Canada does not allow Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) for dairy cows. The US does. This is one of the excuses Canadians use for restricting US access to the Canadian dairy market, through quotas and import permits held by the Canadian dairy industry!
It would be better to just slap a label on it and let it in tariff and quota free. Preferably a label saying hwhether or not it has BGH, but failing that, a label saying it was made in the USA so it prolly has BGH. Personally, I don't care, but some do. Labels are a less bad alternative to outright bans or quotas.
As for statistical discrimination, personally I like to know if products I buy are made in China as they are more likely than products made elsewhere to use Uighur slave-labour in their production and more likely to prop up the Chinese Communist Party and its human-rights abuses. I try to avoid Chinese-made products but it's kinda impossible, these days. I am glad Product of Origin labels are there, if I ever decide to fully boycott the so-called "People's Republic" of China.
I like to buy British and Irish beef because I can be fairly confident that it comes from cows that have lived outdoors and eaten grass with reasonable animal welfare standards and laws against using hormones and antibiotics as growth promoters. But I will buy any RSPCA labelled beef in preference, because if it's alright by the RSPCA it's probably alright by me, and anything from Waitrose because they appear to actually take animal welfare seriously.
I like to buy French food not made from animals because their agriculture is usually small-scale and traditional, which usually means high quality.
I like to buy German beer because they have strong laws about the purity of their beers.
I will not buy any food made in America because the great majority of your food is so degraded, immoral, cruel, chemical-ridden, and tasteless that it strikes me as a sin to collaborate with your food production system in any way.
I cannot imagine that putting 'country of origin' labels on packets is significantly expensive.
My model of you thinks that any extra information is utility maximizing for fairly general reasons. Is that not the case?
I do! And mad cow disease was even worse than that. I imagine that every producer everywhere has incentive to cut similar or much worse corners if they can get away with it. But I'm pretty sure we have more control over what happens in Britain than we do elsewhere in the world.
So if I trust our system more than I trust other people's systems, which I do, then I still think 'Made in Britain' is one of the more important things I can know about a piece of beef.
And of course if mad cow disease was still present in British beef, then it would be even more important.
The horse DNA disproves your faith in the better “control” of British beef. Do you have evidence that demonstrates that British beef is healthier? Not theory but fact.
On the contrary, if it were still present then it would show that horse meat was still getting mixed in. The fact that it used to be present and isn't now shows that that got detected and stopped.
It has done great damage to our reputation, exactly as it should have done.
My wife is gluten-intolerant. Bread, pasta, and similar foods made in the US mess up her stomach for 72 hours minimum. The same foods made from European wheat she is totally fine with. Knowing the origin is valuable information for her.
I do! And mad cow diseases was even worse than that. I imagine that every producer everywhere has incentive to cut similar or much worse corners if they can get away with it. But I'm pretty sure we have more control over what happens in Britain than we do elsewhere in the world.
So if I trust our system more than I trust other people's systems, which I do, then I still think 'Made in Britain' is one of the more important things I can know about a piece of beef.
It's just information. Someone could dislike Japan and buy fewer Japanese products. Another person could like Japan and buy more Japanese products. The reasons for their likes and dislikes could run the gamut from reasonable to wacko.
There are some kinds of information that are cheap for sellers to provide but expensive for buyers to independently discover, so in these cases we sometime mandate that sellers provide it for efficiency reasons. It is much cheaper for each seller to determine the origin of their goods and slap a label on than it is for each and every buyer to try to track down this information when making a purchase decision. Note that this only works for objectively factual info (country of origin, ingredients (especially allergens), weight...).
You can also think of this as "the majority of voters (perhaps indirectly through representatives) have decided that we are willing to pay the slight extra costs of sellers providing this piece of information rather than each of use paying the high costs of us investigating it ourselves independently." You can disagree with those voters' decision (especially if that information is less valuable to you), but that's how democracy works.
