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> Democracy is just better at resource allocation. Only in certain ways. Counter-examples: Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in Amer

> Democracy is just better at resource allocation. Only in certain ways. Counter-examples: Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons. 108 billion pounds of food is wasted, which equates to 130 billion meals. $218B per year. 19% of all crop lands, and more water than Texas, California and Ohio combined. [1] Grown, then thrown out. Enough to feed all the world's hungry. Free markets fail to price externalities all the time. Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and costs about $0.10/kWh. A human life is generally costed at $10M by actuaries for these purposes [2] so at 25 deaths per TWh, the human cost alone is $0.25/kWh. Coal power should cost $0.35/kWh, and yet, it's nowhere close. This leads to terrible resource allocation. On the other hand, authoritarianism built China 24,000 miles of high-speed rail since the mid-2000s. That's good resource allocation. The US has 49.9mi total. Without the need to plan for a 2-4 year election cycle, the government can execute multi-decade initiatives effectively. Like HSR, and like OBOR. [3] I'm of course not advocating for authoritarianism, however some introspection here is warranted, and the current situation isn't a 'pat ourselves on the back' moment. What we need isn't more freedom but just a little bit less, an approach where we staple the actual cost of the things we do onto them so that the market can then take over and do what it's good at. A little respect for our rivals would go a long way IMO. [1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report.... [2] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agencies-determine-the-dollar-value-of-human-life https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

fnfivyv 4y ago
saint_abroad 4y ago
> Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons. Put another way, free markets produce 67% more than required. When it comes to food, most populations that eat prefer a market that favors the buyer.
- deleted 4y ago
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- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  But that is inefficient resource allocation. We could reduce the waste food production and reduce 'carbon' output from USA. Presumably next someone will point at another country and say 'they're worse'. That may be true, but it doesn't make the free market efficient, not make externalised environment damage go away.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    That is efficient resource allocation, optimizing for scarce and important resources (in the case of USA, labor and customer convenience/time) at the expense of abundant and thus unimportant resources (in the case of USA, food).
pfdietz 4y ago
Perhaps wasting 40% of food is economically optimal for us? As food becomes cheaper relative to other things, you'd expect waste to increase.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Nah, that's all democracy at work. The Farm Bill's continuous reauthorization since the New Deal to placate the voting populace in swing states subsidizes many crops to below their cost of production. Americans spend less of their paychecks on food than any other country on Earth. It's again a case of mis-priced externalities leading to poor resource allocation.
  - pzone 4y ago
    Maybe food production in America is subsidized and therefore artificially cheap but there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter)
    - modo_mario 4y ago
      >there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter) If in the process you used practically finite fertilisers in the form of phosphorus from Morocco and nitrogen from fossil fuels, etc then you may wish to rethink that.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Ultimately phosphate is going to have to be recycled or extracted from much less concentrated sources. The average abundance in the Earth's crust is 0.1%, so supplying current world phosphorus demand (about 22 million tonnes/year; equivalent to 50 million tonnes/year of P2O5) would require mining about 9 cubic kilometers of rock per year. Difficult but not impossible.
      - RugnirViking 4y ago
        aren't fertilizers mainly produced using the haber-bosch process which takes nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, directly from air and combines it with hydrogen which is split from water, producing oxygen as a waste product which can itself be sold for oxygen cutting, scuba, and more? of all the things that are limited in this world, this seems like it ranks among the least concerning. Sure, it takes electricity, but that itself can be much more efficiently collected going into the future
ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
Au contraire, the US is so wealthy and efficient at food production that to waste food is much more efficient than to spend the manpower to allocate or recycle it properly. (Most food waste goes into sewage and trash, which is efficient on a per worker basis.) On the other hand, the second round of China's high speed rail investments are not expected to ever pay themselves off, and so the question as how "good" HSR is in China requires considering its positive economic and environmental externalities. There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution). The US certainly has a problem with decentralization making it harder to build large infrastructure, and the US path of infrastructure development has been corrupted by car companies, but I would argue the real vice of the US system is its failure to build maintainable infrastructure: roads are left to crumble quite simply because there are too many of them, serving too few people to make their maintenance affordable.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution). That would be terrible for the climate no? Also I think rail is very much undersold in most places. On one hand airtraffic is given an unfair advantage over other modes of transportation in that it's fuel is basically not taxed across the board by most countries. On the other hand for road traffic the cost of infrastructure is socialised too and unfairly so. Industrial truck transport does lots lots more damage to roads than cars or the like yet they rarely pay the price for that. (where a special vignette does exist it generally doesn't match the cost) Meanwhile the environmental cost of road and air traffic is appropriately applied.
eloisius 4y ago
You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse. While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. Similar to their situation with unoccupied apartments: too expensive for most people, and riddled with safety problems (e.g. concrete made from sea sand). China is a great example of how authoritarian countries can produce stats that look good on paper (km of high-speed rail, number of houses), but when you look behind the curtain it's often crap. It's a house of cards to keep that 8% GDP growth on paper. But on the ground there are thousands of high-rise apartments with corroding rebar.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse. China is building 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years (more than the entire rest of the world has built in the last 35 years) [1] and is adding solar capacity faster than anyone on earth, going from 0.1GW in 2007 to 307GW in 2021. [2] > While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. For now. Safety problems will be resolved and people will move to live alongside the rail lines, which is a chicken-egg problem the US refuses to solve. It starts to look a whole lot better 10 or 20 years down the line. [edit] @elosius: They've more than tripled nuclear generation in China since 2014, going from 100TWh/yr to 350TWh/yr - from 1% of power to 5% of power. Also, they've made huge strides in terms of air quality. Stop looking backwards, and start looking forwards. Air quality improvements will follow. [3] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China [3] https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-blue-chinas-air-quality-transformation/ https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-...
  - 4y ago
pzone 4y ago
- The world produces far more food than necessary to feed everyone. The fact Americans are rich enough to e.g. let a pack of strawberries rot in the fridge is not a huge moral failing. Hunger is a political problem, not a logistics problem. America donates more than any other country in the world, not just in absolute terms but a per capita basis. - We wouldn’t understand the economics of externalities without freedom of thought and expression necessary to cultivate vibrant academic life. China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China. China also severely overfishes. Bad economic decisions and neglect of externalities are not exclusive to democracy. - China’s capacity and political will to build infrastructure is impressive. (Though plenty of countries like Norway also do that.) The problem with the authoritarian style of unchecked decision making is that they built far, far too much HSR. Without any cost/benefit analysis, they’ve ended up with a huge maintenance burden and many lines that are rarely used money pits. https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk American governance does suffer from a culture of adversarial legalism, and an excess of citizen voice. That includes NIMBYism, environmental review, multiple conflicting layers of government, and other features that give small groups the ability to mount challenges to or veto beneficial projects. https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China. Just a reminder that the average american still puts out about twice as much CO2 as the average EU citizen or Chinese and whilst China will or already did surpass the average European I'm not sure about them going up to the current average American output. And no they won't take the 1# spot on a per capita basis. That spot will probably remain reserved for some among the petrostates for a good while still.
- deleted 4y ago
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deepnotderp 4y ago
China's HSR is ~$900B in debt and most lines are expected to never pay themselves off. And coal usage in China has risen while it has fallen in the US.
- deleted 4y ago
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fnfivyv 4y ago

