Global Biological Experiment Generates Exciting New Results 340
New submitter hoboroadie writes "Scientific American Magazine says antibiotic-resistance genes have moved from the incubators of our hospitals and factory farms, and are spreading through diverse species in the wild. Resistance genes have been detected in crows, gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. This stuff is getting more and more like a Hollywood script everyday, n'est ce pas?"
But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had a half a percent higher profit margin on cattle for a couple decades. That's totally worth having permanent incurable deadly diseases. Tragedy of the commons sucks balls, and time and again, it turns out that the "invisible hand" won't develop any solution to it.
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
If you use something that kills of the weak members of a given entity over a period of time the result will be the surviving members will become strong. Darwinism is brutal and efficient like that whether you want it to be or not. In this case by over using antibiotics everywhere from handsoap to feed for cows we have resulted in the saturation of the environment. The result was inevitable and it really is a case of we did this to ourselves.
If memory serves Norway prohibits their use in all settings but hospitals and has healthier citizens as a result. It really does boil down to the classic George Carlin germs are good comedy bit. We need regular exposure to germs to become stronger and build healthier immune systems. The only thing were building is stronger and healthier bugs and weaker humans - there's something wrong with that.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case the "commons" are literally our own bodies and the ecosystems they interact with. Are you suggesting some sort of absurd enclosure movement for air so that bacterial genes can't spread from one place to another? Or are you being an absurd believer in a system for no other reason than your outward facing political philosophy depends on it?
Re:But.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Au contraire. The permanent incurable deadly disease IS the SOLUTION to the common human virus that plagues the planet. You don't know the "invisible hand" very well, do you?
Re:Dystopia (Score:5, Insightful)
They even took steps to limit that much. The terminator seed technology was partly intended to prevent contamination [wikipedia.org]: if the plants can't breed, they're less likely to mix with wild species and contaminate them. Obviously they had a lot of financial interest in it, both because if resistance gets into the pest populations, that's going to make their product worthless. And in response to the controversy and accusations that it would screw over farmers, Monsanto never actually put terminator seeds on the market. [monsanto.com]
Anyway, pointing fingers is only so helpful, even at the agricultural entities that ARE driving antibiotic resistance. At this point, we know the looming disaster. It's not rocket science or even climate science either. This is high school biology. Businesses can be expected to faithfully act without any regard other than immediate profit. Ignorant patients will always find greedy doctors willing to give them antibiotics they don't need for diseases that aren't bacterial. Fixing the problem won't happen voulontarily. We need legislation to prevent milk from cows treated with antibiotics from being sold in supermarkets cheaper than untreated milk. Same with other livestock. It's an externalized cost: there's an advantage to it that needs to be taken away. We also need to strip the medical licenses of doctors who give out antibiotics for the cold. Either they're shockingly ignorant of the last 20 years of research and aren't fit to be doctors, or they're intentionally contributing to a real health hazard and should face criminal charges.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't suggesting totalitarianism as an alternative. I don't know what might lead you to think that.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the free market model doesn't take non-local effects into account. (Or "Not my problem")
Essentially it doesn't prevent someone from causing damage to someone else for profit.
If there had been any connection, that is you can make huge profits by causing a little damage to someone else, this wouldn't be a big problem, then it would be possible to compensate those who got hurt.
Sadly the free market model leads to a situation where someone will cause much damage on a global level for a very tiny profit.
The regulated version is a form of socialism where the government limits and punishes those who tries to make a profit on the behalf of others.
The non-regulated version is an anarchy where the government doesn't step in and protect those who makes a profit when the those who were hurt by it wants to hang them.
The people who talks about "less regulation" seldom wants the second alternative, rather they strive for a system that is called fascism where the government steps in and protects specific individuals so that they can abuse others.
n'est ce pas? (Score:0, Insightful)
n'est ce pas?
shut the fuck up
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I interpret it literally because there are fundamental scientific principles at work here, like convection, and the carbon cycle, which humans have not demonstrated any capacity to overcome in any sort of pragmatic sense.
Your attitude treats the market like a magic wand that you wave and *poof* no more serious real-world problems.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.
Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior (in fact quite seldom do), and individuals will always try to get 'more better' for themselves -- because people are irrational selfish bastards.
So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have, that isn't better (or even good) for the group if we depend on one another. Very often, what's good for an individual is detrimental to the group if the individual is utterly selfish or shortsighted -- like eating all of the food now and leaving none for later. Taking fresh water, bottling it and selling it isn't good for anybody except the ones selling it -- and once it's all gone, we're all fucked. But, for the short term, it was beneficial for some individuals to do what is best for them, and the group suffers.
The prisoners dilemma [wikipedia.org] demonstrates that if everyone does what is strictly in their own best interests, everybody loses.
Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it. And when we're talking about our environment and ecosystem, it impacts all of us. And in the end you get the selfish decisions of a few impacting everybody else.
People like to pretend that 'the market' will solve these problems, when in fact it's mostly a race to the bottom where every sociopath around grabs as much as he can, to the detriment of those around him.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right up until capitalism leads to its own form or totalitarianism, as corporations and cartels control pretty much everything and we all become serfs again.
Capitalism claims to be benign and benevolent, but since everyone tries to gain an unfair advantage and cheat the system, it just leads to a different form of losing your freedoms. The notion that it will self correct assumes that people are honest and not inherently out to screw everyone over -- which is completely disconnected from reality.
Left to its own devices, capitalism will subject you to the same atrocities, it will just defend them on a different set of principles.
