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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2021
Discourse on food ethics often advocates the anti-capitalist idea that we need less capitalism, less growth, and less globalization if we want to make the world a better and more equitable place. This idea is also familiar from much discourse in global ethics, environment, and political theory, more generally. However, many experts argue that this anti-capitalist idea is not supported by reason and argument, and is actually wrong. As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” the main contribution of this essay is to explain the structure of the leading arguments against this anti-capitalist idea, and in favor of well-regulated capitalism. I initially focus on general arguments for and against globalized capitalism. I then turn to implications for the food, environment, climate change, and beyond. Finally, I clarify the important kernel of truth in the critique of neoliberalism familiar from food ethics, political theory, and beyond—as well as the limitations of that critique.
1 See, for example, Holt-Giménez, Eric, ed., Food Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems (New York: Food First Books, 2011)Google Scholar; Alkon, Alison Hope and Agyeman, Julian, eds., Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nestle, Marion, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Shiva, Vandana, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Herring, Ronald J., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Thompson, Paul B., From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barnhill, Anne, Budolfson, Mark, and Doggett, Tyler, eds., Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Barnhill, Anne, Budolfson, Mark, and Doggett, Tyler, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilson, Erinn and Kenehan, Sarah, Food, Environment, and Climate Change: Justice at the Intersections (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)Google Scholar; and many others. A separate issue that is not my focus here is whether we should be in favor of intensive agriculture. Although those in food ethics who oppose intensive agriculture often also oppose capitalism, it should be noted that these are separate issues. For example, someone could consistently argue in favor of intensive agriculture on such grounds as it being necessary to feed the world (see, for example, Sandler, Ronald, Food Ethics: The Basics [New York: Routledge, 2014]CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mark Budolfson, “Food, the Environment, and Global Justice,” in Barnhill et al., Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, for discussion of this argument), but also argue that we should not have a capitalist economic order. Thus, arguments in favor of intensive agriculture do not translate into arguments for capitalism.
2 See, for example, Chomsky, Noam, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Cohen, G. A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed; McKibben, Bill, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008)Google Scholar; and Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014)Google Scholar. Surveys from Gallup and other sources indicate declining support for capitalism in society; see, for example, Lydia Saad, “Socialism as Popular as Capitalism among Young Adults in the United States,” “News,” Gallup, November 25, 2019, news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx.
3 Noam Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order; Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future; Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
4 See, for example, Frédéric Bastiat, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson (July 1850), Online Library of Liberty, last updated November 17, 2015, oll.libertyfund.org/page/wswns.
5 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin Books, 2018); Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, How Was Life? Global Well-Being since 1820 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2014); Charles Kenny, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—and How We Can Improve the World Even More (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Kenneth C. Land, Alex C. Michalos, and M. Joseph Sirgy, eds., Handbook of Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research (New York: Springer, 2012); Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “World Human Development: 1870–2007,” Review of Income and Wealth 61, no. 2 (June 2015), pp. 220–47; Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013); Dean T. Jamison, Lawrence H. Summers, George Alleyne, Kenneth J. Arrow, Seth Berkley, Agnes Binagwaho, Flavia Bustreo, et al., “Global Health 2035: A World Converging within a Generation,” Lancet 382, no. 9908 (2013), pp. 1898–955; Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox” (working paper 14282, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2008); Ruut Veenhoven, “Life Is Getting Better: Societal Evolution and Fit with Human Nature,” Social Indicators Research 97, no. 1 (May 2010), pp. 105–22; and Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek, “One Century of Global IQ Gains: A Formal Meta-Analysis of the Flynn Effect (1909–2013),” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 3 (May 2015), pp. 282–306.
6 Pinker, Enlightenment Now; Christa Brunnschweiler and Paivi Lujala, “Economic Backwardness and Social Tension” (University of East Anglia Applied and Financial Economics Working Paper Series 072, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, 2015); Håvard Hegre, Joakim Karlsen, Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, Håvard Strand and Henrik Urdalk, “Predicting Armed Conflict, 2010–2050,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 2013); Prados de la Escosura, “World Human Development”; OECD, How Was Life?; and Christian Welzel, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
7 Pinker, Enlightenment Now; Deaton, Great Escape; OECD, How Was Life?; Kenny, Getting Better; Land et al., Handbook of Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research; Prados de la Escosura, “World Human Development”; Jamison et al., “Global Health 2035”; Stevenson and Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being”; Veenhoven, “Life Is Getting Better”; Pietschnig and Voracek, “One Century of Global IQ Gains”; Brunnschweiler and Lujala, “Economic Backwardness and Social Tension”; Hegre et al., “Predicting Armed Conflict”; David Dollar and Aart Kraay, “Growth Is Good for the Poor,” Journal of Economic Growth 7, no. 3 (September 2002), pp. 195–225; David Dollar and Aart Kraay, “Trade, Growth, and Poverty,” Economic Journal 114, no. 493 (February 2004), pp. F22–F49; Andrei Shleifer, “The Age of Milton Friedman,” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 123–45; Andreas Bergh and Therese Nilsson, “Is Globalization Reducing Absolute Poverty?,” World Development 62 (October 2014), pp. 42–61; William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (New York: Stripe, 2018); and Bas Van der Vossen and Jason Brennan, In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
8 We need to keep in mind that zero is not the optimal level of pollution, as the costs of reducing pollution to zero in terms of foregone wellbeing from productive activity would outweigh the benefits—and more generally, to keep in mind that costs of policy can outweigh the benefits in other less obvious ways, such as in government failure. See Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jay K. Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2015); and Mark Budolfson, “Market Failure, the Tragedy of the Commons, and Default Libertarianism in Contemporary Economics and Policy,” in David Schmidtz and Carmen E. Pavel, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
9 Consider the theory of externalities, for example in Stiglitz and Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector.
