Comment by pinkmuffinere
20 hours ago
> they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
20 hours ago
> they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
Maybe, but it's not an argument against diversification. When it comes to agriculture, the incentives should be aligned such that a single point of failure like this is highly unlikely.
That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
> That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.
The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.
> You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers.
This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider:
- insurance companies
- banking
- utilities
It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google the sole supplier for search functionality? If 4 suppliers provide 1% of demand, and one supplies 96%, does that comply? If there’s only one company offering some new service (e.g. driverless cars), do they immediately get broken up?
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And conversely you can't grow enough food local to a large population center to feed everyone.
Christopher Alexander figured this one out in A Pattern Language:
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
You'd have to either waste good soil by putting buildings on it, or use a lot of fertilizer.
Why didn’t we do this? Seems cool.
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Bullshit. Christopher Alexander didn't know much about farming.
I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated.
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