What the hell!

The Chetty et al. paper on inter-generational mobility has been getting a lot of attention. Social mobility data are essential to any discussion of economic performance -- and a welcome antidote to all of the misleading conclusions drawn by commentators who simply compare cross-sections. (You know who you are.)  People move between quintiles and it is most informative if we find a way to track their progress.  The Chetty et al. study develops a clever way to use IRS data to make comparisons of incomes, between parents and their offspring.  Have offspring moved up after 30 years?  To their great credit, the authors say that explanations for the geographic variation in their results remain to be explained.

The authors did include a bunch of bi-variate correlations which they point out are only suggestive of where people experience the most and least intergenerational mobility.  The usual suspects pounced on these and concluded it's the "sprawl" that inhibits progress.  I have often posted my thoughts on this misunderstanding. Here is my most recent.

Besides, "sprawl" is a vague and pejorative use. Suburbanization occurs everywhere and is much too varied to be described in overly simple terms.

Wilson and Singer of Brookings report where international immigrants to the U.S. choose to settle. The authors do this for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas for 2000 and 2010. For each of these, they note whether or not the foreign born end up in the suburbs. For the whole set of metros (slightly fewer than 100 in 2010), 56.1% of the foreign born settled in the suburbs in 2000 while 60.6% did so in 2010.

I point this out because these immigrants, by definition, are not in the Chetty at al. data; they were not here (not in the IRS files) in the first year of the study. And by virtue of coming here, they are among the most upwardly mobile (see Lant Pritchett interview).

In the fast-and-loose manner that some have digested the Chetty et al. study, we could conclude that sprawl causes upward mobility.  What the hell!

ADDED

David King's analysis on point.

Less romantic

Thomas Friedman in "I Want to Be a Mayor" writes, "With both DC and the states increasingly AWOL, we need cities more than ever to be our engines of smart growth." 

Cities exist and grow because they are "engines of growth."  But the "smart" part can be many things. That's usually the problem.  Who are these smarties?

Friedman's whole essay is about how cities are governed. When he mentions "cities", does he mean city government?  Many people confuse nations with their governments; many also confuse cities with their governments. Friedman loves it that "Voters are putting up tax dollars for large-scale transit investments in Denver and Los Angeles ..." Politics without romance is adults-only sobering but Friedman will have none of that.

Economists refer to a "sun tax" (or a "commodity curse" or a "curse of oil") when bad governance is made possible in high amenity (or other good fortune) settings.  I have lived in a bad governance setting for many years but economic prospects are still passable.  Exhibit A would be Silicon Valley.  The shenanigans of Bay Area and California politicians have not killed it.  But not all areas have enough "sun" to offset high taxes, crazy policies, unfunded liabilities and such.

By the time a "perfect storm" gathers, it is usually too late. Detroit had badly run General Motors (with many industry soulmates including auto workers' unions) as well as badly run city hall.  Looking back, it is not easy to unscramble these eggs.

Cities are likely to be engines of growth if we do not look for "smart" stuff from city hall; less stuff would be much better. But that is less romantic.

Shipping

Last Sunday's NY Times included a lengthy story about the new Silk Road. Just when I thought that water transport had long eclipsed lengthy overland travel, it seems that the best way to get laptops from Chinese assembly plants to shops in Amsterdam is by train.

Trade begets development and development begets trade. That means both are dynamic and always evolving.

Closer to home, the Panama Canal expansion project is far along. I have found a surprisingly small number of studies that speculate on what this means for shipping and trade. Here is one of the few studies I have found.

Most of what is shipped uses more than one mode of shipment. If U.S. east coast-west coast shipping can more easily move by sea, what happens to U.S. rail and truck use? What about Pacific Rim trade bound for Europe, but that now traverses the U.S. by land routes?  As the use of the various modes changes, does business at the various trans-shipment nodes rise or fall?

But not so fast on mourning what will happen to U.S. overland freight.  Warren Buffett, who knows a few things about investing, made a big bet of trains several years ago. Just like the Eurasian Silk Road, our overland shipping may benefit from the new patterns that will emerge when the bigger and better Panama Canal gets going in 2015.

Detroit

I have long been poaching Wendell Cox’s urbanized area data.  One good reason is that he carefully flags the parts that are core cities. 

