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The free market absolutist response to these events is typically that market forces from consumer preference will drive down leaded turmeric sales, and “who’s t

The free market absolutist response to these events is typically that market forces from consumer preference will drive down leaded turmeric sales, and “who’s to stop me from consuming lead if I want to.” The core issue I have with free market absolutist arguments is their reliance on perfect information across parties and perfectly rational actors. Those constraints make any system of governance viable, and in my view, are a defining feature of extremist ideologies.

PumpkinSpice 3y ago
I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric. This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help. Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.
- OscarCunningham 3y ago
  In particular, adding lead to tumeric was illegal before they made a show of enforcing it in 2019. So their previous policy was the worst of both worlds; telling people they were safe while allowing them to be poisoned.
- pjc50 3y ago
  "Protection of the public from fraud in the marketing of food products represents one of the earliest forms of government regulation of commercial enterprise" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 "FOOD DRUG COSMETIC LAW JOURNAL 39, 2-73 (1984) A History of Government Regulation of Adulteration and Misbranding of Food" The introduction covers food regulation from Biblical and Roman times to the present. If you think about how many of the Biblical rules are devoted to food handling in some sense, it starts to become clear how food regulation is civilization and the state, as much as any other kind of ancient law. I will never understand the Libertarian dream of a "prelapsarian" world where everyone is free to sell poison to everyone else with no consequences.
  - butlerm 3y ago
    A libertarian would say that purveyors of poison would face civil and criminal liability after the fact if anyone was harmed.
- boxed 3y ago
  > It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric. All customers always checking all food for poisons is not reasonable at all.
  - PumpkinSpice 3y ago
    You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want. And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The idea that South Asians consumed poisoned lead because of high average levels of trust in the efficiency of their governments and their regulation of the food supply as opposed to low information on lead poisoning isn't one that survives contact with reality. So the "but the market would have solved this if only lead poisoning was legal" position is definitely an extreme one. The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.
  - HarryHirsch 3y ago
    The world has had millennia of not regulating very much The one exception is weights and measures. There is a long tradition of regulating these strictly, because experience has shown that the market is incapable of driving the cheats out of business and that there must be trust in the markets because else trade will slow down.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Government institutions save transaction costs. Yet we still got some anarcho capitalist idiots on the internet.
      - Xorakios 3y ago
        Most economists and left-leaning research institutes disagree with this. Transaction costs, both monetary and temporal, are always higher with more regulation and governmental institutional involvement. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2006/N2505.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2006/N2505.... https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tce_org_handbook_111410.pdf https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tce_org_handbook_... The arguments are usually about whether equity/fairness/outcomes are better, but cost in money and time is always higher.
- TotempaaltJ 3y ago
  I don't necessarily want to add or take away from your point, but I do want to note that I believe this is false: > People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help. GoFundMe raises about $650 million for medical costs each year[0]. That's just one little thing, I suppose, but there are many, many NGOs, charities, religious institutions and unaffiliated individuals providing personal care inside their communities and outside. There's plenty of care that /cannot be provided/ by these organisations, and was not provided in the past by private charities either. Neither could provide cancer treatment or cure a patient with major injuries from a car accident. That's a job for institutionalized healthcare. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Medical_fundraising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Medical_fundraising
johngladtj 3y ago
Except there is no such reliance on perfect information of all parties. You're coming up with a scarecrow and then tearing it down and pretending it's the real thing. The actual free market answer to these things is that if poisonous turmeric is such a big issue, it will be noticed (by some people dropping dead if nothing else) which will result in consumers prioritizing "knowing if the turmeric is poisonous", resulting in a "food safety rating industry" being created which either consumers or producers can fund in order to accurately determine the safety of the food. We can see stuff like this happen all the time in the financial industry with ratings agencies, and we saw it prior to government based agencies that fullfil that role. Branding was big in the 1800s as a response to precisely that sort of behavior.
- truckerbill 3y ago
  The supply and demand curve doesn't always cross with imperfect information. A lot of free market presuppositions fail actually. This is accepted by many contemporary economists. Samuel Bowles on Mindscape podcast was an interesting high level discussion
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Lead doesn't cause people to just "drop dead" like that. Like other heavy metals, it bioaccumulates and gradually causes harm. It is not something where people can trace their problem to one specific seller, or even turmeric specifically.
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    [flagged]
- notahacker 3y ago
