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Krugman gets a Rotten Tomato
Paul Krugman is attacking Milton Friedman (again) for rotten tomatoes. Here's Krugman in 2007:
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
...Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.
and here he is today repeating himself:
Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes.
How did America find itself back in The Jungle?
I was curious so I collected data from the Center for Disease Control on Foodborne Disease Outbreaks from 1998-2006. The data only go back to 1998 because in that year the CDC changed its surveillance system creating a discontinuity but note that we are covering a chunk of the Clinton years and are well within the time frame over which Krugman says the safety system has degenerated. Here's the result:
What we see is a lot of variability from year to year but a net downward trend. You can also look at cases per year which are more variable but also show a net downward trend. No evidence whatsoever that we are back "in The Jungle."
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on June 13, 2008 at 12:31 PM in Economics, Food and Drink, Medicine | Permalink
Comments
Interesting. I'd like to hear more about the other variables you included for controls and the t-statistics, if it's not too much trouble.
Posted by: brian at Jun 13, 2008 12:47:38 PM
Please send that to the NY Times and request both a retraction and Krugman's firing. There are arguments to make for more and less regulation (on nearly every issue) but no one really benefits from people like Krugman, who either can't be bothered to look up facts or knowingly lies to further his arguments.
Posted by: Scoop at Jun 13, 2008 12:48:55 PM
Never let the facts get in the way of a good socialist rant. ;-)
Posted by: Speedmaster at Jun 13, 2008 12:49:56 PM
On face, Krugman could be referring to the size of individual outbreaks, rather than the overall number. I doubt this, as it appears that he (like most commentators) is reacting to volatility rather than fundamental numbers. It isn't too much of a jump to assume that our impression of food safety is driven more by volatility than actual number of outbreaks. For one, small disease outbreaks in this country are REALLY small. If an e. coli outbreak kills just one person, it is national news. The converse of that is that we are likely to never hear of small outbreaks or outbreaks caught at the factory or distribution level. I think that most people assumed (I certainly did before seeing that chart) that there were closer to 0 outbreaks on average and that the recent years were a large jump. If we change the axes on that graph so that the origin of the vertical axis begins at zero outbreaks, the number would appear almost constant.
But, unfortunately, a broken clock is right twice a day. Krugman, like most pundits, is capable of being right for the wrong reason. Like most regulatory arms of the executive, the FDA has atrophied during the tenure of the Bush administration. To the best of my knowledge this is because of willful neglect rather than directed malice (unlike the MSHA, OSHA, or the EPA). To say otherwise would ignore the explicit promises of the bush administration vis a vis these regulatory agencies as well as their past actions.
Posted by: Adam Hyland at Jun 13, 2008 12:53:31 PM
Brian: they are probably in the link. Doesn't look like Alex produced the graph himself. As we say at /., RTFA. :)
Posted by: Adam Hyland at Jun 13, 2008 12:55:02 PM
There aren't enough data points there to know whether there's a real trend. The volatility is as big as the trend.
But I think that observation alone is enough to question whether there is really any evidence for Krugman's claim.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jun 13, 2008 1:00:57 PM
No controls - just the raw data by year. I produced the graph. Email me if you want the data.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jun 13, 2008 1:06:50 PM
This seems reminiscent of what happened to a variety of different rates of violence throughout the 1990s, with particular regard to John DiIulio's "superpredator" (the spread of merciless, murderous juveniles)... though media coverage skyrocketed, the number of actual incidents fell.
Posted by: Glenn at Jun 13, 2008 1:09:11 PM
Personally, I find all of these food outbreak things to be quite silly. I remember not being able to get Spinach on a pizza back when that thing was going on. Obviously there wasn't any risk (no way the bacteria survives a 400 degree oven), and I was fully aware of the scare, so it's not like I was being duped.
But the fear of litigation by the restaurant and the media blitz basically made it impossible for me to make that choice for myself.
I guess a case can be made that consumers being near-100% confident that the products they buy aren't contaminated with anything is worth the costs of the massive recalls that accompany such scares. But there's no way the physical medical benefits (ie, fewer people getting sick) are.
Posted by: mravery at Jun 13, 2008 1:22:22 PM
Salmonella, shmalonella. There's been, what, a couple hundred cases? My odds of getting killed crossing the street are still greater. Mind you, I don't know the exact odds of getting killed while crossing the street, especially for a relatively small town like mine, but if Krugman doesn't need facts ....
Posted by: Franklin Harris at Jun 13, 2008 1:25:40 PM
Paul Krugman says that food safety deregulation is the cause of the recent trend in food safety, or the lack thereof.
I'll second the motion, Krugman is right (!), deregulation is the cause of the increase in food safety.
That said, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Krugman to write an article called I was wrong, Milton Friedman is right, food deregulation is making us safer.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Jun 13, 2008 1:25:59 PM
These data include all outbreaks, including those originating in private homes. Therefore they don't settle the issue one way or the other. If you were to isolate just the outbreaks originating in places that the FDA monitors, get data from prior to 1996, and then compare the trends to other countries that have maintained the same inspection system over the same period, you might have a point. As it is, you seem to have produced an interesting graph, but not one that is relevant to the question at hand.
Posted by: es32 at Jun 13, 2008 1:28:31 PM
Like most regulatory arms of the executive, the FDA has atrophied during the tenure of the Bush administration. To the best of my knowledge this is because of willful neglect rather than directed malice (unlike the MSHA, OSHA, or the EPA).
But:
1) Mine incidents, costs, and people injured show a downward trend.
2) Workplace incidents, costs, and people injured show a downward trend.
3) Food incidents, costs, and people injured show a downward trend.
4) On another level, plane crashes also show a downward trend.
There have been people jumping all over year-to-year volatility or incidents that make the paper, but the data, including that from independent groups, say otherwise. Why, one might almost think that other factors are more important than OHSA, MHSA, and all the rest at promoting safety.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jun 13, 2008 1:28:39 PM
We weren't even in "back in 'The Jungle'" when we were back "The Jungle." Conditions were nowhere near what Sinclair described. Investigative reporting by mainstream newspapers after "The Jungle" was published thoroughly debunked his histrionic depictions.
People should remember that Sinclair was a muckracker journalist before he became a muckracker fictionalist (and socialist agitator).
Posted by: KipEsquire at Jun 13, 2008 1:37:58 PM
John:
I don't think that trend is robust against the industry trends independent of regulation. E.g. cancer rates due to uranium dust has decreased in the 1990's in the US but safety practices really haven't changed, the mines have been closing down.
Also, I don't automatically think that the impacts are coupled directly to regulation. In the case of the FAA, there are thousands of checks built in from a half-century of regulation. That Northwest wiring inspection incident? It was a non-starter from the safety point of view because the engineering practices undertaken by the manufacturer. We aren't decreasing regulation and suddenly entering the state of nature.
RE: Plane crashes. I think the governing data here should be near miss and collected anon reports from pilots and controllers. Again, the system in question is VERY, VERY robust.
RE: Mine, workplace, and other incidents. Where is that data coming from?
Posted by: Adam Hyland at Jun 13, 2008 1:39:07 PM
Perception is reality, and the buzz surrounding a story such as food safety makes for good copy. The media hypes it, creating a perception in the readers' minds, absent any change in trends.
Posted by: jn at Jun 13, 2008 1:50:03 PM
Adam Hyland already hit on the main part of this problem, however, it's not just the federal level.
There has been a continuing decline over the past couple of decades of the resources and thus the ability of state public health agencies to adequately collect, analyze and report much of this type of data.
What you are therefore seeing in the CDC data is at least partly (a very large part IMHO)due to the decline of incoming data and not really a decline in actual incidents.
Posted by: Blaine Higgy at Jun 13, 2008 1:55:26 PM
Cure for tainted foods: Wash or cook foods before eating them.
Or, as in China, eat some garlic cloves beforehand.
Posted by: jorod at Jun 13, 2008 2:20:41 PM
Anyone got a good hypothesis about why outbreaks go up in even numbered years? Congressional elections?
