That’s probably as good or better of an analogy than the food supply one. One of those things where the success of the system as is makes people think that the system is not necessary.
Note in what you replied to I said, “probably good at 3 weeks.” I did not say, “still good at three weeks.” If at 3 weeks, there is a 10% chance of making people sick, do you think that this is a good thing to serve the public? If every restaurant is saving money by pushing stuff into the points where it is 10%, or even 5% likely to make someone sick, is that something that you want?
this is different from your statement of “perfectly edible food,” it’s more like “probably edible food.”
And at this point, we are more talking about larger organizations like the FDA and USDA, which inspect the food supply at the source, as opposed to restaurant health inspectors, that are only inspecting the final point of preparation. Both are important, but the larger organizations would be harder to replicate on an individual level. It’s one thing to check on the reputation of the restaurant, but if you need to track down all the food to its original source, you have much much more homework to do before you grab a bite to eat.
I think we all probably have more experience with restaurants than we do with banks, particularly the sort of investment/securities/derivatives institutions that were so much a part of the most recent downturn. It’s easier to discuss matters of regulation, inspection, compliance, economic incentives, etc, at a level where we can all appreciate the consequences. I agree with the poster above who pointed out that without groups like health departments or the CDC we’d never know when cases of food poisoning could be traced to a single source. I don’t know that we’d even have standards for things like e. coli or algae levels in shellfish if there wasn’t a public body to do the research. It’s not that I think the government is all-knowing or brilliantly competent, but the public is paying the inspectors salaries, and it should be cheaper for a commercial kitchen to handle food safely than to bribe their way through the inspections.
Miller, Maule is a light aircraft manufacturer, Their planes are quite simple and sturdy; good for back-country flying on unpaved airstrips. Don’t know if that’s where IdahoMauleMan got the name, but it’s one possibility.
That one was better. Another simple analogy might be: There can be no doubt that a submarine would be cheaper without all those internal doors. It would also weigh less so could either carry more equipment or go faster. Movement of sailors throughout the ship would be much easier. So why oh why do they keep these darn compartment hatches?
The food is not like Schrodinger’s cat. It is either edible or not edible. If you set the bar at one point you are going to throw out lots of edible food, if you set it lower than you are going to throw out less edible food but at the price of more sick people. Every policy has its tradeoff. Since we are a rich country with plentiful food, millions of pounds of food waste is probably worth it so people get sick slightly less often.
However, when it comes to finance and bank regulations there are also tradeoffs. The tradeoff is possibly slightly less risk of a bank bailout versus a less dynamic financial industry. A healthy financial industry is critical for economic growth and in the long run economic growth helps everyone. If the US had 1% less growth every year for the last 100 years the GDP per capita in the US would have been the same as Mexico. The poor in Mexico are much worse off than the poor in the US. So a tradeoff of helping people with fewer mortgage meltdowns that comes at the cost of slower growth ends up being worse for everyone, even those it is designed to help.
Of course. It doesn’t change the fact of a large practical, not necessarily as purely philosophical, question of what kind of bank financial regulation actually works and what kind just becomes a form over substance ritual which just reduces competition and efficiency.
And there’s a big question what confluence of factors, what particular weightings of them, actually caused the '08 crisis. Plus it’s indisputable that a future crisis could have very different causes, so precise engineering of the barn door one proposes to close after the horse bolted only goes so far even if everyone can agree that’s actually how/why that particular horse escaped last time.
Realistically only non-elected libertarian purists are talking not regulating anything, or eliminating the basic original function of agencies like the FDA (FDA’s role in modern new drug development, as opposed to the original idea of clamping down on poisonous snake oil, is a serious question, along with the patent system and other related policies). But realistically Dodd-Frank can be a argued a very sub optimal solution without being a doctrinaire libertarian. But it depends on those details.
This is very, very, very untrue, unless you are positing that every person has exactly the same immune system, and exactly the same reactions to contamination, and the food is prepared in exactly the same way for all customers. Otherwise, a particular food item will have a spectrum of effects, from little to none, to hospitalization.
This is also not something that you can tell just by looking at or even smelling or tasting the food. It actually is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat like that, in that there is no way to find out if something is going to make you sick unless you try it. (Or have a lab perform analysis on it.) Therefore, the only way to prevent such things from happening is to avoid the conditions that create risky food in the first place, like throwing out food past its expiry date.
I venture to say that health regulations should get a rating a bit better than “people get sick slightly less often.”
Before health departments, people got sick all the time. Ever hear of Typhoid Mary? And that was before we had restauranting as a major industry. That was back when field to table was only a few miles and a few people involved.
The economy can grow too fast, too. If it grows too fast, it is unhealthy and unsustainable. The numbers look cool, because their bigger, but if productivity and purchasing power are not rising evenly along with the GDP, then many people will quickly find themselves worse off. For instance, if we had had about a .5% reduction in the growth from 2001 to 2007, but that reduction also meant that we did not get the market correction in 2008, then we would all be much better off. Well, maybe not the richest .01%, but pretty much everyone else. Now, if you only look at GDP, or GDP per capita, without looking at how the wealth is actually distributed, you may think that the economy is functioning better than it really is.
