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Comment by bbddg | Hacker News Reader

Customers in many cases don't have the information to know the potential long term damages of buying the $4.50/kg tomatoes. It's insane to put that burden on the end user as opposed to the tomato grower. How in the world is the customer supposed to know what pesticides are used and what the damages could be?

Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates the actual cause of these problems. Which is generally an economic system that puts private profits above everything else.

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What's extra weird is that everything got really cheap, yet most people don't have any money, and the environment is in disarray. I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap.

What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it in real dollars, whose huge mortgage payment is in turn now eating more than all of the money saved from having crappy tomatoes.

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.

To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.

If you compare 340 billion to the net worth of the median person the mind boggles.

Then you're comparing the sum total of the wealth of many of the richest families to that of one individual person.

The fact that rich people have a lot of money is not really a recent development. But it's the focus on the super rich which is missing the thread.

If housing prices go up, people at the 25th percentile lose and people at the 75th percentile gain. We see the loss for the people at the 25th percentile and recognize it as a problem, but then people are pretending like we can just take the money "back" from the Walton family even though that's not where most of it actually went.

It went to home price appreciation for a bunch of middle aged and retired sociologists and car dealership managers and dental hygienists. If you want them to give it back so the poor aren't so poor then you have to recognize that and thereby identify who it is you really have to fight over that money.

My point was that Sam Walton didn't seem to exactly price in carbon when he went to market with wal-mart in the 70s. Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation), the same could be true for Ikea tables, Amazon Prime 1 day toothbrush, Sugar and chemicals for candy, Pesticides on crops, Opioids, red meat, etc. We got exactly what we wanted, loads of new cheap stuff with loads of selection at our convenience. We also got a labor crisis, a health epidemic, climate change and massive knowledge and wealth inequality.

> Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation)

Not really. The profit on buying for $8 and selling for $11 is about the same as on buying for $9 and selling for $12. You make a little less, because there is lower demand and you have higher initial capital costs for inventory, but it's only a marginal difference.

The reason they don't do it regardless is that if Sam Walton tries selling only the carbon-priced thing for $12 when some competitor is selling the bad thing for $11, the customer chooses the lower price. There is still a Walmart-shaped thing in the economy whether or not it's called Walmart and founded by Sam Walton, because most customers choose that over the thing that costs more.

Because they have instant personal feedback into the price and the taste but not into the long-term health effects of sugar and red meat. But if you can solve that for voters then doesn't the same solution work for customers?

I don't know how to respond to this. It makes no sense to me, so I'll agree to disagree.

What I'm saying is that you would have to convince people that red meat is bad for them before they'd be willing to pass a law against it. If they're not convinced of that then they'll just buy it from whoever sells it and it doesn't matter if one seller here or there carries it or not as long as somebody does, which somebody will as long as people want it. But if you successfully convince them that it's so bad for them that it should be illegal, wouldn't they just stop buying it at that point, even without a law or any action by retailers?

I see. I agree with that point generally. I think we're talking past each other? I'm thinking about the morality and ethics of a supply chain and how it's disclosed/understood. Where should we be working to offload the understanding of how vast humans in a societal context impact ecology?

Wait, ok, I genuinely don't understand your proposition here.

We should ignore the people with the most assets, and only pay attention to the people with the most assets?

"The people with the most assets" in aggregate are the upper middle class, lawyers and nurses and chemical engineers, not Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

But Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are part of the upper class. There's the whole "millionaires paid by billionares" type stuff.

What I'm saying is that the upper middle class (e.g. the top quartile excluding billionaires) has more money than the upper class (billionaires), because there are so many more people in it. Tens of millions rather than a couple thousand. But then they're regular people, doctors and engineers, one out of every four Americans.

The top 3 richest people (Gates, Buffet, Bezos) own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.

That's because the bottom 50% of the country own almost nothing. They rent and have debts. The net worth of the entire bottom quintile is negative -- if you have a dollar in your pocket you don't owe to someone then you have more wealth than the bottom 20% of the country.

Yeah and what's your point? That's a huge fucking problem.

History won't be looking kindly on anyone in this era. Wealthy or not.

It's not like before, when no one knew how things worked and were subsequently duped into doing dumb things. In this era, historians will find the information was openly published on the internet, in music, in newscasts, in movies, etc for all to see, and we still did the dumb thing.

I suspect entire books on everything from history to psychology will be written in an attempt to dissect and figure out what was going on and how this could happen?

$4.5/kg does not look cheap at all, I buy tomatoes for less than $1/kg directly from farmers 15 km outside the city or up to $1.5 from the Mega Image (Belgian chain) at the end of the street. The cheap ones have great taste, the supermarket ones are bad, I buy those only outside of the regular season when they are the only option.

puts every imaginable fruit and veggie in a store at extremely low prices

Why are people buying this food that is harming the planet??

Probably because those that produced and distributed goods and services (be it red meat, pesticides, prescription medications, airline tickets or Tupperware) did not clearly understand (or did and chose not to) and spell out the true cause and effect for the average consumer.

You can't put the burden on the grower either. If you have two growers, one who tries to internalizes all the costs of production and one who doesn't, the market will reward the latter, because the market -- the consumers -- only see the price and appearance of the tomatoes. Regulation is required so that externalizing costs is not an option for either grower. People who rail against regulations, most of them, just see it as a cost and a hassle and a totem of a hostile tribe they want to drive out of their society; but the people who are paid to rail against it are paid by interests who know well what the regulation is meant to do and know that they will be the externalizers without it. And what they're paying for is agents who will bamboozle the majority, keeping them useful, angry idiots.

It's not as simple as "regulation good" or "regulation bad" -- there are plenty of companies that lobby for regulation because they know it will exclude smaller competitors, or ward off lawsuits because they followed the regulations even if people still died, or they want them to get passed while their stooge is in the majority so they can draft the rules themselves and then claim that it was already done last year when someone else wants to do something more effective next year.

There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.

The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.

Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.

I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.

When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.

But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.

Sure. There's regulatory capture. But this particular problem, the externalization of costs, is a classic one solved by regulation rather than the free market.

The problem where the pesticides are destroying native insect populations, sure. But not the problem where the tomatoes taste like nothing and have pesticide in them -- that's not an externality, it's an information asymmetry. And then it has the same problem in the legislature as the supermarket.

Central planning is a failure throughout history.

The problem isn't the capitalism that transitioned the US into a powerhouse that feeds the world or provides goods at discounted prices, or ensures that millennials in Minnesota can enjoy avocado dip while complaning about having to much.

This is a failure at the local level. Ever spent time in the grocery isle? Children believe their meat comes from meat packages. Not that it was a living creature at one point. As people have moved into cities, they've lost the connection to the land that provides for them, and life's interconnectedness.

Top this off with the crony capitalism that gives subsidies to farmers for tariffs, or subsides for a myriad of other reasons all of which are asinine(like ethanol or which crops yield most), and prevent groups like Monsanto from any real liability (both civil and criminal) by giving them government/EPA endorsements.. Such endorsements often take years before they recognize a mistake was made or that their data from 1977 is woefully inaccurate.

No this is a horror story of central planning gone horrifically wrong again, and no one can prosecute/sue these terrible companies out of existence because they have the EPA's blue checkmark and some politicians endorsement.

In the absence of the ability for individuals to hold companies liable for their mistakes, it is absolutely incumbent on individuals and parents to make sound choices. Depending on the government to be your saviour simply leads to more tragedy.

I stopped after you unironically started complaining about millennials and avocado dip (guacamole?)

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