And Is It Guaranteed Watered With the Tears of Indentured Child-Laborers?

I reveal my ignorance…. what is the error on the menu…?

bartese,

They write “free trade” when they mean “fair trade.”

@ Greg
I’m blind too – thanks for that.

A libertarian friend objected to my college dining hall’s fair trade bananas. Her argument was that fair trade efforts propped up inefficient economies that needed to abandon an outmoded agricultural base. I proposed that bananas had to be picked by someone, who might as well receive a livable wage with a portion of my board fees. My friend doubted that such livable wages were actually possible, for reasons that look congruent to those in HL’s linked podcast (gestures toward corruption down the supply chain).

It seemed to me there were two axioms underlying her argument: that the lives of agricultural laborers cannot be improved by anyone else’s good intentions, and that any price premium on a commodity good was based on a scam. Neither is precisely a libertarian belief, but ISTM they both fit with a libertarian aesthetic.

I continue to buy fair trade bananas, personally, and plan to keep doing so unless somebody rakes up some muck to substantiate the corruption concerns.

I don’t think you’ll find libertarians who want to, say, *ban* fair trade coffee or anything like that. I think the general argument is that a) it’s a waste of your money because b) it’s a terribly inefficient way of doing charity if that’s what your after and c) in general equilibrium, it’s not even clear that unskilled workers in countries with fair trade coffee or bananas or whatever are better off. It seems much more likely that some workers are better off, but that the workers on fair trade farms will be disproportionately those with family connections to the farm or those with particularly high productivity. I think libertarians would argue that if you want to help third world farmers improve their incomes, you would be spending your income much better by lobbying for freer trade in those goods in Western countries, or alternatively working with charities that support productivity-enhancing techniques such as rural schools, clinics to deworm/provide antimalarials, etc. And you can be sure with those techniques that the vast majority of your money actually goes to its intended target and not to, say, the corporate vault of Starbucks.

It’s not so much the consumer act of buying the fair trade that would bother a libertarian – consumer sovereignty, after all – but the overblown claims of who is being helped by the fair trade label.

I stopped listening to Econtalk some time ago – Russ Roberts has never, that I have heard, heard anything on his show that has made him wonder in the slightest about his own beliefs, and he generally interviews his ideological friends under the guise of objectivity. In this episode, he and Mike Munger make the usual cases about displacement of the poorest, make the usual observations that WalMart’s average wage is higher than minimum wage (being an average, it could not be anything else of course). These arguments are circular – if things could be better they already would be, and any improvement in conditions will simply be dissipated and will even make people poorer. Yet there were no empirical cases at all in the discussion, simply perfect competition market models. The cynicism of Robers and Munger about fair trade marketing efforts contrasts remarkably with their belief that other marketing efforts, as part of regular market operation, are to be admired (companies would not engage in them if they weren’t worthwhile). They impute all kinds of other motives to their ideological foes without any evidence. And yet, shockingly enough, production standards regulations of all kinds have actually made worthwhile impacts on many different markets, and efforts to improve labour standards have, while patchy, had good impacts too.

The point is that libertarians (well, at least libertarian bloggers) seem much less coherent in their objections than this, so it is reasonable to infer that their objections are indeed rooted in ressentiment rather than from having thought it through.

I’ve never heard a convincing rationale for what seems to be their near-universal objection to unions. Somehow, one person bargaining with an employer is perfectly okay, but two people coordinating their bargaining is not. I don’t see why collective bargaining would necessarily be a bad thing by their lights, so long as no “coercion” is involved (another word with layered and manifold meanings not immediately apparent to the uninitiated), but, well, it just is.

kevincure: Fair trade does pay for schools and clinics. Doesn’t welfare (charity) create dependence and so on? Why should libertarians prefer charity to market mechanisms, which is what fair trade is? That is kind of the mystery here. But in fact, “libertarians” are never consistent and have never been. Collective bargaining is one case in point and Pigouvian taxes – which are a market mechanism for correcting market failures – is another one. If libertarians were consistent, they’d spend all their waking time lobbying for carbon taxes. This is such an old and banal story, why do we waste out time discussing it. Yawn.

Same reason that global warming sceptics often believe in the DDT myth – it’s got nothing to do with their core issue, but it’s a bit of hippy-punching that lets them tell one of the favourite “Rhetoric of Reaction” stories about counterproductiveness. Having said that, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation IMO has some pretty serious questions to answer about why the hell its support price for coffee has hardly risen in the last few years and is so low relative to the premium charged for Fairtrade-labelled coffee. (Also, the fairtrade organisation has had massive mission creep over the last decade and is now involved in all sorts of things with debatable relevance to the original idea of price stabilisation for small farms).

kevincure, those points only work if you assume companies are owned and controlled by single individuals. In practice, management or owners are also in-groups, with the same aim of standing united to increase their share, and with similar internal dynamics as unions.

