Within a 10 minute timespan I read two completely unrelated articles that, in passing, said the same thing which is something that should be paid attention to.

The first was in Canadian Thoroughbred (my wife is a race official) on decreasing field sizes at race tracks. Field sizes at racetracks is a lagging economic indicator in that it takes 2 years at least between conception and racetrack for a horse with most being fully productive in the winners circle at a 3. And so now we are starting to see the effects of the economy on horse breeding as there has been a 20% drop in mares bred since 2006.

But to say that there are less horses in the starting gate because there is a 20% drop in breeding accurate. Not quite; ‘because’ is a heuristic which means it is fallible. Here is an important part of the article.

In my opinion, there simply have not been enough owners who have wanted to race those horses, as the economics of operating a racing stable in most jurisdictions have become more challenging, and the overall economy as cause the type of individual who might invest in racing to cut back on their discretionary spending.

So yes, the economy is involved, but not in the way you might think.

The other article was in Canadian Business about beekeeping. There was lots of stuff on Colony Collapse Disorder, etc. and how ‘less bees means higher food cost.’ Except this part of a paragraph stood out.

“To be honest,” says Melhim, “we’re talking about the disappearing of beekeepers more than we’re talking about [the disappearing of] honeybees.” As smaller operations fold, fewer commercial beekeepers are managing more colonies—and shouldering more financial risk. “It’s not very sustainable,” says Jeff Pettis, head of the Beltsville, Md., Bee Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

So the big risk to the food system is not because of CCD, but the commercialization of beekeeping itself.

Which means we now need to add ‘because’ to our list of words that trigger further investigation upon hearing them. As if we didn’t have enough stuff on our plate already…