Posted by: mobile at Jun 13, 2008 2:54:31 PM
"Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines"
And it doesn't occur to him, a journalist (mainly), that the writers of the headlines might be as much to blame as anything? It's as if he's willfully ignoring the way journalism works as much as he's ignoring economics.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Jun 13, 2008 2:55:02 PM
Did you really just plot a trend line with 8 data points and no control variables? This almost makes me jump to the conclusion that Krugman must be right, or you would have put real arguments up to counter him. What is the correct measure? Probably not outbreaks. With increased news coverage (that some have mentioned are the reason people think there is a trend) the outbreaks are very limited. Although i am bummed right now I can't get tomato on my hamburger at Wendy's, at least I am not getting sick. Maybe quantity of food contaminated is the correct measure. It seems that the quantity of tomatoes (and spinach earlier) affected is very high, but the information is spread quick enough to reduce the outbreaks from reaching large numbers of people.
Posted by: drh at Jun 13, 2008 3:04:44 PM
Did you really just plot a trend line with 8 data points and no control variables? This almost makes me jump to the conclusion that Krugman must be right, or you would have put real arguments up to counter him. What is the correct measure? Probably not outbreaks. With increased news coverage (that some have mentioned are the reason people think there is a trend) the outbreaks are very limited. Although i am bummed right now I can't get tomato on my hamburger at Wendy's, at least I am not getting sick. Maybe quantity of food contaminated is the correct measure. It seems that the quantity of tomatoes (and spinach earlier) affected is very high, but the information is spread quick enough to reduce the outbreaks from reaching large numbers of people.
Posted by: drh at Jun 13, 2008 3:05:01 PM
In my fantasy world, every news article is required to have a little blurb at the bottom that indicates the true statistical likelihood of the events covered in the article happening to the average person. I'm getting so tired of people getting riled up over nothing because some journalism major couldn't think of anything novel to write this week. This is just another example.
Posted by: 12345 at Jun 13, 2008 3:15:21 PM
Odd. Its almost like Krugman emphasizes scoring political points for causes he is sympathetic to over honest economics and journalistic integrity.
I am shocked because this is so uncharacteristic for him.
Posted by: kevin at Jun 13, 2008 3:17:03 PM
Is that correct - 8 data points in 8 years?
Posted by: gab at Jun 13, 2008 3:22:21 PM
Krugman is wrong about history -- again!! As Gabriel Kolko and other historians discovered, the Meat Inspection Act and FDA regulation was favored, not opposed, by the large meat packers. The reason: the regulations had little or no effect on what they were doing. But the regulations did raise costs and put out of business their smaller competitors.
Posted by: John Goodman at Jun 13, 2008 3:33:21 PM
No doubt the NYT owners think Krugman is a genius. Therefore they should redirect his efforts into saving the NYT, itself. The stock price is the same as it was 22 years ago so they need his expertise.
Posted by: Norman at Jun 13, 2008 3:42:55 PM
I'd be willing to bet that the economic harm from pulling so many tomatoes from shelves and restaurants was a lot more harmful than the few people getting sick.
Posted by: Grant at Jun 13, 2008 3:44:43 PM
Adam and Blaine hit it.
The less money we spend finding out about incidents, the more it will look like we don't have incidents to spend money fixing.
There will always be dull people who believe that reported cases = total cases.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 13, 2008 3:53:06 PM
Obviously, when we find data showing that American food is safer than ever, we should naturally assume in bad faith that it is due to a lack of data and spend more money.
Posted by: Billare at Jun 13, 2008 4:16:59 PM
Also, with the exception of the spinach case, I can't remember other times in my adult lifetime where an entire category of food was pulled off the shelves or advisories were sent out. Because of notifications like that, wouldn't illness incidents also go down?
Posted by: Mo at Jun 13, 2008 4:27:01 PM
Alex, I believe Krugman said "without question." You wouldn't be... questioning, would you?
Posted by: Cliff at Jun 13, 2008 4:36:33 PM
Here is the data on outbreaks as number of cases and not number of outbreaks. It shows the same downward trend. And it shows volatility increasing (2004 is th worst year by far and 2005 is the best by even farther), which of course may or may not be a real change in the underlying process (it is only a few points).
1998 26719
1999 25286
2000 26043
2001 25035
2002 24971
2003 22791
2004 28239
2005 20179
2006 25659
Posted by: Charlie at Jun 13, 2008 4:40:22 PM
Kurgman gets "two thumbs up" from me. Food safety has declined in the United States.
We've industry hacks writing our legistlation, congress is awash in donations from the PACs, a deluge of propaganda from k Street, tax-cuts for the corporations, deregulation of food oversight; and MSM is barely reporting on issues like Mad Cow disease, genetically modified foods being implicated in the die-off of honeybees, and how the corporate stranglehold on food supply is implicated in the recent wave of worldwide food shortages.
I'm glad Krugman's got the cahones to report on it.
Posted by: the_big_wedding at Jun 13, 2008 4:51:08 PM
So, do you suppose Krugman's gaffe (# 1,743 in a continuing series) will cause Brad DeLong to write one of his infamous why oh why can't we have a better press corps whines? Neither do I.
Posted by: ostap at Jun 13, 2008 5:00:37 PM
I would imagine that anyone living during the time of "The Jungle" (can't figure out how to underline, sry) would say, "Ummm...couple hundred cases in the entire freaking country and no one died? Could you just please stop whining?" I would be equally willing that people in Haiti (less than four hours from where Krugman sits his sorry fanny every day), where children are eating dirt to keep something in their stomachs, would kill someone to get ahold of our tainted tomatoes. Someone needs to tell Krugman he needs to get a bit of perspective.
Posted by: Carolynp at Jun 13, 2008 5:03:42 PM
If you thought these numbers looked small you're right,
"Foodborne diseases cause an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year (21). Although foodborne diseases are common, only a fraction of these illnesses are routinely reported to CDC because a complex chain of events must occur before a foodborne infection is reported; a break at any point in the chain will result in a case not being reported. In addition, the majority of reported foodborne illnesses are sporadic; only a small number are identified as being part of an outbreak and reported through the Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System. ... Therefore, the system represents only a fraction of the burden of foodborne disease."
(http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5510a1.htm?s_cid=ss5510a1_e)
So we are getting a small sample of something that may be pretty volatile. I don't hold any strong priors about changes in food safety in the last 8 years, but if I did, I doubt this evidence would change it much.
Posted by: Charlie at Jun 13, 2008 5:05:41 PM
More reason to vote for McCain and safety and security for our food industry, our familys and our lives!! He's sure got my vote!!
Posted by: Darlena at Jun 13, 2008 5:31:56 PM
always read the footnotes:
*All data for 2001 - 2006 were collected electronically through the Electronic Foodborne Outbreak Reporting System (EFORS) without confirmation of etiology by CDC staff; all etiologies are as reported by the state. Etiologies of outbreaks prior to 2001 had been confirmed by CDC staff. Therefore some differences may exist comparing 2001 - 2006 data with that from prior years
Posted by: spencer at Jun 13, 2008 5:32:58 PM
Carolynp is right but our lack of perspective is a sign of progress. if people are getting increasingly worried about shark attacks and tomato safety, it means incomes have gone up and our risk aversion has increased.
Posted by: DK at Jun 13, 2008 5:52:48 PM
Except that the same trend is shown by number of reported cases of food poisoning as well. I have a hard time to believe that people would fail to record when they get sick. Certainly actual incidents of contamination could be not reported, simply the goods thrown away. Actual sickness is much more likely to show up in reported data. Just as I find it hard to believe that the FAA is covering up actual air crashes and passenger fatalities, even if you believe that they're not inspecting often enough. The same is true about mine fatalities-- several events that were well-covered by the news, but actual injuries and fatalities down. Eventually this lack of necessary regulation should show up in the easily measured stuff, right?
There will always be dull people who will choose to believe anecdotes over data, no matter what the data says.
The mine data, Adam Hyland and others ask about? Right off the MSHA website, among other places. It's not just because of mines being closed, fatality rates per hours worked are declining. Total injury and incidence rates per hours worked are down as well. The data in mine safety is overwhelming; it's a trend that started long ago and has shown no signs of stopping. The number of deaths averaged in the 90s in the 1990s, and has dropped to the mid 60s in the 2000s.
Workplace injury? Again, right off of OSHA's site. While they could be hiding things that would turn up in more inspections, or not inspecting as much, I think it's much harder to hide severe injuries and fatalities. Look at the 2006 data Not just total incidents, rates declined. Not because of a shift from manufacturing to services-- rates within the manufacturing sector and within individual industries declined. Fatal work injuries? A steady decline.
