Not super important to the overall discussion but since it is mentioned a few times, corn syrup is a variety of glucose syrup so would be allowed in EU formula.
Excellent write up. Trying to explain the economics of these policies and the entirely predictable outcomes to being buried under 10^24 tiny regulatory pebbles is exhausting. "But, removing pebbles 1-34 won't do anything!" Yes, but they are part of the problem. "Let's just remove pebbles 5 and 6, then add pebble 1,349,359,767,031. That one is hardly a big deal, and it shows how much we care." You are still going to have the problem. "See, this is what free markets do!" YOU ARE THE ONES WHO PUT ALL THE GODDAMNED PEBBLES THERE! HOW THE HELL IS IT FREE WHILE BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCH?!
I don't know how Don Boudreaux does it. I mean, I do know how he does it, but I am amazed at how he can write cogently considering how much wine he has to consume to maintain sanity and a friendly disposition.
Charitably, so many people don't trust markets because they've been told basically their entire lives that markets are (almost) always the thing that causes all of the problems everywhere and for everything.
And then, at every chance to update those 'beliefs', new evidence is taken as further confirmation.
I'm not sure that there's a way to persuade people to reconsider what feels like an axiom.
I mean, yes, that is a lot of it, especially in blue culture.
I worry that the answer is 'you need to ensure good times because otherwise people will blame markets for bad times, creating worse times, and then there's a spiral until everything falls apart.'
But then again, sometimes people do get convinced, and sometimes free market people win elections, sometimes big (e.g. 1984).
I can't help but notice that the FAA has done a better job killing general aviation, the DOE has done a better job of killing nuclear power, etc. than the ATF has done of killing civilian firearms ownership. Seems like the rest of society would do well to take a note from the firearms community's playbook and adopting a "not one more inch" adversarial stance to any administrative regulation at all. Sorry if this was too off-topic, just thought it worth pointing out that the industry with the most adversarial relationship with its regulatory agency is also the most healthy.
That's because it's ideological. You can't make an ideology out of something like baby formula. Maybe out of nuclear power.
Preferably move towards more direct-democracy oriented model like liquid democracy, make it so each rule can be questioned and discussed. It wouldn't be necessarily tribal because it wouldn't present a single binary choice to each citizen over how the country is ran.
I mean, take this problem. If people could actually vote over an issue like "remove these labeling requirements now", how many people would vote against and why?
Instead we have these idiotic Twitter takes defending these decisions... not because they agree necessarily - but because they think Left>Right, and since Left is "in power" now...
If right-wing was in power it'd be reversed, or problem blamed on bureaucrats - without anyone doing anything about them of course.
Liquid democracy (="rule by the most murcurial and least principled median voter") is a terrible idea. As for how many people would vote against the rules and why, special interests would vote against it and that would be a large number of people. Probably not enough to defeat the motion because baby formula is the Current Thing, though you can't rely on the Current Thing always actually being the most important. And, of course, a 5 minute conversation with the median voter puts paid to the idea that any sort of direct democracy will choose its policies based on evidence or reason.
I disagree that the secret sauce is ideology. It's (correctly) viewing the regulatory agency in charge of you as a hostile power to be fought rather than a well-meaning body to be evaluated on the merits and appeased. Ideology helps with this, but it's not the critical component.
"Mexico, you see, does not restrict imports of baby formula, so they are fully stocked and could easily handle our orders, and their babies seem to do fine."
Was unclear what this sentence means?
Is it that, up until now, Mexico freely imported baby formula from the US and/or other countries? And that, as a result, they might have excess stock they could consider selling back to us – in sufficient quantities to make a difference during the current US shortages?
They're not allowed to sell back to the US, likely because it isn't labelled correctly. I just bought a bunch of made in the USA formula in Canada. The FDA doesn't like the bilingual label.
I just picked up a six-month supply from Walmart in Canada. It's 37% cheaper than the almost-identical version sold in US Walmarts (which are all out of stock).
Get this: IT IS MADE IN THE U.S.A.!!! But the label is a little different - the nutrients are listed per 100g instead of per 100 calories. Both are manufactured by Perrigo, ingredients are virtually identical.
