RADAMISTO: REGULATION AND FOOD SAFETY

Friday, June 13, 2008

REGULATION AND FOOD SAFETY

Paul Krugman argues (6/13/08) that our food safety has declined because the believers in the Free Market Fairy don't like regulation:

Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed — not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era — as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.

Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

The late Milton Friedman agreed, calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits. (Friedman, unlike almost every other conservative I can think of, viewed lawyers as the guardians of free-market capitalism.)

Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety 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.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution thinks Krugman is wrong to blame the GOP and provides a graph for the years 1998-2006 derived from data at the CDC for Food Borne Illnesses. In his graph, the trend in number of outbreak seems to be declining although there is considerable variance. He also states that in 1998 CDC changed it's "surveillance system creating a discontinuity " in the data. I don't see that noted on the CDC's site and Tabarrok does not give a link.

The available data go back to 1990 and I graphed the number of outbreaks and the number of individual cases of food borne illnesses. Tabarrok seems partially correct about 1998 - something happened that greatly increased the numbers. Overall, though, it seems that the GOP Congress since 1994 may have had a role, as Krugman claims.

DATA SOURCES

http://www.cdc.gov/foodborneoutbreaks/us_outb/fbo1990/fbofinal1990.pdf