Bill B

I want to go back to one of the points that Bill G. made regarding the substitute industry.  This is a powerful concept.  People are in the business of making money off substitutes.  I was thinking back to an old tale. A wise (and not very honest) man makes money by putting stars on people’s foreheads.  Once everyone has a star on their forehead, this man makes money taking the stars off their foreheads.  The substitute industry operates in a similar manner. This industry encourages people to get food with sugar in it, but then at some point this industry says that sugar is bad for you. So, they now make their money off of sugar substitutes. They now say that there is this substitute that is better for you than sugar.  I suspect that we will go back and put stars on people’s foreheads again.  Actually, the substitute industry will declare that these artificial things aren’t good for you. Sugar is really what you should get. We have a healthy sugar product here that’s so much better than Stevia. So, we put the stars back on the forehead.  The substitute industry is making money coming in and going out.  The notion of a substitute industry is a very powerful and relevant concept.

Jeremy

It is important to note that the corn industry tends to overproduce corn. So, they have a byproduct called high fructose corn syrup.  They either are going to throw it away or sell it.  This became a way to utilize excess corn production.  Which is probably happening because of farm subsidies. You end up in this industry with a solution to the excess production problem. However, the corn industry must now find a place in our economy for this product (corn syrup). Fortunately for this industry there is no price being paid by them for the introduction of fatty liver disease. If this disease happened within a couple of months after high fructose corn syrup hit the market, and if livers blew up, then we would have declared “that’s a poison!”  And it would have been stripped off the market within two months. However, a challenge exists because the high fructose corn syrup has had a slow impact. This is where some of Jack’s ideas might come. In. How do we bring forth meaningful policy issues that slow down or block processes that produce outcomes which take decades to emerge. Randomized control trials are an impractical means of studying these slowly emerging outcomes. Are you going to do a randomized control study over a ten-year period of time? This study is not going to be funded.  Are we going to make children’s livers fat? No, the ethics become impossible. Furthermore, this type of study is very expensive. So, the industries are protected by our dominant mental model: you can only change policy based on results from randomized, controlled studies and these studies are often impractical and unethical.