Looking at these data for the decades 1950-2000, one can quickly correlate core city population growth with subsequent decade suburban growth.  Using just the 24 largest of these for which six decades of data are available, two types of lagged correlations are easily found.  What does one decade’s growth predict for the next decade’s growth, core areas vs suburbs?  Here are some correlations:

1950-60: core cities growth with subsequent decade suburban growth, r = 0.64; suburban growth with subsequent decade core city growth, r= 0.66;

1960-70: core cities growth with subsequent decade suburban growth, r = 0.18; suburban growth with subsequent decade core city growth, r= 0.39;

1970-80: core cities growth with subsequent decade suburban growth, r= 0.13; suburban growth with subsequent decade core city growth, r= 0.28;

1980-90: core cities growth with subsequent decade suburban growth, r= -0.01; suburban growth with subsequent decade core city growth, r = 0.17.

For each pairing, I italicize the larger value.  Strong suburban growth does a better job predicting strong core growth than the other way around.  These are mostly positive; growth in one part of the metropolitan area is not at the expense of the other. And core areas do well if their suburbs have been doing well.

Paul Krugman reports that “sprawl killed Detroit.” But strong suburbs usually have the opposite effect.

ADDED

Wendell Cox has more to say about this. 

Local screwdriver

Resource allocation is not simple.  It is especially difficult when limited land is available for the various plausible land uses.  Markets (with the possibility of failure) is all we have.  In my walkable neighborhood, there is considerable turnover among retail vendors. Smart people (and their financial backers) often guess wrong re my neighbors' fickle tastes and/or fail to deliver an appealing package of goods, service, price, etc.  They have to go.

The standard textbook objection involves negative externalities. In my June 26 blog post, I noted that textbooks and teachers once evoked the old example of a glue factory somehow ending up on the corner of Park Ave and 50th in Manhattan.  More subtle examples from the real world are rare.

But there is usually another story. Creative destruction animates a lot of political activity. Losing in the market place may still leave the option of winning by other means.  This morning's LA Times includes "Malibu residents complain of becoming Rodeo Drive by the Sea ... Malibu residents are weighing whether to regulate the influx of upscale chains that are driving quaint mom-and-pop stores out of business. ... A few years ago, actor Dick Van Dyke complained in a local newspaper that for all the fancy boutiques, he could not buy a screwdriver within the city limits."

If the land market cannot accommodate Van Dyke, the Planning Department might.  Trouble is that no one will have an inkling of what it will cost to solve Van Dyke's screwdriver problem.    

When in doubt

I had thought that David Neumark and colleagues have the last word on the minimum wage debate.  Yes, there is a Law of Demand. Yes, people respond to incentives. Yes, we assume ceteris paribus and therefore must do more than take a first glance. Yes, we can measure what is seen, but know very little of the unseen (Bastiat), those who never enter the labor force if/when job creation slows. The New York Times and others celebrate the former, those whose wages did go up after a wage hike mandate, but they usually stop there.

Not mincing words, James Buchanan (cited here) famously referred to economists who find that minimum wage effects are benign as "camp following whores."

This morning's WSJ reports "The Shift to Part-Time ... Many Restaurants Avoid Hiring Full-Time Workers Due to Health-Care Rule."  When/if in doubt go with the incentive effects.

"Wild West Texas"

Planners and many others like urban "density".  The 1974 Costs of Sprawl report and hundreds of sympathetic tomes (look at the Sierra Club's "Ten Reasons Why Sprawl is Hazardous to Your Health") provided a focus for various antipathies, particularly those focused on auto travel and personal mobility (and choice). This is an old story. People keep making choices their betters disapprove of.

But the plot thickens. Most urban and regional plans are full of policies to reverse "sprawl" and promote densification. More public transit ("light" rail is the current favorite), more transit-oriented development. More investments in old downtowns, etc.  A 2006 Brookings Institution study sought to classify and categorize all of the planning approaches.

Have they worked?  Look at U.S. urbanized area density trends. They do not line up with the policies.  The Brookings study itemized the many types of measures that planners throughout the U.S. have adopted. The last column of Table 3 of the urbanized area data link indicates thirteen urbanized areas which experienced increased population densities in the most recent decade, the period during which the policies studied should have had an effect. There is not observable connection between increased population densities and regulatory approaches as identified by the Brookings study (Table 3 of their study and their Appendix).