  The idea of contaminated food being solved by a food safety rating industry set up to rate thousands of small South Asian market stalls for the benefit of poor and sometimes functionally illiterate customers after enough of them have traced their family members' deaths to the food supply sounds more like the sort of scenario raised to mock libertarians than 'perfect information', which is just a technical requirement for an ideally functioning market in economics (the theory that safety ratings industries can fill the gap is a theory of markets converging on consumers having all relevant information anyway) Even if we assume safety ratings for a complex food supply chain resulting in tens of thousands of one man businesses selling to people earning a dollar a day is a massive market opportunity, brands and safety labels are trivially copied by sufficiently people selling adulterated food, so they alone fundamentally don't solve the problem. Only a government can step in and regulate that IP, and at that point they might be better off just banning the poisoning...
hliyan 3y ago
Also, the free market requires the actual damage to materialise before it gets factored into the decision making of participants. E.g. climate change effects may eventually get factored into the energy markets, but by then, the damage would have been done.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  It wouldn't factor in even then, because it's a classic externality. Polluters don't contribute individually to climate change just for themselves or their customers, they contribute -- each in a small way -- to the problem for everyone on the planet. If factory pollution was somehow isolated to just the factory or people buying things from that factory, instead of just going into everyone's air, regulation would be much less necessary, because in that case yes, consumer behavior would change. People wouldn't want smog inside their homes because they bought a new widget from a polluting manufacturer. This is the inherent problem with people complaining that they have the right to pollute with their cars or factories or what have you as an argument against regulation. The pollution doesn't just stay next to the person creating it! If someone invents a box that captures all the fumes that car puts off and localizes it to the car itself, then sure, pollute all you want.
- nickpp 3y ago
  This is not true. Plenty of people already changed their consumer behavior due to Climate Change info. For example Solar deployment is quite impressive around the word even if it's not always the best strategy financially (governmental incentives included).
_nalply 3y ago
The assumption of perfect information is still useful as long state actors maintain market conditions for that. Bangladesh example: Consumers didn't know about lead in turmeric. After the information campaign consumers know about lead in turmeric but not whether a specific seller offers lead-free turmeric. After the raids consumers know that they can usually trust turmeric to be lead-free. The assumption of perfectly rational actors is not so useful. However there's another solution. State actors should control confusopoly. That's a lot more difficult, but if the market is not too complex, one can assume consumers are mostly rational. In other words: in reality the assumptions are not assumptions but preconditions for a free market.
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
[flagged]
- boxed 3y ago
  You know it's lead we are talking about right?
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    Yes I do. Have you ever thought about that? Consider that literally everyone used to believe it was either benign or beneficial, (including western experts before they got expelled) used it for various purposes and noticed no ill effects. It was found in the neanderthals. Now you come and claim that everybody is wrong. What if it's you who is wrong?
    - Kbelicius 3y ago
      > Consider that literally everyone used to believe This literally isn't true since, you know, ancient Romans were aware of lead poisoning.
      - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
        There is a couple of dubious quotes, the well documented fact that they cooked in it rather strongly implies that this belief wasn't widespread either. It really seems like the climate change debate, only that the deniers won, and those who claim otherwise are getting silenced even as the effects are becoming obvious, and people desperately look for some explanation why people are getting increasingly ill, frail, weak, and dumb.
        lupusreal 3y ago
        [dead]
    - hnbad 3y ago
      You know that you can look up "lead poisoning" and it effects, right? It's an entire thing with many studies into it and a well-understood mechanism of how it happens and so on? It tastes sweet and is a very useful material and the toxicity is delayed because it builds up in the body over time, especially through touch rather than consumption. The symptoms might also not be immediately noticeable, especially if malnutrition, parasites and other contaminants are also widespread. If you want to get into a conspiracy of Western corporations trying to suppress a useful thing by spreading lies about it contrary to traditional wisdom, maybe try hemp/cannabis (no, not just for getting high: there are plenty of industrial uses hampered by the illegality of "marijuana"). Lead seems like a really bad hill to die on given that it's been known to have adverse health effects for over 2000 years (while continuously being used because it was so darn useful and contamination was often limited by how it was used for most of history).
Waterluvian 3y ago
I also dislike how they’re reactionary in nature and therefore are satisfied with an inferior process. I’d rather protect the market from lead rather than wait and hope they notice the harm it’s causing and decide to stop buying the product.
imtringued 3y ago
A popular implicit assumption, probably because nobody really though about it, is that economics models often include perfect cooperation. If it takes multiple people to get to an optimal outcome, they will all cooperate and never do any infighting. Economists use reverse causality and argue that non-cooperative behavior doesn't exist. You know, in exactly the same way racism/sexism was sometimes considered irrational by some economists.
- Xorakios 3y ago
  Um, what? I am a Princeton trained economist from the 1980's and not once, not ever do we talk about non-cooperative behavior not existing. Rather, it is sub-optimal and self-defeating in the long run and that's why economies that evolve into hierarchical control eventually result in rebellion. And bewilderingly about the last claim, but yes, I know, racism/sexism is sometimes considered irrational by some economists, because, um, you know, it is?