Some people have mythologized capitalism and the free market to the point of it being a religion -- it is uncritically championed as being perfect and infallible, and completely ignores many aspects of human behavior which negate some of its assumptions. And once you are convinced that you are the keeper of Immutable Truth and Knowledge, you will defend that belief to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
A resource can't be shared if no one claims ownership of it. So is your solution that no one is allowed to claim ownership? Or is it that the State will claim ownership?
In a system where property is not allowed, what is the motivation to be productive? An interest in the common good? That demands altruism. Without individual moral principles, the common good fails... and look, here is the tragedy of the commons again.
I guess what we've discovered here is that both capitalism and a demand economy fail when people are immoral.
Re:Dystopia (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But.. (Score:2, Insightful)
No. That is not what was being discussed.
We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, being murdered is clearly not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.
Also, as an aside: As someone else pointed out, there's no indication that killing an individual is necessarily bad for the group.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the regulation of the health care industry is to the side of this issue. The largest driver for resistance is the over-use of antibiotics in non-health care related fields, like industrial agriculture, and hand soap.
The market forces here are the desire for higher meat production (ie, more profit!) as well as the marketability of antibiotics to consumers that don't realize that you don't need or want antibiotics everywhere.
Where the market forces completely and utterly fail is that the very high cost of widespread antibiotic resistance is NOT being directly felt by the industries that are using them the most. It is in fact a very nice example of where pure capitalism fails - large, long-term, external costs are not felt by the people making short term profits.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The market cannot regulate itself (the government is what regulates it and enforces contracts and legitimizes the money exchange)
2. Adam Smith's free market book talks about how competitive markets lower prices for consumers.
Monsanto does NOT want to be competitive. They say people won't buy GMO-labeled food when what they mean is people won't buy GMO-labeled food at the same price as already-familiar food. If Monsanto is forced to label it, they are also forced to pass the cost savings on to consumers in exactly the way Adam Smith--the god of free market enterprise--postulated.
Like most, they want all the benefits of the market without having to follow the rules that actually keep the market working for society as a whole.
Re:Dystopia (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called homeopathy, and they didn't need to change the name in centuries.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism doesn't claim to be benign or benevolent. It just claims to be better at finding more efficient solutions than systems which are (over)managed.
The key to making capitalism work though is competition. The more eyeballs you have looking at a problem and trying to solve it, the more quickly you can arrive at an optimal solution (vs. a single set of eyeballs in the managed solution). Evolution is capitalism. The totalitarianism and serfdom you complain about is the antithesis of capitalism. If you corrupt the system so all parties can no longer compete freely, by definition it's no longer pure capitalism.
The one area where capitalism does fail is in externalized costs. Where one actor gains the benefits of their decision while the other actor is stuck with the costs. Pollution and overfishing are primary examples of this. The technical nomenclature is the prisoner's dilemma (one actor shifts the costs of their decision onto another actor) and the tragedy of the commons (one actor divides the cost among all actors). So it's not a case of capitalism being a panacea or a complete failure. In these types of situations, capitalism fails and you need management. Outside of these situations, it's the most efficient solution (that we've been able to find) and management is usually just an opportunity to introduce corruption. Both sides of this debate are right, we just need to clarify the situations when one side is right and when the other side is right.
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, a tragedy of the commons is in no way in the interests of any individual!
This statement is absurdly false. If this were true, there would be no tragedy of the commons to talk about because everyone would be on the look out for such situations.
The tragedy of the commons happens because somebody does benefit from screwing everyone else over. In this particular case, if the beef industry was at all concerned with the tragedy of the commons, they would have abandoned antibiotic over-application years ago when resistant bacteria were first discovered.
The free market fails because some things simply are necessarily shared -- the air we breathe for example. By your "free" market, you're perfectly free to pollute the air above your land as much as you want. But unless you've figured out how to control the wind, that polluted air is going to affect all of your neighbors.
You, being the awesome capitalist that you are, see no reason to spend money installing air filters because what do you care? If you don't like the pollution yourself you just go ahead and use the money you saved on air filtering to buy a nice house a few miles away where it doesn't affect your personally.
So now we're in a situation with one of three outcomes:
- Your neighbors coerce you into installing air filters against your will.
- Your neighbors have to install their own air filters (essentially being coerced by your lack of care, to use your terminology.)
- Your neighbors just have to live with it (essentially being coerced to breathe bad air by your lack of care.)
In all of those cases, some form of market-breaking coercion is in effect. And its unavoidable as long as air is able to freely move across our arbitrarily defined boundaries.
Now you might say this is just an opportunity for more capitalism -- someone can just start producing air filters and make a fortune! This is true but it doesn't negate the fact that we're buying those air filters due to an initial breakdown in the market caused by you damaging an unavoidably shared resource.
And that's an example with fairly immediate and obvious impacts. Something like the antibiotic resistance is neither immediate nor obvious, so you don't even have to be a complete jerk to screw up the free market -- you can manage to do so completely unintentionally.
The free market works great under perfect conditions with a complete lack of externalities and a complete lack of barriers to entry. Unfortunately the real world doesn't have such conditions. The free market can still work well in the real world but some control must be influenced in order to prevent destroying public resources, prevent unnatural monopolies, keep natural monopolies in check and so forth. As usual, its very debatable exactly how much control is necessary for these purposes but it should be fairly obvious that the answer is neither "none" nor "total" but somewhere in between.
Re:But.. (Score:4, Insightful)
At least in the US, there's an underlying sentiment of anti-intellectualism and "my opinion is just as valid as your knowledge", and a lot of people who just straight out don't trust scientists because of their own self-ignorance. This is why we have things spreading like creationism, anti-GMO activity, climate change debate, etc. If it were that easy, these things wouldn't exist. You can lead a horse to water....