The question is not really why actually-existing libertarians rally against against unions or fair-trade chocolate. The question is why they rally so much more againt them then against other similar phenomena like management in-groups or luxury brand chocolate. Being against hippies, as a principle, seems to explain that pretty well.

This Marginal Revolution post struck me at the time as a pretty good summary of the argument that buying Fair Trade goods is likely to be counter-productive. I’m not sure if Tyler Cowen counts as a libertarian for the purposes of this discussion…

” We might think of sub-Saharan subsistence economies when we think of Fairtrade, but the biggest recipient of Fairtrade subsidy is actually Mexico. Mexico is the biggest producer of Fairtrade coffee with about 23% market share. Indeed, as of 2002, 181 of the 300 Fairtrade coffee producers were located in South America and the Caribbean. As Marc Sidwell points out, while Mexico has 51 Fairtrade producers, Burundi has none, Ethiopia four and Rwanda just 10 – meaning that “Fairtrade pays to support relatively wealthy Mexican coffee farmers at the expense of poorer nations”.

The article offers many other points of interest. For instance:

By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply, which depresses global commodity prices. This locks Fairtrade farmers into greater Fairtrade dependency and further impoverishes farmers outside the Fairtrade umbrella. Economist Tyler Cowen describes this as the “parallel exploitation coffee sector”.

Coffee farms must not be more than 12 acres in size and they are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that during harvest season migrant workers must be employed on short-term contracts. These rural poor are therefore expressly excluded from the stability of long-term employment by Fairtrade rules.

In other words, it’s mostly a marketing gimmick.”

#21: I remember reading that at the time and thinking that it was entirely in character for Tyler Cowen and libertarians in general to be using data from 2002 in order to write about Fairtrade coffee in 2009. The linked article is quite good, and replicates a number of Peter Griffiths comments (plus a load of rather dodgy ASI market-boosterism). But it’s clear that for MR, it isn’t really about fairtrade – the hippypunching is the objective.

‘By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply’.

I would also like to see some hard empirical data for this claim. I know it is an item of faith amongst market fundamentalists, but is it in actual fact true? The basis for this would seem to be belief in the ‘laws of supply and demand’. But these ‘laws’ are semi-mythical.*

*Just to explain what I mean by this: I don’t actually mean to deny that there is supply, there is demand, and that there is some kind of relationship between the two. What I object to is the word ‘law’ in that phrase, with the pun (no weaker word will do) which means that one is irresistably reminded of the laws of physics and chemistry. But the word ‘law’ in the economic phrase simply means ‘heuristic’: in other words, the ‘law’ of supply and demand is more like a proverb than a law of physics, something like ‘A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor’ or whatever.

Laws of physics are deterministic, the ceteris paribus restriction, while it applies, generally does not matter in real world situations, and they can be proven by empirical, quantitative data. The theory that there is a ‘law’ of supply and demand is not like this. Arguably, no ‘law’ of economics is like this.

Alex,

“Regular work excludes all seasonal work.”

There actually isn’t a lot of regular work in coffee growing … seasonal work is planting and harvesting … the two main steps in coffee production …

Tyler looks right on this one.

While fair trade doesn’t violate the non-agression principle, libertarians are usually compassionate people on some level too, so the ineffectiveness of fair trade at improving human welfare (as documented in comments above) is likely to make them critical.

There actually isn’t a lot of regular work in coffee growing … seasonal work is planting and harvesting … the two main steps in coffee production …Tyler looks right on this one.

Tyler Cowan asserts that the Fairtrade certification forbids coffee farms to employ permanent staff. I have read the document, and have provided links to it. It says no such thing. Further, you appear to have missed this paragraph, directly above the sentence you quoted, on page 19, in the guidance notes to 1.5.1.13:

The objective is that as often as possible, work is undertaken by permanent workers. Only work that is added to usual work levels during peak seasons may be undertaken by seasonal workers.

As you rightly say, most work on a coffee farm is seasonal by nature. Tyler Cowan, therefore, cannot possibly have been right even on his own terms; were his assertion accurate, it would be impossible for any coffee to pass Fairtrade certification. I refute it thus! (lifts cup)

Further, this demonstrates that he knows nothing about coffee, agriculture, or really anything else relevant to the issue.

Abolishing subsidies to American farmers, indeed. Abolishing American subsidies to American industries as well; specifically those that are disguised as military purchases.