saint_abroad 4y ago

> Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons. Put another way, free markets produce 67% more than required. When it comes to food, most populations that eat prefer a market that favors the buyer.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
But that is inefficient resource allocation. We could reduce the waste food production and reduce 'carbon' output from USA. Presumably next someone will point at another country and say 'they're worse'. That may be true, but it doesn't make the free market efficient, not make externalised environment damage go away.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  That is efficient resource allocation, optimizing for scarce and important resources (in the case of USA, labor and customer convenience/time) at the expense of abundant and thus unimportant resources (in the case of USA, food).

pfdietz 4y ago

Perhaps wasting 40% of food is economically optimal for us? As food becomes cheaper relative to other things, you'd expect waste to increase.

arcticbull 4y ago
Nah, that's all democracy at work. The Farm Bill's continuous reauthorization since the New Deal to placate the voting populace in swing states subsidizes many crops to below their cost of production. Americans spend less of their paychecks on food than any other country on Earth. It's again a case of mis-priced externalities leading to poor resource allocation.
- pzone 4y ago
  Maybe food production in America is subsidized and therefore artificially cheap but there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter)
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    >there’s no significant externality to tossing a few squishy potatoes in the compost bin (or a landfill for that matter) If in the process you used practically finite fertilisers in the form of phosphorus from Morocco and nitrogen from fossil fuels, etc then you may wish to rethink that.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Ultimately phosphate is going to have to be recycled or extracted from much less concentrated sources. The average abundance in the Earth's crust is 0.1%, so supplying current world phosphorus demand (about 22 million tonnes/year; equivalent to 50 million tonnes/year of P2O5) would require mining about 9 cubic kilometers of rock per year. Difficult but not impossible.
    - RugnirViking 4y ago
      aren't fertilizers mainly produced using the haber-bosch process which takes nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere, directly from air and combines it with hydrogen which is split from water, producing oxygen as a waste product which can itself be sold for oxygen cutting, scuba, and more? of all the things that are limited in this world, this seems like it ranks among the least concerning. Sure, it takes electricity, but that itself can be much more efficiently collected going into the future

