor can be rich (full bodied), complex (multi-flavored), or balanced (no one characteristic overpowers the other), among other things.  Take note of the coffee’s natural sweetness and also its finish.  Does the flavor stick around and stay good or great?

Check out this cool How Stuff Works video to get an idea of professional cupping methods and purposes:

So coffee cupping can be a really big deal.  It can also be just a good way to identify what YOU like in a coffee.  Do you like high or low acidity?  Full body?  Tend to go for chocolaty or flowery?  What’s old coffee taste like as opposed to fresh?

Like for the producers, cupping basics are good to have for those of us that want to learn more about the coffee we consume.  Like we like to say, more information, more power.  And well, better coffee.

Taste away!

Cupping matters to farmers.

For six weeks this summer, the Liga Masiva team is based in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic, partnering with our organic coffee farmers on a series of coffee excellence projects. As part of this project, we conducted the farmers’ first ever cupping of their coffee to introduce them to its smells and flavors.  In Part 1 of this series, we provide commentary on the tasting.  This section, Part 2 will outline why this coffee cupping might just revolutionize the way trade works for small-scale farmers.  Part 3 will enable you to join the farmers in your own in-home coffee cupping.

Yesterday, Liga Masiva brought a barista-style coffee cupping to farmers in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. Why? Well, we think it might just revolutionize the way trade works for small-scale farmers.

Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people are small-scale farmers. These farmers face three major obstacles to getting ahead: access to capital (to pay for improvements on farms), access to new markets (to earn more selling their premium products), and access to information (to hone their products to make them more marketable). Liga Masiva works to address all three obstacles, and yesterday, we worked on access to information in the form of… a coffee tasting!

Many of us enjoying morning brews of the world’s best beans don’t know that many coffee farmers never taste their high-quality coffee.  Rather, they export their best stuff because it earns the most. Farmers may brew lower quality beans on their farms, and drink it as it is drunk locally.  In DR, this means sugary and dark (which can be pretty darn tasty on a foggy morning, truth be told)!  They know more about growing coffee than anyone, but have little opportunity to learn what buyers look for in a cup.

This leaves farmers not knowing how to tune growing practices to buyer preferences. If you’ve been to a coffee cupping, you know coffee can smell like everything from tomato soup to chocolate (kind of like a wine tasting, only with more slurping, if you haven’t been).  For the farmers, this type of knowledge enables them to tweak their practices–say, choosing coffee cherry pulp fertilizer or immediately fixing a damaged depulper–to create the best coffee, and get the highest price they can.

Tasting their own coffees helps farmers understand the qualities of their coffee… and what makes it worth top dollar. We’ll keep up the farmer workshops in coming weeks, but in the meantime, we’re glad to know that farmers have a better sense of what we consider a cafecito delicioso. We’re glad to share one with them, and with you.

Check us out tomorrow for info on how to follow in the farmer’s footsteps and do your own tasting at home.

Barista skills come to the campo.

Today was the big meeting we’ve been awaiting and planning since we packed our bags for Jarabacoa. And… it started a bit awkwardly.

At 11am, the farmers began arriving from the mountains by motorcycle and on foot for their first coffee cupping.  As they assembled, the familiar awkwardness of a first wine tasting (what with all of that uncomfortable swirling, sniffing, and spitting) was palpable in the group.

Jacinto looked particularly skeptical, saying he had never drunk coffee without sugar. (Sheepishly, this blogger admits she’s not terribly fond of coffee without it either.)

The discussion started with the smells and tastes—everything from floral notes to nuts and chocolate—that are present in coffee.  One of the farmers remarked what most first time tasters think but don’t say, “What do you mean the coffee is going to taste like caramel?  It should taste like coffee!”

After the initial moments of uncertainty, the farmers became their typical talkative selves, opining on which coffees smelled and tasted the best.  Smelling the dry grounds, Jacinto asked, “Why does this coffee smell so sweet if it doesn’t have any sugar in it?”

Interestingly, four of the five farmers identified the lesser-quality coffee, the kind they normally drink, as the best brew on the table.  This allowed us to have a conversation about different coffee preferences, and to discuss the qualities people look for in Liga Masiva coffee.  To each his own in terms of coffee flavors, but these farmers now have a better sense of how small actions on their farm– like not letting the coffee sit too long before washing it– affect the cup.

