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Hemp has emerged as a novel crop and ingredient for sustainable products. If innovative hemp‐based products are to succeed in the market, the surge of interest in production must be accompanied by information generation across the supply chain. At present, there is little knowledge on consumer behavior toward hemp and hemp‐based products, and even less on how this behavior has changed since hemp's reintroduction to the production landscape of the United States in 2014. This study compares representative survey data of Vermont residents in 2019 and 2020 on their support for hemp production, and awareness and use of hemp‐based products. Although the influence of demographic variables did not significantly change over time, our findings reveal structural change, with more respondents aware of and using hemp‐based products in 2020 compared to 2019. These findings point to hemp's growing presence and acceptance in the marketplace, where consumers are more informed about or have greater access to hemp products. Despite the state's focus on cannabidiol production, Vermonters appear to be aware of and are purchasing a variety of hemp goods, such as clothing and paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many liberal-arts institutions, Middlebury College, where the author teaches, has a problem: Too many students want to be economics majors. Economics enrollments keep growing, and adding more faculty members to the department seems to only increase the demand. Professors at other liberal-arts colleges confirm that the phenomenon is widespread and has been for some time. The author advocates that economics has become a "just right" major that provides the appropriate middle ground of skill preparation, analytic rigor, and intellectual excitement that students look for in a major, and that employers look for when hiring students. Economics has so many majors, he says, because it is doing something right. Rather than trying to reduce the number of economics majors, as the author has been asked by the dean of a college that refuses to keep increasing the number of economics faculty members, he suggests that a successful department should be rewarded rather than changed, and that other departments should be encouraged to follow the example pf becoming "just right," too.

This paper assembles heating fuel prices for the U.S. state of Vermont, from the colonial era to the present, in order to test whether energy fuel prices and energy service prices have diverged over this time period. Prior authors have reported evidence of a significant difference between long run energy fuel prices and energy service prices. However, this is the first analysis to pose this question beginning in the context of colonial America. In accord with earlier work focused in the U.K. the paper reports a significant divergence in fuel and service prices. In this setting real heating fuel prices increased over the 220 year time period by a factor of between 15 and 20. In contrast, heating service prices increased by a factor of two. Expressed in labor units, heating service prices have fallen in Vermont by 25%, while fuel prices were essentially flat. Finally, over this two century time period in Vermont and the U.K., the rate of change in service prices expressed in labor units is remarkably similar: − 1.1% and − 0.9%, per annum, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As the emphasis in health reform shifts to value-based payments, especially through multi-payer initiatives supported by the U.S. Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, and with the increasing availability of statewide all-payer claims databases, the need for an all-payer, "whole-population" approach to facilitate the reporting of utilization, cost, and quality measures has grown. However, given the disparities between the different populations served by Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial payers, risk-adjustment methods for addressing these differences in a single measure have been a challenge.Methods: This study evaluated different levels of risk adjustment for primary care practice populations - from basic adjustments for age and gender to a more comprehensive "full model" risk-adjustment method that included additional demographic, payer, and health status factors. It applied risk adjustment to populations attributed to patient-centered medical homes (283,153 adult patients and 78,162 pediatric patients) in the state of Vermont that are part of the Blueprint for Health program. Risk-adjusted expenditure and utilization outcomes for calendar year 2014 were reported in 102 adult and 56 pediatric primary-care comparative practice profiles.Results: Using total expenditures as the dependent variable for the adult population, the r2 for the model adjusted for age and gender was 0.028. It increased to 0.265 with the additional adjustment for 3M Clinical Risk Groups and to 0.293 with the full model. For the adult population at the practice level, the no-adjustment model had the highest variation as measured by the coefficient of variation (18.5) compared to the age and gender model (14.8); the age, gender, and CRG model (13.0); and the full model (11.7). Similar results were found for the pediatric population practices.Conclusions: Results indicate that more comprehensive risk-adjustment models are effective for comparing cost, utilization, and quality measures across multi-payer populations. Such evaluations will become more important for practices, many of which do not distinguish their patients by payer type, and for the implementation of incentive-based or alternative payment systems that depend on "whole-population" outcomes. In Vermont, providers, accountable care organizations, policymakers, and consumers have used Blueprint profiles to identify priorities and opportunities for improving care in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid-nineteenth century, east-central Vermont supported two major copper mines and their associated villages. In order to wrest thousands of tons of copper from the earth these mines, the Elizabeth and Ely mines, hired and housed thousands of miners, laborers, and their families. Both mines pursued the same resource in the same environment during the same period, but the Ely Mine developed a centralized village, while the Elizabeth Mine housed its workers in isolated housing clusters. The causes of these differences in worker housing can be traced to differences in scale, setting, and managerial philosophy, and can be analyzed within the larger historical context of Improvement and the larger ethnographic context of paternalism in mining communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]