Nothing Good About Increased Scarcity
9 December 2007
The Editor, The Economist
25 St James's Street
London SW1A 1HG
United Kingdom
SIR:
I'm disappointed to read in your Leader "The end of cheap food" (December 8) a line unworthy of your great tradition and name. You proclaim that "Dearer food has the capacity to do enormous good and enormous harm." Harm, yes. But good?
You're correct, of course, that higher food prices raise returns to agricultural work (which indeed is good for farmers). But would you insist also that, say, earthquakes do enormous good as well as harm? These disasters raise returns to those who work in, and who supply, the building and medical trades. Alternatively, would you worry that an invention that allowed a single farmer to feed the world from a single flowerpot would do harm as well as good? Do you not see that economic growth consists in producing today's goods and services with fewer and fewer resources so that not only are the prices of these outputs lowered, but resources are made available to produce things that would otherwise be too costly?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
The Editor, The Economist
25 St James's Street
London SW1A 1HG
United Kingdom
SIR:
I'm disappointed to read in your Leader "The end of cheap food" (December 8) a line unworthy of your great tradition and name. You proclaim that "Dearer food has the capacity to do enormous good and enormous harm." Harm, yes. But good?
You're correct, of course, that higher food prices raise returns to agricultural work (which indeed is good for farmers). But would you insist also that, say, earthquakes do enormous good as well as harm? These disasters raise returns to those who work in, and who supply, the building and medical trades. Alternatively, would you worry that an invention that allowed a single farmer to feed the world from a single flowerpot would do harm as well as good? Do you not see that economic growth consists in producing today's goods and services with fewer and fewer resources so that not only are the prices of these outputs lowered, but resources are made available to produce things that would otherwise be too costly?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Saturday May 17, 2008 at 3:09pm