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Comment by tanzam75 | Hacker News Reader

From 2008-2011:

- Average price of raw sugar, world market: $492.8 per tonne

- Average price of HFCS-55, US market: $528.1 per tonne (HFCS-55 has equivalent sweetness to sucrose.)

Sugar vs. HFCS is a natural experiment. Americans are the experimental group, and the rest of the world is the control group. In non-OECD countries, HFCS has less than 1% market share. Why would you pay more money for an inferior product?

And remember -- the price of high-fructose corn syrup includes subsidies. In a free market, with no corn subsidies and no sugar tariffs, HFCS would be at an even greater price disadvantage.

Source: OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook, 2011-2020, p. 132. http://www.oecd.org/site/oecd-faoagriculturaloutlook/4818429...

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Sugar vs. HFCS is a natural experiment. Americans are the experimental group, and the rest of the world is the control group. In non-OECD countries, HFCS has less than 1% market share.

Is there anything useful that can be derived from that experiment, though? The control group varies in significant ways, both amongst itself and w.r.t. Americans, and includes countries with both high and low levels of obesity. Has anyone attempted to back out any kind of useful estimate by treating this as a natural experiment and adjusting for confounds?

Examples: most sugar in both Germany and Mexico is from sugar rather than HFCS, but Germany is less obese than the US, while Mexico is more obese than the US. Mexico is poorer than either the US or Germany, so that could be the confound; but Germans walk and bike more than either the US or Mexico, so that could be a different confound. It's kind of a messy experiment.

I think the 'natural experiment' was in reference to the selection of HFCS over sugar for economics reasons. Not obesity.

You can't compare the US price of HFCS to the world price of raw sugar as it doesn't count the absurd US tariffs on it. When you count these in I'm pretty sure that HFCS is cheaper than sugar in the united states.

That's right, HFCS is slightly cheaper than raw sugar in the US because the government has extremely protective import quotas against world priced sugar. The invention of HFCS in the 1980s is a direct result of the U.S. sugar program. But if you allowed a free market for sugar in the U.S. the U.S. raw sugar price would equalize at the world sugar price, and it is likely that HFCS would disappear.

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