In tomorrow’s post: how this kind of experience is a critical piece of revolutionizing trade for small-scale farmers.

A bean tale…

We are on a great and constant pursuit of knowledge, closer relationships, and well, ever better coffee. Today, that pursuit led us to bean counting.  Literally.  We spent two hours going over beans.

Part of the process of evaluating the coffee each harvest season is to look for defects.  These defects can happen naturally, on the farm, or in the process of getting the bean from being a cherry to being the green coffee bean that comes to the US to be roasted.  Defects are always present, but with specialty coffee they should be at a bare minimum.  We work with the farmers and on processing to ensure that each harvest has fewer defects than the last.

Liga Masiva’s next import is ready and waiting.  The coffee has been through a long process: grown, picked, depulped, fermented, washed, dried, hulled, weighed, sorted by color, and reviewed by hand.  Even with all that care, some defects make it through.  You might find a couple of beans that are “withered” (arrugado), little and wrinkly.  A couple might have “broca”, a little hole that almost looks like where a worm got into an apple, caused by an insect that is a bane to many coffee farmers.  Or, you might find “bitten” (mordido) beans, ones that were slightly damaged going through the depulper.

Today we saw some bitten beans.  This helps us figure out that a priority for this summer is to create a workshop with farmers to make sure their depulpers are in perfect working condition.  It makes your beans even better.  We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on how the workshop goes in the next couple of weeks.

How do we know the coffee is organic? Is there a certification for that?

We’ve been asked this question a couple of times recently (thanks for reaching out!).  So here’s the skinny on how the certification works for this whole organic thing.

Our coffee is certified organic by an independent certifier, BCS Öko-Garantie GmbH, which is based in Germany.  This organization visits a percentage of the farmers that we work with each year to do various tests and inspections in order to ensure that the production and processing used by the farmers meets the USDA organic certification requirements.  The organization certifies a number of different agricultural products, and more than 450,000 farmers around the world.

Our farmers’ certification falls under the BCS Oko-Garantie certification provided by the Belarminio Ramirez, CxA, a company based in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic, where the farms are located.  Because the organic certification is rigorous and costly, many of Jarabacoa’s small scale organic farmers are incorporated and inspected for this certification as part of a Jarabacoa coffee community initiative.  We get a list each year of the farmers that are certified, which of course includes each of the farmer’s that we work with.

Perhaps most importantly, we work in partnership with each farmer on coffee growing and processing initiatives, which means that we’re on their farms and talking about the “latest and greatest” in organic techniques a few times a year.  If this brings up other questions, feel free to send them to us at  Since we are often in Jarabacoa doing work with the farmers, we would be happy to chat with them about anything specific that you might think of or want to know more about!

How to rent an apartment in Jarabacoa

The Liga Masiva team is now successfully installed in an apartment in Jarabacoa, and we have some lessons to share!

How to rent an apartment in Jarabacoa:

  1. Ask/walk/talk all over town.  Preferably, avoid doing the walking in the middle of the day, when the sun is blaring down, and everyone who knows what they are doing is sensibly indoors, in the shade, or in front of a fan.
  2. Write down all the phone numbers that you see, or knock on doors.  Or, stop in the colmado and ask if anyone knows of houses for rent.  Here, you are likely to get a whole bunch of leads, rapid fire questions and conversations, and to make a bunch of new friends.
  3. Once you find something promising, meet the neighbors.  And the people that own the bakery across the street.  And the kids playing with the puppy in front of house.  This is likely to increase your happiness and your bargaining power in entering the neighborhood.
  4. When bargaining with your summer landlord, throw some dinner plans into the mix!  In our negotiations, we offered a nicely prepared meal in our potential home in exchange for a discount.  Somehow, we ended up with a smaller discount than planned, but with our new landlord and friend Raul supplying the food for said meal.
  5. Lastly, for internet, talk to everyone.  Once you have agreed to share internet with your neighbor, run the cable through the kitchen, over the roof, and into the bedroom window.  Not only do we get internet, but a new Spanish/English exchange partner.

Those are the logistical tips we garnered over the last couple of days.  More to come, and farmer updates starting Monday…