If there's one place where Bryan Caplan's pessimistic bias rears its head, it's here.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jun 13, 2008 6:00:28 PM
There is a host of varying statistics all showing improvement; the ones that measure difficult to hide numbers (like fatalities, but also serious injuries and illness) show the same decrease as the others. It's rather absurd to see the denialism going on among people who think that mine safety, workplace safety, air safety, or food safety is getting worse.
Posted by: John Thacker at Jun 13, 2008 6:02:25 PM
John Thacker,
It is rare for people to seek help with a mild case of food poisoning, therefore, there is no reporting. The cases that tend to be reported are usually from the elderly and young children. Not everybody who gets sick from eating bad Chinese food or something that "just didn't taste right" runs off to the ER or the clinic for treatment. It's not just about being personally aware that you've been sick, but the numbers that actually make it to the desk of the CDC.
Posted by: Doc Lee at Jun 13, 2008 6:31:30 PM
So did the metric that people used to report food poisoning somehow change after Bush took office?
Posted by: Billare at Jun 13, 2008 6:36:11 PM
And you just gave him a Milton-like-answer, stricly empircal, based on facts from history.
Posted by: Tomislav Najdovski at Jun 13, 2008 7:01:41 PM
Doc Lee,
Ok, but can you show that phenomenon has changed at all? If you can show that 10 years ago, people were more likely to go the the ER for such conditions but now do not, then maybe you have a point.
Posted by: anomdebus at Jun 13, 2008 7:21:20 PM
There are two problems here that are intertwined. A couple of posters know they're separate.
1) Risk perception. The risks are trivial and we overestimate the probability of small risks (look it up).
2) Regulation. An efficient regulation system could reduce overall food risks, or any other risks, further, but we ain't gonna get one.
3) Leaves lawsuits. But regulation precludes this! This is why the regulated love regulators.
4) Without regulation, the food distributors (Supermarkets) could get nailed, and they'd then watch out for us.
Posted by: Frank at Jun 13, 2008 7:37:06 PM
Read Charlie's post.
If you like, look up his link.
In 1998 CDC set up a web-based reporting system. The number of reported cases went up higher than ever before, because it was easier to report.
CDC collects the data reported by local and state public health agencies. The reporting agencies do not have a consistent protocol for studying outbreaks of food poisoning etc, but the CDC reports do follow a standard for.
Most cases do not get studied at all. Some cases get studied by local authorities and then do not get reported. Traditionally some got reported late, and in the months after a MMWR bulletin corrections would come in.
At all levels, it's predictable that budget cuts will result in fewer reports on average.
"...no standard criteria exist for classifying a death as being FBDO-related. This determination is made by the reporting agency."
Reporting of deaths are not standardised. They vary by state and sometimes by locality. Depending on where the deaths happen, they may or may not get into these statistics.
"For example, Salmonella infection causes an estimated 1.4 million foodborne illnesses annually (22). However, during 1998--2002, a total of 164,044 Salmonella infections (approximately 32,000 annually) were reported through the National Salmonella Surveillance System (23--27), which is a passive, public health laboratory-based system. During the same period, 585 recognized outbreaks of Salmonella infection resulting in 16,821 illnesses were reported through the Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System, not all of which were necessarily culture-confirmed. Therefore, the system represents only a fraction of the burden of foodborne disease."
Should we believe that the system captures only a small fraction of cases? Or should we believe that the estimates of total cases (extrapolated from multiple moderate-size samples that might not be representative of the whole population) are high overestimates?
Just to try out the idea, suppose that our reporting system is getting less efficient at reporting outbreaks. If it regularly misses large outbreaks but sometimes catches more large outbreaks than usual, wouldn't you expect the result to become increasingly variable? Even while the average slowly declines due to the slow breakdown of the system?
That explanation looks to me compatible with the data. But just being compatible with the data doesn't mean it's proven. It's just one of the possibilities.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 13, 2008 8:33:30 PM
There are good comments here about the difficulty of estimating food borne illness but I think that misses the point of Tabarrok's post. Tabarrok is not arguing that food illness is down, Tabarrok is testing, using the evidence available to him (and us), Krugman's shocking assertions. The real question is. What evidence does Krugman have for his strident, extreme and damning claims?
Posted by: anon at Jun 13, 2008 8:56:44 PM
Le Krugmanmeister has been right twice in his life, once when he gave a nod to Hayek on economic fluctuations, and in his recent NYT column linked to by Alex on how technology undermines the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property.
In general, he exemplifies Rush Limbaugh's LL...r quip. (For the record I am not a dittohead.)
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Jun 13, 2008 9:41:33 PM
The responses on this blog really show the fact that there is a huge difference between understanding understanding economics and just being a libertarian.
Posted by: csning at Jun 13, 2008 10:05:01 PM
DK: "Carolynp is right but our lack of perspective is a sign of progress. if people are getting increasingly worried about shark attacks and tomato safety, it means incomes have gone up and our risk aversion has increased."
You're confusing the mainstream media's focus on shark attacks and tomato safety with what Actual People are focusing on in Real Life. The public may be thinking a bit about the latter. But tomato safety isn't likely to make people start forgetting about the economic threats they face daily from market manipulation, lopsided "free-trade" arrangements and off-shoring, deregulation-scheming politicians (both past and present - Phil Gramm's chickens are coming home to roost a second time), and the like.
Posted by: ranger_granger at Jun 13, 2008 10:06:07 PM
"Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman."
Geez, what happened to old-fashioned, red-blooded, 'merican scapegoats, like gay marriage and global warming?
Regarding those food-producing corporations, thank goodness for the 2006 elections because the new Congress would never commit such blatant acts of corporate farm welfare as were committed in the past by those dastardly red-staters.
Incidentally, shouldn't the data be reported in per capita terms?
Posted by: Eric H at Jun 13, 2008 10:30:21 PM
As it is, you seem to have produced an interesting graph, but not one that is relevant to the question at hand.
Which is one more than the number of graphs produced by Krugman in support of his wild-eyed assertion.
Posted by: Bill Quick at Jun 13, 2008 11:03:58 PM
A couple years ago there was a similar food borne illness scare. I noted then that the statistics showed a decrease in such cases.
http://www.walterindenver.com/archives/001374.html
Ahead of the curve.
Posted by: Walter at Jun 13, 2008 11:40:15 PM
Bill Quick, have you actually read the Krugman article you are criticising?
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 13, 2008 11:47:31 PM
Geez, it's so easy to line up against Krugman. Pick an issue -- any issue -- and invariably old Paul is on the wrong side of it.
Posted by: Denny, Alaska at Jun 14, 2008 12:02:35 AM
2007 and 2008 data are not on the graph...
Posted by: reggie at Jun 14, 2008 12:10:07 AM
The actual details don't matter too much. It's just another case of Friedman wishing that wishes were fishes. Remember that he has predicted 9 of the last 0 recessions.
Posted by: Pink Pig at Jun 14, 2008 12:27:18 AM
Oh, give Krugman a break.
It's the middle of June, been 95 degrees and humid here in the east, he probably has some work to do at Princeton or selling a book or something on top of it, people are on summer vacation so readership is down...
All newspaper writers recycle their columns.
Posted by: Jim Glass at Jun 14, 2008 12:41:52 AM
Hey, Krugman, MIT called! They want their sheepskin back.
Posted by: Russell Nelson at Jun 14, 2008 1:28:52 AM
Important to remember that in Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" he was trying to call attention to the condition of workers in meat packing plants, but instead aroused concern about food safety. Sinclair said words to the effect: "I aimed for America's heart, and hit her in the stomach."
A commenter above is correct. Regulations helped the big corporations because they put the trusted local butchers out of business. Local butchers had to keep a scrupulously clean shop, or the neighbors wouldn't come in, and any hint of tainted meat would drive them out of business. The key inspector was the customer's nose! What the local butchers couldn't afford was an army of feather bedding government inspectors.
The large corporations lost to the small local butchers every time until the small butchers were forced to use the lower, yet more expensive standards of the large corporations.
