This seems like a clear counterexample to the “invisible graveyard” model of FDA incentives. That model would say that the FDA is incentivized to keep the plant closed, because food-poisoning-for-babies is newsworthy and attributable, but higher-prices-for-formula isn’t. But it turns out there was a threshold somewhere, where if the FDA suppressed supply too much, the damage becomes impossible to ignore and the FDA becomes the subject of a proper scandal.
But I think the leadership of the FDA might not know that they’re scandalized? There’s a weird thing that happens when people need to keep up the pretext of not being responsible, where you can’t tell whether they know they’re being blamed or not.
They didn’t even start out with any of their existing powers, there was a guy going around measuring stuff (which yay! good job!) who then got government powers and started trying to remove lots of products from the market like some kind of food nazi. The guy flipped around and switched from “telling people about bad stuff in products” to using his new legal powers to take Coca-cola off the market because it had caffeine, which he proved addictive, and but coke won on the defense that just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it is automatically bad, so… its cool that Coke stopped that, I guess? :-)
The larger point: there is more than a century here of an insulated institutional culture of “busybodies trying to extend their empire of power that uses the state violence apparatus in a moralistic way to control consumer behavior whether the consumers want it or not”.
I do think that they are de facto protecting giant monopolies and so on… I just also think that they don’t even care, and don’t even notice, and just have a sort of moralistic puritanism that what they’re doing is intrinsically right, and they think their power proves their virtue and their virtue is why (they think) they have power?
I think the right thing is not to get angry at “those people” who “should feel scandalized”. They have no shame in this matter, from what I can tell?
The right thing is to TAKE AWAY THEIR LEGISLATIVELY AUTHORIZED POWERS.
Repealing Kefauver Harris for example would have let covid have a chance of being solved with super fast deployment of new tests and new drugs.
In this case, I’m honestly not sure what legislative power would need to be taken away from the FDA to solve “whatever the root cause is” of the baby formula industry being broken. Some part of this code seems like it would need to be fixed?
This seems like a clear counterexample to the “invisible graveyard” model of FDA incentives. That model would say that the FDA is incentivized to keep the plant closed, because food-poisoning-for-babies is newsworthy and attributable, but higher-prices-for-formula isn’t. But it turns out there was a threshold somewhere, where if the FDA suppressed supply too much, the damage becomes impossible to ignore and the FDA becomes the subject of a proper scandal.
If the FDA (or other bureaucrats) were worried about babies being poisoned, they could just allow imports of Canadian baby formula. They know there’s no meaningful risk of baby-poisoning from that, and yet they’re making up excuses as if that were a serious risk. The reason the “invisible graveyard” model doesn’t apply is that there’s no danger to be avoided in this case.
In this case, I think the FDA is performing a few functions:
Protectionism of the American baby formula industry
Allowing Biden to “take charge” by invoking the Defense Production Act
Enforcing policy for the sake of policy, a bureaucracy performing its self-perceived role in the manner it believes is viewed as conventionally appropriate by others
If I were to psychoanalyze the FDA in terms of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, I’d place it at stage 4: authority and social order obedience driven:
it is important to obey laws, dicta, and social conventions because of their importance in maintaining a functioning society. Moral reasoning in stage four is thus beyond the need for individual approval exhibited in stage three. A central ideal or ideals often prescribe what is right and wrong. If one person violates a law, perhaps everyone would—thus there is an obligation and a duty to uphold laws and rules. When someone does violate a law, it is morally wrong; culpability is thus a significant factor in this stage as it separates the bad domains from the good ones. Most active members of society remain at stage four, where morality is still predominantly dictated by an outside force.
But it turns out there was a threshold somewhere, where if the FDA suppressed supply too much, the damage becomes impossible to ignore and the FDA becomes the subject of a proper scandal.
Outside of niche circles, how is blame actually distributed in this case? Does the FDA in fact get enough blame, or does everyone blame the other side, or capitalism, or the unsafe plant, etc.?
For bureaucratic institutions, errors only matter if people in fact blame them for those errors. Otherwise, they have no incentives to improve. Not to mention that there’s at least one case (an earlier inspection of the Abbott plant) where they might instead get blamed for being insufficiently strict.
This seems like a clear counterexample to the “invisible graveyard” model of FDA incentives. That model would say that the FDA is incentivized to keep the plant closed, because food-poisoning-for-babies is newsworthy and attributable, but higher-prices-for-formula isn’t. But it turns out there was a threshold somewhere, where if the FDA suppressed supply too much, the damage becomes impossible to ignore and the FDA becomes the subject of a proper scandal.
But I think the leadership of the FDA might not know that they’re scandalized? There’s a weird thing that happens when people need to keep up the pretext of not being responsible, where you can’t tell whether they know they’re being blamed or not.
I think the FDA is a cultural silo?
They didn’t even start out with any of their existing powers, there was a guy going around measuring stuff (which yay! good job!) who then got government powers and started trying to remove lots of products from the market like some kind of food nazi. The guy flipped around and switched from “telling people about bad stuff in products” to using his new legal powers to take Coca-cola off the market because it had caffeine, which he proved addictive, and but coke won on the defense that just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it is automatically bad, so… its cool that Coke stopped that, I guess? :-)
The larger point: there is more than a century here of an insulated institutional culture of “busybodies trying to extend their empire of power that uses the state violence apparatus in a moralistic way to control consumer behavior whether the consumers want it or not”.
I do think that they are de facto protecting giant monopolies and so on… I just also think that they don’t even care, and don’t even notice, and just have a sort of moralistic puritanism that what they’re doing is intrinsically right, and they think their power proves their virtue and their virtue is why (they think) they have power?
I think the right thing is not to get angry at “those people” who “should feel scandalized”. They have no shame in this matter, from what I can tell?
The right thing is to TAKE AWAY THEIR LEGISLATIVELY AUTHORIZED POWERS.
Repealing Kefauver Harris for example would have let covid have a chance of being solved with super fast deployment of new tests and new drugs.
In this case, I’m honestly not sure what legislative power would need to be taken away from the FDA to solve “whatever the root cause is” of the baby formula industry being broken. Some part of this code seems like it would need to be fixed?
If the FDA (or other bureaucrats) were worried about babies being poisoned, they could just allow imports of Canadian baby formula. They know there’s no meaningful risk of baby-poisoning from that, and yet they’re making up excuses as if that were a serious risk. The reason the “invisible graveyard” model doesn’t apply is that there’s no danger to be avoided in this case.
In this case, I think the FDA is performing a few functions:
Protectionism of the American baby formula industry
Allowing Biden to “take charge” by invoking the Defense Production Act
Enforcing policy for the sake of policy, a bureaucracy performing its self-perceived role in the manner it believes is viewed as conventionally appropriate by others
If I were to psychoanalyze the FDA in terms of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, I’d place it at stage 4: authority and social order obedience driven:
Outside of niche circles, how is blame actually distributed in this case? Does the FDA in fact get enough blame, or does everyone blame the other side, or capitalism, or the unsafe plant, etc.?
For bureaucratic institutions, errors only matter if people in fact blame them for those errors. Otherwise, they have no incentives to improve. Not to mention that there’s at least one case (an earlier inspection of the Abbott plant) where they might instead get blamed for being insufficiently strict.