Paul Krugman is attacking Milton Friedman (again) for rotten tomatoes. Here’s Krugman in 2007:
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there
may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and
melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your
chicken sandwich.Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating?
Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some
blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.…Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.
and here he is today repeating himself:
Lately, however, there always
seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines – tainted
spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the
killer tomatoes.How did America find itself back in The Jungle?
I was curious so I collected data from the Center for Disease Control on Foodborne Disease Outbreaks from 1998-2006. The data only go back to 1998 because in that year the CDC changed its surveillance system creating a discontinuity but note that we are covering a chunk of the Clinton years and are well within the time frame over which Krugman says the safety system has degenerated. Here’s the result:
What we see is a lot of variability from year to year but a net downward trend. You can also look at cases per year which are more variable but also show a net downward trend. No evidence whatsoever that we are back "in The Jungle."
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I see no reason to propagate a flawed system, even if I did believe in gov’t regulation per se.
I don’t know the details of how the system is run. They should have had the best professional scientists they could get to design it. The system may have been designed for one level of funding, and then have the funding cut with no funds to optimise the system for reduced funding. That happens sometimes.
One advantage of government testing is that they don’t have as much incentive to cheat. Except that we’re getting a lot of reports of attempts to cheat by political appointees. A private testing system that could show its integrity would be a good alternative.
Q: Why get into debating what constitutes BSE free? It’s hard to prove a negative. Why not just advertise what testing protocols were used?
I completely agree.
I disagree about the safe choices. If beef is the most affordable protein source, then it is not reasonable to avoid it on the miniscule chance of getting BSE.
The USDA testing is designed to make sure that chance is miniscule, at minimal cost. If the chance gets too high, then the testing should detect it. Assuming various assumptions, that we have no evidence against yet.
Tomatos are very good for you, a lot of health has been lost as an opportunity cost for recalling all the maters to get a small fraction of bad ones.
This is a side-effect of our distribution system. Probably the small fraction are coming from a few places, but we don’t track which places they are. Better tracking would probably pay for itself pretty quick.
…our tax dollars might be better spent researching remedies for the cellular junk problem…
Research is good. Our beef industry has a PR problem — people don’t trust them not to break the rules then that’s profitable. So testing by somebody generally believed to be trustworthy is an aid to commerce — to people getting meat on their tables. But now the government testing is somewhat suspect too. What to do?
There’s the side issue that globalization reduces our government’s sovereignty. When it’s all domestic the government can say what to do and people can do it that way or be criminals. When we compete on the world market then to some extent we have to do what foreign customers want.
Just a couple of comments on the food fight: First, it’s apparent we don’t need lawyers to protect us – what happened to spinach producers during the E. coli scare was pretty devastating. Now tomato producers are taking a huge hit. The food industry is well motivated to police itself. Second, and more importantly, I don’t think hiring more inspectors will do much to prevent these outbreaks; these big government initiatives work well at getting politicians reelected but rarely deliver much added safety, IMHO.
We do, however, have a safe technology that could greatly reduce the incidence of bacterial contamination in our foods – irradiation. Hysterical and committed “activists† have intimidated grocers to the point that a consumer like me can’t get irradiated chicken, eggs, hamburger, spinach, etc. even if I were willing to pay a premium for safety. The National Academy of Science has judged the process to be free of risks to the consumer, and the FDA has approved it for use – so why can’t we get our bacteria-free food? Interestingly, spices have been irradiated for many years without any protests from the “activists†; in this case, the practice is meant to improve shelf-life, which is another benefit of irradiation.
The lowdown on The Jungle
DanC, when I did a quick Google search the first article I turned up was somebody who claimed Milton Friedman advocated eliminating the FDA.
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=279
They didn’t quote him directly, though. They quoted somebody who quoted him.
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/stop_taxing_non.htm
Here’s Friedman himself saying he wants to abolish the FDA.
He might easily be recommending that we do something better than the FDA, but he definitely has done what Krugman says he did.
I don’t know how much to blame him for the result. If a nobel peace prize winner announces we ought to nuke russia, and later the US government does start a war on russia that doesn’t exactly follow the smart guy’s advice, how much should we blame him for it? I’d tend to think not much. He might have had a good idea that went bad when they did it badly.
We can’t hold people responsible when they propose policy and somebody else tries to carry it out and does it badly. Nobody had to follow their advice. If you tell somebody to jump off a cliff and they do it, is it your fault? They should have known better.
And J Thomas, I would reject your notion of who is to blame for nuking Russia.
A better analogy is a preacher preaches love and understanding but his message is distorted by some to mean control and intolerance. (Or in Krugman’s case you claim the it was secretly a message of hate and violence.) Can you blame the preacher for the way others have distorted his message?
I give up. You willfully refuse to understand the point. First, the evidence is that food safety has not declined so Krugman is wrong on the facts. Second, Krugman blames Milton but Milton was not against government inspection of food so Krugman is wrong when he tries to assign blame.
Milton was correct in arguing against federal regulatory policies that reduce competition, increase costs, and decrease freedom. History is full of examples. And on the occasions when the market fails, by the time the press and politicians realize there is a problem, the market is fixing it. But this tread was about food safety and Krugman was wrong on almost every level.
The Jungle was a joke anyway. Check this out: http://mises.org/story/2317. Put that in the pile atop your copies of Silent Spring, the Kinsey Report, and Coming of Age in Samoa, and file under Influential but Deeply Flawed Works by Deceptive and Self-Interested Authors.
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by the way, think I would die in 1000, at least assuming I could avoid the plague and a few other maladies. Temporary aid is the natural human tendency, among the poor too, and it is unlikely I would be killed for being a witch. I would end up doing hard physical labor
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