Oddbean new post about login | logout Isn’t this the free market at work? The free market would want to find the cheapest alternative ingredients and make the food as addicting as possible to maximize profits.
Not at all. We don’t have free markets.
Okay, so how did the state put this in place, and how would the free market avoid it?
That’s a long discussion over about 60 years. But the short version is regulatory capture, corrupt “science,” and how horribly broken our money is. Money printing is literally a form of silent slavery. Those with access to the printer can consume and own everything in society while everyone else ends up renting it from them. This has occurred in almost every industry in this country over the past ~60 years. I have a podcast that’s basically built entirely around explaining how.
Idk man. Yeah I’ve listened to your podcast. I feel like you should have a pretty concise explanation for how state intervention leads to seed oils and nutrient deficient food. Something like A leads to B leads to C. And you still didn’t answer the other question I asked which is, “How would the free market prevent this from happening?” Conversely, I can create a very simple explanation for how this is caused by the free market*. Corporations want to minimize costs and maximize profits. How do they cut costs? Use cheap to manufacture chemicals in place of real food. How do they maximize profit? Make their food highly addictive. If you think this explanation is wrong, you should be able to clearly tell me why it’s wrong and why it actually comes about due to some government intervention. *I grant you that we don’t live in a totally free market, but rather there are aspects of freeness in the market, and my point still stands regardless.
I wish the nuance was as easy to explain. I work on trying to make it easier to understand, but when people are ignorant of how money even works, how do you then give an explanation that requires them to apply it? I agree that there needs to be an explanation, and the problem is that all you have to do is regurgitate nonsense propaganda we’ve been fed our whole lives to “understand” the other narrative, and nobody asks the question, “well why do people buy it when they bought the other before?” Again the answer is in the money. Here’s an analogy that I use to help picture it, maybe this will help: Imagine you have an honest winemaker, and a dishonest one. The honest winemaker uses high quality ingredients because they care about their product. The dishonest winemaker uses what is the standard. It’s good enough not to raise any eyebrows and he basically labels it the same as his competition. The government prints trillions of dollars, wages take years to adjust to it, but input prices and business costs rise almost immediately. The good winemaker refuses to compromise on the quality of their wine. He has to raise prices by 15% to keep selling a high quality product. The dishonest winemaker has no problem adding fake coloring, some Monsanto flavors, and then watering down the actual wine to keep the price the same. The customers don’t get a 15% pay raise and won’t make up for that difference for a year minimum. Now they are poorer and have to budget on things they never had to before. They see that of the two wines they purchase, one just shot up in price, and the other stayed the consistent. To them, the honest winemaker is a greedy asshole, while the dishonest one looks consistent and reliable. The customer only budgeted for X to spend on wine, not X+15%, so they switch to the dishonest winemaker out of either anger at the honest one, which is doubly driven by the profits of the dishonest one who will gladly repeat the politicians stupid “greedy business” bullshit and pay others to repeat it as well with their higher profit and revenue, or they switch out of simple poverty. The CPI doesn’t account for quality or substance in products, only what customers buy. So CPI comes in at 1% that year, because the quality and ingredients of everything were degraded to make up for a broken, corrupt money. So when people say “it was inflation,” they don’t believe you, because they pay the same amount for wine… The dishonest winemaker gains a massive influx of customers. The honest one goes out of business. And everyone takes the lesson that to value quality over price is a recipe for disaster, and lying is just “a part of doing business.” Do this for 60 years and you can rot the core of any nation on earth.
imo the idea of "How could the free market prevent this" is a misunderstood approach you can fix it, you can tell your loved ones and close friend to fix it the "market" is nothing but the addition of all the decision each human does, not a being in and on itself. we can argue a lot on how the gvm might fix it or had caused this, which they have a lot of influence over sadly due to the fact that a lot of ppl blindly listen to them + they can influence a lot of decision by tax and regulation. but at the end WE have the control over our lives. you can chose different food even if the gvm tells you it's bad, cause you are free you can move to another state where taxes are diffrent or even another country trying to blame or hope for "the market" or the "government" to solve it all won't solve you anything. it's much easier than one might have been made to believe by our education system. on another topic, the long answer as to how in hell did the health / food / education system reached this point I recommend: "Fiat Food: Why Inflation Destroyed Our Health" by Matthew Lysiak or if you prefer videos he has made some interviews he did a lot of research into the chain of events leading to this point in time and how the additive pressure of: short time solutions + religion bias + lobby by food industry + trying to cover it all up = here we are now