My great grandfather ran a chain of local supermarkets. He had his own farms, his own warehouses and fleet of trucks, his own food packing plants, each aspect of the business supervised by one of his sons. Without regulation he developed and put into service his own ammonia-water freezers. During WWII his food processing plants produced dried onions, to prevent scurvy in soldiers and sailors stationed far from home. The people downwind cursed him, but he bought the machines at his own expense, and refused to make a dime from that contract.
Posted by: Don Meaker at Jun 14, 2008 1:36:16 AM
Actually, I read a really good Krugman article opposing rent control. (I had to double-check to make sure it was actually Krugman.)
It was great to see his breathless, red-faced, shrill reporting turned against an issue when he is correct.
Posted by: kevin at Jun 14, 2008 2:18:11 AM
Maybe Mr. Krugman clicked over to this page avaibale from the link provided,
Surveillance for Foodborne-Disease Outbreaks --- United States, 1998--2002
Results: During 1998--2002, a total of 6,647 outbreaks of foodborne disease were reported (1,314 in 1998, 1,343 in 1999, 1,417 in 2000, 1,243 in 2001, and 1,330 in 2002). These outbreaks caused a reported 128,370 persons to become ill. Among 2,167 (33%) outbreaks for which the etiology was determined, bacterial pathogens caused the largest percentage of outbreaks (55%) and the largest percentage of cases (55%). Among bacterial pathogens, Salmonella serotype Enteritidis accounted for the largest number of outbreaks and outbreak-related cases; Listeria monocytogenes accounted for the majority of deaths of any pathogen. Viral pathogens, predominantly norovirus, caused 33% of outbreaks and 41% of cases; the proportion of outbreaks attributed to viral agents increased from 16% in 1998 to 42% in 2002. Chemical agents caused 10% of outbreaks and 2% of cases, and parasites caused 1% of outbreaks and 1% of cases.
The so-'called "net" downward trend seems to be a bias on the part of the person that made the graph. Chemical agents - which do make a difference in lower food pathogens are also growing in importance as a cause of food born illness. As several others have pointed out since the reporting methods and criteria for reporting is not standardized you might have a case against Krugman, but you have in no way proven your case in this post.
It is also been found by The Center for Science in the Public Interest that many food bourne illnesses are never reported by the victim - they simply mark it up to a stomach flu or 24 hour virus. The CSPI has also found that much of the data that finds its way into Center for Disease Control, such as the data you used is 1) Provided by the food industry, 2) Voluntary - as in they report when and if they want to.
"Then why the knee jerk defense of Milton Friedman. It seems that few readers clicked over to see the context in which Krugman dared criticize Saint Milton,
That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.
O.K., I’m not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls “E. coli conservatives”: ideologues who won’t accept even the most compelling case for government regulation."
This bizarre and what seems dogmatic belief that businesses will act ethically if left completely alone defies a history that shows otherwise.
Posted by: Samuel Ink at Jun 14, 2008 4:41:49 AM
If I could make an observation to those who comment about about lack of controls;
1) I think you are demanding slightly unreasonable levels of data for what is, after all, a prima facie, refutation. The obvious control variables are probably near constants. Ideally, yes, we might control for something like "# of portions consumed", or "calories consumed" or "% of cases reported" of some-such. But really; do people imagine these numbers have >5% year-on-year variance? They will be close to constant, probably increasing slowly over time. So no effect on the argument.
2) Krugman's assertion: "Things are more dangerous; Trade & Milton Friedman are to blame." is simply false on its first premise and can be discarded at that point. The logic doesn't require a statistical control to explain the variance in the trendline because the claimed premise are about values and not sources of variance. No more than the claim "Temperatures are warmer" requires a detailed model of climate to evaluate.
In fairness, as others (correctly) have pointed out, an argument might still be constructed that "Milton Friedman has made food more dangerous". Indeed; it could use this approach, perhaps showing that "global consuming cities" showed larger upswings over the period that "local consuming midwest"? But the onus must surely now lie with Krugman to develop a more sophisticated model and produce data for such an argument?
On a sceptical note and slightly sour note; I observe that if people don't check their prima facie data before putting pen to paper, they usually are not interested or capable of doing so.
Best regards.
Posted by: Alistair Morley at Jun 14, 2008 6:49:39 AM
An afterthought: The year-on-year variance is very high for such a widely distributed social phenomena. Could there be some kind of weird exogenous variable here; like sunny days in summer?
My reasoning: sunny days drive hot dog sales which drive.... Some Years have better summers and more regretful fast food, which in the end swamps other sources of variance.
Posted by: Alistair Morley at Jun 14, 2008 6:56:50 AM
I think what Mr Krugman meant to say is that "reporting about America's food safety" has increased dramatically the past six years. Let a Democrat into the White House, and watch that trend immediately reverse.
Posted by: Patrick at Jun 14, 2008 9:18:27 AM
The lines on your graph are the same color.
Posted by: gijoe at Jun 14, 2008 10:12:15 AM
What we see is a lot of variability from year to year but a net downward trend.
I'm not a statistician, but based on the data Charlie posted, a regression line seems to have a slope that's not significantly different from zero. (I expect the same is the case for the data in the graph, in which the pattern is qualitatively similar.) That is, there's no net downward or upward trend--there's not enough data and it's too noisy for this linear model to give any insight.
Posted by: RSA at Jun 14, 2008 10:32:06 AM
Alex -- do you have a chart with number of PEOPLE affected? Seems to be a more important variable.
Posted by: David Zetland at Jun 14, 2008 11:19:46 AM
"there's no net downward or upward trend"
Correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causation. Is it getting worse with respect to time? It may not be clear that the trend is down, but it's pretty clear that it isn't up. Krugger bugger is either looking at different data, agrees with the reporting bias argument, or is just capitalizing on hype- none of which he cited in his article. So, what is he looking at? And who has the burden of proof, a NYTimes columnist, or a blog post?
Other questions: What role did the gov't play in the tomato lockdown versus private sector? What does this say about who leads and who practices CYA and what does this say about who acts fastest to protect their customers?
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 14, 2008 11:26:00 AM
You know, this may be a cranky old fart reaction, but I remember as a kid in the 50's and 60's that people got "food poisoning" and diarrhea then too. What I don't remember was there being a Federal agency tasked with counting them and writing press releases to say they were doing a great job because they were counting them.
Or a 24 hour news operation desperate for something to talk about.
I'm very suspicious this is a place where the real world is safer, but the reporting world looks worse.
Posted by: Charlie (Colorado) at Jun 14, 2008 12:12:31 PM
[sigh]
OK, go read the Krugman article. Just read it.
Krugman does not claim that incidents of food-born illnesses are up. He doesn't say anywhere in this editorial that incidents are up. The people who say he says that, made it up. It isn't there.
What Krugman says is first that the media are reporting a lot of incidents.
"Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes."
Second, he says that the perception that we are doing less testing has hurt our exports.
"The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003."
Are either of these claims somehow controversial? Aren't both of them obviously true?
Then he explained how it happened. Fringe conservatives wanted everything deregulated. They didn't get enough power to get rid of FDA but they did get enough to make it ineffective.
"They did this in part by simply denying these agencies enough resources to do the job. For example, the work of the F.D.A. has become vastly more complex over time thanks to the combination of scientific advances and globalization. Yet the agency has a substantially smaller work force now than it did in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress."
Is this debatable?
Krugman reports that regulatory agencies got political appointees who tried to stop them from regulating.
"Thus, when mad cow disease was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the Department of Agriculture was headed by Ann M. Veneman, a former food-industry lobbyist. And the department’s response to the crisis — which amounted to consistently downplaying the threat and rejecting calls for more extensive testing — seemed driven by the industry’s agenda."
He doesn't support this point. Maybe they refused to regulate for some other reason. Maybe Veneman had nothing to do with it. Stranger things have happened. I suppose someone could research this and get back to us.
"One amazing decision came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows, so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit."
I read about this at the time. It seems utterly unbelievable. Maybe it was a false report? Private industry forbidden to self-regulate? If that was true it would be like a war crime. Except the Bush administration is not at war with the US public. Probably this was some sort of false report, it didn't really happen, and Krugman got fooled. No government agency could be that bad.
"Eventually, the department did expand its testing, and at this point most countries that initially banned U.S. beef have allowed it back into their markets. But the South Koreans still don’t trust us."
Nothing controversial there.
