While giving some of my thoughts on R. R. Reno’s book Return of the Strong Gods, I gave Reno credit for doing very well at something called the Display Test. I quoted from Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke’s book Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, where it was described this way:
Virtually every policy proposal would have downsides – perhaps even significant ones – if implemented. If a politician is honest about those downsides and supports the policy anyway, this is good evidence that she supports the policy because she thinks it will secure overall good outcomes. On the other hand, if a politician obscures or refuses to acknowledge the negatives of her proposal, Pincione and Teson suggest she is either ignorant or dishonest. She’s ignorant if she’s not aware of the downsides. She’s dishonest if she’s aware of the downsides but conceals them for rhetorical advantage. As Pincione and Teson put it, she’s a “posturer.”
Of course, it’s all well and good to value the Display Test and talk about how useful it is, but simply leaving it at that might indicate one is doing little more than, well, grandstanding. I think it’s a good idea for people to regularly apply this test to themselves. And in the spirit of that, I thought I’d carry out this exercise as well. I’ve done something like this before, where I described what I see as real downsides that come along with my support of the free press. This time, I’m going to describe what I see as real potential downsides that come along with something I think is generally great – the tendency of the market mechanism to improve efficiency.
Calling back to another post of mine, I once wrote about how HarperCollins spent a great deal of time and effort making changes to font format and print layouts for their books to minimize the number of pages needed per book and ink needed per page. The end result was a page that was virtually indistinguishable to the eye from previous formats, but when put to use printing Bibles, “these adjustments resulted in 350 fewer pages being needed per Bible, which in 2017 alone resulted in over 100 million fewer pages needed – four times the height of the Empire State Building, according to the story.”
Overall, I said, this was a really impressive display of how much the market incentivizes producing as much as possible while using the least resources necessary:
The market provides strong incentives to find and implement every feasible option to reduce and minimize the resources needed in production. If there is some means available to reduce resource usage by even a tiny amount, someone out there is looking for it, and will find and implement it. By contrast, can you imagine any government agency putting teams to work engaging in similarly intensive efforts to ensure they are using only the minimum amount of resources necessary?
But this process, too, can have serious downsides, in a way that reminds me of a quip from the comedian Lewis Black when he was ranting about how Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as governor: “Jesse Ventura proves what’s great about democracy – anybody can get elected to any office. And he also shows what stinks about democracy – anybody can get elected to any office.”
I’m on the record as having been convinced to give up animal products as a result of Michael Huemer and Bryan Caplan’s debate about the ethics of animal treatment. I was persuaded by Huemer that the amount of cruelty that exists in the meat, eggs, and dairy industry is a moral travesty far outweighing the importance of personal gustatory pleasure. A lot of that cruelty is done in the name of maximizing output while minimizing costs. And it turns out, even the most extreme measures don’t actually reduce costs by all that much.
As just one example, a common practice in egg production is called chick culling. Basically, newborn male chicks aren’t much use for an egg farm, but about half of all chickens born on an egg farm will be male. As a result, male chicks are killed en masse shortly after birth, most commonly by being fed straight into grinding machines (less commonly, they’re gassed or suffocated to death in plastic). It’s estimated that something like seven billion baby chickens are killed this way each year. Technology exists that allows egg farmers to identify which eggs will produce male or female chicks, and ensure only the female chicks hatch. It’s expensive, but chick culling has its own expenses, like doubling the energy and space needed to incubate eggs while only using half the resulting chicks, plus paying the costs of the culling operation itself. (It’s estimated to cost about a dollar per baby chicken culled, so industry wide $7 billion dollars are spent just carrying out this act.) Still, chick culling is cheaper – but by how much? A few countries have banned the practice of chick culling, such as Germany and Austria, and producers began using screening technology instead. The result was an increase in prices of about two cents per egg.
In this way, the process of market efficiency mirrors the above quip from Lewis Black. If producers can find ways to make just a few tiny tweaks and get just a few more words printed per page in order to use the least necessary resources, the market will drive them to find and use those techniques. But in the same way, if farmers feeding live baby chickens directly into meat grinders by the billions shortly after birth lets them shave another two cents off the price of an egg, then they’ll do that as well. This is true not just of chick culling but of pretty much all of the cruelest practices of the meat and dairy industry – if a method that massively increases the pain and suffering of billions of animals each year also results in just a tiny decrease in prices, then producers will do that as well.
However, rather than turn the comment section into a flame war about the ethics of animal cruelty, I’d like to suggest a different route. Dear EconLog readers, what would be an example of your own for the Display Test? What’s a policy you favor, and what are some of the negative results you believe will come about from that policy as a result?
