What happened to the Co-op that was at Telegraph and Alston (if memory serves) in 1962, when I started graduate school? It was part of the Twin Pines co-operative movement, with headquarters in Albert Lea, Minnesota. It seemed to be competitive with Safeway and Lucky, the two big private chains.
I agree completely that the best thing Momdani can do for all New Yorkers, including me, is to have a well run city with a good public school system. Hard enough to get that done. Keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, get a great superintendent of schools, someone excellent at running the MTA, and so on. Granted much of these need state agreement, and Cuomo has already shown himself to be anti-NY when he was governor.
As Edward Banfield argued in his 1970 classic Unheavenly Cities, socialism in one city is a losing proposition. House the current homeless population and more people will show up needing housing. Raise taxes too high and tax-payers will leave. Redistribution is best done at a national level. But great public management is available to everyone.
Republicans are the Mao Zedongs of our time. Bad economic ideas, (tariffs, subservient fed, corporate subsidies, anti science, anti history) bigotry, isolationism, and a league of fools.
Where I live in California, the <s>city</s>town I live in has food deserts - that is, a lack of grocery stores within easy reach in some districts. It has been noted for years, yet the town cannot seem to attract grocery store companies to locate in these districts. What I have is a Dollar General store locally. It has a pitiful selection of fruits, vegetables, and meats. Most of the store is ultra-processed foods, beverages, and household goods. yet we have the idiots in charge of kneecapping the HHS demanding we are patriotic and eat healthy foods! No joined-up thinking there.
To be fair, I mostly shop using delivery, so I can access the more expensive, but proper full grocery stores that are more distant using online selection and delivery. I have to pay the service and delivery fees, but at least they are accessible. DG is just for emergencies.
Like many towns, we have a food bank, as well as charity food help to stretch budgets. The USDA distributes excess farm produce at one site. Why shouldn't there be local city-owned stores that source fresh food from farms, especially the fruits and vegetables that the grocery stores won't accept because they are misshapen and not "pretty"? Such stores need not sell vast varieties of processed foods, but be more like the open markets found in many European towns, like our "Farmers' Markets," but with more foods and include the other items on a grocery list.
What boggles my mind is that, weight-for-weight, fresh fruit and vegetables are often more expensive than meats. Protein is important, but why are healthy fruits and vegetables so relatively expensive? How does this help with healthier diets?
Publicly owned stores are not necessarily the best solution, but when the "free market" refuses to serve a population, shouldn't the government step in to meet that need?
I think that Brad might want to reconsider his 1978 decision to abjure the "socialist" label. Several reasons: 1.) It doesn't mean "commie dupe" anymore; 2.) A lot of people are disgusted with left-neoliberal mainstream-D rhetoric--especially young people. It sounds like boss-talk; 3.) AOC and Bernie have thrived with the label; 4.) As a consequence of #3, Che Guevara is finally dead; 5.) Fiery rhetoric never hurt the Republicans; and 6.) Republicans genuinely believe that watered-down New Dealism is socialism. Running away from the word only looks cowardly and hypocritical.
Well, in many (some) linguistic communities "socialism" still does mean "commie dupe". Consider, as an analogy, "globalize the intifada": one of the organizations that
There is a lot of leftazoid rhetoric that signifies a bad case of intellectual acne. I just don't think that "socialism" is part of this parcel any more. Not that Mamdani is completely innocent of leftazoid babble. Third-worldist rhetoric--such as "globalize the intifada"--is chum-bait for dupes. (I call them "America Worsters.") "Socialism" attracts many young and generally angry people, and repels few reachable folk.
Well, in many (some) linguistic communities "socialism" still does mean "commie dupe". The question is whether those communities contain many reachable folk or not...
Consider, as an analogy, "globalize the intifada":
One of the organizations that uses the phrase most frequently and stridently is "Within Our Lifetime". Within Our Lifetime's webpage highlights things like:
> If you take peace from the people, we take peace from you: a call for sustained action against the Brooklyn Museum in Gaza.... The Brooklyn Museum’s complicity in this genocide.... Despite its claim to be a “progressive” cultural institution, we know that through its leadership, trustees, corporate sponsors and donors, this museum is deeply invested in and complicit in the ongoing colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.... Three central demands.... 1. To recognize the genocide in Palestine and make a declaration to this effect. 2. To disclose its investments and divest from Israel’s genocidal apparatus. 3. To pay reparations for its contributions to colonial looting and gentrification..."