Th researchers surveyed 1,800 jurisdictions which reported planning efforts in six broad areas of land use regulation (zoning, comprehensive planning, containment, infrastructure regulation, growth control, affordable housing). These were represented by twelve policy measures. Factor analysis was applied to classify the metropolitan areas in terms of their dominant regulatory approach, e.g., twelve "clusters" of  policies. The study authors then arrayed the clusters into four "typologies of land use regulations" ("Traditional," "Exclusion," "Wild West Texas," "Reform").  But the Demographia density report (Table 3) shows that very few urbanized areas experienced increased average densities. The few that did were scattered across the four typologies.  Houston, (as in no traditional zoning and as in "Wild West Texas") was one of the few. Houston, do we have a problem?

Many settings

Paul Romer asks whether Detroit is Denser than Denver. It's a set up because Romer is calling attention to the widespread silliness of referring to city-wide overall densities. Readers of this blog have heard it many times. Romer mentions that we have to look at local maps and consider small area peculiarities.

Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute are doing interesting cross-sectional work on cities. They report finding scalability over a large international set of cities. But we know that definitions and boundaries     vary considerably from place to place. There are local economies (labor markets) everywhere, to be sure. Do the definitions of spatial units used in the SFI sample match these?

 Zipf-rule rank-size distributions apparently describe all sorts of artifacts.  SFI researchers often cite the example of gas stations.  But we can bet that the density of these artifacts does not scale.

What matters most is the networking opportunities -- in Detroit or Denver or any place. We prosper when we can exchange goods and ideas at acceptable costs.  We apparently do this in all sorts of densities and settings.

Those human tragedies

What I knew about wiretaps, I got from The Wire.

I knew more about South Asian immigrants to the U.S., having encountered many through their academic contributions -- mostly via their writings but also many as high-achieving students and colleagues. The immigration debates highlight the latter; keeping out large numbers of talented and hard working South Asians is just one of the flaws in current immigration policy that should be remedied ASAP.

But having read Anita's Raghavan's The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund, I know a bit more about wiretaps as well as about elite Indian-Americans. They appear on both sides of the story. I am glad the author had the good sense to cite the David Ben-Gurion quip that the new Israel will have achieved real nationhood once it has its own burglars and hookers. South Asian immigrants, the author shows, are now more than simply a "model minority."  They pass the Ben-Gurion test.

The story is chilling on many fronts. Seeing the prosecutors, the defendants and the bit players (all through Rachavan's eyes), I did not encounter many "good guys". Prosecutors can  now use wire taps when investigating financial crimes and everyone knows it. But it is amazing how much the smart guys involved in illicit trades gab while on the phone.

The rise and fall of Rajat Gupta are the most fascinating parts of the story. Gupta rose about as far as anyone can. McKinsey CEO and Boards of Directors of top schools, corporations and charities. So why did he break the law on insider trading? (Why did he do it in a stupid way, caught by a phone tap?)  His net worth of $100-plus million was not enough. Spoiler alert. When he finally moved to New York (having made it a point to work from Chicago and Scandinavia offices of groups he was attached to), he perceived a new ball game.  He  now wanted to join those who bankroll the causes that he had previously (successfully) collected checks for (p. 401). He could have progressed towards his goal of ending malaria in the world either way, but that was apparently not satisfying enough

He wanted to keep up with the Rajaratnam's, referring to the hedge fund billionaire for whom Gupta played the apprentice.  It is the human tragedies that keep us turning the pages.

Coordination problems all the way down

Aggregation in economics presents problems. In fact, a case can be made that aggregation contradicts and even undermines our understanding of  markets. See Christopher Coyne's "Economics as the study of coordination and exchange" in Boettke's Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics.

We study markets because decentralized exchange is the only way we know to solve the immensely difficult and complex problem of getting uncountable scarce resources to where they are most valued. Coyne argues we have to focus on exchange rather than pose mechanical "allocation" problems which can be solved via aggregation and modeling.

Think about the idea of "capital".  Das Kapital denotes a nefarious thing that is accumulated solely for the sake of profiteers -- and at the expense of everyone else. But neo-classical economists also aggregate to get the "capital" that we see in their models.

But these approaches ignore and obscure the interesting problem.  Society provisions itself for a better future if and only if some of today's consumption is deferred in the service of worthy projects that will pay off (be rewarding and rewarded) at some future date. These simple words do not do evoke the scope and the difficulty of the task.  Tremendous risk-raking and coordination are involved.

