The industry shapes the culture, but worse, the law and the market.
Very typical example is the corn lobby group, whose result on the market is to cause junk food to be much cheaper than nutritious food, thanks to perverse subsidization. In turn this makes much more difficult for a relatively large part of the population to eat correctly - practically difficult.
This is one of the more bizarre artifacts of our system. And it took the concentrated efforts of almost everyone involved to make it this way.
But in a way , cheaper is always better. Nutritious food is also cheap, relatively, unless the "nutritiousness" of it is also a price differentiator. Frozen veggies are pretty easy to get, IMO - but it seems there usually has to be a largish supermarket to buy them in. And that implies a finance model, which implies a governance structure, which in the end means more dependence in suppliers being "standard". Junk food makers probably can spend more bandwidth on being "standard" and less on "quality".
If I had to describe Whole Foods model I would say that it intentionally "violates" this tendency.
I have never been to a Trader Joes, and I usually use a mix of WalMart and the dominant local chain - Publix when I lived in Florida. Whole Foods is kinda creepy to me to shop in. I can't say exactly why.
> But in a way , cheaper is always better. Nutritious food is also cheap, relatively, unless the "nutritiousness" of it is also a price differentiator.
Well, to get things into perspective, one needs to consider a few things.
We start from the fact that there is a disproportionate amount of people living on food stamps, which will be effectively forced to buy junk food.
Then we factor in that junk food is harmful (not just unhealthy or less nutritious).
Finally, we correlate with a huge amount of people having disease which are linked to unhealthy lifestyles, primarily food-related (60% obese people is the very general guideline given).
I see a very strong thread here.
Food is not just calories, it's a complex mix of things - the way the industry is working, in a way, it's giving cheaper food by stripping that mix of things; this doesn't match the idea of "making food cheaper" in a generic way.
(Note that I'm strongly identifying junk food with processed food in the logic).
For me, it's the paradoxical idea that not only do some dirty hippies have enough money to shop there, but also that there are enough of them to actually keep the company in business. Nationwide.
Very good elaboration. Most of the times, objective science has way fewer resources to spread the word than industry groups. One can only imagine how our society would look like if power and money was distributed more evenly and information was freely available to anyone.
Information is pretty much freely available to everyone already. The value of that information, however, has dropped to near-zero from the point of view of uninitiated - as various groups with agendas publish lies which then get regurgitated by clueless people, we have enough freely available information on any topic to confirm any biases you started with.
So for example, you love GMOs because they're cool and futuristic. So here, read that study on this new plant that is safe and abundant in vitamins and can save a million of children a year from blindness. Or maybe, you hate GMOs because they're unnatural and a product of humans messing up with what God has perfectly made - ok, here, have those 10 papers that have words "GMO", "rats" and "cancer" in them.
What we need is a system that doesn't incentivize people to lie and cheat as much as the current does.
> Very typical example is the corn lobby group, whose result on the market is to cause junk food to be much cheaper than nutritious food
Junk food is cheap because it is engineered to be cheap (particularly, to have a long shelf-life to avoid losses which drive up the price of what actually does get sold to the customer to subsidize the costs of what doesn't do to losses.) The effect of the corn lobby and the resulting subsidization isn't to make junk food cheaper than nutritious food so much as to encourage the use of corn products in junk food by making corn products cheap compared to other alternatives to corn products for making junk food.
The industry shapes the culture, but worse, the law and the market.
As you say, it's not so simple.
Industry is just a part of a cycle of perversion of the goal of effective government.
Industry isn't forcing politicians to create or execute bad legislation. Industry isn't forcing voters to ignore the voting records of politicians who demonstrate poor integrity.
Ultimately, the driver of everything in a democratic republic is the voter.
You seem to be reinventing "median voter theory", which got rebadged "public choice theory", which nearly nobody attests to in public.
In the US at least, government was designed to be ineffective and deadlock-prone. When there was a monoculture, individual legislators (say, Tip O'Neil) bucked the central tendency to ... do whatever it is we do now out of a sense of duty and pragmatism. And as the monoculture faded, so did that.
As the culture got noisier, you had to yell louder. Once you ( you public servant ) get used to living without dignity and a sense of gravitas, it just gets easier... eventually the system selects for the lack of those.
There's much more money in it now, and money makes people take less risk. So you get cookie cutter.
I didn't claim that voters got what the median wants. I claimed that the main driver in the complex cycle of perversion of the function of government is the bad choices of voters.