Of all the movers and actors committing and supporting the massacres and atrocities committed by Bibi and all his henchmen in Gaza, the Brooklyn Museum is **way** down on the list. A focus of Within Our Lifetime's response to Gaza today is to "take peace"—whatever that might mean—away from the Brooklyn Museum, as one link in "confronting U.S. and Israeli aggression globally... [by] fighting against–the creditor class, the landlords, the cops, the prison industry, the teargas manufacturers, the multinational corporations, the mining companies, and the military defense complex..."
And so: adopt that slogan, and are going to find yourself with very few normies in America willing to give you a hearing. Whatever "globalize the intifada" might mean to you when you say it, it is unlikely to serve coalition-building purposes here in America.
Ditto for the word "socialism", I think.
To some degree, I think, the poison comes because Lenin and Mao and company do have a valid warrant from Karl Marx to make a revolution and then not establish a democracy. The point of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" is that after the revolution normal rights, processes, and procedures are suspended so that bold action can be taken ("dictatorship"), and that if you are not in the industrial working class ("proletariat") you do not get any kind of say, because you have a strong class interest opposed to the General Will that is the inescapable decree of History.
"Social democracy" was a synonym back in 1848, and only began to get distinguished when—with Marx and Engels objecting—the Lasalleist Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein picked "The Social Democrat" as the title for its newspape in 1864.
And so I think it is still the case that if you want to get waste-deep in the Big Muddy very quickly, try to grab that word "socialism" as a substitute for "social democracy":
> Ziggy: I think that Brad might want to reconsider his 1978 decision to abjure the "socialist" label. Several reasons: 1.) It doesn't mean "commie dupe" anymore; 2.) A lot of people are disgusted with left-neoliberal mainstream-D rhetoric--especially young people. It sounds like boss-talk; 3.) AOC and Bernie have thrived with the label; 4.) As a consequence of #3, Che Guevara is finally dead; 5.) Fiery rhetoric never hurt the Republicans; and 6.) Republicans genuinely believe that watered-down New Dealism is socialism. Running away from the word only looks cowardly and hypocritical...
AEI guy argues that Mamdani’s math on city-run grocery stores is based on a huge error.
FWIW, I ran this through high-level AI and it pretty much checks out. But I’m curious what an expert human would say.
Bottom line:
FRESH “costs an average of $3.3 million per year. So, this program would take 42 years to cost the city the $140 million that Mamdani says “the city is set to spend” on it.”
According to this, he misread numbers on city’s web page.
…According to Mamdani, his five grocery stores would cost $60 million.
“That should be compared to the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores … So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results,” he said …
[The Fresh Program] is a bundle of tax breaks and special regulatory relief for grocery stores that open up in so-called food deserts …
The subsidy includes some tax breaks: building taxes stay at the pre-improvement level for a few years, land taxes are abated, there are some tax breaks for building the store, and some of the transfer taxes are cut. (The store still collects and remits sales tax, pays payroll taxes, pays corporate income taxes, et cetera.)
The FRESH program can also include some zoning and regulatory relief.
The tax breaks have saved the grocery stores a few million dollars each year.
Here are the hard numbers: All in all, the city has given up about $30 million in tax revenue through this program. In the last six years, since FRESH got into full swing, the program has reduced revenue by about $20 million total, according to the city’s estimates. That is, it costs an average of $3.3 million per year. So, this program would take 42 years to cost the city the $140 million that Mamdani says “the city is set to spend” on it.
"Want" does a lot of work in economics generally and pretty much undermines the meaning of rationality in any but the thinnest instrumental sense (an addict who buys a unit of heroin at the cheaper of two prices is acting rationally). Once you introduce even a mildly thicker sense of welfare or utility, the arguments for the functionality of free markets break down.
Regarding people not wanting fresh foods. Keep in mind these food deserts are not new. There are many kids who have grown up on high-sugar, high-fat diets - and not just in food deserts. It will take a long time to reverse this. The other problem is that giving transportation and storage costs, highly produced foods with lots of preservatives (sugar and salt being two of them), fresh, unprocessed foods are always going to be significantly more expensive unless subsidized (anyone been to Whole Foods lately?).