"The ironic thing is that the Agriculture Department’s deference to the beef industry actually ended up backfiring: because potential foreign buyers didn’t trust our safety measures, beef producers spent years excluded from their most important overseas markets."
Again, nothing controversial.
"The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business."
Krugman says that to participate in global markets, we must regulate enough to satisfy foreign customers -- independent of whether that regulation is actually needed or useful. He also says without evidence that the lack of regulation is bad for consumers.
With the Mad Cow disease thing, how would we tell whether it was bad for consumers? If we know now how much mad cow disease there was in US cows, we could look back and see whether testing was needed. Since there has not been a mad cow epidemic we can safely say that we didn't need testing, that the testing was in fact a total waste except to restore public and foreign confidence.
If there had been an epidemic and, say, over the next 30 years 50 million americans were to come down with symptoms, then we would know that the testing was needed and over the next 30 years a big scandal would develop about it. It would be bigger than the thalidomide thing was, which is almost completely forgotten now.
What does any of this have to do with the idea that food-borne epidemics might be declining although we recently had the worst year since we started collecting data?
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 14, 2008 12:12:45 PM
Interesting that the "outbreaks" always spike upward in even-numbered years -- i.e., election years.
Posted by: Jim at Jun 14, 2008 12:53:12 PM
So why didn't you include the data pre- and post-1994, when the Republicans took over the branch of government that controls spending? You see a clear increase after that date from ~500 outbreaks/year to 1999 levels, where it begins to decline.
Or was this post some sort of confidence game about reading your source with your readers?
Posted by: at Jun 14, 2008 1:02:13 PM
at, please read the post. If you do you will see that I gave the source of the data, provided a link and explained why I began in 1998. Here is the CDC on that point
"In 1998, CDC increased communication with state, local, and territorial health departments to enhance surveillance for FBDOs, including formal confirmation procedures to finalize reports from each state each year. This led to a substantial increase in the number of reports, resulting in a surveillance discontinuity during 1997--1998."
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jun 14, 2008 1:14:28 PM
Ok, quickly here...
(1) I don't know if Krugman is right or wrong.
(2) From all the commments here on the stats and - much more important! - the various issues with collecting this data (which are referenced in the report) - it is *very clear* that analyzing this issue requires really digging into the data and looking at reporting biases, methodological issues etc.
(3) So: the bottom line (if you agree with #2) is that a simple graph like Alex presented is only the beginning of the discussion.
And - Alex, c'mon. This would be less a deal if you had said something like "an initial analysis" or "a cursory view of the data" .."does not support Krugman's statements".
Instead:
You wrote the blog entry like a disproof. And, no, your simple analysis is not enough.
Frankly, you would *never* accept this sort of thing in your professional work - so please don't be so sloppy.
I'll just put this one in as a "bad day for for the excellent MR blog". We all have them (this writer included!)
Posted by: Mark at Jun 14, 2008 3:39:01 PM
What Krugman says is first that the media are reporting a lot of incidents.
Which is inconclusive and most likely meaningless, especially since there doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in the numbers of people actually getting sick. Krugman is a member of "the media," which makes this all feel rather circular.
"The ironic thing is that the Agriculture Department’s deference to the beef industry actually ended up backfiring: because potential foreign buyers didn’t trust our safety measures, beef producers spent years excluded from their most important overseas markets."
Krugman says that to participate in global markets, we must regulate enough to satisfy foreign customers -- independent of whether that regulation is actually needed or useful.
So we should have gone through useless, highly visible motions just to make some people feel better. When the TSA does this, it's called Security Theater. If a private business does it, it's fraud.
Posted by: E. Nough at Jun 14, 2008 3:48:33 PM
Mark, I repeat: Krugman did not say that food poisoning is getting worse.
Krugman said that unless we convince foreigners that we adequately monitor food safety, we cannot sell our food on the global market.
With globalization it isn't enough to require consumers to depend on industry self-regulation. We can't get away with forbidding industries to self-regulate. Foreign buyers -- unlike US consumers -- have alternate sources and they will choose the ones they think are safe.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 14, 2008 3:57:26 PM
You're all missing the point. Milton Friedman was ee-vil, so it's OK to lie if it makes him look bad.
Posted by: Jeff at Jun 14, 2008 4:14:58 PM
"What Krugman says is first that the media are reporting a lot of incidents."
Which is inconclusive and most likely meaningless, especially since there doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in the numbers of people actually getting sick.
"Seem to be" is the important phrase there. We aren't putting as much effort into finding cases, and then we don't find as many on average. What conclusion should we draw from that?
Look -- imagine you're in charge of a bunch of warehouses and you want to know how many rats are there. You could start with estimates of rat damage but that's hard -- you need trustworthy inspectors who check that it's actual rat damage or a lot of pilferage will get called that. So you put out ten rat traps per warehouse and you count how many rats you catch.
Then during a budget cut you put out only 5 rat traps per warehouse, and you find that the number of rats you catch has not gone up. Can you conclude from this that the number of rats has not gone up?
"Krugman says that to participate in global markets, we must regulate enough to satisfy foreign customers -- independent of whether that regulation is actually needed or useful."
So we should have gone through useless, highly visible motions just to make some people feel better.
Unless you measure, how do you know whether it's useless? You can assume it has to be useless, but how can you test that assumption without actually measuring?
And especially for epidemic disease, you'd like to find out it's happening before the media report there are millions of cases. One year there could be very few cases, the next year it could go into exponential growth. The sooner you stop it doing that, the better. Years that nothing happens you can think the testing is useless. Years that they stop problems early and without much media coverage you can think the testing is useless. It's only after a disaster that it's obviously worth doing.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 14, 2008 4:20:44 PM
Mark,
I am astounded by your comment. Krugman offered zero evidence for his extreme remarks ("without question," "fear of eating", "food crisis,") in the NYTimes. I simply pulled what data was available and pointed out that there was no evidence that we are back in the jungle. If someone makes extreme claims, "the moon is made of green cheese," it's up to them to provide the evidence to back up the claim. I have not claimed that food quality is getting better or even staying the same I have said that Krugman provided no evidence for his assertions and what evidence exists is not favorable.
J Thomas - you wrote "Krugman did not say that food poisoning is getting worse." Here are his own words:
"I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman...he did help to make our food less safe..."
"Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad."
"tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes"
"How did America find itself back in The Jungle?"
we need to "get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe."
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jun 14, 2008 4:24:06 PM
Sorry if someone has already pointed this out but there's something very odd about this graph.
Why the hell the foodbourne diseases outbreaks always decrease on odd years and increase on even years. The only eception to the "rule" was 1999.
Posted by: Bruno at Jun 14, 2008 4:41:22 PM
I simply pulled what data was available and pointed out that there was no evidence that we are back in the jungle.
Just out of curiosity, I crunched a few numbers myself to see if there might be some difference in assumptions between Alex and Paul Krugman. The reports sort outbreaks into confirmed etiology and unconfirmed etiology, where the former "met the criteria specified in the guidelines for confirmation of foodborne-disease outbreak". If you grab those numbers, assuming that etiology confirmation stands in for the reliability of a given report, they look like this:
Year Outbreaks Cases
2006 623 16,904
2005 410 10,781
2004 519 16,372
2003 409 15,569
2002 494 16,117
2001 455 13,945
2000 448 14,112
1999 368 11,913
1998 368 11,651
Here a simple linear regression gives a significant positive coefficient for Outbreak but not for Cases (unless you drop 2005 as an outlier).
In other words, I think Mark's comment has to do with evaluating evidence: Krugman didn't give any numbers, just some arguments about "structural" stuff. But one piece of evidence that's inconsistent with the arguments doesn't mean there's no other consistent evidence.
Posted by: RSA at Jun 14, 2008 5:31:53 PM
Just a quick comment on the idea that such "large amounts" of tomatoes and spinach were affected the last few outbreaks.
What's happening there is the lag between globalization and traceability. You have Mr. Restauranteur who was used to getting in a shipment from the same few farms once a day, now he's getting shipments from a warehouse that can get its material from all over.
And you have Mr. Farmer who was used to shipping his crop out to a handful of folks, now he's shipping to a warehouse that goes all over the world.
Mr. Warehouse Guy didn't even exist 60 years ago.