PumpkinSpice 3y ago

I see the problem a bit differently. Perhaps a society could function in a model like that. But we decided it's too burdensome and we ceded this responsibility to the government. In such a world, it is paradoxically more dangerous to come across some under-regulated niche, because our default assumption is that the government took care of the risk. It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric. This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help. Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.

OscarCunningham 3y ago
In particular, adding lead to tumeric was illegal before they made a show of enforcing it in 2019. So their previous policy was the worst of both worlds; telling people they were safe while allowing them to be poisoned.
pjc50 3y ago
"Protection of the public from fraud in the marketing of food products represents one of the earliest forms of government regulation of commercial enterprise" -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26658854 "FOOD DRUG COSMETIC LAW JOURNAL 39, 2-73 (1984) A History of Government Regulation of Adulteration and Misbranding of Food" The introduction covers food regulation from Biblical and Roman times to the present. If you think about how many of the Biblical rules are devoted to food handling in some sense, it starts to become clear how food regulation is civilization and the state, as much as any other kind of ancient law. I will never understand the Libertarian dream of a "prelapsarian" world where everyone is free to sell poison to everyone else with no consequences.
- butlerm 3y ago
  A libertarian would say that purveyors of poison would face civil and criminal liability after the fact if anyone was harmed.
boxed 3y ago
> It doesn't even cross your mind that you should be asking about lead in your turmeric. All customers always checking all food for poisons is not reasonable at all.
- PumpkinSpice 3y ago
  You're not describing a position taken by sane libertarians, though. Their argument is different: that if the government didn't regulate so much, customers would depend on the merchant's reputation, possibly backed by independent testing done by private sector institutions. A modern-day parallel would be electrical safety. In the US, this is largely handled by private organizations such as the UL. You can buy a non-UL extension cord or a toaster if you want. And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.
notahacker 3y ago
The idea that South Asians consumed poisoned lead because of high average levels of trust in the efficiency of their governments and their regulation of the food supply as opposed to low information on lead poisoning isn't one that survives contact with reality. So the "but the market would have solved this if only lead poisoning was legal" position is definitely an extreme one. The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.
- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  The world has had millennia of not regulating very much The one exception is weights and measures. There is a long tradition of regulating these strictly, because experience has shown that the market is incapable of driving the cheats out of business and that there must be trust in the markets because else trade will slow down.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Government institutions save transaction costs. Yet we still got some anarcho capitalist idiots on the internet.
    - Xorakios 3y ago
      Most economists and left-leaning research institutes disagree with this. Transaction costs, both monetary and temporal, are always higher with more regulation and governmental institutional involvement. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2006/N2505.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2006/N2505.... https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tce_org_handbook_111410.pdf https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tce_org_handbook_... The arguments are usually about whether equity/fairness/outcomes are better, but cost in money and time is always higher.
TotempaaltJ 3y ago
I don't necessarily want to add or take away from your point, but I do want to note that I believe this is false: > People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help. GoFundMe raises about $650 million for medical costs each year[0]. That's just one little thing, I suppose, but there are many, many NGOs, charities, religious institutions and unaffiliated individuals providing personal care inside their communities and outside. There's plenty of care that /cannot be provided/ by these organisations, and was not provided in the past by private charities either. Neither could provide cancer treatment or cure a patient with major injuries from a car accident. That's a job for institutionalized healthcare. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Medical_fundraising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Medical_fundraising

johngladtj 3y ago

Except there is no such reliance on perfect information of all parties. You're coming up with a scarecrow and then tearing it down and pretending it's the real thing. The actual free market answer to these things is that if poisonous turmeric is such a big issue, it will be noticed (by some people dropping dead if nothing else) which will result in consumers prioritizing "knowing if the turmeric is poisonous", resulting in a "food safety rating industry" being created which either consumers or producers can fund in order to accurately determine the safety of the food. We can see stuff like this happen all the time in the financial industry with ratings agencies, and we saw it prior to government based agencies that fullfil that role. Branding was big in the 1800s as a response to precisely that sort of behavior.

truckerbill 3y ago
The supply and demand curve doesn't always cross with imperfect information. A lot of free market presuppositions fail actually. This is accepted by many contemporary economists. Samuel Bowles on Mindscape podcast was an interesting high level discussion
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Lead doesn't cause people to just "drop dead" like that. Like other heavy metals, it bioaccumulates and gradually causes harm. It is not something where people can trace their problem to one specific seller, or even turmeric specifically.
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  [flagged]
notahacker 3y ago
The idea of contaminated food being solved by a food safety rating industry set up to rate thousands of small South Asian market stalls for the benefit of poor and sometimes functionally illiterate customers after enough of them have traced their family members' deaths to the food supply sounds more like the sort of scenario raised to mock libertarians than 'perfect information', which is just a technical requirement for an ideally functioning market in economics (the theory that safety ratings industries can fill the gap is a theory of markets converging on consumers having all relevant information anyway) Even if we assume safety ratings for a complex food supply chain resulting in tens of thousands of one man businesses selling to people earning a dollar a day is a massive market opportunity, brands and safety labels are trivially copied by sufficiently people selling adulterated food, so they alone fundamentally don't solve the problem. Only a government can step in and regulate that IP, and at that point they might be better off just banning the poisoning...

hliyan 3y ago

Also, the free market requires the actual damage to materialise before it gets factored into the decision making of participants. E.g. climate change effects may eventually get factored into the energy markets, but by then, the damage would have been done.