You also need to take into account the huge costs to society in loss of productivity and medical expenses as well as knock-on effects to education and housing caused by food deserts. These dwarf the cost of subsidizing fresh food.
Krugman, following historian David Courtwright, has talked about limbic capitalism.
"I've heard from constituents time and again that there simply isn't high-quality produce within a five-block, 10-block radius, but I can find five, six different fast food restaurants in that same space"
This is laughable. A neighborhood that can support five fast food restaurants could support a at least small grocery store IF THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD WANTED FRESH GROCERIES. That's how "markets" work, isn't it? If the demand is there, the market will satisfy that demand. "Food deserts" and "food anxiety" are fake concepts invented by virtue-signaling liberals to justify giving more money to the poor. If Mamdani actually does establish even a single "People's Grocery Store" anywhere in New York, I will be surprised. And if he does establish one, or more, they will be money losers, because they will designed to sell people the food that liberal elitists think they ought to want ("high quality produce") instead of the food they actually do want (Big Macs). But the stores probably won't be shut down, because, like any government program, they will be job creators, aka "pork".
It's "sad" that someone like you who has quite a bit of knowledge about how markets work is so willing to fall in love with this pseudo-socialist posturing.
The word "want" is doing an awful lot of work here.
I genuinely want to weigh 180 pounds. My revealed preference is that I do not really "want" to weigh 180 pounds. The von Hayekian market economy is going to deliver me a profit motive-guided food system that is going to make it much harder for me to ever weigh anything close to 180 pounds—unless I choose to shop at Berkeley small grocery stores run by truly crazed hippies that are unprofitable because they do not put empty-calorie fats and sweets in front of your face while you wait in the checkout line.
Start from the von Hayekian catallaxy of property and contract and market as a discover procedure. Then recognize:
* **Pigovian externalities**, which need bounties and taxes to get incentives for market behavior right...
* **Monopoly**, which requires **Shermanian** antitrust.
* **Increasing returns**, which mean that a competitive equilibrium cannot be sustained, and require **Elyist** rate regulation or **Samuelsonian** public provision of public and public-like goods and services, or something...
* **Beveridgean externalities**—that the market economy maximizes a social welfare function that, roughly, weights the utility of each individual by their lifetime wealth. Unless you think that weighting people's needs and desires by their wealth is what a good SWF should do, you need redistributive progressive taxes and programs...
* **Keynesian** externalities: when aggregate demand is not matched to aggregate supply, the market cannot do its proper job, for either market prices will not support profitable production at scale or you will find yourself unable to carry out your budget plan of taking your income and spending it to purchase things at the prices you had expected.
* **Weinerian cybernetic considerations**, for the firms needed for efficient local non-market coördination cannot be unitary rational actors but are, rather, conflicted systems of communication and control...
The question now is: Do we add:
* **Kahnemanian behavioral considerations**, requiring the building of an economy that makes it easy for us to live wisely and well by maximizing our ease of accessing our long-run System II thinking and making it very difficult for bad actors to profit by hacking our brains to make us fall back into knee-jerk System I?
Or do we pretend that this last does not exist, or is not important? Or that people who have not been situated in their life to have an easy time making their System II the default deserve what happens to them, for, after all, "if God had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep"?
OK, this is entertaining. It is likely that we will have a "real world" experiment when/if Mamdani is elected and he actually does build a "People's Grocery" somewhere. I predict that the market for "high quality produce" (presumably, arugula, baby spinach, and "heirloom" tomatoes) will prove significantly less than that for all the beef/bacon/cheese double whoppers that cunning capitalists so insidiously contrive for our corporeal seduction/damnation. Unless you actually ban all the fat foods Americans consume (which is of course impossible), they will eat them. You can find my own take on Mamdani on my own substack site, "Literature R Us", under the title "Zohran Mamdani is full of ideas, and every single one of them is bad" and my own take on you at my old "Literature R Us" site (avanneman.com) under the title "Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?", which is a lie, because I never took Econ 101. But thanks for the reply. Food for thought, definitely!
