> People have been claiming short term incentives for decades. If short term incentives were having long term negative impacts the corporate feedback mechanisms would have picked up on it by now.
Maybe the mechanisms are working fine, the markets keep going up, as well as the long term profitability. But I think the incentives themselves are the wrong incentives: as a society, profits are just a (very useful) tool to help us trade and regulate resources. They're not an end goal. The end goal is the wellbeing of humans.
The problem is when we forget that goal, we tend to believe predatory practices are fine, when they aren't. It may well be profitable, even long term, to make predatory (hyperpalatable, heavily processed) foods that make us unhealthy. The reasoning may well be 'Let's make enough money until consumers figure out we're being dishonest'. Getting the hands off the wheel doesn't seem like a sensible choice.
I think the solutions are many. People need to realize those problems exists, not just be in denial -- people are the agents of society, and even if you think pure markets are ideal, you need individuals to make good choices for themselves. In this sense you might say there's an untapped market of consumer and large-scale social protection that balances out our interests and capabilities with corporations. Individuals don't have decades of food research (that's in many cases influenced by industry funding, to make things more complicated) in mind when making choices, and they're influenced by marketing.
I do think ethics plays a large role here. It doesn't seem like a person, working in the food industry, should in good conscience be complicit in any scheme that harms the people eating your food. If the baker near your house started sneaking in addictive substances or subtly (and largely imperceptibly) altering ingredients to save costs, you should well claim that's a failure of ethics in the first place, not of markets. Part of the failing comes from the belief that profit is the be all end all mechanism of society. Being a good person to yourself and others is more important, fundamentally important.
If you work in industry and start seeing those practices being used as a desperate attempt to keep you alive versus the competition, that should give you pause: something in our industry, and our society is broken. You should fight, even from within your company, and spearhead, a change to align your ethical incentives with financial sustainability: by demanding more (or just _better_!) regulation, but also by changing the narrative around marketing, by investing in consumer awareness (and organizations specialized in raising awareness and food research), and also investing in genuine unbiased research. You need to basically fight evil and not let the bad guys have their way. If you're complacent, the default mode is defeat, just like getting your hands off the wheel of a car the default mode is crashing.