Readers of this blog know that I view cities the same way.  The managers of firms are part of various supply chains.  In each case, they must decide how much of the supply chain is within vs beyond the firm.  Many of them locate their firm in cities and make the concurrent decision of how much of the supply chain (within as well as beyond the firm) takes place nearby or not (in the vicinity or not, in the same city or not, etc.). Attending to and forming any supply chain is also a coordination problem.  In fact, I often note that there are supply chains for ideas as well as things.  Expanding useful knowledge is a key part of the problem. This complicates matters even further.

We have to think of coordination problems that involve fine-grained spatial as well as temporal dimensions. Markets (always "imperfect" as in straw man) are the only game in town.

But this is not the way most analysts approach the problem.  Google scholar comes up with only 14,500 hits for "coordination problem" entered along with "markets". "Keynesian" gets 169,000.  "Cities" along with "coordination problem" gets 6,160.  "Marx" and "cities" gets 212,000.

These are crude measures, but cities' role in the coordination problem is, in my view, much more interesting than the cities' role in whatever Marxists write about these days.

Off topic: Three recent films

Here are three excellent films that cover the same theme. How do the children of monstrous parents make their way in the world?  Lore is fiction. Inheritance and Hitler's Children are documentaries.  All three cover the same ground and all three are chilling in their own way.

We have trouble understanding evil. We have trouble understanding advanced and seemingly enlightened societies (in this case 20th-century Germany and friends) marching into the abyss.  The educated middle classes caved.

The three movies are about the children and grandchildren of perpetrators who encounter an added difficulty: they decide that they cannot follow the injunction to honor father and mother.

But in all three films, notably the two documentaries, we also see that bad people can have decent offspring.

There are many very bad movies about historical events.  These three are very good.  

All those networks

The many Club of Rome-type "doomsday" forecasts have not done well.  There have been the similar outcomes for the peak-this-or-that forecasts. "Peak oil" (many titles like this at Amazon) looks sillier by the day as the shale revolution progresses. The Economist reports that even Vladimir Putin and his people have had to admit that shale gas is big ("Spooked by shale").

But "peak auto" has also been around for a while.  It has long been promoted by nostalgics who dream of a return to 19th-centruy cities and lifestyles.  In today's NY Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal writes about "The End of Car Culture ... Younger people are less likely than their predecessors to have licenses."

We know that many young (and not-so-young) do a lot of networking electronically.  That is not an unmixed blessing. But Rosenthal writes that, "President Obama's ambitious goals to curb the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, unveiled last week, will get a fortuitous assist from an incipient shift in American behavior: recent studies suggest that Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by."  Even the shale revolution provides a fortuitous, though seemingly unwelcome, assist.

But most of us are learning to manage (and trade off) many networks in our business as well as our social lives.  A mountain of formal literature by urban economists, urban geographers, urban planners and others evokes the journey-to-work as the basis for understanding the self-organization of cities.  But that was then.  Location patterns in cities and beyond will be better understood as the product of how all of us manage and trade off the many networks in our lives -- including electronic and conventional (and even including the occasional trip to the airport).  

Zoning

Bill Fischel has just posted his "Fiscal Zoning and Economists' Views of the Property Tax."  As usual, Fischel provides a great summary of the problem. We get zoning for fiscal reasons.  Yes, when it comes to nuisance control, the common law offers "retrospective remedies" and these may not be adequate. But economists have established a more plausible rationale for fiscal zoning, emphasizing it over conventional arguments re nuisance control.

There is a lot to learn re-reading Robert Murray Haig's 1926 essay on the topic.  Haig argues for zoning in the traditional way. "A glue factory on the corner of Park Avenue and 50th Street might show a net profit, considered by itself and ignoring the losses of its neighbors" (p.433). This is the version that has made its way into popular discourse and many people still buy it.  I seriously doubt that glue factories would have been located at that address even in the 1920s.  Land markets do not place glue factories where they have no business.

The fiscal zoning story is better because it is a political economy story.  Rather than a panel of wise men and women coming together to do "Regional planning, based on economic analysis ..." (Haig), there are a bunch of self-interested people politicking (fighting) to get the zoning that is best for them.

This morning's LA Times includes "Westside development fuels debate over growth -- smart or otherwise." One simply cannot read it (and a thousand like it) without thinking of Bruce Yandle's bootleggers and baptists.