I know there is demand for higher quality produce by lower income shoppers. When the local farmers' markets started to accept EBT, it got a lot more low income shoppers buying fruits and vegetables from local farmers. The market already issued scrip, so this just meant setting up a terminal. It's in the old tradition of farmers' markets. NYC had a number of them dating to the New Deal and some earlier where one could buy cheaper produce. Haymarket was noted for this in Boston.
If you talk to the people running the food banks, you'd know there is demand for produce among the financially stressed. Don't confuse high quality produce with specialty produce. No one is talking about morels or heirloom tomatoes. Things like arugula and baby spinach are pretty mainstream now, and not particularly expensive. There has been a lot of innovation in packaging, preservation and presentation in the past decade or two, and supply chains have moved with the times.
For a long time, the relatively low cost of a fast food meal made it the cheaper option, but fast food is no longer as cheap as it used to be. I don't buy much of it, but I see the signs and ads offering deals. I get the impression that ingredients and cooking may have become the cheaper option. As a sign of the times, the local MacDonald's was once the neutral turf where divorced parents exchanged children. Recently, the local court ended the practice when a lot of poorer parents complained that they had become the parent who couldn't afford to treat their children there, and it's not like the nearby Wendy's, Chipotle or the others are cheaper.
"A neighborhood that can support five fast food restaurants could support a at least small grocery store IF THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD WANTED FRESH GROCERIES. "
You seem to be divorced from reality. The excuse that people don't want fresh food is bizarre, to say the least. Fast food is a substitute that is relatively cheap, and easier for stressed parents to feed themselves and their kids. It certainly isn't healthy. In my part of the US, fast food is burgers, pizzas, or burritos. Some families have forgotten how to even cook. There are classes to learn that skill. Bulk home cooking, often at a weekend, to make meals that can be reheated during the week, keeps food costs low, but you need to learn how. But if there are no grocery stores within easy reach, then this dissuades one from even trying.
What happened to the Co-op that was at Telegraph and Alston (if memory serves) in 1962, when I started graduate school? It was part of the Twin Pines co-operative movement, with headquarters in Albert Lea, Minnesota. It seemed to be competitive with Safeway and Lucky, the two big private chains.
I agree completely that the best thing Momdani can do for all New Yorkers, including me, is to have a well run city with a good public school system. Hard enough to get that done. Keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, get a great superintendent of schools, someone excellent at running the MTA, and so on. Granted much of these need state agreement, and Cuomo has already shown himself to be anti-NY when he was governor.
As Edward Banfield argued in his 1970 classic Unheavenly Cities, socialism in one city is a losing proposition. House the current homeless population and more people will show up needing housing. Raise taxes too high and tax-payers will leave. Redistribution is best done at a national level. But great public management is available to everyone.
Republicans are the Mao Zedongs of our time. Bad economic ideas, (tariffs, subservient fed, corporate subsidies, anti science, anti history) bigotry, isolationism, and a league of fools.
Where I live in California, the <s>city</s>town I live in has food deserts - that is, a lack of grocery stores within easy reach in some districts. It has been noted for years, yet the town cannot seem to attract grocery store companies to locate in these districts. What I have is a Dollar General store locally. It has a pitiful selection of fruits, vegetables, and meats. Most of the store is ultra-processed foods, beverages, and household goods. yet we have the idiots in charge of kneecapping the HHS demanding we are patriotic and eat healthy foods! No joined-up thinking there.
To be fair, I mostly shop using delivery, so I can access the more expensive, but proper full grocery stores that are more distant using online selection and delivery. I have to pay the service and delivery fees, but at least they are accessible. DG is just for emergencies.
Like many towns, we have a food bank, as well as charity food help to stretch budgets. The USDA distributes excess farm produce at one site. Why shouldn't there be local city-owned stores that source fresh food from farms, especially the fruits and vegetables that the grocery stores won't accept because they are misshapen and not "pretty"? Such stores need not sell vast varieties of processed foods, but be more like the open markets found in many European towns, like our "Farmers' Markets," but with more foods and include the other items on a grocery list.
What boggles my mind is that, weight-for-weight, fresh fruit and vegetables are often more expensive than meats. Protein is important, but why are healthy fruits and vegetables so relatively expensive? How does this help with healthier diets?