Hopefully the border guards won't confiscate it on my drive home.
Been around formula production since the late 90s, including novel ingredients being included in infant formula. One of the most politicized and mine field laden spaces in industrialized food production, and with good reason. Your article is insightful and makes some big points but a better grasp of some of the history both related to formula but also food regulation in particular will bring a better picture of how what seems crazy today maybe isn’t as avoidable as it seems. I share the extreme of melamine in China. But as well the holy Europeans aren’t the quite as clean hands as they seem. We are good at finding fault, which is important but sometimes have blinders to some other structural drivers, like the way you picked up the dairy market shenanigans, and there is more to unravel.
This sounds very much like a 'say more' situation, on many of these fronts. Exactly how is this unavoidable, and do you mean that in the sense that 'doing the thing I suggest would lead to babies being unhealthy or dying', do you mean 'powerful lobbies and special interests would block it,' 'the restrictions are because others are being crazy in their own ways' or something else?
Sorry, wasn't meant to come across as say more or otherwise, i don't think you can cover every detail nor would it be helpful, but there is a lot to it. There is zero chance babies would die or become unhealthy from access to infant formula that is produced in accordance with the minimal CODEX and following GMP for baby food, zero. I do think there are powerful lobbies, special interests, but as well founded and unfounded fears of pandora box scenarios and the straight jacket of admin procedures.
Here is a dumb one, FDA is more fearful of letting in one pallet layer of formula that ends up with an incident vs being smeared as thoughtless bureaucrats, not because they are idiots, but because the personal and institutional consequences for the former are much higher than the latter. It is a very perverse and unfortunate situation. Congress sets the sandbox and gives some marching orders, the agency then has to operate within it but carries all the consequences of illogical or in the current case nonsensical outcomes. Labelling laws are one of the primary ways FDA has been empowered to regulate the food and supplement market (even drugs to an extent) but they end up being a blunt instrument to a nuanced challenge because congress won't give a clear food safety and consumer protection framework. You have to believe an inch given by FDA on formula for labelling will bring a cascade of challenges not only on their authority to do so, but on unfairly treating the other millions of products that are being restricted by the same laws (right or wrong, I'm not making the judgment, I'm sharing the craziness of it all).
I also wouldn't put a low probability that the companies themselves don't want any kind of accommodation, it will create issues for them as well. Think about this, how much did Reckitt Benckiser pay for Mead Johnson and that NAM presence and heft, and now think about Lactalis wanting to buy Danone and that Europe to China milk/formula road? These little carve ups as you captured in the WIC microcosm have driven those company optimizations. Any waivers by FDA would not be easily limited to hey Wyeth Ireland you can send your stock to Wyeth in Ohio, it would be Wyeth formulas x, y and z can be imported if they have this label, and anyone can do it if they show that the product is not tampered with, which means the distributors in europe could, officially and unofficially, divert their supplies from europe to US and disturb EU market.
> Then they celebrate, in ways that sound a lot like drug busts.
I mean, it's the same category of things, pretty much. Government decides, disregarding evidence, that something is Dangerous, and so you can't purchase it. Decides based on pure ideology.
Sacking David Nutt was one of the most beautiful examples. Quoting from the Wikipedia
> The UK government was accused by its most senior expert drugs adviser Professor David Nutt of making political decisions with regard to drug classification, for example in rejecting the scientific advice to downgrade ecstasy from a class A drug. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report on ecstasy, based on a 12-month study of 4,000 academic papers, concluded that it is nowhere near as dangerous as other class A drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, and should be downgraded to class B. The advice was not followed.
> Professor Nutt was later sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson; Johnson saying "It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine public understanding of them. I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD."
That last quote reminds me of what (in Poland) PiS party spokesperson said in an interview: "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in the years 2005-2007. Then we moved in the direction of very expert, open competitions as far as supervisory boards are concerned. There were experts from the market, people with degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. The problem was that their way of thinking about the economy and management was completely contradictory to what Law and Justice had in its program.". Through this was about blatant nepotism.
