Institutional Constraints

Francis Fukuyama | Stiglitz on Freedom | Back of House as a Food Factory | Factoids

source; The True Forest - Micahel Pollard

Quote of the Moment

Populism is a very crude expression of public will that does not like institutional constraints.

| Francis Fukuyama

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Stiglitz on Freedom

Watching the political front over the past few weeks (while I was away from the office) has been a reclarification of some of the latent forces at work in the US.

The resurgence of so-called ‘populist’ ideology — as embodied in the rhetoric coming principally from the Right — is, at its core, a rejection of constraints over institutions that we expect to administer the complex agreements that weave society together.

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. | Isaiah Berlin

This ‘populism’ is also a rejection of the now increasingly unpopular neoliberalism that dominated the Western world for the past 70 years or so. But this rightwing populism has accreted onto a substrate inherited from the decades of neoliberal economics and holds onto the desire of some elements of the elite to dominate through the intrusion of unfettered markets into every niche in society. So when JD Vance and Donald Trump say they are for the ordinary people out there, just remember that they would like to break the unions, dismantle regulatory agencies, and tell women what to do with their bodies.

I recently came across Time is up for neoliberals by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and here’s a few extracts to back up my point:

Champions of the neoliberal order, moreover, too often fail to recognize that one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom — or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

[…]

Trade-offs are the bread and butter of economics. Sometimes, how these trade-offs should be made is obvious: We should curtail corporations’ freedom to exploit workers, consumers and communities. Sometimes the trade-offs are more complex; how to assess them is more difficult. But just because they’re difficult is no reason to shirk addressing them, to pretend that they don’t exist.

[…]

Neoliberal capitalism has thus failed in its own economic terms: It has not delivered growth, let alone shared prosperity.

Its influence, then is illegitimate.

But it has also failed in its promise of putting us on a secure road to democracy and freedom, and it has instead set us on a populist route raising the prospects of a 21st-century fascism.

The failure of neoliberalism is the root cause of this new ‘populism’, which a polite way for journalists to say ‘fascism’.

There is an alternative. A 21st-century economy can be managed only through decentralization, entailing a rich set of institutions — from profit-making firms to cooperatives, unions, an engaged civil society, nonprofits and public institutions. I call this new set of economic arrangements “progressive capitalism.”

Or by a less showy, and historically grounded term, ordoliberalism, which stands in direct opposition to neoliberalism, and ordoliberalism’s less pushy cousin, Keynesian liberalism.

Central are government regulations and public investments, financed by taxation. Progressive capitalism is an economic system that will not only lead to greater productivity, prosperity and equality but also help set all of us on a road to greater freedoms.

When Kamala Harris next speaks of freedom, remember: this is what she is calling for. A road to greater freedoms.

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Back of House as a Food Factory

Restaurateurs would like to move past wheeled robots delivering food to tables, a form of automation that is slowly infiltrating the front of house in fast-casual restaurants, reports Meghan McCarron. They profile various approaches, but the one that seems most promising is, basically, to copy the sorts of food automation widely used in industrial food production, like pizza factories, where specialized machinery handles the prep of various pizza components: one machine makes the dough, another turns that into pizza shells, another shreds cheese, and so on, and another assembles the parts into a final pizza. In the modern efforts to employ robots in the kitchen, the specialized activities at the top of the ‘food chain’ — like preparing avocados — are the most likely to be automated first:

If consumers prefer human cooks, and cooks worry about losing their human jobs, making a too-human robot may backfire. Instead, Mr. Ahler believes that automation “needs to act like a toaster.”

He helped develop the Autocado, an avocado-processing machine that is now being adopted by Chipotle. A waist-high metal box with a chute for cooks to dump in avocados, it does the tedious work of peeling, halving and pitting. “People don’t see this as taking jobs,” Mr. Ahler said. “They see it as assisting.”

A soft entry by automating a job that no one sees as cooking artistry.

Benson Tsai, the chief executive and co-creator of Stellar Pizza, a fully automated pizza truck, said he was inspired by frozen pizza factories. “Walking into the grocery store, everything there is made by robots,” he said. “You can watch YouTube videos of pizzas being made by the thousands on conveyor belts. It’s a beautiful thing.”

A veteran of the electric vehicle industry and SpaceX, Mr. Tsai said his interest in automating restaurants began when he saw food costs going up. “If people could pay $2 to $5 less for their food, that’s much more beneficial than the few jobs we might be removing,” he said.

Yes, food prices will go down but principally because a fully automated pizza kitchen will employ much fewer workers, which is the goal of most restaurant owners. Or owners of almost any business.

Stellar Pizza has been acquired by Korean conglomerate Hanwha Food Tech, and they plan to deploy the technology in full-service pizza restaurants in LA.

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Factoids

Soils

Soils hold three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and they can potentially absorb more than 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, or one-seventh of all the carbon dioxide that human activity injects into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That makes them the world’s second-largest carbon store, after oceans.

| Somini Sengupta reports on efforts to pull more carbon from the atmosphere into soils.

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