Publicly owned stores are not necessarily the best solution, but when the "free market" refuses to serve a population, shouldn't the government step in to meet that need?
I think that Brad might want to reconsider his 1978 decision to abjure the "socialist" label. Several reasons: 1.) It doesn't mean "commie dupe" anymore; 2.) A lot of people are disgusted with left-neoliberal mainstream-D rhetoric--especially young people. It sounds like boss-talk; 3.) AOC and Bernie have thrived with the label; 4.) As a consequence of #3, Che Guevara is finally dead; 5.) Fiery rhetoric never hurt the Republicans; and 6.) Republicans genuinely believe that watered-down New Dealism is socialism. Running away from the word only looks cowardly and hypocritical.
Well, in many (some) linguistic communities "socialism" still does mean "commie dupe". Consider, as an analogy, "globalize the intifada": one of the organizations that
There is a lot of leftazoid rhetoric that signifies a bad case of intellectual acne. I just don't think that "socialism" is part of this parcel any more. Not that Mamdani is completely innocent of leftazoid babble. Third-worldist rhetoric--such as "globalize the intifada"--is chum-bait for dupes. (I call them "America Worsters.") "Socialism" attracts many young and generally angry people, and repels few reachable folk.
Well, in many (some) linguistic communities "socialism" still does mean "commie dupe". The question is whether those communities contain many reachable folk or not...
Consider, as an analogy, "globalize the intifada":
One of the organizations that uses the phrase most frequently and stridently is "Within Our Lifetime". Within Our Lifetime's webpage highlights things like:
> If you take peace from the people, we take peace from you: a call for sustained action against the Brooklyn Museum in Gaza.... The Brooklyn Museum’s complicity in this genocide.... Despite its claim to be a “progressive” cultural institution, we know that through its leadership, trustees, corporate sponsors and donors, this museum is deeply invested in and complicit in the ongoing colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.... Three central demands.... 1. To recognize the genocide in Palestine and make a declaration to this effect. 2. To disclose its investments and divest from Israel’s genocidal apparatus. 3. To pay reparations for its contributions to colonial looting and gentrification..."
Of all the movers and actors committing and supporting the massacres and atrocities committed by Bibi and all his henchmen in Gaza, the Brooklyn Museum is **way** down on the list. A focus of Within Our Lifetime's response to Gaza today is to "take peace"—whatever that might mean—away from the Brooklyn Museum, as one link in "confronting U.S. and Israeli aggression globally... [by] fighting against–the creditor class, the landlords, the cops, the prison industry, the teargas manufacturers, the multinational corporations, the mining companies, and the military defense complex..."
And so: adopt that slogan, and are going to find yourself with very few normies in America willing to give you a hearing. Whatever "globalize the intifada" might mean to you when you say it, it is unlikely to serve coalition-building purposes here in America.
Ditto for the word "socialism", I think.
To some degree, I think, the poison comes because Lenin and Mao and company do have a valid warrant from Karl Marx to make a revolution and then not establish a democracy. The point of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" is that after the revolution normal rights, processes, and procedures are suspended so that bold action can be taken ("dictatorship"), and that if you are not in the industrial working class ("proletariat") you do not get any kind of say, because you have a strong class interest opposed to the General Will that is the inescapable decree of History.
"Social democracy" was a synonym back in 1848, and only began to get distinguished when—with Marx and Engels objecting—the Lasalleist Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein picked "The Social Democrat" as the title for its newspape in 1864.
And so I think it is still the case that if you want to get waste-deep in the Big Muddy very quickly, try to grab that word "socialism" as a substitute for "social democracy":
> Ziggy: I think that Brad might want to reconsider his 1978 decision to abjure the "socialist" label. Several reasons: 1.) It doesn't mean "commie dupe" anymore; 2.) A lot of people are disgusted with left-neoliberal mainstream-D rhetoric--especially young people. It sounds like boss-talk; 3.) AOC and Bernie have thrived with the label; 4.) As a consequence of #3, Che Guevara is finally dead; 5.) Fiery rhetoric never hurt the Republicans; and 6.) Republicans genuinely believe that watered-down New Dealism is socialism. Running away from the word only looks cowardly and hypocritical...
AEI guy argues that Mamdani’s math on city-run grocery stores is based on a huge error.