Anyway. Could anything be done? Somehow promote the idea that these nonsensical regulations are an issue\*, after you convince the population (make it bipartisan thing) (is it even possible?), poll them proving they overwhelmingly disapprove and shove the results in the official's faces demanding they do what the population wants?
How could it possibly be this broken?
\* _somehow_ avoiding association with past right-wing complaining about nebulous _unspecified_ regulations-in-general, which they did nothing about whenever they were in power. Yeah, might be a problem.
"If the regulations were of good form there wouldn’t need to be a ‘negotiation’ because there’d be very clear rules and nothing left to negotiate. If there is a negotiation, either the FDA is claiming the right to make arbitrary demands, there is no way to know when you’ve done what the FDA requires without getting them to say so, or Abbott actually can’t satisfy the requirements of a safe plant and the FDA is finding a way to let them operate anyway."
Its not with the FDA, but I have profesional insight into this. Yes, this is *exactly* how every single interaction with a regulator works. They make a list of demands on my client. The client gives the list to us. We pull out the big book of regulations that regulate how the regulator must regulate out client, and then we send a document to the regulator outlining how the regulator is not following the regulation regulations. The regulator then provides this letter to the person who decides if the regulator regulated us according to the big book of regulations. This person is the regulator who made the illegal regulations in the first place. The regulator will comply with our demands just enough to make "bring in the lawyers and sue the agency" a negative EV proposition. We bluff and say "we are bringing in the lawyers" and the regulator says "well, what if instead of this one illegal demand, I illegally require this other illegal demand." Then we figure out how expensive that will be and either take him up on the offer or appeal to the person who decides if his new illegal demand is illegal. This is also the same person. Then we help our client do whatever illegal demands are placed on them. Sometimes we help them do the legal demands from the regulator, but usually the regulators don't care about that. They want to 1) minimize their work and 2) not get red flagged on the automated quality control check after they give us a little slip of paper stating that, while we aren't in full compliance, we aren't going to be shut down today.
Sadly, this isn't nearly enough information for me to dox myself because there are so many industries regulated like this you'll never know which one I am talking about.
Generalized ones include areas where the regulator can't ask for paperwork outside of a bounded set, but they do all the time, deamanding access at times that require significant buisness disruption (think - shutting down an assembly line or calling a semi truck back to the loading dock from 100 miles away) when they are only permitted access on specific scenarios that were defined based on notice-and-comment so the regulated industry can tell the regulating agaency when access will be minimally disruptive.
You might say "well its just paperwork" but its things like "we need a count of the number of emplyees who quit because injury risk was too high" or "what percent of your maintence budget was spent on foreign parts when you could have bought US made parts in the last 25 years?"
I'm reminded of healthcare.gov back around 2013. Everyone involved in building it did what they were supposed to; all the rules and weird procurement regulations were observed to the letter, and the result was a mess that didn't work, because the goal was not, in the end, to make it work. The goal was to fulfill a byzantine contract according to byzantine rules, and this, they did. When engineers parachuted in from institutions that had a tradition of making things work, they were utterly baffled, and had to teach the locals things like "you should have monitoring".
Similarly, the affordable-housing industrial complex (as primarily seen in the Bay Area) does not have as its goal to make housing affordable. The goal is to block and outlaw non-affordable housing, which ironically has the opposite effect.
The disaster here looks like the goal of the FDA is to avoid risk, and it's doing a fabulous job. The mistake is thinking that the job was to ensure the availability of effective drugs and good food.
We suck at risk. I hope that's a solvable problem. Maybe the nascent Abundance Caucus can help with that, if it ever comes together.
Not super important to the overall discussion but since it is mentioned a few times, corn syrup is a variety of glucose syrup so would be allowed in EU formula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose_syrup
Excellent write up. Trying to explain the economics of these policies and the entirely predictable outcomes to being buried under 10^24 tiny regulatory pebbles is exhausting. "But, removing pebbles 1-34 won't do anything!" Yes, but they are part of the problem. "Let's just remove pebbles 5 and 6, then add pebble 1,349,359,767,031. That one is hardly a big deal, and it shows how much we care." You are still going to have the problem. "See, this is what free markets do!" YOU ARE THE ONES WHO PUT ALL THE GODDAMNED PEBBLES THERE! HOW THE HELL IS IT FREE WHILE BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCH?!
