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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely hate this (meaning Swan's) take. The modern world is waaaay to complex to offload all responsibility to "consumers".

They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.

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> Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments.

I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.

Fair, I should have said "Swan's statement in the quote" - the intention was mainly to avoid being misinterpreted as disagreeing with DoingIsLearning anyway, not to dunk on my namesake.

Consumers can't compete on an individual level against giant mega corporations actively obfuscating information from them even if they had lots of free time and weren't overburdened already. And corporations can lobby to even get obvious terms redefined (Assembled in America) so everyone needs to understand lawyer speak to even make sense of the information they do receive.

And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.

With sustainability and sweat shops, the trade off is making things a lot more expensive, so the offloading is more that most people don't care.

I think a majority of people do care, but there's not really a way for them to express that in the market. You can't just buy the more expensive product and trust that it's going to be more ethically produced.

It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.

Non-regulatory solutions also doesn't empower the market to optimize cost in a productive way (which would cut into profits). In the current economy for the vast majority of products we have two options 1) a cheap option made in horrendous inhumane conditions and 2) a luxury good made in a process that's inherently limited in aim and scope. Globalism basically exports the suffering of the most unregulated markets to the entire planet.

Or maybe people aren't stupid but they don't give a shit.

I did not say anything about stupidity. Nobody has the time, energy and even financial means to individually tackle all the issues out there. Putting the burdens on consumers is an excuse used by companies to externalize costs to the buyer, plain and simple.

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