FWIW, I ran this through high-level AI and it pretty much checks out. But I’m curious what an expert human would say.
Bottom line:
FRESH “costs an average of $3.3 million per year. So, this program would take 42 years to cost the city the $140 million that Mamdani says “the city is set to spend” on it.”
According to this, he misread numbers on city’s web page.
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/mamdanis-government-grocery-stores-plan-is-based-on-an-accounting-error/
Longer excerpt:
…According to Mamdani, his five grocery stores would cost $60 million.
“That should be compared to the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores … So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results,” he said …
[The Fresh Program] is a bundle of tax breaks and special regulatory relief for grocery stores that open up in so-called food deserts …
The subsidy includes some tax breaks: building taxes stay at the pre-improvement level for a few years, land taxes are abated, there are some tax breaks for building the store, and some of the transfer taxes are cut. (The store still collects and remits sales tax, pays payroll taxes, pays corporate income taxes, et cetera.)
The FRESH program can also include some zoning and regulatory relief.
The tax breaks have saved the grocery stores a few million dollars each year.
Here are the hard numbers: All in all, the city has given up about $30 million in tax revenue through this program. In the last six years, since FRESH got into full swing, the program has reduced revenue by about $20 million total, according to the city’s estimates. That is, it costs an average of $3.3 million per year. So, this program would take 42 years to cost the city the $140 million that Mamdani says “the city is set to spend” on it.
So why does Mamdani use that $140 million number?
He misread the city’s webpage …
Does this reach an objection to the $60 million number?
The problem is not the $60 million number.
It’s M’s assertion the city is spending $140 million to subsidize grocery stores that can be redirected.
That’s wrong - according to AEI guy.
Article is short and clear. Don’t know if it’s correct. Maybe Prof. D will weigh in.
"Want" does a lot of work in economics generally and pretty much undermines the meaning of rationality in any but the thinnest instrumental sense (an addict who buys a unit of heroin at the cheaper of two prices is acting rationally). Once you introduce even a mildly thicker sense of welfare or utility, the arguments for the functionality of free markets break down.
Regarding people not wanting fresh foods. Keep in mind these food deserts are not new. There are many kids who have grown up on high-sugar, high-fat diets - and not just in food deserts. It will take a long time to reverse this. The other problem is that giving transportation and storage costs, highly produced foods with lots of preservatives (sugar and salt being two of them), fresh, unprocessed foods are always going to be significantly more expensive unless subsidized (anyone been to Whole Foods lately?).
You also need to take into account the huge costs to society in loss of productivity and medical expenses as well as knock-on effects to education and housing caused by food deserts. These dwarf the cost of subsidizing fresh food.
Krugman, following historian David Courtwright, has talked about limbic capitalism.
"I've heard from constituents time and again that there simply isn't high-quality produce within a five-block, 10-block radius, but I can find five, six different fast food restaurants in that same space"
This is laughable. A neighborhood that can support five fast food restaurants could support a at least small grocery store IF THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD WANTED FRESH GROCERIES. That's how "markets" work, isn't it? If the demand is there, the market will satisfy that demand. "Food deserts" and "food anxiety" are fake concepts invented by virtue-signaling liberals to justify giving more money to the poor. If Mamdani actually does establish even a single "People's Grocery Store" anywhere in New York, I will be surprised. And if he does establish one, or more, they will be money losers, because they will designed to sell people the food that liberal elitists think they ought to want ("high quality produce") instead of the food they actually do want (Big Macs). But the stores probably won't be shut down, because, like any government program, they will be job creators, aka "pork".
It's "sad" that someone like you who has quite a bit of knowledge about how markets work is so willing to fall in love with this pseudo-socialist posturing.
The word "want" is doing an awful lot of work here.
I genuinely want to weigh 180 pounds. My revealed preference is that I do not really "want" to weigh 180 pounds. The von Hayekian market economy is going to deliver me a profit motive-guided food system that is going to make it much harder for me to ever weigh anything close to 180 pounds—unless I choose to shop at Berkeley small grocery stores run by truly crazed hippies that are unprofitable because they do not put empty-calorie fats and sweets in front of your face while you wait in the checkout line.
