http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/weekinreview/23kershaw.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=0f09ffc021b0c0db&ex=1190779200&pagewanted=print

September 23, 2007

Ideas & Trends

Don’t Even Think of Touching That Cupcake

By SARAH KERSHAW

THE cupcake is at something of a crossroads. Edible icon of Americana, frosted symbol of comfort and innocence, it may not have faced such an identity crisis since first appearing in cookbooks sometime in the 18th century.

As we know, cupcakes have had a whopping resurgence: they are retro-food chic, the thing to eat for people in the know.

But cupcakes have also recently been marched to the front lines of the fat wars, banned from a growing number of classroom birthday parties because of their sugar, fat and “empty calories,” a poster food of the child obesity crisis. This was clear when children returned to school this month to a tightening of regulations, federal and state, on what can be served up between the bells.

And it has led some to wonder whether emotional value, on occasion, might legitimately outweigh nutritional value.

Schools trying to bring parents to the table in efforts to root out fat and sugar have faced what Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University who strongly supports limiting sweets in schools, calls “the cupcake problem.”

When included on lists of treats that parents are discouraged or forbidden to send to school — and when those policies are, say, put to a vote at the P.T.A. — “cupcakes are deal breakers,” Professor Nestle said. “It sounds like a joke, but it’s a very serious problem on a number of levels. You have to control it.”

While the merits of banning goodie bags filled with Reese’s and Skittles seem obvious — especially at a time when the risk of childhood diabetes is high for American children — many parents draw the line at cupcakes.

This could have something to do with the fact that in the modern age, the cupcake may be more American than apple pie — “because nobody is baking apple pies,” Professor Nestle explained.

The confection is so powerfully embedded in the national consciousness — and palate — that its future is quite possibly the only cause to unite Texas Republicans and at least some left-wing foodies behind a singular mission: keep the cupcake safe from harm.

“I think the wholesale banning of parents’ bringing cupcakes as a legal issue is over the top,” said Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former sex columnist for The Village Voice who founded the Web site “Cupcakes Take the Cake” three years ago.

The Texas Legislature agreed, in spirit, when it passed the “Safe Cupcake Amendment,” in 2005, in response to new federal child nutrition guidelines and lobbying from parents outraged by the schoolroom siege on cupcakes.

After the amendment passed, a blogger on Homesick Texan wrote: “i don’t think it necessarily warrants all the hubbub, or the intervention of legislature to intervene on behalf of the cupcake. ... but then, another part of me is screaming ‘CUPCAKES!!!’ because they just make people happy.”

Hillary Clinton perhaps was aware of this when on David Letterman’s show recently she listed as No. 9 of her Top 10 campaign promises, “Each year on my birthday everyone gets a cupcake.”

As Ms. Kramer Bussel, who organizes monthly cupcake meet-ups in New York City, said, “If you bring cupcakes to a party, you are so popular.”

Until the late 1990s, the cupcake often shared the mental dessert pantry with canned peaches and ambrosia; it was nostalgia food, mom-in-an-apron food, happy food.

But then cupcakes took a very chic turn. Trend-setting bakeries like Magnolia, the Greenwich Village cupcake empire, arrived on the scene; by 2005, a parody music video on “Saturday Night Live,” which was later viewed more than five million times on YouTube, included the lyrics, “Let’s hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.”

And now the new cupcake, having drifted so far from Betty Crocker, is facing fierce competition from the retro cupcake, which is the new, new cupcake that is really the old cupcake.

Americans still find time to whip up some batter and slide a tray in the oven. It’s easy, and the appeal is multifaceted. Cupcakes are portable, cute and relatively inexpensive. They are also “feminine and girlie,” Ms. Kramer Bussel said, so the majority of cupcake bakers and fans are women.

Cupcake is a term of endearment, but it can also be a rather mean-spirited word. “Cupcake teams” in sports are said to be soft and easily crushed. As food, though, cupcakes are democratic; everyone gets one. And they are libertarian; individual and independent compared with communal cakes, which may not have enough slices for everyone.

Across the Atlantic, where cupcakes have become increasingly popular in the last few years, some bakers said they were perplexed by word of an American cupcake crackdown.

“Over here people think it’s a bit like this innocent cake,” said Jemma Wilson, owner of Crumbs and Doilies, a new cupcake bakery in London. “And it seems more dignified and civilized to eat one portion, unless you kind of eat 10, which obviously happens a lot.”

A sub-debate within the cupcake debate has revolved around whether the meaning of cupcakes has been lost — and it’s not pretty.

Can the cupcake loyalist support the sale of a chocolate Guinness cupcake with green-tea cream-cheese frosting? Has the cupcake been stolen from the people by the baking aristocracy?

For a sense of how charged the subject is, consider what happened in July, when Magnolia Bakery, having vaulted to fad status by an appearance on “Sex and the City,” was briefly shut down by the city health department for not having enough sinks at its Greenwich Village establishment.

“At last!” said a blogger posting on Eater.com. “We neighbors get relief from cupcakistas who don’t realize Duncan Hines makes better-tasting cupcakes.”

