It still won't be perfect, but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My impression is that they trust anything that is not from mainland China will be better than what they can get domestically.
I have long suspected years ago that in the US mysterious, sporadic local news reports of a Wal-Mart, CVS, Target, or similar store getting wiped out of all baby formula or all of a certain brand/SKU were simply rings of people scooping it up for this arbitrage over eBay, similar resale/auction sites or even WeChat. It doesn't seem systematic, and was very arbitrary which towns/cities they hit and when, but I've always wondered what the real story was.
I mean, I know that the lawyers and finance people would create such convoluted ownership structures that forcing a company out of existence and liquidating its assets would be meaningless, but apart from that detail, it has a certain appeal in the way many ideas that fit on a bumper sticker do.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/21/us/salmonella-peanut-exec-sen...
I'll give congress some credit for being vocal about the problem at least. In a congressional report last year about the dangerous levels of heavy metals in baby foods they repeatedly concluded that the FDA's polices were "designed to be protective of baby food manufacturers" and they recommended more regulation, but still, I haven't seen any action that would address the underlying issues that allow a regulatory body to prioritize the profits of industry over the health and safety of the population.
If you're curious, that report can be read here: https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house....
There was also a follow up report on the issue you can read here: https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house....
Short of shooting both the c-suite, and their families, I don't think this will align their interests with those of the public as well as you hope.
More likely: people stop making baby formula entirely and women have no choice but to breastfeed, which is a problem if baby is lactose intolerant, among other things.
She wrote up a set of safety guidelines for the beef industry and McDonald's adopted her recommendations. You couldn't sell beef to McDonald's without following her guideline.
McDonald's buys so much beef, this became the de facto industry standard.
You can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to love you. You can't get blood from a turnip. And draconian measures generally fail to get real results.
Carrots and stick sometimes work. But "the beatings shall continue until morale improves" is generally counterproductive. It doesn't supply the necessary competence for setting a higher standard and usually actively disincentivizes trying to solve the problem.
I might be willing to stipulate the above. However there is a different mechanism at work when actors in the system have skin in the game.
And so, I will see your Temple Grandin (who I admire) and raise you a Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Specifically: these producers need to be feeding their own children and raising their own families with these very same products.
Ironically, wealthy-global-north consumers (like foodco CEOs) are almost certainly not consumers of infant formula[1] (or lunchables or scent sprays or Monster drinks) so it is difficult to establish "skin in the game".
... and therein lies a tremendous amount of information. It should give consumers pause to learn that these products are not used - and likely disdained - by the stakeholders that produce them.[2][3]
[1] https://qz.com/1034016/the-class-dynamics-of-breastfeeding-i...
[2] http://www.freebooks8.com/Fiction_Library/3308/37.html
[3] “I don’t think my kids have ever eaten a Lunchable,” she told me. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we eat very healthfully.”
It’s really that simple. We know how to make baby formula safely. We have known how to do that for a long time. It’s clearly profitable enough that companies are willing to do it.
But if you cut corners to boost profits and you end up poisoning babies you should be punished. There’s no need to tie yourself into knots reasoning that it’s actually not possible to enforce safe production of baby formula.
When in reality, the worker who's not maintaining the machine properly, isn't doing so because he was never instructed in it's operation, his supervisor who's "been doing this job for years, never had a problem with this", the manager of the department loves how many run hours they're getting from that machine and "it hasn't killed anyone" is said when the dangers of not cleaning it are mentioned in meetings, and after all they don't want to look bad to the executives who are saying serious things like "the economy is tightening, we need to find savings!" a lot.
In that chain, pick out who is directly responsible for the situation? Better: pick out who can be told to fix this problem, and they'll actually know how to do it? Pick out who you kill as a lesson to the others that will actually be learned?
Suppose you kill all of them: great, so what are you now doing to make sure the next group actually do their jobs properly?
You're at the same time arguing "meat producers had to adapt to external guidelines to be able to continue selling their products"
and "government imposing external guidelines for producers to be able to continue selling their products would be inefficient".
Or am I misunderstanding your point?
She provided a better method. Market forces took care of the rest.
A gun to someone's head doesn't magically make them capable of coming up with better solutions.
In your example, for instance, even if the law said Ronald McDonald would face the firing squad if their beef didn’t meet the legal minimum standard it wouldn’t matter because they are already exceeding it. The stick is not causing the carrot any trouble.
I'd bet on improvement if we enforced the law and actually sent people to jail.
In pharmaceuticals, a executive needs to sign off, under penalties of imprisonment, if prices reported to the US government are incorrect.
Fraud still happens and nobody goes to jail because hell , people don’t jail for more severe crimes so no court would impose the punishment.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-ille...
Today pfizer is one of the most trusted companies and many people will be mad at you if you criticize pfizer in any way.
I don't buy that for a second. I see plenty of criticism of pfizer, for both what they've done before the pandemic and what they've done after it. This includes criticism from what many would consider "left-wing" sources. Whoever told you that they were beyond criticism lied to you, and you may want to reconsider trusting them in the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/08/pfizer-covi...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/13/after-year-vacc...
So it seems that everyone (or at least many) have an inherent bias to view the "other" as much less nuanced then they are themselves. The thought that a left-winger might oppose Pfizer in some ways while supporting the vaccine[1] is as unexpected as a left-winger opposing Obama's drone policies to someone who doesn't see the detail of the other side.
And the same goes in reverse, I hasten to add. And the same goes for every other A Vs B situation: the other side are all humans too and humans are complicated.
[1]: how is this even a left-right thing?
The right can't view the left as entirely monolithic either. They get a lot of mileage out of phrases like "The left eats their own" and "Democratic civil war" which, again, not unfair.
I think it's just easier to demonize a caricature so that's what ends up in heavily repeated talking points which then get regurgitated even when they're demonstrably false or ridiculous.