Tough choices

Tyler Cowen linked to this Joe Satran post about LA vs NY food (also look at the video). LA vs NY stuff is always interesting, especially when food is involved. Predictably, the discussion evokes "sprawl" and "density" and ease of access to a variety of choices.  As readers of this blog know, some of these are bad words.  "Sprawl" is pejorative and vague. "Density" is also vague and is often used when agendas are in place.

Both, NY and LA, are much too big to be described by just plain "density;" I keep noting that if one must play that game, then one has to face the fact that the LA urbanized area is denser that NY's -- and has been for at least the past 25 years. Overall "density" is a poor descriptor.

In this discussion, when the foodies compare, they rely on the poor descriptors. How easily can I access a rich variety of eateries?

The question of where one can find a better quality of life intrigues planners and others. But that question does not work. Preferences and resources vary and we each look for a niche (in this case a neighborhood) that works best in light of our preferred lifestyles -- including restaurant styles, prices, access, variety, etc.

A good friend once confided that he would like Manhattan outside his front door and Santa Monica outside his back door. Until we make progress on this package, we will have to evaluate the trade-offs involved in the packages available and make our choices. 

Simple?

Today's WSJ includes a (seemingly) whimsical piece, "If the World Were Run Like Airlines ... Sandwich Prices Would Spike at Peak Hours and 'Priority' Elevators at the Hotel Would Cost Extra."

What is all the fuss? Price is determined by the interesction of supply and demand. Five little words.

Joking! It's a serious question and the textbooks are not always the best source.

Here is another shot: Sellers charge what they can. That's also five little words and it highlights the fact that pricing is dynamic, on-going, all about feedback, learning-by-doing adjustments and never stops being difficult and challenging. Business people know all this.  It is their "bread and butter," so to speak. Bundle or unbundle services? Charge by level of service, including time-of-day and season-of-the-year?

There is another aspect. What kind of resistance will there be from a public (and media) that routinely expect cost-based prices (whatever that is). Anything that can plausibly be linked to "cost" (not opportunity cost) may be justifiable as "fair". Otherwise, be very careful.

I presume that this is all very simple and basic -- but often beyond the elites who make (and comment on) the policies we have. 

Conversations

Economist Robert Frank wrote in the NY Times "What Sweden Can Tell Us About Obamacare." One could add that the U.S. is not Sweden.

The differences are clear but often overlooked by those who look to European policy examples.  This morning's LA Times celebrates the various "pocket parks" being opened in LA. "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa unveils new donwtown L.A. park."

The story also notes "Downtown residents, although excited that construction is complete, were already buzzing about the potential problems that could befall Spring Street Park — including crime, litter and pet waste."

I recently blogged about a pocket park in my neighborhood that was fenced off almost as soon as it was built because it became an encampment for homeless as soon as it opened ("City not beautiful").

To borrow from my friends in Washington DC, can we at least have "a conversation" about the fact that street life (and civic life) in U.S. cities is not promising until we find a better way to deal with the "homeless" that we put on the streets because we cannot figure out what to do with/about them?  We do have many "conversations" about how awful it is that so many Americans withdraw to private communities and private spaces.

Can we all just get along?

World War II ended in the popular imagination when the troops came home to victory celebrations and reunions. There may have been a lot of these in the U.S., but the war was much too big and too tragic in Europe for there to be simple endings.  This fact is well documented by Keith Lowe in his Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.

From the Conclusion: "There were many reasons not to love one's neighbor in the aftermath of the war ... The sheer variety of grievances that existed in 1945 demonstrates not only how universal the war had been, but also how inadequate is our traditional way of understanding it ..."  Communists and nationalists have exploited these grievances with tragic results. Ethnic cleansing in the the former Yugoslavia is fresh in our memories, but massive ethnic cleansings had been in force before 1945, after 1945 and through most of the 20th century.  Ethnically "pure" nation states had been a goal for many groups for many years.  Current economic crises in Europe provide new openings for the demagogues.  In comparison, our own immigration debates seem pretty tame.

"Can we all just get along?" Perhaps. But first we have to (all) learn and digest enough history. Lowe's book is, in my view, a great place to begin.

Many movies simply build on the cliches of history. But there are some that are worthy because they prompt deeper reflections. I liked these: Lore, Inheritance, Worse Than War.