Back then, lot traceability didn't have to be that tight at all, because you didn't have to follow the trail that far. The supply chain has changed, but the lot traceability really hasn't. So the best you can manage when you find an outbreak is to cut it to a so-many-county area within a space of a few months.
--Obs, In my experience, give the industry a few more expensive recalls like this and they'll figure out how to grow leaves with barcodes on them.
Posted by: Obs at Jun 14, 2008 6:07:52 PM
Alex, in none of your quotes is Krugman saying that food poisoning is getting worse.
However, I was looking only at the latest article. In the earlier one he does say something that are compatible with the claim that food poisoning was getting worse.
"O.K., I’m not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls “E. coli conservatives”: ideologues who won’t accept even the most compelling case for government regulation."
When he says that Friedman helped to make our food less safe, it could be argued that he's saying that our food is less safe.
But isn't he correct that Friedman helped to legitimize these insane people?
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 14, 2008 6:30:10 PM
Interesting post and thread, Alex.
On food safety issues, I try to ignore the ideologues.
On the one hand, Grover Norquist and Milton Friedman have hopes for market incentives that are not only unrealistic, they are very far from the current state of good contemporary economic thought on food safety.
On the other hand, I give little weight to critics who hold out unrealistic expectations for government prevention of all food safety risks, not so much because they care about food safety, but because they just have large ambitions for government interventions in the economy.
Current economic thought draws on a fairly specific diagnosis of different kinds of imperfect information, each of which calls for a different policy response, which can range from laissez faire to labeling to testing to regulation.
A standard mainstream -- or even somewhat conservative -- text on the economics of food safety is John Antle's book on food safety. It acknowledges market failures in food safety, and particularly recognizes the need for strong government regulation of food-borne pathogens, because in many cases consumers cannot recognize the safety of the food even after purchase, and hence cannot defend their own interests in the marketplace. In my reading, Antle is a strong critic of food safety activisits on other topics, such as pesticides (where he believes there is overregulation disproportionate to risk), but on food-borne disease he seems to me closer to Krugman than Friedman.
There are some exciting private market innovations in food safety recently. For example, the buyers for major supermarket chains are getting more sophisticated in demanding safety from their suppliers, which allows the market to achieve good outcomes that individual consumers could not command on their own.
At the same time, it is fair to say USDA and FDA oversight of food safety have fallen far short of a balanced position. The CDC stats on outbreaks have a number of shortcomings, and don't suffice to make me think otherwise. Take something like the USDA's refusal to let Creekstone beef voluntarily test its own product for BSE. It is so outrageous that the J. Thomas in his comments even presumes it to be untrue (it's true). The so-called "regulators" are way out of step with the public interest position of economists, even market economists who appreciate the market's accomplishments on its good days.
Posted by: Parke at Jun 14, 2008 8:44:08 PM
Big Wedding chortles: "I'm glad Krugman's got the cahones to report on it."
Big, switch some sensors on. Krugman is the most cosseted columnist at the New York Times. It takes no cahones at all for Krugman to write anything he wants. Which, of course, is fortunate for Krugman.
Posted by: vanderleun at Jun 14, 2008 10:44:20 PM
J Thomas,
So, you think the people saying Krugman is spouting hyperbole to forward an agenda came up with this notion out of thin air?
"How did America find itself back in The Jungle?"
I'm sure he's not aware of how the use of his buzz words might be interpreted.
"But isn't he correct that Friedman helped to legitimize these insane people?"
Legitimization happens in peoples' minds, for which they are solely responsible for. If Friedman said something that is true, and other people assume he said something about some group that other people still consider insane, but Friedman never said anything of the sort, then no, Friedman is not responsible for that.
So, if Krugman is innocent of people misunderstanding his meaning, then Friedman certainly is.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 15, 2008 5:14:34 AM
"Take something like the USDA's refusal to let Creekstone beef voluntarily test its own product for BSE. It is so outrageous that the J. Thomas in his comments even presumes it to be untrue (it's true)."
Parke, if this is true why hasn't it been more widely reported? Why don't we get an editorial every day about how utterly outrageous it is?
It happened in an election year? Congress did nothing?
This is an issue that practically everybody could agree on. Libertarians should be outraged. Environmentalists should be outraged. I can't see any political philosophy that would support it, except "government by the highest bidder".
So I see two possibilities. Either we had first a ridiculous failure of government, followed by a massive media failure.
Or there's something more fundamental going on, so that reasonable people who look deeper into the issue see that what happened is actually pretty much supportable and they lose interest.
You looked into it, and it was true?
OW! I guess I ought to look at it too, then.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 5:40:33 AM
Andrew, it's hard for me to see your point.
Friedman said that we should get rid of the FDA because private businesses will coordinate their own safety practices better without it.
Later, people who previously would have had no credibility at all managed to get control of the FDA and attempted to turn it into something we'd be better off without.
Did I misunderstand Friedman's meaning? What did he really say?
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 5:53:16 AM
J Thomas, Yes the Creekstone story is true. I reported on this four years ago.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/its_a_mad_mad_m.html
I invite you to read my post and ask whether the story supports the Friedman/public choice view of government or the Krugman view.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Jun 15, 2008 9:57:44 AM
Alex, I read your report and also some others. I have not read the court records yet. (Creekstone sued and won, I think USDA is appealing.)
I think I understand USDA's position better now. It goes something like this:
BSE had a chance to increase rapidly because we were feeding cow brains to cows. One infected cow could infect multiple others, and then they could infect more still....
So we made rulings forbidding that practice. If (as USDA believes) there is no other important pathway for infection, there might be a very few cases but not many. Their testing showed up one case which caused a panic. Then they tested 600,000 animals that were in high-risk groups and found two more.
The hope is that infected animals don't pass on the disease to humans if they are slaughtered young enough. Since young or recently-infected cases are hard to detect even if you test them, this hope is necessary. It's only older animals that benefit from testing, and many cows are slaughtered young.
A few people die every year from symptoms similar to BSE, from unknown causes. It could be from eating beef products or it could be something else. We accept this level of awful symptoms followed by death because we have to.
So the USDA strategy is to break the cycle of infection, and then test the most likely cases to see whether there is infection going on. Don't slaughter animals that have symptoms. Don't feed cow parts to cows. That way we avoid a giant epidemic, and we accept the background level while we do the research to find out how to best deal with it.
The USDA's problem with Creekstone is first with the test they want to use, and second with them wanting to do it themselves.
It appears the test has too many false negatives and too many false positives. False negatives mean that some infected animals will be wrongly certified clean. False positives aren't so bad, we only lose a small fraction of good beef, but they scare people into believing we have more BSE than we do. This test has been approved by various other nations that test every cow. They reject a few thousand cows and they feel better for it. Even if a few infected animals get through, every infected cow that's caught is a good thing.
Next, when the company does its own testing, who checks whether they do it right? They have an incentive to ignore positive results, or even to fake their records and claim they did tests they did not do. You don't usually choose a basketball players who's playing the game to be the referee.
If you believe the USDA is unbiased, then you will trust them to detect an epidemic. They can do the cheap quick test first, and then follow up with a slower more expensive test on the positives to reduce the false positives. When the number of detections goes up significantly then you know there's a problem that must be solved. Two cases out of 600,000 of the most at-risk is pretty encouraging. The USDA tests are reliable for detecting an increasing epidemic, but they aren't reliable to find every case.
Why should we use the cheap test and then brand meat safe, when it is not safe? And the more false positives we get, the more people will think we actually have a significant level of BSE in our beef when we don't.
I can imagine that position. It isn't as absurd as it looked at first. I can imagine other approaches. For example, the USDA could set up teams to do full testing, and when somebody requests it, test all their animals at cost. The exporter gets his certification better than doing it himself. The USDA gets to confirm that the work was done correctly. USDA gets more baseline information at low cost to the budget. And FDA can forbid domestic advertisers from making misleading claims about the results. But Creekstone asked for permission to do it themselves, and it took USDA 6 weeks to say no -- rather fast for a big bureaucracy faced with a subtle problem. It would have taken much longer to get my solution working.
If we're selling in a global market we have to do the tests the customers want, regardless whether we think those are adequate tests.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 1:10:26 PM
Paul Krugman said:
One amazing decision came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows, so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit. When push comes to shove, it seems, the imperatives of crony capitalism trump professed faith in free markets.