So this is just my opinion but when you spend your entire argument on the intricacies of an analogy maybe it’s not so fucking useful. I mean, analogies are supposed to illustrate something, right? They aren’t supposed to be a complete change of subject? “Hey, banking regulation is important so let’s talk about food sevice rules for a while!”
My bad, I’ve spent over 20 years working in restaurants, and have been servsafe certified for almost all that time. Food and food safety is a passion of mine. If the analogy is more of a hijack, I am happy to drop it or take it elsewhere.
Though the overall idea of regulation is not that big a stretch from analogy. I find the health department to be an entirely positive regulatory agency, and the analogy started with the idea that the health department, like the financial regulatory agencies, is unimportant.
The entire point of my screeds is to let those individuals know how much they don’t know about what keeps them safe from a potentially contaminated food supply. The point of which is to get them to think of how much they don’t know what keeps them safe from a potentially “contaminated” money supply.
@k9bfriender:
It is undoubtedly a hijack. When you are having to explain immune systems and food inspection in a financial regulation thread, there is little doubt of that. But more importantly, the analogy is of limited use. Food safety is primarily a consumer protection thing whereas financial regulation is only partly that, it’s also about protecting the foundations of the entire economy. It’s about making a functional and resiliant system. So yeah, if someone says “regulation is always bad” you can say “food safety regulations are pretty useful”. But carrying it beyond that is silly.
And sorry if I’m a little over the top. I got pretty sick of analogy arguments after a few too many Intellectual Property debates. “No downloading a song is not exactly like stealing your car!”. Lol.
I think you are overly optimistic about the integrity of the food industry. I have read a certain amount of muckraking journalism from the early 20th century about the situations in food, drugs and cosmetics that later led to the establishment of some of the major US regulatory agencies for those areas. These included many discussions of commercial sale of spoiled food.
One that comes to mind is a dairy selling butter, that would buy spoiled milk at a discount, separate the butterfat, treat it to remove the odor, and mix it with a portion of fresh butter to sell as their cheaper line. Besides the “ick” factor, the treatment used was not sufficient to kill fungi and bacteria in the “renovated” butter.
The book noted that most of the other dairies that they (covertly) inspected had similar practices; when challenged, the owners all argued that it was an economic necessity because using only fresh milk would price them out of the market. They also thought it was reprehensible for the media to bring these practices to the attention of the public, because it would unnecessarily degrade consumer confidence in their products. This was around the 1930s, after the first round of food regulation laws were already in place; the reclaimed butter scheme was technically illegal, but there obviously wasn’t enough regulatory oversight to keep this sort of thing in check.
Unfortunately I can’t remember which book had this particular tidbit, I think it might have been 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (1933) but I’m not sure…
The problem is that food need not be rancid or obviously tainted to be dangerous. For example, this past spring the FDA investigated an outbreak of listeriosis linked to frozen vegetables; a previous major outbreak came from contaminated cantaloupe. The presence of potentially deadly bacteria did NOT affect the taste, color, or consistency of the produce; people ate the fruits and veggies because the produce looked and tasted fine, and because they had no way of observing the presence of the bacteria.
Moreover, cross-contamination is an issue: the bacteria from the cantaloupes could end up on a cutting board or a knife, and improper/inadequate cleaning transfers the bacteria to some other food product. Preventing listeria contamination in fresh fruits and veggies mostly means thoroughly washing the produce and thoroughly cleaning the utensils, equipment, and surfaces used in handling and preparing the food. How do you, as a restaurant customer, find out the steps the kitchen staff takes to avoid cross-contamination?
Anyway, as regards to banking… what if the American system was as tightly regulated as the Canadian system? Is the U.S. was constrained to a Canadian level of economic growth (assuming generously that banking regulation alone dictates such things)… would that be so bad? Would it be so depressing that all Americans would put their American guns in their American mouths and blow their American brains out?
As an analogy, consider a child’s diet. The regulator is the nanny who says “eat some more protein and vitamins, Billy.” But the kid needs to eat carbohydrates too. We do need a thriving financial sector, and your comment does suggest that over-regulation could stifle it.
The problem is: Your analysis is completely wrong! We don’t have a financial sector that’s prevented from eating the carbohydrates it needs. We have one that’s gorging itself on raw sugar only, and complains to its Congressmen if nanny tries to get it to eat a single vitamin pill. Puddleglum’s argument breaks down for the same reason that If a diet of 100% vitamin pills is bad, it follows that eating a single vitamin pill is bad.
is faulty.
No, I won’t list the myriad facts that support a correct analysis: the fact that our brightest young people are deserting their STEM curricula to go into finance, etc. — I’ve posted cites and book recommendations before. People will believe what fits their political prejudices, not what fits the facts.
The analogy is awful. Regulators are not telling companies what to eat or anything remotely similar.
Why are salaries in the finance world so high? It certainly is hard boring work that only smart people can do, but that is no the only reason. One of the biggest reasons is that the big investment banks have very little competition. That is because regulation is a fixed cost. The more regulations the higher the costs to comply. These fixed costs create a barrier to entry that prevent new firms from disrupting the industry. If you want to build a business to disrupt an industry like taxis or hotels all you need is a good app, but if you want to disrupt the investment banking industry then you need an army of lawyers to make sure all regulations are dealt with. As a result finance companies have no competition and get to charge more and more for their services. As a result the number of companies in US stock exchanges are down almost half from their high twenty years ago.