After a long debate thread, another blogger wrote, “You people need to go back to the suburbs ... Seriously, bunch of grown up New York City residents obsessing over a cupcake shop. I miss the gunfire and crackheads.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/weekinreview/23bajaj.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=weekinreview&pagewanted=print

September 23, 2007

The Nation

They Cried Wolf. They Were Right.

By VIKAS BAJAJ

IN May of 2004, Dean Baker, an economist in Washington who had been warning about excesses in the housing market, sold his two-bedroom condo after concluding that the market had lost its moorings from reality.

In a way, he was two years too early. Had he waited until May 2006 when home prices in the Washington area peaked, his home would likely have appreciated by roughly 38 percent from its 2004 value, according to an index that tracks home prices in the metropolitan region.

The case of Mr. Baker, who now happily rents a similar condominium a few blocks away, serves as a useful illustration about the perils of calling and timing financial bubbles. It may be easy to spot an out-of-control market, as Mr. Baker and others did, but quite another to predict when one has truly gotten out of hand.

In a replay of the years before the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000, housing market skeptics have spent much of this decade being tarred as the boys who cried wolf. Their predictions were proved wrong year after year as people continued to bid up the price of condos in Miami and new houses in suburban Phoenix.

Academics and economists like Mr. Baker came across as gloomy sourpusses who did not want Americans to have fun and grow rich by flipping second homes on the New Jersey or Florida coasts.

“The naysayers simply look silly at the end of the bubble,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com who was among the experts raising questions about the underpinnings of the housing boom. “They are completely discounted and discredited because they have been saying things are askew for a year or two. It’s when the naysayers’ views have been completely discarded and discredited that the bubble inflates to its apex.”

Mr. Baker said he knew he would never be able to call the top of the real estate market precisely, either as a home seller or an economist. He noted that he was also too early in calling the tech bubble in 1997. “Sure it could go somewhat higher,” he said of the real estate market. But, he added, “I felt the need to talk about it, and do anything I could to bring attention to it.”

Some in the real estate industry say the early cries of bubble should be called to account on the grounds of intellectual fairness. If the boosters have to acknowledge they were wrong when they provided justifications for prices that were, well, unjustifiable, then the doubters should also own up to the fact that they were too negative, too early.

“Even the people that were talking about booms busting, my goodness they were talking about it in 2001 and 2002,” said David Lereah, the former chief economist with the National Association of Realtors. “And they were wrong for four years and they only became right at the end of 2004.” He and his former employer had been criticized for the optimistic forecasts they made during the boom.

Economists, even the famous ones, mostly see the to and fro between the housing bulls and bears as an academic debate. Their influence over markets and the behavior of consumers, they say, was and is at best marginal.

Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist whose book “Irrational Exuberance” became required reading for bubble watchers, has said that there is a long tradition of naysaying in the face of soaring markets to little effect.

Newspapers during the boom in the 1990s and in the early years of this decade expressed warnings about the housing market, along with more upbeat sentiments. But the critical voices often did not register above the din of the frenzied market.

“You got some of us sitting there in a distance saying that this is a bubble, we don’t know when its going to end,” said Christopher F. Thornberg, an independent economist who is based in Los Angeles. “And then you have mortgage brokers and real estate agents who are much closer to the buyer who are whispering in their ear that, well, yeah, there are some markets that are out of line but not this neighborhood.”

Almost everyone would agree that of far greater import to the timing and performance of bubbles are interest rates and the availability of credit. Both are set by the market, but regulators at the Federal Reserve exert significant influence over them. The main discussion now, with the benefit of hindsight, is whether the central bank should have taken a more muscular approach in regulating mortgage lending and raised interest rates sooner. (After the tech bubble burst, the Fed cut its benchmark rate sharply and left it at 1 percent from the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004.)

In recent interviews, Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, has argued he did not realize the extent of reckless lending practices in 2005 and 2006. He also defended the central bank’s decision to keep short-term interest rates low early in this decade to avert the risk of deflation.

Last week, the Fed cut rates sharply to ease conditions in the credit market, kindling some fears of inflation.

“We have had two bubbles in the last 10 years,” noted Allen L. Sinai, the president and chief economist at Decision Economics, a consulting firm based in New York. “The only way I would say it won’t happen — and this is arguable — is for the central bank to do something about it before it gets too far, and right now the central bank’s religion is not to interfere.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/weekinreview/16toner.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=weekinreview&adxnnlx=1190041758-iKTkcQBoNc1/dkHE4Hnohg

By ROBIN TONER

Published: September 16, 2007

WASHINGTON

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DO-OVER Hillary Clinton failed to sell her health care plan in 1993, but will try again Monday.

Rarely does a politician, a party or a political system get a chance at a do-over.

Yet when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rolls out her comprehensive health plan in Iowa on Monday, it will be just that: Mrs. Clinton, or whoever the next president might be, has a second chance to fix a system that has, in many ways, deteriorated in the 14 years since the Clintons’ last attempt at an overhaul.