Krugman's description of this story is highly misleading. As I pointed out last year, the government's position had little or nothing to do with "crony capitalism." Instead, the USDA had issued its rule banning early testing because the incubation period averages 5 years, and testing cows younger than that age would inevitably result in false negatives. The USDA therefore thought it better to rely on a targeted surveillance program. Right or wrong, the USDA's rule arose for reasons other than what Krugman claims.
Posted by: Stuart Buck at Jun 15, 2008 3:11:39 PM
Stuart, it isn't that simple to conclude why someone does something. The USDA could have been ordered to make that decision because of crony capitalism, and then come up with this reasonable-sounding excuse.
Many cattle are slaughtered younger than the apparent incubation period. Can they infect people? If they are infective before they show symptoms themselves and before the test detects them, then we have a serious problem.
You must hope that early-stage cattle are not infective, or that BSE is as rare among the cattle that are slaughtered early as it is among the differently-treated cattle that are slaughtered late.
Or else you should give up beef until the situation is clarified and we have better tests.
This is a serious issue.
So, meanwhile USDA says that US beef can't be tested as foreign nations require because the tests are not effective. Foreigners require an ineffective test and so we can't export to them?
If a foreign nation requires exporters to them to fill out a form where there's a checkmark for "tested negative for BSE", it isn't false advertising to check that mark when the test has actually been done.
So, they have a rationale that sounds better than the explanation the media gave. Was that really their reason? No way to tell, yet. Look at our war in iraq, where officially the US government announced that iraq was trying to build nukes, but we now know they were lying, that they had no reason to think that, but instead they made up their evidence so they'd have a plausible excuse.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 5:25:10 PM
The USDA could have been ordered to make that decision because of crony capitalism, and then come up with this reasonable-sounding excuse.
Hypothetically, yes, but I very much doubt that Krugman has any evidence that your hypothetical is actually true.
Posted by: Stuart Buck at Jun 15, 2008 7:24:39 PM
"The USDA could have been ordered to make that decision because of crony capitalism, and then come up with this reasonable-sounding excuse."
"Hypothetically, yes, but I very much doubt that Krugman has any evidence that your hypothetical is actually true."
Agreed. It looks like Krugman got taken in by the conventional wisdom on this particular example. While it's completely plausible that the reasons the media gave for the decision were the real ones and the ones the USDA gave the courts were a cover story, still it hasn't been proven.
The USDA story, while obviously boneheaded and wrong, is still superficially plausible. An incompetently managed agency might do things like that out of stupidity and not malice.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 8:21:33 PM
How is the USDA regulation "obviously boneheaded and wrong"? I'd be the first to admit that I don't understand the science here, but if the USDA is correct, doing testing on young cows -- where the disease apparently can't be detected in the first place -- would basically amount to false advertising.
Posted by: Stuart Buck at Jun 15, 2008 8:47:57 PM
Stuart, at the time a number of foreign countries demanded that all cattle they imported must be tested.
US exporters who complied with their demand could export to them. US exporters who did not could not.
It is not false advertising to say that you did the test they demanded. It might be false advertising to say that the cattle who tested negative were BSE-free.
The science is peculiar. As I understand it (and I haven't done a lit search for well over a year), there are no living organisms involved except victims. A particular protein in your brain can change shape, and if it does change to just the wrong shape then it can catalyse other copies of that protein to also change shape. When too many copies change shape your brain shuts down.
When you eat copies of the protein that have changed shape in some other nervous system, somehow some of them might get to your brain and start catalysing your own brain proteins to change shape too.
Nobody knows how much of a dose it takes to do that. Cows that are only starting the process have small amounts of the protein present in their brains and nerves. You aren't safe if you avoid brain and CNS tissue, the nerves that run through muscle might have the protein too. And other food can be contaminated by brain or spinal contents. Also, human tests consistently show small amounts of the changed protein in the brains of people who died in accidents and had no symptoms. So detecting early infection from small amounts of the changed protein is probably not workable.
If you can get the disease from eating meat that can't be tested, then the only safe choices are to make sure none of the meat is contaminated or else stop eating beef.
The USDA has rejected the latter approach, so they test to make sure that the number of cases is at acceptable levels. When they find a positive case people freak out because the only acceptable level is zero, so they must test enough to detect a truly dangerous epidemic, but not enough to detect any cases when there is not an epidemic.
Maybe you can't get the disease from cows unless they already show symptoms. In that case we're OK as long as beef producers discard every cow that has symptoms instead of profiting from them.
If you like voodoo thinking, the low levels detected in random human brains could possibly mean that you can get it from early-stage cows, and most of us have gotten it and will show symptoms in the future. This is compatible with the data but you don't win anything by thinking about it unless you like to feel doomed.
We are betting the nation on the hope that early-stage infections are not infective, or that there are very very few early-stage infections in our cattle. We currently have no way to tell whether that's true.
If it's false advertising to say that young cattle which have been tested are BSE-free, what kind of advertising is it to say that our national stock of cattle -- only a very few of which ever get tested -- is BSE-free?
Anyway, I say that the obviously good choice here would be, if US businesses want to test cattle so they can export them and improve our balance of trade, do the tests for them at cost. But have the FDA tell them they can't advertise their meat as BSE-free.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 15, 2008 10:35:05 PM
Can't resist being the 100th commenter.
I wonder if the regulators are implementing Demings methods of statsistical process control and quality management. If not, and if not utilizing other known best practices, and if the system is as helter skelter as it appears, then I see no reason to propagate a flawed system, even if I did believe in gov't regulation per se. Propagating a good gov't system would be one thing, even for me. Propagating one like this does not meet the smell test (or was that smell the meat test?)
Q: Why get into debating what constitutes BSE free? It's hard to prove a negative. Why not just advertise what testing protocols were used?
"Later, people who previously would have had no credibility at all managed to get control of the FDA and attempted to turn it into something we'd be better off without."
I'd probably say Friedman would have agreed with you that we'd be better off without something that instills a false sense of security. But, you can't blame Friedman for the mistaken credibility others impute by taking his name in vain. I want to abolish most gov't programs, but until that day, they should do their best to achieve their missions. I suspect Friedman would have agreed with this. If some hacks use Friedman as an appeal to authority fallacy and fool some suckers, I can't blame Friedman.
I disagree about the safe choices. If beef is the most affordable protein source, then it is not reasonable to avoid it on the miniscule chance of getting BSE. Tomatos are very good for you, a lot of health has been lost as an opportunity cost for recalling all the maters to get a small fraction of bad ones. This is invisible and marginal health compared to outright poisoning, so rationally or not, the more dramatic will win ever time. I can accept that reality without accepting that it is rational. To use your Iraq analogy, should we invade every country based on the infinitesimal chance they are pursuing WMD to use against us? Doing so might eliminate the chance of WMD being used against us (probably not), but it would entail other costs.
I think you have the science about right and the voodoo thinking spot on. I'd say, if anything, because prions and cellular junk is a more general aging-related problem, not just a mad cow problem, our tax dollars might be better spent researching remedies for the cellular junk problem rather than wringing our hands and political wrangling over something that amounts to government PR for the beef industry.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 16, 2008 6:26:58 AM
I see no reason to propagate a flawed system, even if I did believe in gov't regulation per se.
I don't know the details of how the system is run. They should have had the best professional scientists they could get to design it. The system may have been designed for one level of funding, and then have the funding cut with no funds to optimise the system for reduced funding. That happens sometimes.
One advantage of government testing is that they don't have as much incentive to cheat. Except that we're getting a lot of reports of attempts to cheat by political appointees. A private testing system that could show its integrity would be a good alternative.
Q: Why get into debating what constitutes BSE free? It's hard to prove a negative. Why not just advertise what testing protocols were used?
I completely agree.
I disagree about the safe choices. If beef is the most affordable protein source, then it is not reasonable to avoid it on the miniscule chance of getting BSE.
The USDA testing is designed to make sure that chance is miniscule, at minimal cost. If the chance gets too high, then the testing should detect it. Assuming various assumptions, that we have no evidence against yet.
Tomatos are very good for you, a lot of health has been lost as an opportunity cost for recalling all the maters to get a small fraction of bad ones.