10 Consider the second welfare theorem, for example in ibid.
11 Consider the second welfare theorem, for example in ibid., and the literature on economics and institutions, for example Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
12 Consider the first welfare theorem, for example in Stiglitz and Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector.
13 Wolfgang Lutz, William P. Butz, and Samir K.C., World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century: An Overview (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). A complication on the other side is that increased wealth per capita is correlated with increased meat consumption, but even here there is evidence of an inverted U relationship, with meat demand eventually peaking and declining once individuals are sufficiently wealthy, as in the current highest income deciles in developed nations.
14 Nathaniel O. Keohane and Sheila M. Olmstead, Markets and the Environment (New York: Island, 2016).
15 Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economics Review 45, no. 1 (March 1955); Gene M. Grossman and Alan B. Krueger, “Economic Growth and the Environment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, no. 2 (May 1995), pp. 353–77; and David Tilman, Kenneth G. Cassman, Pamela A. Matson, Rosamond Naylor, and Stephen Polasky, “Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices,” Nature 418 (August 2002), pp. 671–77.
16 Jamison et al., “Global Health 2035”; Pinker, Enlightenment Now; and Deaton, Great Escape.
17 See references in n. 5.
18 See references in n. 6.
19 Deaton, Great Escape.
20 See, for example, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (New York: Norton, 2020).
21 See, for example, Dollar and Kraay, “Growth Is Good for the Poor”; Dollar and Kraay, “Trade, Growth, and Poverty”; Shleifer, “The Age of Milton Friedman”; Bergh and Nilsson, “Is Globalization Reducing Absolute Poverty?”; Easterly, Tyranny of Experts; Cowen, Stubborn Attachments; and Van der Vossen and Brennan, In Defense of Openness.
22 See, for example, McKibben, Deep Economy; and Klein, This Changes Everything.
23 Keohane and Olmstead, Markets and the Environment.
24 Or create such a price via some other nontax mechanism, such as via a cap-and-trade system that would yield the same price for a unit of GHG emissions; in the main text, I use the example of a tax because it is the easiest to conceptualize.
25 Keohane and Olmstead, Markets and the Environment.
26 William D. Nordhaus, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008).
27 Stern, Nicholas H., Why Are We Waiting?: The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits; Chichilinsky, Graciela and Heal, Geoffrey, eds., Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Budolfson, Mark and Dennig, Francis, “Optimum Global Climate Policy and Regional Carbon Prices,” in Chichilinsky, Graciela and Rezai, Armon, eds., Handbook on the Economics of Climate Change (New York: Edward Elgar, 2020)Google Scholar; and Sheats, Nicky, “Achieving Emissions Reductions for Environmental Justice Communities through Climate Change Mitigation Policy,” William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review 41, no. 2 (2017)Google Scholar, scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol41/iss2/3.
28 See nn. 5–7 related to premise 1, together with Nordhaus, A Question of Balance, which provides a model that represents many of both kinds of harm, where the key trade-off is between reducing climate harm and increasing harm from foregone economic development. See, for example, Hahn, Robert W and Ulph, Alistair, Climate Change and Common Sense: Essays in Honour of Tom Schelling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the references to literature therein for more on climate and development trade-offs.
29 Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Outdoor Air Pollution,” Our World in Data, November 2019, ourworldindata.org/outdoor-air-pollution; “Air Quality—National Summary,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, n.d., www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary; and Grossman and Krueger, “Economic Growth and the Environment.”
30 Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality”; Grossman and Krueger, “Economic Growth and the Environment”; Tilman et al., “Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices”; and Pinker, Enlightenment Now. The idea behind the last point is that because the relationship between economic output and environmental degradation has a U shape, and given that developing nations are nearing peak degradation now, if we move away from capitalism we will stall growth and thus stall them at peak degradation, rather than allowing them to transition into less and less degradation in the future via capitalism and economic growth.
31 See, for example, Holt-Giménez, Food Movements Unite!; Alkon and Agyeman, Cultivating Food Justice; Nestle, Food Politics; Shiva, Stolen Harvest; Herring, Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society; Thompson, From Field to Fork; Barnhill et al., Food, Ethics, and Society; Barnhill et al., Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics; Gilson and Kenehan, Food, Environment, and Climate Change; and many others.
32 See, for example, Stiglitz and Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector.
33 This definition is extensionally similar to the richer and more detailed definition provided in Halliday, Daniel and Thrasher, John, The Ethics of Capitalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The essential point is that capitalism refers to the familiar system of markets, money, banking, property rights, and the rule of law favored by most of the free world by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
34 As just one example in the context of climate change, see Nordhaus, A Question of Balance.