But will it turn out any differently this time? Can another big national health plan survive the furious lobbying of the interest groups, the divisions between the parties, the ambivalence of the public?

It is, clearly, a moment of political opportunity: Strong majorities of Americans, once again, tell pollsters they want guaranteed health care for all. Some of the most powerful interest groups — representing business, labor, hospitals and insurers — have tried to set aside their differences to call for action.

The number of uninsured is approaching 50 million, the average cost of family coverage has risen 78 percent in the last six years, and more and more employers say they cannot afford to provide health coverage and still compete in a global marketplace.

The major Democratic presidential candidates have offered plans aimed at expanding coverage and lowering costs — Mrs. Clinton’s is only the latest — and the major Republican candidates acknowledge that there are serious problems in the system.

But it is worth remembering: Health care reform seemed inevitable in the early 1990s, too.

It was almost inconceivable, in the spring of 1993, when nearly three-fourths of Americans said they supported the Clinton plan and political consensus seemed easily within reach, that everything would collapse in the end.

The Democrats, and especially Mrs. Clinton, promise that this time will be different. Like Vietnam, the failure of the last health initiative has been endlessly analyzed by those who lived through it, and its proponents say they have learned some lessons. First and foremost: That the last plan was doomed when middle-class Americans came to see it as more risk than benefit — a 1,342-page restructuring of the health care system, creating vast and confusing new bureaucracies, in an effort to extend benefits to everyone.

Those fears were symbolized by Harry and Louise, two nervous 40-somethings created for a devastating advertising campaign by the insurance industry. Between 1993 and 1994, support for the Clinton plan dropped to 43 percent from 71 percent, according to Robert J. Blendon, a Harvard professor and expert on health. The plan literally lost the support of the middle — the middle income, the middle aged, political independents.

In short, altruism has its limits, as does the public’s appetite for trade-offs in their own lives for the sake of the uninsured, said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who worked for the insurance industry in 1993 and 1994. “Never, in my years of work, have I found someone who said, ‘I will reduce the quality of the health care I get so that all Americans can get something,’ ” he said. “Every time the debate reaches that point, it collapses.”

This time, candidates are emphasizing the benefits for people who already have insurance — lower costs for coverage, new programs to improve the quality of health care. “Everyone has to feel, at the end of the day, that they will get something,” said one Clinton adviser.

At least by Democratic standards, there is a certain humility to the major universal coverage plans these days, some health policy analysts say. The plans would build on the existing system, as governors in both parties have tried to do in the states — expand public programs for children; shore up the employer-based system; and offer new private and public options for people who cannot get their coverage through work.

And Mrs. Clinton is offering herself as the paradigm of this sadder-but-wiser approach.

For its part, the public may also be sadder but wiser, some analysts say. Most Americans are now in some form of managed care, still a novel concept in the early 1990s. More say they know someone who is going without health insurance, working in jobs that do not provide it. Most people with coverage still say they are personally satisfied with the care they receive but they are worried about the system as a whole.

Some of the romanticism about the virtues of the American health care system may be diminishing, and not just among the audiences who cheered Michael Moore’s “Sicko” this summer. Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and a longtime expert on health policy, noted that recent studies show the United States does not rank at the top on several measures of health care quality, like waiting times to see physicians. “We always had this fallback — that we might cost too much, have a lot of people uninsured, but you bet your bottom dollar that those who have health coverage get the best care in the world,” Mr. Reischauer said. “And the answer is, some here do.”

Many politicians and activists survey this landscape and see extraordinary prospects for major health legislation, if a president were committed to it. In fact, frustration has been simmering on the left over what they see as Mrs. Clinton’s excessive caution in tackling the issue again.

But there are also grounds for skepticism that the stars may have finally aligned, many experts say. Politics itself, at least in Washington, has grown more partisan and ideologically charged in the last 14 years, making it more difficult to pass something as complicated as national health legislation. The debate over renewing and expanding the children’s health insurance program is a case in point, with President Bush and other Republicans assailing a bipartisan plan as a first step toward a government takeover of health care.

The debate over health care on the presidential campaign trail is increasingly ideological, as candidates woo their core constituents on the right and the left. Republicans assail the Democrats for advocating nothing short of socialism on health care. Democrats, for their part, are moving toward an increasingly populist attack on the big economic interests, like the insurance industry. Mrs. Clinton has been escalating those attacks in the run up to her speech.

Mrs. Clinton herself can be an extremely polarizing figure on this issue; while memories have faded, Mr. Blendon said, “there’s no question that if she’s the presidential nominee, they’ll bring out the old films and the tapes and the details.”

Paying for universal coverage is always an issue, especially in a budget strained by war, a growth in entitlement spending and a nagging deficit. Moreover, all the talk of common ground and a new consensus for change among the so-called stakeholders — business, the health insurers, doctors, hospitals, unions — can quickly fade.

Universal coverage, after all, has been a dream of the Democratic Party’s since the New Deal — but always just over the horizon.

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