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago

Au contraire, the US is so wealthy and efficient at food production that to waste food is much more efficient than to spend the manpower to allocate or recycle it properly. (Most food waste goes into sewage and trash, which is efficient on a per worker basis.) On the other hand, the second round of China's high speed rail investments are not expected to ever pay themselves off, and so the question as how "good" HSR is in China requires considering its positive economic and environmental externalities. There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution). The US certainly has a problem with decentralization making it harder to build large infrastructure, and the US path of infrastructure development has been corrupted by car companies, but I would argue the real vice of the US system is its failure to build maintainable infrastructure: roads are left to crumble quite simply because there are too many of them, serving too few people to make their maintenance affordable.

modo_mario 4y ago
>There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution). That would be terrible for the climate no? Also I think rail is very much undersold in most places. On one hand airtraffic is given an unfair advantage over other modes of transportation in that it's fuel is basically not taxed across the board by most countries. On the other hand for road traffic the cost of infrastructure is socialised too and unfairly so. Industrial truck transport does lots lots more damage to roads than cars or the like yet they rarely pay the price for that. (where a special vignette does exist it generally doesn't match the cost) Meanwhile the environmental cost of road and air traffic is appropriately applied.

eloisius 4y ago

You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse. While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. Similar to their situation with unoccupied apartments: too expensive for most people, and riddled with safety problems (e.g. concrete made from sea sand). China is a great example of how authoritarian countries can produce stats that look good on paper (km of high-speed rail, number of houses), but when you look behind the curtain it's often crap. It's a house of cards to keep that 8% GDP growth on paper. But on the ground there are thousands of high-rise apartments with corroding rebar.

arcticbull 4y ago
> You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse. China is building 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years (more than the entire rest of the world has built in the last 35 years) [1] and is adding solar capacity faster than anyone on earth, going from 0.1GW in 2007 to 307GW in 2021. [2] > While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. For now. Safety problems will be resolved and people will move to live alongside the rail lines, which is a chicken-egg problem the US refuses to solve. It starts to look a whole lot better 10 or 20 years down the line. [edit] @elosius: They've more than tripled nuclear generation in China since 2014, going from 100TWh/yr to 350TWh/yr - from 1% of power to 5% of power. Also, they've made huge strides in terms of air quality. Stop looking backwards, and start looking forwards. Air quality improvements will follow. [3] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China [3] https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-blue-chinas-air-quality-transformation/ https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-...
- 4y ago

pzone 4y ago

- The world produces far more food than necessary to feed everyone. The fact Americans are rich enough to e.g. let a pack of strawberries rot in the fridge is not a huge moral failing. Hunger is a political problem, not a logistics problem. America donates more than any other country in the world, not just in absolute terms but a per capita basis. - We wouldn’t understand the economics of externalities without freedom of thought and expression necessary to cultivate vibrant academic life. China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China. China also severely overfishes. Bad economic decisions and neglect of externalities are not exclusive to democracy. - China’s capacity and political will to build infrastructure is impressive. (Though plenty of countries like Norway also do that.) The problem with the authoritarian style of unchecked decision making is that they built far, far too much HSR. Without any cost/benefit analysis, they’ve ended up with a huge maintenance burden and many lines that are rarely used money pits. https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk https://youtu.be/ITvXlax4ZXk American governance does suffer from a culture of adversarial legalism, and an excess of citizen voice. That includes NIMBYism, environmental review, multiple conflicting layers of government, and other features that give small groups the ability to mount challenges to or veto beneficial projects. https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...

modo_mario 4y ago
>China is on a trajectory to become the #1 environmental polluter on a per capita basis. No, it’s not because America outsources industrial production to China. Just a reminder that the average american still puts out about twice as much CO2 as the average EU citizen or Chinese and whilst China will or already did surpass the average European I'm not sure about them going up to the current average American output. And no they won't take the 1# spot on a per capita basis. That spot will probably remain reserved for some among the petrostates for a good while still.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deepnotderp 4y ago

China's HSR is ~$900B in debt and most lines are expected to never pay themselves off. And coal usage in China has risen while it has fallen in the US.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]