I don't know how Don Boudreaux does it. I mean, I do know how he does it, but I am amazed at how he can write cogently considering how much wine he has to consume to maintain sanity and a friendly disposition.
Charitably, so many people don't trust markets because they've been told basically their entire lives that markets are (almost) always the thing that causes all of the problems everywhere and for everything.
And then, at every chance to update those 'beliefs', new evidence is taken as further confirmation.
I'm not sure that there's a way to persuade people to reconsider what feels like an axiom.
I mean, yes, that is a lot of it, especially in blue culture.
I worry that the answer is 'you need to ensure good times because otherwise people will blame markets for bad times, creating worse times, and then there's a spiral until everything falls apart.'
But then again, sometimes people do get convinced, and sometimes free market people win elections, sometimes big (e.g. 1984).
I used to be a market abolitionist. Now I’m too old to care about sounding cool, and I want to buy shit I need.
Me too! That phase was much more brief for myself I think than what your comment implies about yourself.
But I think there's a big piece of the puzzle (as to why people seem generally 'anti-market') – markets aren't _cool_ (for almost anyone).
I can't help but notice that the FAA has done a better job killing general aviation, the DOE has done a better job of killing nuclear power, etc. than the ATF has done of killing civilian firearms ownership. Seems like the rest of society would do well to take a note from the firearms community's playbook and adopting a "not one more inch" adversarial stance to any administrative regulation at all. Sorry if this was too off-topic, just thought it worth pointing out that the industry with the most adversarial relationship with its regulatory agency is also the most healthy.
That's because it's ideological. You can't make an ideology out of something like baby formula. Maybe out of nuclear power.
Preferably move towards more direct-democracy oriented model like liquid democracy, make it so each rule can be questioned and discussed. It wouldn't be necessarily tribal because it wouldn't present a single binary choice to each citizen over how the country is ran.
I mean, take this problem. If people could actually vote over an issue like "remove these labeling requirements now", how many people would vote against and why?
Instead we have these idiotic Twitter takes defending these decisions... not because they agree necessarily - but because they think Left>Right, and since Left is "in power" now...
If right-wing was in power it'd be reversed, or problem blamed on bureaucrats - without anyone doing anything about them of course.
Liquid democracy (="rule by the most murcurial and least principled median voter") is a terrible idea. As for how many people would vote against the rules and why, special interests would vote against it and that would be a large number of people. Probably not enough to defeat the motion because baby formula is the Current Thing, though you can't rely on the Current Thing always actually being the most important. And, of course, a 5 minute conversation with the median voter puts paid to the idea that any sort of direct democracy will choose its policies based on evidence or reason.
I disagree that the secret sauce is ideology. It's (correctly) viewing the regulatory agency in charge of you as a hostile power to be fought rather than a well-meaning body to be evaluated on the merits and appeased. Ideology helps with this, but it's not the critical component.
> rule sand incentives
You break the rule, I throw sand in your face.
"Mexico, you see, does not restrict imports of baby formula, so they are fully stocked and could easily handle our orders, and their babies seem to do fine."
Was unclear what this sentence means?
Is it that, up until now, Mexico freely imported baby formula from the US and/or other countries? And that, as a result, they might have excess stock they could consider selling back to us – in sufficient quantities to make a difference during the current US shortages?
They're not allowed to sell back to the US, likely because it isn't labelled correctly. I just bought a bunch of made in the USA formula in Canada. The FDA doesn't like the bilingual label.
I just picked up a six-month supply from Walmart in Canada. It's 37% cheaper than the almost-identical version sold in US Walmarts (which are all out of stock).
Get this: IT IS MADE IN THE U.S.A.!!! But the label is a little different - the nutrients are listed per 100g instead of per 100 calories. Both are manufactured by Perrigo, ingredients are virtually identical.
Hopefully the border guards won't confiscate it on my drive home.
*********************************
For those who are curious:
Walmart US, $19.98 for 1020 grams. Out of stock everywhere. https://www.walmart.com/ip/22862021
Walmart Canada: $14.22 CAD ($11.09 USD) for 900 grams. In stock everywhere. https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/parents-choice-iron-fortified-milk-based-infant-formula/6000069712248
We need another convoy.