TulliusCicero 3y ago
It wouldn't factor in even then, because it's a classic externality. Polluters don't contribute individually to climate change just for themselves or their customers, they contribute -- each in a small way -- to the problem for everyone on the planet. If factory pollution was somehow isolated to just the factory or people buying things from that factory, instead of just going into everyone's air, regulation would be much less necessary, because in that case yes, consumer behavior would change. People wouldn't want smog inside their homes because they bought a new widget from a polluting manufacturer. This is the inherent problem with people complaining that they have the right to pollute with their cars or factories or what have you as an argument against regulation. The pollution doesn't just stay next to the person creating it! If someone invents a box that captures all the fumes that car puts off and localizes it to the car itself, then sure, pollute all you want.
nickpp 3y ago
This is not true. Plenty of people already changed their consumer behavior due to Climate Change info. For example Solar deployment is quite impressive around the word even if it's not always the best strategy financially (governmental incentives included).

_nalply 3y ago

The assumption of perfect information is still useful as long state actors maintain market conditions for that. Bangladesh example: Consumers didn't know about lead in turmeric. After the information campaign consumers know about lead in turmeric but not whether a specific seller offers lead-free turmeric. After the raids consumers know that they can usually trust turmeric to be lead-free. The assumption of perfectly rational actors is not so useful. However there's another solution. State actors should control confusopoly. That's a lot more difficult, but if the market is not too complex, one can assume consumers are mostly rational. In other words: in reality the assumptions are not assumptions but preconditions for a free market.

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

[flagged]

boxed 3y ago
You know it's lead we are talking about right?
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  Yes I do. Have you ever thought about that? Consider that literally everyone used to believe it was either benign or beneficial, (including western experts before they got expelled) used it for various purposes and noticed no ill effects. It was found in the neanderthals. Now you come and claim that everybody is wrong. What if it's you who is wrong?
  - Kbelicius 3y ago
    > Consider that literally everyone used to believe This literally isn't true since, you know, ancient Romans were aware of lead poisoning.
    - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
      There is a couple of dubious quotes, the well documented fact that they cooked in it rather strongly implies that this belief wasn't widespread either. It really seems like the climate change debate, only that the deniers won, and those who claim otherwise are getting silenced even as the effects are becoming obvious, and people desperately look for some explanation why people are getting increasingly ill, frail, weak, and dumb.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        [dead]
  - hnbad 3y ago
    You know that you can look up "lead poisoning" and it effects, right? It's an entire thing with many studies into it and a well-understood mechanism of how it happens and so on? It tastes sweet and is a very useful material and the toxicity is delayed because it builds up in the body over time, especially through touch rather than consumption. The symptoms might also not be immediately noticeable, especially if malnutrition, parasites and other contaminants are also widespread. If you want to get into a conspiracy of Western corporations trying to suppress a useful thing by spreading lies about it contrary to traditional wisdom, maybe try hemp/cannabis (no, not just for getting high: there are plenty of industrial uses hampered by the illegality of "marijuana"). Lead seems like a really bad hill to die on given that it's been known to have adverse health effects for over 2000 years (while continuously being used because it was so darn useful and contamination was often limited by how it was used for most of history).

Waterluvian 3y ago

I also dislike how they’re reactionary in nature and therefore are satisfied with an inferior process. I’d rather protect the market from lead rather than wait and hope they notice the harm it’s causing and decide to stop buying the product.

imtringued 3y ago

A popular implicit assumption, probably because nobody really though about it, is that economics models often include perfect cooperation. If it takes multiple people to get to an optimal outcome, they will all cooperate and never do any infighting. Economists use reverse causality and argue that non-cooperative behavior doesn't exist. You know, in exactly the same way racism/sexism was sometimes considered irrational by some economists.

Xorakios 3y ago
Um, what? I am a Princeton trained economist from the 1980's and not once, not ever do we talk about non-cooperative behavior not existing. Rather, it is sub-optimal and self-defeating in the long run and that's why economies that evolve into hierarchical control eventually result in rebellion. And bewilderingly about the last claim, but yes, I know, racism/sexism is sometimes considered irrational by some economists, because, um, you know, it is?