While giving some of my thoughts about RR Reno’s books The Return of a Strong God, I’ve given Reno credit for doing so well in what’s called display tests. I quoted from Justin Toshi and Brandon Walke’s books Grand Standing: Use and abuse of moral stories, Where it was explained like this:
Virtually every policy proposal has policy proposals, if implemented, perhaps even important. If politicians are honest about those shortcomings and support policies anyway, this is good evidence that she supports policies, as she thinks she will ensure a good overall outcome. Meanwhile, when politicians vague or refuse to accept the denial of her proposal, Pincione and Taesung suggest that she is ignorant or injustice. If she doesn’t know her flaws, she is ignorant. If she knows the downsides, she is dishonest, but hides them for rhetorical advantages. As Pincione and Teson said, she is a “mail provider.”
Of course, cherishing display testing and talking about how useful it is is all right, but simply leaving it behind may indicate that it is doing more than grand. I think it’s a good idea for people to apply this test to themselves regularly. And with that spirit, I thought I would also carry out this exercise. I’ve done something like this before. So I described what I see as the real drawback that comes with my support in the Free Press. This time I will explain what I consider to be a real potential drawback that comes with something that I generally find great – trends in market mechanisms that improve efficiency.
Calling back to my other post, I once wrote about how HarperCollins spends a lot of time and effort to change the font format, print the layout of the book, minimizing the number of pages needed per page and the number of pages needed. The final result was a page that was virtually indistinguishable from the previous format, but using the Print Bible, “These adjustments meant that 350 fewer pages needed per Bible.
Overall, this was a truly impressive display of encouraging the market to produce as much as possible, while using the necessary resources.
The market offers a powerful incentive to find and implement all viable options to reduce and minimize the resources needed for production. If there’s less way to reduce resource usage, someone there is looking for it, so find it and implement it. In contrast, can you imagine government agencies working with teams involved in equally intensive efforts to ensure that only the minimum necessary resources are used?
However, this process can also have serious drawbacks. “Jesse Ventura proves great about democracy,” in a way that reminds me of a quip from comedian Lewis Black when Minnesota ranted that he had chosen a professional wrestler as governor.
I am on the record as I am confident that I will abandon animal products as a result of Michael Fumer and Brian Kaplan’s discussion of animal therapy ethics. I was persuaded by Huemer that the amount of cruelty present in the meat, eggs and dairy industry is a moral tragedy that far outweighs the importance of personal taste pleasures. Much of that cruelty comes from the name of maximizing output while minimizing costs. And even the most extreme measures actually do not cut costs that much.
As just one example, the common practice in egg production is called chick culling. Essentially, newborn male chicks are not very useful on egg farms, but about half of all chickens born on egg farms will be male. As a result, male chicks are killed in large quantities immediately after birth. Most commonly, they are killed by being fed straight to a grinder (not so common, they are gassed or choked with plastic). It is estimated that 7 billion baby chicken-like things are killed each year. technology It exists This allows egg farmers to identify which eggs produce male or female chicks, and to secure only female chick hatch. It’s expensive, but chick culling has its own costs, including double the energy and space required to incubate the eggs while only using half of the resulting chicks, plus the cost of the culling operation itself. (It is estimated that it will cost around $1 per baby chicken, so just carrying out this act will cost $7 billion across the industry.) Still, chick culling is cheap, but how much is it? Several countries have banned chick culling practices, such as Germany and Austria, and producers have instead started using screening techniques. As a result, the price increased by about 2 cents per egg.
In this way, the market efficiency process reflects the above quip from Lewis Black. If producers can find ways to create small tweaks and get some printed words per page to use the resources they need, the market will find and use those techniques. But likewise, if a farmer feeding live baby chickens directly to meat powder, which is immediately after birth, can shave from two more cents from the price of the egg, they will do so. This applies not only to chicks culling, but to almost all of the most cruel practices of the meat and dairy industry. A method that significantly increases the pain and suffering of billions of animals each year is also done by producers if it results in a slight reduction in prices.
However, rather than turning the comment section into a fire war on the ethics of animal cruelty, I would like to propose a different route. Dear econlog reader, what are your own examples for display testing? What policy do you prefer? Also, what negative consequences do you think result from that policy?