If you’re in Colorado please see milkbankcolorado.org - Mom’s are sharing milk for people who need it.
Wow. That’s long.
The poor European babies, dying from non-FDA compliant labeling.
Intercepting European formula reminds me of US Customs intercepting shipments if foreign Ivermectin. We are literally being protected to death.
Its been years since we used it but all the time I was reading this post I could smell baby formula
Been around formula production since the late 90s, including novel ingredients being included in infant formula. One of the most politicized and mine field laden spaces in industrialized food production, and with good reason. Your article is insightful and makes some big points but a better grasp of some of the history both related to formula but also food regulation in particular will bring a better picture of how what seems crazy today maybe isn’t as avoidable as it seems. I share the extreme of melamine in China. But as well the holy Europeans aren’t the quite as clean hands as they seem. We are good at finding fault, which is important but sometimes have blinders to some other structural drivers, like the way you picked up the dairy market shenanigans, and there is more to unravel.
This sounds very much like a 'say more' situation, on many of these fronts. Exactly how is this unavoidable, and do you mean that in the sense that 'doing the thing I suggest would lead to babies being unhealthy or dying', do you mean 'powerful lobbies and special interests would block it,' 'the restrictions are because others are being crazy in their own ways' or something else?
Sorry, wasn't meant to come across as say more or otherwise, i don't think you can cover every detail nor would it be helpful, but there is a lot to it. There is zero chance babies would die or become unhealthy from access to infant formula that is produced in accordance with the minimal CODEX and following GMP for baby food, zero. I do think there are powerful lobbies, special interests, but as well founded and unfounded fears of pandora box scenarios and the straight jacket of admin procedures.
Here is a dumb one, FDA is more fearful of letting in one pallet layer of formula that ends up with an incident vs being smeared as thoughtless bureaucrats, not because they are idiots, but because the personal and institutional consequences for the former are much higher than the latter. It is a very perverse and unfortunate situation. Congress sets the sandbox and gives some marching orders, the agency then has to operate within it but carries all the consequences of illogical or in the current case nonsensical outcomes. Labelling laws are one of the primary ways FDA has been empowered to regulate the food and supplement market (even drugs to an extent) but they end up being a blunt instrument to a nuanced challenge because congress won't give a clear food safety and consumer protection framework. You have to believe an inch given by FDA on formula for labelling will bring a cascade of challenges not only on their authority to do so, but on unfairly treating the other millions of products that are being restricted by the same laws (right or wrong, I'm not making the judgment, I'm sharing the craziness of it all).
I also wouldn't put a low probability that the companies themselves don't want any kind of accommodation, it will create issues for them as well. Think about this, how much did Reckitt Benckiser pay for Mead Johnson and that NAM presence and heft, and now think about Lactalis wanting to buy Danone and that Europe to China milk/formula road? These little carve ups as you captured in the WIC microcosm have driven those company optimizations. Any waivers by FDA would not be easily limited to hey Wyeth Ireland you can send your stock to Wyeth in Ohio, it would be Wyeth formulas x, y and z can be imported if they have this label, and anyone can do it if they show that the product is not tampered with, which means the distributors in europe could, officially and unofficially, divert their supplies from europe to US and disturb EU market.
> Then they celebrate, in ways that sound a lot like drug busts.
I mean, it's the same category of things, pretty much. Government decides, disregarding evidence, that something is Dangerous, and so you can't purchase it. Decides based on pure ideology.
Sacking David Nutt was one of the most beautiful examples. Quoting from the Wikipedia
> The UK government was accused by its most senior expert drugs adviser Professor David Nutt of making political decisions with regard to drug classification, for example in rejecting the scientific advice to downgrade ecstasy from a class A drug. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report on ecstasy, based on a 12-month study of 4,000 academic papers, concluded that it is nowhere near as dangerous as other class A drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, and should be downgraded to class B. The advice was not followed.
> Professor Nutt was later sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson; Johnson saying "It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine public understanding of them. I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD."