Start from the von Hayekian catallaxy of property and contract and market as a discover procedure. Then recognize:
* **Pigovian externalities**, which need bounties and taxes to get incentives for market behavior right...
* **Monopoly**, which requires **Shermanian** antitrust.
* **Increasing returns**, which mean that a competitive equilibrium cannot be sustained, and require **Elyist** rate regulation or **Samuelsonian** public provision of public and public-like goods and services, or something...
* **Beveridgean externalities**—that the market economy maximizes a social welfare function that, roughly, weights the utility of each individual by their lifetime wealth. Unless you think that weighting people's needs and desires by their wealth is what a good SWF should do, you need redistributive progressive taxes and programs...
* **Keynesian** externalities: when aggregate demand is not matched to aggregate supply, the market cannot do its proper job, for either market prices will not support profitable production at scale or you will find yourself unable to carry out your budget plan of taking your income and spending it to purchase things at the prices you had expected.
* **Weinerian cybernetic considerations**, for the firms needed for efficient local non-market coördination cannot be unitary rational actors but are, rather, conflicted systems of communication and control...
The question now is: Do we add:
* **Kahnemanian behavioral considerations**, requiring the building of an economy that makes it easy for us to live wisely and well by maximizing our ease of accessing our long-run System II thinking and making it very difficult for bad actors to profit by hacking our brains to make us fall back into knee-jerk System I?
Or do we pretend that this last does not exist, or is not important? Or that people who have not been situated in their life to have an easy time making their System II the default deserve what happens to them, for, after all, "if God had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep"?
OK, this is entertaining. It is likely that we will have a "real world" experiment when/if Mamdani is elected and he actually does build a "People's Grocery" somewhere. I predict that the market for "high quality produce" (presumably, arugula, baby spinach, and "heirloom" tomatoes) will prove significantly less than that for all the beef/bacon/cheese double whoppers that cunning capitalists so insidiously contrive for our corporeal seduction/damnation. Unless you actually ban all the fat foods Americans consume (which is of course impossible), they will eat them. You can find my own take on Mamdani on my own substack site, "Literature R Us", under the title "Zohran Mamdani is full of ideas, and every single one of them is bad" and my own take on you at my old "Literature R Us" site (avanneman.com) under the title "Yeah, I flunked Econ 101! What’s your point?", which is a lie, because I never took Econ 101. But thanks for the reply. Food for thought, definitely!
I know there is demand for higher quality produce by lower income shoppers. When the local farmers' markets started to accept EBT, it got a lot more low income shoppers buying fruits and vegetables from local farmers. The market already issued scrip, so this just meant setting up a terminal. It's in the old tradition of farmers' markets. NYC had a number of them dating to the New Deal and some earlier where one could buy cheaper produce. Haymarket was noted for this in Boston.
If you talk to the people running the food banks, you'd know there is demand for produce among the financially stressed. Don't confuse high quality produce with specialty produce. No one is talking about morels or heirloom tomatoes. Things like arugula and baby spinach are pretty mainstream now, and not particularly expensive. There has been a lot of innovation in packaging, preservation and presentation in the past decade or two, and supply chains have moved with the times.
For a long time, the relatively low cost of a fast food meal made it the cheaper option, but fast food is no longer as cheap as it used to be. I don't buy much of it, but I see the signs and ads offering deals. I get the impression that ingredients and cooking may have become the cheaper option. As a sign of the times, the local MacDonald's was once the neutral turf where divorced parents exchanged children. Recently, the local court ended the practice when a lot of poorer parents complained that they had become the parent who couldn't afford to treat their children there, and it's not like the nearby Wendy's, Chipotle or the others are cheaper.
"A neighborhood that can support five fast food restaurants could support a at least small grocery store IF THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD WANTED FRESH GROCERIES. "
You seem to be divorced from reality. The excuse that people don't want fresh food is bizarre, to say the least. Fast food is a substitute that is relatively cheap, and easier for stressed parents to feed themselves and their kids. It certainly isn't healthy. In my part of the US, fast food is burgers, pizzas, or burritos. Some families have forgotten how to even cook. There are classes to learn that skill. Bulk home cooking, often at a weekend, to make meals that can be reheated during the week, keeps food costs low, but you need to learn how. But if there are no grocery stores within easy reach, then this dissuades one from even trying.