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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the tree destruction is a perfectly rationale reaction - but it is still an injustice. This quantity of waste is not free and not fully priced into the cost to produce the fruit.

I think the emotional misalignment most people will feel at this announcement is a signal that there's a large missed externality that allowed margins on this produce to get too thin.

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A big part of the problem here is that Del Monte was the victim of several leveraged buyouts that had executives walking away with millions while the company was saddled with debt.

Exactly. That is what is missing in this discussion. If you want to cut down the trees, fine, but those people who profited should pay for it.

I always wonder where consumer surplus fits into arguments about profit.

Although in this particular situation clearly the consumer surplus wasn't enough to keep consumers buying Del Monte products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus

If we measure consumer surplus as a percentage, how would it compare to business profits as a percentage?

Edit:

  Nobel laureate William Nordhaus studied the historical data of the U.S. economy and concluded that innovators and corporations capture only a tiny fraction of the total social value they create. Consumers capture ~98% of the value in the form of surplus. Producers capture ~2%.

I think that notion is mostly meaningless to actual humans.

I'm not sure I understand your point? If you are private equity and do a leveraged buyout, the company is priced as if you could extract the current value of the company out of the acquisition. As if the company were a consumable basically, because that's how you're going to pay off the loan. If consuming the company requires mistreating customers (getting rid of consumer surplus), then that's what's going to happen. The way you're talking about this sounds like the cause is a lack of consumer surplus when that's just a symptom of a leveraged buyout.

Also Nordhaus being a Sveriges Riksbank price laureate tells you how silly and meaningless the Sveriges Riksbank price in economics is. His work on climate change is so bad it's embarassing.

I'm trying to explore how we decide on root causes, and how many seem to want deserving victims to punish.

Is "those people who profited should pay for it" a desire to guillotine[1] those "executives walking away with millions".

Who profited? Do we blame the executives? Should we search for culprits of modern capitalist systems? How much is my fault or responsibility?

Sorry for the horrid quote - it was there to illustrate the question about consumer surplus - but it is too close to trolling.

> consuming the company requires mistreating customers (getting rid of consumer surplus)

I don't think you are using surplus meaningfully

Byrne Hobart[0] calls such acquisitions strip-mining of goodwill. Essentially extracting money from intangibles by destroying a brand. He uses brutally vivid metaphors, but with solid economics.

Yeah the Sveriges Riksbank prize seems ignoble.

[0] Byrne Hobart writes The Diff. Worthwhile subscribing to the free tier, although there is a lot of referencing to paid tier content. https://diff.substack.com/

[1] I've just read «A Tale of two cities» which uses the French revolution for English entertainment.

They will be replaced with something else, don't feel bad for the trees, they had a good run.

Did they? How long have they been around?

It’s an injustice to destroy orchards of commercially planted fruit trees that were bathed in pesticides for their entire life? I’m not seeing the injustice here, something else will be planted in place of the peach trees. It’s productive agricultural land.

I don't know what you mean by 'injustice' - it seems to be a proxy for 'I don't like it when trees die'. Is there more?

By that logic, all "injustice" is "I don't like it when X happens" - there is nothing more.

Actually, for me, I primarily dislike needless waste. A bunch of resources were dedicated to growing this orchard which will all go to naught. It's better to destroy the orchard than sink even more effort into it if it'll be wasted in the end but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning.

It's a bit awkwardly worded but unjust isn't the word I'd specifically choose, it was inherited from the OP so maybe their view of what "injustice" meant was different and I just hijacked it. Dunno. I interpreted is as an unjust allocation of resources that could have been put to more productive uses.

>but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning.

How did you determine this? Do you expect every single venture with forethought and planning to "succeed" (however you define that)?

Is it not prudent to assume that when the farmers made the decision to plant those trees, they did so with the best available information and "forethought" they had?

They are going to naught now, so that the resources (land) can be better used. The trees were productive during their life.

The waste would have been continuing to use large amounts of water to grow a crop with declining popularity.

Did it have declining popularity?

Yes

What is unjust about cutting down an orchard producing a product people aren't buying?

This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.

My opinion is that it's mainly unjust to have invested so much in growing it to destroy it. Mistakes happen and this is the right decision for now given the situation but it is wasteful.

I see people finding too often that change is injustice, and this is strange.

I think I just have a strange personal definition of injustice - but the effort put into growing this orchard to destroy is could have gone to better projects. The fact that so much of an investment is being wasted is, to me, a misallocation of resources that were unjustly allotted to this failed venture. A more just outcome would have been these resources and efforts going to projects that actually yielded benefits to people.

I've noted this elsewhere but "injustice" was semantically baked into the OP so I retained that wording but my brain really stretched the term here to align better with "wasteful". I can certainly argue to their equivalence but I think if multiple people have gotten hung up on the term I've committed a semantic misstep.

It is important to not think of failure as injustice. Something not working out is not immoral. Carelessly wasting resources can be, but doing everything in good faith and something ending not at the absolute optimal time isn't wrong. No plan survives contact with reality perfectly.

The effort required to maintain the orchard when its fruit would go to waste would be even more destructive and wasteful, no? Which is really the greater injustice?

Yes - I absolutely endorse destroying the orchard at this point.

Well then the solution is simple: people need to stop making mistakes. We should all have perfect foresight, and never guess wrong about counterparty risk or changes in consumer tastes.

Agreed. And the single best way to avoid making mistakes is to stay at home and complain on the internet about everyone else's.

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