Finally, there is different regulatory treatment of mandatory labels. If I ask a sales person where the coat he want to sell me is from and he lies there is very little recourse and my gains from trying to prosecute him (assuming i am able to detect his deception) are probably not worth the effort. If, however, a seller mislabels a product then there is a *federal* agency with concentrated incentives to go after him. So here we can model this as the majority of voters have delegated enforcement of origin representations to a centralize entity because that is much more efficient that us each trying to enforce on our own independently. In this case, the mandatory labeling is just an efficient way of making any representations manifest and irrefutable, which again makes enforcement more efficient (no expensive sing operations where undercover FTC agents regularly go into coats stores and try to catch someone in the singular act and then spend more resources prosecuting on each and every case where they do).
Why is statistical discrimination not plausible? You point out that a lot of people hate it in other contexts (more fools they) and in some cases it is illegal (bad law, but still the law).
I do not recall you regarding *vox populi* as the final word, however. For example, I notice that you make the (unanswerable) arguments in "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation," trying to appeal to both left and right, although you know as well as anyone it will probably appeal only to that tiny minority already YIMBY-sympathetic (or more generally market-sympathetic), or a fraction adjacent thereto that is (probably, alas) an even tinier.
It always blows my mind why people would want less information about a product. Where it is manufactured may not be useful to me or Dr. Caplan, but it might be to someone else. Same with brand information. Same with quality indicators and price. If we are not supposed to "discriminate" with information, perhaps we should censor the Consumer Reports site. Would we prefer that? Now, I suspect Dr. Caplan wants information, but does not want the government interference in the form of coercion, which does not seem to be the subject of the piece. I am completely on board with dramatically limiting government interference, but that goes way beyond whether my car was assembled in Poland. Let's continue the discussion of government coercive economic interference on April 15th is the US.
I only support national origin labeling on wine, as well as local origin labeling. As a wine lover, I know that wine from certain regions of France tastes quite different from otherwise similar wine from South Africa or Argentina, due to differences in soil and weather. For that matter, Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, CA tastes somewhat different than Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz mountains in rural Santa Cruz County, CA, even though those two areas are less than 150 miles apart. So both local and national origin labeling is important in the wine industry, where there is no consensus among wine lovers what "quality" wine is.
Canada does not allow Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) for dairy cows. The US does. This is one of the excuses Canadians use for restricting US access to the Canadian dairy market, through quotas and import permits held by the Canadian dairy industry!
It would be better to just slap a label on it and let it in tariff and quota free. Preferably a label saying hwhether or not it has BGH, but failing that, a label saying it was made in the USA so it prolly has BGH. Personally, I don't care, but some do. Labels are a less bad alternative to outright bans or quotas.
As for statistical discrimination, personally I like to know if products I buy are made in China as they are more likely than products made elsewhere to use Uighur slave-labour in their production and more likely to prop up the Chinese Communist Party and its human-rights abuses. I try to avoid Chinese-made products but it's kinda impossible, these days. I am glad Product of Origin labels are there, if I ever decide to fully boycott the so-called "People's Republic" of China.
I like to buy British and Irish beef because I can be fairly confident that it comes from cows that have lived outdoors and eaten grass with reasonable animal welfare standards and laws against using hormones and antibiotics as growth promoters. But I will buy any RSPCA labelled beef in preference, because if it's alright by the RSPCA it's probably alright by me, and anything from Waitrose because they appear to actually take animal welfare seriously.
I like to buy French food not made from animals because their agriculture is usually small-scale and traditional, which usually means high quality.
I like to buy German beer because they have strong laws about the purity of their beers.
I will not buy any food made in America because the great majority of your food is so degraded, immoral, cruel, chemical-ridden, and tasteless that it strikes me as a sin to collaborate with your food production system in any way.
I cannot imagine that putting 'country of origin' labels on packets is significantly expensive.
My model of you thinks that any extra information is utility maximizing for fairly general reasons. Is that not the case?
Remember when a lot of beef sold in Britain was found to contain horse DNA?
I do! And mad cow disease was even worse than that. I imagine that every producer everywhere has incentive to cut similar or much worse corners if they can get away with it. But I'm pretty sure we have more control over what happens in Britain than we do elsewhere in the world.
So if I trust our system more than I trust other people's systems, which I do, then I still think 'Made in Britain' is one of the more important things I can know about a piece of beef.
And of course if mad cow disease was still present in British beef, then it would be even more important.
The horse DNA disproves your faith in the better “control” of British beef. Do you have evidence that demonstrates that British beef is healthier? Not theory but fact.
