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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

If foreign food or textiles are cheaper than your local production in a developing nation, it seems your population is suffering from those inflated prices and the aggregate good of the nation may very well be improved by having more food and clothing available at lower-than-current prices. Anything less is forcing your local population to subsidize the inefficient-but-domestic production of goods.

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The problem is that free or cheap subsidized goods sent to developing countries to help them along ruin prices on the local market and remove local suppliers. There are many examples of well-meant, but badly thought out aid making things worse.

Suffering until global supply chains are disrupted. And when that happens, your country’s lack of production independence becomes a vulnerability. Like how things are right now.

What good is it to live in a wealthy nation, if being a citizen means you have to operate at cut throat efficiency in order to keep up? Creating slack for the average man to enjoy is also a valuable national economic goal.

There’s an old joke about a statistician who drowned in water that was only one meter deep - On Average. Thinking in terms of aggregate value neglects the possibility that you will create winners and losers in such a scenario and creating a system of transfers to share the aggregate surplus is politically difficult.

I agree it's a sovereign nation's call on what to do, but it seems like improving the lot of everyone who buys food (10s of millions of people) is something I'd be more inclined to do than to ensure that farmers (10s of hundreds of people) who are demonstrably uncompetitive continue to have a path to profitability anyway.

There are 2.6 million farmers in the US, or about 1.3% of the employed population. In less developed economies farmers are a much higher percentage of the population. We are talking about helping tens of millions of people who are farming. In Nigeria for example, it’s 35% of the population. Only in very tiny countries are there only ‘tens of hundreds’ of farmers.

Do you really think that wiping out employment for a third of the population would improve the economy? It takes money to make money.

Do you really think that harming 2 people for every 1 you help is obviously the best course of action? (It’s not obviously better to me, though you point out some ways that it might not be as bad as that framing suggests.)

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