Meta-stuff

Urban planners generally love densities. Many call it "smart growth." Urban economists and urban geographers have embraced density as a proxy for networking opportunities and have suggested that all manner of positive interactions are made possible at high enough urban densities. Richard Florida expects "creative people" to seek high density settings.

I have previously suggested that it is inevitably more complex than that. First, it is misleading to characterize whole metropolitan areas by their overall density because that masks considerable variation within areas. Second, we know that there are successful clusters in high-density Manhattan as well as much lower density Silicon Valley. Path dependence is powerful and we do not expect either place to evolve so as to become like the other.

I have just read "Travel and the Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis" by Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero.  The authors survey the many elasticities that various researchers have estimated.  They admit right off the bat that, "Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled."  I am not surprised.

One meta-finding (of many) is the elasticity of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) with respect to household or population density (their Table 3) which they report is -0.04. This is very small but, for practical purposes, what does it mean?

New development occurs mostly at the fringes of metropolitan areas but there is also considerable "infill" development. In most cases, there will be pressures to develop the project at a higher density in the name of less VMT.  But there are two problems. First, more people traveling a little less could still generate more overall VMT. Second, if the higher density leaves more space available, would the space be developed? If so, we get even more people and more VMT.  If not, the space will have to be traversed by anyone going to or from the new development, creating more VMT. Simple rules are never adequate.

That aside, Google scholar yields 39,800 hits for the paired words "density" and "sustainability" since just 2009. A small sampling of these involves studies or tomes that link the two in a positive way.  That suggests yet another meta-study.

   

Hard work

This morning's WSJ includes "Rail Lines Bring Housing Clashes ... Cities Take Steps to Promote Affordable Housing While Rents Rise Near New Transit Stops." 

Those who comment on the economic problems of the EU point out that a common currency and and independent fiscal policies (politics) can clash in a big way.  One cannot have both.  And this simple trusim is how we got to all the head scratching and the occasional hand wringing.

If your transit policy requires a transit-oriented development policy, then there will be consequences for the low-rent housing (and occupants) that had been in place.  Planners embrace and also scorn gentrification.

How to escape the conundrum?  The answer has been to subsidize favored developers and coax them into including quotas of new but affordable housing units in their projects. This enriches certain developers and solidifies city hall crony capitalism.

On a bad day, it also takes some developers and some development out of the picture, causing housing to become more expensive. But when people move out of central cities, dysfunctional city government (including public schools) as well as costly housing are often in the mix

Fixing a policy error by piling on more policies is never promising.

On our own

"Eat your spinach," "Take your vitamins," "Live like a caveman."  There is lots of accumulating evidence on how to live longer and better.  I learned a lot from Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live, and have abandoned plans to do the caveman thing.

The serious research never stops and we learn new things all the time.  We have better access to information than ever and the responsibility to go on seeking, learning and deciding is each individual's personal responsibility. 

Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration are supposed to help us in this project.  But the FDA operates in a political context, as does every set of regulators. (This truism is often overlooked as part of the blame for the financial crisis is placed on "deregulation" or "inadequate" "lax" financial sector regulation.)

Yesterday's NY Times included "Don't Take Your Vitamins".  It appears that there is accumulating evidence of real health danger from megadoses of some vitamins. 

And the same story reports that the FDA has been politicized! There are shocking revelations each day. The IRS, the SEC, the NSA, and now the FDA.

I still have no idea what it will take to wean some Americans away from their faith in "regulation."

Here is the punch-line from the Times story:

In December 1972, concerned that people were consuming larger and larger quantities of vitamins, the F.D.A. announced a plan to regulate vitamin supplements containing more than 150 percent of the recommended daily allowance. Vitamin makers would now have to prove that these “megavitamins” were safe before selling them. Not surprisingly, the vitamin industry saw this as a threat, and set out to destroy the bill. In the end, it did far more than that.


Industry executives recruited William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, to introduce a bill preventing the F.D.A. from regulating megavitamins. On Aug. 14, 1974, the hearing began.

A little more than a month later, Mr. Proxmire’s bill passed by a vote of 81 to 10. In 1976, it became law. Decades later, Peter Barton Hutt, chief counsel to the F.D.A., wrote that “it was the most humiliating defeat” in the agency’s history.


As a result, consumers don’t know that taking megavitamins could increase their risk of cancer and heart disease and shorten their lives; they don’t know that they have been suffering too much of a good thing for too long.

We are on our own and it was foolish to ever believe otherwise