This is a side-effect of our distribution system. Probably the small fraction are coming from a few places, but we don't track which places they are. Better tracking would probably pay for itself pretty quick.
...our tax dollars might be better spent researching remedies for the cellular junk problem...
Research is good. Our beef industry has a PR problem -- people don't trust them not to break the rules then that's profitable. So testing by somebody generally believed to be trustworthy is an aid to commerce -- to people getting meat on their tables. But now the government testing is somewhat suspect too. What to do?
There's the side issue that globalization reduces our government's sovereignty. When it's all domestic the government can say what to do and people can do it that way or be criminals. When we compete on the world market then to some extent we have to do what foreign customers want.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 16, 2008 7:56:26 AM
I agree that the info (can't be called analysis) provided in the original post here is far too circumstantial to be considered a disproof or a debunking of Krugman. A simple explanation would be supported by this claim in Slate ( http://www.slate.com/id/2193474/ ) that the increase has not been in food-bourne sanitary problems, but in produce (i.e. non-meat). That article is also not conclusive, but Krugman's claim (direct or implied) that the type of outbreak he is talking about has increased is not outrageous.
At any rate, a column with these arguments (an opinion piece in a major newspaper with limited column space) will not contain the detailed statistical analysis. At minimum, before making claims about debunking Krugman with a terrible quality regression (seriously, that regression would be laughed out of any intro stats course) - one could ask Krugman or his assistants to provide their sources.
Krugman may not have proven his point (it's an argument, not a proof), but this so-called disproof is a joke.
Posted by: Armoured at Jun 16, 2008 7:59:02 AM
Just a couple of comments on the food fight: First, it’s apparent we don’t need lawyers to protect us – what happened to spinach producers during the E. coli scare was pretty devastating. Now tomato producers are taking a huge hit. The food industry is well motivated to police itself. Second, and more importantly, I don’t think hiring more inspectors will do much to prevent these outbreaks; these big government initiatives work well at getting politicians reelected but rarely deliver much added safety, IMHO.
We do, however, have a safe technology that could greatly reduce the incidence of bacterial contamination in our foods – irradiation. Hysterical and committed “activists” have intimidated grocers to the point that a consumer like me can’t get irradiated chicken, eggs, hamburger, spinach, etc. even if I were willing to pay a premium for safety. The National Academy of Science has judged the process to be free of risks to the consumer, and the FDA has approved it for use – so why can’t we get our bacteria-free food? Interestingly, spices have been irradiated for many years without any protests from the “activists”; in this case, the practice is meant to improve shelf-life, which is another benefit of irradiation.
Posted by: fcrawford at Jun 17, 2008 9:39:06 AM
It seems to me that anyone getting sick from anything resembling foodborne disease is reported numerous times in the media. The news is awash with the same repetitive story for days. Public opinion drives businesses to over-react and recall millions of individual items to avoid litigation. It doesn't matter whether the budget of CDC is limited (just like everyone else's budget)the news media will report the event as an earth-shaking tragedy. All the cases that really are cases of food poisoning are reported.
New technology and computer connections take the place of an on-site CDC representative and Big Brother knows more than ever what is happening in our lives. In part, because we insist on whining about it.
Posted by: Stan Heard at Jun 17, 2008 10:20:48 AM
The lowdown on The Jungle
Posted by: cpurick at Jun 17, 2008 10:38:48 PM
Milton favored the inspection of restaurants and other food suppliers by the government. He opposed silly regulations but he was not against inspections. I don't know where this idea that Milton disliked food inspections comes from. His view was that informed consumers would be able to make informed choices. For example, a scare about the safety of watermelons could be traced to a single grower but all growers would suffer absent some way to convince. It is in the interest of the careful growers to communicate their safe product. This can be done by branding, by 3rd party inspections, or by government inspections. He did not call for an end to food inspection he just discussed how the same objectives could be achieved through other means.
I remember Phil Donahue interviewing Milton on this very topic. Milton said that he had no objection to food inspections by the government. He even conceded that the government could have advantages and that it was a proper role for government to inform people about safety concerns. Markets work better if you can lower the transaction costs for consumers in such a way that everyone benefits. New York city benefits if tourist know that all New York restaurants are inspected and customers don't need to do independent research.
Krugman is wrong on the facts and on Milton's views on the topic.
Posted by: DanC at Jun 18, 2008 12:04:32 AM
DanC, when I did a quick Google search the first article I turned up was somebody who claimed Milton Friedman advocated eliminating the FDA.
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=279
They didn't quote him directly, though. They quoted somebody who quoted him.
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/stop_taxing_non.htm
Here's Friedman himself saying he wants to abolish the FDA.
He might easily be recommending that we do something better than the FDA, but he definitely has done what Krugman says he did.
I don't know how much to blame him for the result. If a nobel peace prize winner announces we ought to nuke russia, and later the US government does start a war on russia that doesn't exactly follow the smart guy's advice, how much should we blame him for it? I'd tend to think not much. He might have had a good idea that went bad when they did it badly.
We can't hold people responsible when they propose policy and somebody else tries to carry it out and does it badly. Nobody had to follow their advice. If you tell somebody to jump off a cliff and they do it, is it your fault? They should have known better.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 18, 2008 9:51:50 AM
In the second article you mention, Milton is talking about the FDA and drug laws. That has nothing to do with food safety. Milton wanted to decriminalize drug use. Krugman was not talking about that.
In the first article, Milton did talk about how the FDA approval process added costs to the development of drugs far more then they increased safety. That is the truth. Of course, once a seller gets approval for a drug they like the fact that the FDA keeps all but the most deep pocketed competitors away from the market is a plus. But again that has little to do with food inspections.
Milton was not against the government doing food inspections and it was essentially about who had the lowest transaction costs to conduct such inspections and inform the public. Milton was never anti-government or pro- business. Milton favored competition and individual freedom. Free markets that are not overly regulated encourage competition and offer citizens the greatest opportunities.
Krugman was wrong on the facts and he was wrong about Milton's views.
Posted by: DanC at Jun 18, 2008 12:40:04 PM
And J Thomas, I would reject your notion of who is to blame for nuking Russia.
A better analogy is a preacher preaches love and understanding but his message is distorted by some to mean control and intolerance. (Or in Krugman's case you claim the it was secretly a message of hate and violence.) Can you blame the preacher for the way others have distorted his message?
Posted by: DanC at Jun 18, 2008 12:53:46 PM
A better analogy is a preacher preaches love and understanding but his message is distorted by some to mean control and intolerance.
I don't see it. Maybe a better analogy is an economist who preaches the abolition of federal regulating agencies and his message is distorted by politicians who weaken and attempt to abolish federal regulating agencies.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 19, 2008 7:31:13 PM
I give up. You willfully refuse to understand the point. First, the evidence is that food safety has not declined so Krugman is wrong on the facts. Second, Krugman blames Milton but Milton was not against government inspection of food so Krugman is wrong when he tries to assign blame.
Milton was correct in arguing against federal regulatory policies that reduce competition, increase costs, and decrease freedom. History is full of examples. And on the occasions when the market fails, by the time the press and politicians realize there is a problem, the market is fixing it. But this tread was about food safety and Krugman was wrong on almost every level.
Posted by: DanC at Jun 19, 2008 11:39:40 PM
DanC, I concede your points. We have so little evidence about food safety that Krugman would be wrong to claim it's much worse than before. Krugman might be wrong to blame Friedman for the US government's generalised regulatory collapse.
However, these are not what Krugman was talking about. For him they were minor side issues that you have put all your attention onto because they make it look like Krugman is wrong. You are barking down the wrong tree.
Krugman's point was that by emasculating USDA and FDA the Bush administration hurt US business. That it was counterproductive for their own goals.
But this tread was about food safety and Krugman was wrong on almost every level.
True, your interpretation of Krugman is wrong on almost every level. But you are interpreting Krugman wrongly. That's one of the levels it's wrong on.
Posted by: J Thomas at Jun 20, 2008 8:59:01 AM
The Jungle was a joke anyway. Check this out: http://mises.org/story/2317. Put that in the pile atop your copies of Silent Spring, the Kinsey Report, and Coming of Age in Samoa, and file under Influential but Deeply Flawed Works by Deceptive and Self-Interested Authors.
Posted by: dbthayer at Jun 25, 2008 10:50:40 PM
