Meet George Davis

Davis’ field of expertise after graduate school was in econometrics and international trade, specifically working on demand analysis (e.g. import demand for products). Even though demand analysis was his focus he started looking at the demographics of individuals, mostly the baby boomer generation, and what were going to be their hot topics in the future.

“It was not rocket science. I just projected the demographic profile of the U.S. for the next 30 years. As the ‘boomer generation’ would age, they will have health issues. Health is related to diet, diet is related to food, and food is related to what people eat and demand. Therefore food, diet, and health will likely become more important over my career.”

This was a pivotal moment for Davis, and how his interest led him to work in food and nutrition. 

“I have always been interested in time allocation because that is our most precious resource.” Gary Becker, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, conducted research and wrote a paper on “A theory of the allocation of time. Davis’ interest coupled with Becker’s theoretical analysis, started him thinking about food at home.

“When you go to the grocery store you buy food and take it home to prepare. So this raises the question is it time or money that is most important in determining what people are eating? Ask yourself tonight, when I choose what to have for dinner: is it mainly a time constraint or money constraint affecting my choice? In the U.S. we spend less than 10 percent of our income on food, so for many, it is more about time than money and yet time continues to be an understudied determinant of food choices.”

In the classroom, Davis talks with students about the spectrum from planting food to going out to eat and all that happens in between. As Davis says, “You can plant the food and spend a lot of time doing so and it is cheaper if you ignore your own labor (time) cost. But as you move through the spectrum from your garden to the grocery store to the restaurant, you use less of your time, but it becomes more expensive. You are effectively buying and substituting someone else’s time for your own. Regardless of whether it is a grocery store or a restaurant, as I say in class, we aren’t really paying for food, we are paying for convenience.”

His current research looks at the tradeoffs between money and time, which is really important in terms of nutrition policies like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food and move towards self-sufficiency.

What is the cost of a diet? The program estimates the cost of groceries. In terms of calculating the cost of a diet, they ignore the labor cost. This is important. For example, let’s say you work at a fast food restaurant and they ask you the cost of a hamburger. They will include the cost of the bun, lettuce, meat, etc., and the labor in their response.

But when you are at home and you look at the cost of preparing a hamburger, USDA does not include the labor cost.

“I am looking at to what extent are the benefits too low because they do not include labor cost.”

This is key – “Faculty early in their careers tend to think too much like an economist when being interviewed. What you don’t realize is that answers do not need to be at a Ph.D. level. Economics is very intuitive for most people and the main concepts are easy to grasp without all the jargon. Follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. If you can’t explain it to a 10^th grader without the jargon, you probably don’t understand it yourself.”

Know your audience – “Speak at a level that will make sense to the viewer watching the interview on TV or reading your response in a magazine. Also, being interviewed is like the DOVE commercial. You have to be ‘comfortable in your own skin’ and realize you are the expert. Just be conversational.” 

Davis has the reputation for having high expectations of his students, but he says that is ok. “I try to push students to do their best, so when I see the lightbulb go off and their passion is ignited, that’s what my favorite part is.”

So, why did I choose the title I did for this interview? Wait for it…

“The biggest mistake I have ever made in my career is not adhering to the law of comparative advantage.”

Davis loves economics because as he says, “it is simply the science of making optimal decisions subject to constraints and that applies to every decision you make every day. I, therefore, see economics everywhere and often get distracted by novel applications, ‘shiny objects’ that are outside of my comparative advantage.”

So, first, what does comparative advantage mean?

Let’s say you and your partner have to decide who will prepare taxes and who will help the kids with their homework. You might be good at both relative to your partner (This is called an absolute advantage), but you can’t do both. A decision needs to be made from comparative advantage. So, what you do is look at the one where the absolute advantage is greatest. While you might be good at both, there will be one that you are a little better at than the other.

Now, back to the title and why I chose it.

When Davis came to Virginia Tech in 2007, he began talking with a geneticist who was working with mice and researching obesity in HNFE. She did experiments with how different diets interacted with genes to affect obesity. She would feed a control group of mice a low-fat diet and the treatment group of mice a high-fat diet and compare the results. Davis however saw the economics of choice being ignored. Humans and mice make choices in what foods they eat. They don’t eat just one food type. He asked if she had ever given them a choice between low and high-fat diets and she said no. That was fascinating to them both and they began working on experiments where mice had choices between the two.

For the next six years, Davis worked on several mice-related projects at the intersection of genetics, economics, nutrition, and obesity. It was fascinating and productive work, but he wasn’t trained to do this, so there was a steep learning curve. This was his shiny object.

After encountering some insurmountable technical hurdles, he stepped back and re-evaluated his focus and recalled his training and comparative advantage was in econometrics and human food demand, not mice and genetics. He recalibrated his own time allocation and went back to spending more time in his area of comparative advantage: human food demand.

“Pay attention to what you are educated and trained to do and don’t get distracted by the shiny objects.”

Hence, the title of this Q & A: Mice are not my comparative advantage.

Personal webpage
https://aaec.vt.edu/people/faculty/davis-george.html

Follow on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-davis-40282382/