Jayson Lusk and Pierre Desrochers write,
In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
I am stunned by the casual way in which environmentalists dismiss the information that markets provide concerning costs. They instead substitute their own cost estimates.
Some further thoughts:
1. If you really have a better estimate of costs than the market, then there should be profit opportunity. In the case of locavorism, you should be able to offer local food for lower prices. Do any locavorists stop to wonder why food that comes from far away cost less? Do they suppose it is some perverse conspiracy on the part of “big food” to subsidize the transportation industry (or perhaps the other way around)?
2. Consider recycling. At a local elementary school, I saw the winning poster in a county contest to promote recycling. The poster pictured a barren, brown earth, and said that this is what would happen if we did not recycle. And yet, economically, government-forced recycling is unsustainable, and it probably results in a net cost to environmental desiderata. (I wonder if people on the left would be so attached to government-run schools if the propaganda coming from those schools offended them.)
3. Consider two extremes: “free-market fundamentalism,” which says that markets always lead to optimal outcomes; and “market denialism,” which I will define as the belief that the information found in markets is of so little importance that one’s personal opinions should take precedence. I think that in practice market denialism is much more prevalent than free-market fundamentalism. In fact, it is so prevalent that no one refers to it as “market denialism.” They just presume that it is the appropriate point of view.
Related: Clive Crook cites Dani Rodrik‘s 10 commandments for economists.
“Substituting your values for the public’s is an abuse of your expertise.”
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. And how can Rodrik be immune from “abuse of your expertise”?
Well, there are people making ton of profits off of natural local foods with farmer markets, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s prices. I tend to believe most of the anti-GMO movement to be 50% of people who profit from the selling of non GMO foods.
Boy Recycling is your hobby horse. Most of these are local governments mildly subsidizing a program that probably keeps the price of Land Fills a lot lower in the long run.
Hard to know what people really think, but I think many locavores see this as improving freshness and nutrients and assume while costs are higher, they won’t be that much higher if more spending stays local, and may even stimulate advanced production techniques that may lower them more in the future, though these seem weak. Recycling just promotes keeping the amount and cost of waste as low as possible at the slight increase of effort at the household sorting level, a partial rather than full optimization but also why it is done only at the simplest level. If markets lead to one universal specialized machine then self reliant households are the counterpart where all markets have been assembled, scaled, and automated out of existence, eventually forming our own independent self replicating spaceships and the only exchange is in shared ideas and performances, a view of a far distant future.
Someone needs to make an “I, pencil” version of global food trade.
In my pantry I see Macadamia nuts from Australia, pineapple from Hawaii, Dried mango from the Philippines, Rum and brown sugar from the Caribbean , Vanilla from Madagascar, Coffee from Costa Rica, Turmeric from India, Miso paste and Seaweed from Japan, Dried apricots from Turkey, Couscous from Israel, and so forth. I go on for a long time. I have the whole world in a little closet! It’s great, and that it was affordable makes it even more awesome. All acquired through peaceful trade too.
Some people just can’t accept that the proper attitude is not gloom or guilt but celebratory gratitude, “What a time to be alive!”