On the contrary, if it were still present then it would show that horse meat was still getting mixed in. The fact that it used to be present and isn't now shows that that got detected and stopped.
It has done great damage to our reputation, exactly as it should have done.
Then your faith is based on what?
My wife is gluten-intolerant. Bread, pasta, and similar foods made in the US mess up her stomach for 72 hours minimum. The same foods made from European wheat she is totally fine with. Knowing the origin is valuable information for her.
But European wheat products are not without gluten.
I always thought it was to enable consumers to discriminate against non-US made products.
(Ha ha - Bolivia has "100% quality"; everyone knows that Ecuador products have only 94.7% quality.)
I do! And mad cow diseases was even worse than that. I imagine that every producer everywhere has incentive to cut similar or much worse corners if they can get away with it. But I'm pretty sure we have more control over what happens in Britain than we do elsewhere in the world.
So if I trust our system more than I trust other people's systems, which I do, then I still think 'Made in Britain' is one of the more important things I can know about a piece of beef.
It's just information. Someone could dislike Japan and buy fewer Japanese products. Another person could like Japan and buy more Japanese products. The reasons for their likes and dislikes could run the gamut from reasonable to wacko.
There are some kinds of information that are cheap for sellers to provide but expensive for buyers to independently discover, so in these cases we sometime mandate that sellers provide it for efficiency reasons. It is much cheaper for each seller to determine the origin of their goods and slap a label on than it is for each and every buyer to try to track down this information when making a purchase decision. Note that this only works for objectively factual info (country of origin, ingredients (especially allergens), weight...).
You can also think of this as "the majority of voters (perhaps indirectly through representatives) have decided that we are willing to pay the slight extra costs of sellers providing this piece of information rather than each of use paying the high costs of us investigating it ourselves independently." You can disagree with those voters' decision (especially if that information is less valuable to you), but that's how democracy works.
Finally, there is different regulatory treatment of mandatory labels. If I ask a sales person where the coat he want to sell me is from and he lies there is very little recourse and my gains from trying to prosecute him (assuming i am able to detect his deception) are probably not worth the effort. If, however, a seller mislabels a product then there is a *federal* agency with concentrated incentives to go after him. So here we can model this as the majority of voters have delegated enforcement of origin representations to a centralize entity because that is much more efficient that us each trying to enforce on our own independently. In this case, the mandatory labeling is just an efficient way of making any representations manifest and irrefutable, which again makes enforcement more efficient (no expensive sing operations where undercover FTC agents regularly go into coats stores and try to catch someone in the singular act and then spend more resources prosecuting on each and every case where they do).
Why is statistical discrimination not plausible? You point out that a lot of people hate it in other contexts (more fools they) and in some cases it is illegal (bad law, but still the law).
I do not recall you regarding *vox populi* as the final word, however. For example, I notice that you make the (unanswerable) arguments in "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation," trying to appeal to both left and right, although you know as well as anyone it will probably appeal only to that tiny minority already YIMBY-sympathetic (or more generally market-sympathetic), or a fraction adjacent thereto that is (probably, alas) an even tinier.
It always blows my mind why people would want less information about a product. Where it is manufactured may not be useful to me or Dr. Caplan, but it might be to someone else. Same with brand information. Same with quality indicators and price. If we are not supposed to "discriminate" with information, perhaps we should censor the Consumer Reports site. Would we prefer that? Now, I suspect Dr. Caplan wants information, but does not want the government interference in the form of coercion, which does not seem to be the subject of the piece. I am completely on board with dramatically limiting government interference, but that goes way beyond whether my car was assembled in Poland. Let's continue the discussion of government coercive economic interference on April 15th is the US.
I only support national origin labeling on wine, as well as local origin labeling. As a wine lover, I know that wine from certain regions of France tastes quite different from otherwise similar wine from South Africa or Argentina, due to differences in soil and weather. For that matter, Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, CA tastes somewhat different than Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz mountains in rural Santa Cruz County, CA, even though those two areas are less than 150 miles apart. So both local and national origin labeling is important in the wine industry, where there is no consensus among wine lovers what "quality" wine is.
Boycott all you want over a countries policies and not be guilty of violating the boycott. Ignorance is bliss.