How Food Became Capitalism’s Greatest Failure
The origins of our global obesity and chronic disease epidemics
Capitalism: that ingenious system for mobilizing people to create value and advance our civilization. Without it, most of us would still be peasants slaving away on subsistence farms. But capitalism has its problems, mainly 1) extreme wealth disparities and 2) huge externalities (costs to society not reflected in the selling price of goods and services).
Most countries have the first issue under reasonable control via tax brackets that take a much larger fraction of income from high earners. For example, even in the notoriously unequal USA, the top 1% pays a 6x higher tax rate than the bottom 50%, contributing 38.5% of total income tax revenue.
It’s the second point that really drives me up the wall — not only because of its terrible effects on society but also because it’s theoretically so simple to fix.
I used to think that climate change was the worst consequence of our failure to fix capitalism. Now, I think it’s addictive food. Here’s why…
Our Primitive Food Cravings
Humans evolved over 200 millennia in a harsh world of great scarcity. Feeding ourselves in this environment required tremendous effort, sacrifice…