That last quote reminds me of what (in Poland) PiS party spokesperson said in an interview: "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in the years 2005-2007. Then we moved in the direction of very expert, open competitions as far as supervisory boards are concerned. There were experts from the market, people with degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. The problem was that their way of thinking about the economy and management was completely contradictory to what Law and Justice had in its program.". Through this was about blatant nepotism.
Anyway. Could anything be done? Somehow promote the idea that these nonsensical regulations are an issue\*, after you convince the population (make it bipartisan thing) (is it even possible?), poll them proving they overwhelmingly disapprove and shove the results in the official's faces demanding they do what the population wants?
How could it possibly be this broken?
\* _somehow_ avoiding association with past right-wing complaining about nebulous _unspecified_ regulations-in-general, which they did nothing about whenever they were in power. Yeah, might be a problem.
"If the regulations were of good form there wouldn’t need to be a ‘negotiation’ because there’d be very clear rules and nothing left to negotiate. If there is a negotiation, either the FDA is claiming the right to make arbitrary demands, there is no way to know when you’ve done what the FDA requires without getting them to say so, or Abbott actually can’t satisfy the requirements of a safe plant and the FDA is finding a way to let them operate anyway."
Its not with the FDA, but I have profesional insight into this. Yes, this is *exactly* how every single interaction with a regulator works. They make a list of demands on my client. The client gives the list to us. We pull out the big book of regulations that regulate how the regulator must regulate out client, and then we send a document to the regulator outlining how the regulator is not following the regulation regulations. The regulator then provides this letter to the person who decides if the regulator regulated us according to the big book of regulations. This person is the regulator who made the illegal regulations in the first place. The regulator will comply with our demands just enough to make "bring in the lawyers and sue the agency" a negative EV proposition. We bluff and say "we are bringing in the lawyers" and the regulator says "well, what if instead of this one illegal demand, I illegally require this other illegal demand." Then we figure out how expensive that will be and either take him up on the offer or appeal to the person who decides if his new illegal demand is illegal. This is also the same person. Then we help our client do whatever illegal demands are placed on them. Sometimes we help them do the legal demands from the regulator, but usually the regulators don't care about that. They want to 1) minimize their work and 2) not get red flagged on the automated quality control check after they give us a little slip of paper stating that, while we aren't in full compliance, we aren't going to be shut down today.
Sadly, this isn't nearly enough information for me to dox myself because there are so many industries regulated like this you'll never know which one I am talking about.
I am going to have to quote that at some point. Wow.
Feel free to fix any typos you find!!
I'm very curious what an illegal demand looks like, if you can share without giving yourself away.
Generalized ones include areas where the regulator can't ask for paperwork outside of a bounded set, but they do all the time, deamanding access at times that require significant buisness disruption (think - shutting down an assembly line or calling a semi truck back to the loading dock from 100 miles away) when they are only permitted access on specific scenarios that were defined based on notice-and-comment so the regulated industry can tell the regulating agaency when access will be minimally disruptive.
You might say "well its just paperwork" but its things like "we need a count of the number of emplyees who quit because injury risk was too high" or "what percent of your maintence budget was spent on foreign parts when you could have bought US made parts in the last 25 years?"
I'm reminded of healthcare.gov back around 2013. Everyone involved in building it did what they were supposed to; all the rules and weird procurement regulations were observed to the letter, and the result was a mess that didn't work, because the goal was not, in the end, to make it work. The goal was to fulfill a byzantine contract according to byzantine rules, and this, they did. When engineers parachuted in from institutions that had a tradition of making things work, they were utterly baffled, and had to teach the locals things like "you should have monitoring".
Similarly, the affordable-housing industrial complex (as primarily seen in the Bay Area) does not have as its goal to make housing affordable. The goal is to block and outlaw non-affordable housing, which ironically has the opposite effect.
The disaster here looks like the goal of the FDA is to avoid risk, and it's doing a fabulous job. The mistake is thinking that the job was to ensure the availability of effective drugs and good food.
We suck at risk. I hope that's a solvable problem. Maybe the nascent Abundance Caucus can help with that, if it ever comes together.
Yes, I model this as the FDA doing its job and people being confused about what their job was.