Without an informed citizenry that can make solid election choices, even the best government framework is doomed to fail because it will be populated with politicians who are unable or unwilling to do the jobs they were elected to do.
I've read perhaps too much Bryan Caplan :), who holds that Median Voter Theory/Public Choice theory is sufficient to explain the bad choices of voters. But of course you are as familiar with that as I am, right? No. You probably are not. My bad then. rends garment.
That's more like "assuming a linkage not in evidence", a much less crafted thing than a strawman. It's ordinary carelessness, not savage guile. I can see how they seem like the same, though.
Although in the sense of revealed preferences, I'm sort of loath to call it all "bad choices." We are inconsistent, hypocritical, vain and venal creatures. That's sort of who we are; I can ... function better if I accept that and celebrate the odd exception. That way the glass is half full. For every thing that doesn't work, there are thousands of cases where it does.
And let's not kid ourselves. It's all very difficult, what our public servants do.
And let's not kid ourselves. It's all very difficult, what our public servants do.
Yes, it's very difficult to raise that much money to destroy your political opponents while balancing all of the donor favors against what you promised to your constituents while also trying to figure out a way that you can become rich from your time in public office.
I have no pity for most politicians. They tend to be power hungry control freaks who have no problem lying to (get into/remain in) office. The lack of discrimination in voter ability to at least filter out the obvious liars is a never ending source of frustration for me.
This is true, but I think it glosses over a bunch of important structure in society that isn't obviously connected to the voter. An analogy might be to say that ultimately, all of your behaviors come down to the neuron. While technically true, it ignores brain structures, hormones, emotional state, etc that are almost always more important in actual treatment than any attempt to deal with individual neurons.
Society is an enormously complex thing with all kinds of hidden influences and imbalances, and I think that saying "it's all the voter" tends to shut down thinking about the real alternatives for fixing problems. I'm not saying that I know what those alternatives are, just that they are likely to exist because we live in a society with structure. Since they're likely to exist, I think we should be looking for them and trying to address them in order to treat this kind of problem.
I think that saying "it's all the voter" tends to shut down thinking about the real alternatives for fixing problems
There are plenty of real alternatives for fixing problems that involve the voter: Education, access to information, encouraging cultural changes, etc.
In part, I was countering the previous poster who was blaming the 'Industry' boogey man, for why sugar has done the damage it has - but not mentioning the culpability of a government so easily influenced by money and then voters so easily influenced by politicians who don't have their constituents' interests at heart.
As you say, it's complex. But, we could talk about fixes on HN all day, but until voters elect smart politicians with integrity who will implement fixes, it's all just academic.
Even more fundamental than the voter is information itself. Voters would be the ultimate drivers if they had perfect information. Since they do not, their choices are limited by their access to information (as well as their ability to process it).
Well, we don't have perfect information - but I think it's pretty obvious that we have abundant information that voters don't avail themselves of. The drive to use even the information available seems to be lacking.
At scale, I would agree with this, although I wouldn't say "prevents", I would say "discourages". You should definitely notice large effects at scale in any economy, in this case, people definitely do buy more junk food because it's cheaper
(I even do this, and I prefer healthy foods when possible! But at your typical gas station, junk:healthy::10:1, which is not quite the same problem)
vegatables, and fruit to a lesser extend, is much cheaper than junk food. Why isn't that encouraging healthy eating?
I believe junk food is like smoking. Everyone knows it's not a healthy choise, but they do it anyways. People are choosing to eat unhealthy food because they want to, it tastes good.
That's a nice belief, but evidence shows people choose junk food because of availability, price, associated preparation time and a lack of nutritional education.
The further down the income ladder you go the more those factors come into play rather than the simplistic "it tastes good" conclusion.
evidence shows people choose junk food because of availability, price, associated preparation time and a lack of nutritional education.
Oh I believe it. I would just phrase it as: people take the easy way out when it comes to eating. They prefer something that is front of them, cheap and they don't need to cook.
You can't ignore personal responsibility. Plenty of poor folks eat health meals.
You say 'they want to' but you ignore that junk food is designed to amplify the superficially appealing qualities of the food without regard to the nutritive value.
Nobody 'wants' that. What they want is good tasting food that is also nutritious. That costs more.
The industry shapes the culture, but worse, the law and the market.
Very typical example is the corn lobby group, whose result on the market is to cause junk food to be much cheaper than nutritious food, thanks to perverse subsidization. In turn this makes much more difficult for a relatively large part of the population to eat correctly - practically difficult.