@14:
Libertarians–or at least some libertarians–have genuine conceptual problems with associations of any kind, including both voluntary associations such as unions and involuntary associations such as the state. (Don’t get them started with the family!) Dicey did a very nice job with this: high Victorian libertarian thought.

However, since most libertarians are merely money-cons looking for a smidgen of intellectual respectability (when they aren’t virgin teenaged boys), they personify corporations as individuals, and only view unions as associational.

However, since most libertarians are merely money-cons looking for a smidgen of intellectual respectability

This. Lots of libertarians are anti-union and anti-Fair Trade because they’re either not really libertarians, or they came to libertarianism through conservatism and haven’t really thought through the implications of the philosophy. Personally, I don’t care about Fair Trade coffee one way or the other, and I’m pro-union.

(btw, I heartily second the last paragraph of Alex’s #32. The fact that someone claims that it is because of Fairtrade that family-owned small coffee plantations employ labour on seasonal contracts, or that anything remotely close to the current Fairtrade market could be supplied by unmechanised farms, while not completely discrediting them, certainly casts doubt on whether they have thought this sort of thing through).

Henry, longer comments don’t go through.

the only references to “machines” refer to health and safety standards in their operation

Clearly, Third World laborers are being oppressed by intrusive, patronizing liberals who refuse to let them trade the risk of being maimed for pennies that they could use to feed their families.

Insisting on safe machinery interferes with the economic growth that could lift them out of poverty altogether. A rising tide lifts all boats, which is great if you still have arms to row with.

Emerging from lurker status to point out another error on the menu: If “John Daley” is supposed to refer to the golfer, the name’s “Daly”. That is all.

If market mechanisms are poorly suited to promoting public welfare in situations where the profit motive is mixed up with the desire to do good, then many libertarian schemes for reform are in very big trouble.

This depends a great deal on what the actual goals of the schemes for reform are. “Public welfare” and “desire to do good,” if they appear at all, are used merely as window dressing when, e.g., Cato supports eliminating Social Security. Such a scheme for reform would greatly enrich their donors, and further afflict the afflicted while comforting the comfortable. You say “very big trouble”; I say “mission accomplished.”

What do you mean by “so many libertarians opposed to fair trade”?

By ‘so many’ do you mean a majority of libertarians? Or even a large percentage that isn’t quite a majority?

And what do you mean by ‘opposed to’? Do you mean, “thinks it is rather useless on a practical level and wouldn’t personally pay the premium (and perhaps think that those who do are kind of silly and/or deluded about its effects)” or do you mean “think it should be outlawed”?

So far as I know there is nothing about being a libertarian that means you can’t believe that people make stupid and/or counterproductive choices. Nor does it mean that you aren’t permitted to point out that certain choices may be stupid or counterproductive. I think it just means that except for very extreme choices, you don’t think the government should outlaw/meddle with it.

Right?

I think that smoking weed every day would be a stupid choice for most people. I don’t smoke weed myself and I suspect I wouldn’t if it were legal. I would be willing to tell one of my friends if I thought he was smoking weed too much. I don’t think the government outlaw or even very strongly regulate the smoking of weed.

Does that make me a libertarian ‘opposed’ to smoking weed?

Does anyone seriously believe that Fair Trade will, all by itself, lift entire populations out of poverty? If so, then the punch everyone is drinking in this argument is most certainly spiked.

I reach for fair or direct trade coffee because I presume workers there are treated marginally better. I also like the shop from which I purchase it. I don’t think I’m saving the world, lifting anyone out of poverty, or really doing much more than buying coffee, and hoping that there is a bit more dignity in everyone’s work, from the plantation to the point of purchase. I know there certainly isn’t any less.

Also, I’d like to ask, for the sake of provocation: has anyone commenting here ever lived in a coffee producing country and actually have some experiential knowledge of the plantation agricultural that brings the bean to every corner in the US? If so, please chime in, because with all this bluster, I’d forgotten that these pawns in various ideologies of economic development were actual human beings.

One of my libertarian friends claims he would have no problems with unions, so long as employers had the right to fire anyone who joined one.

I’m neither a libertarian nor a blogger, but “fair trade” sets teeth on edge in a way that honestly pre-disposes me to want to be critical ahead of hearing the arguments. It’s the phrase itself: it’s propaganda. I think it’s clever and effective (for its beneficiaries), but – as for a lot of effective propaganda – I think this is a bad thing. If they had chosen something more obviously a trademark or certificastion rather than a value judgment (e.g. “ShareTheWealth-Certified(TM)” coffee) I’d feel entirely differently. Another label I have the same instinctive reaction to is “cruelty-free”.
It’s like selling a new brand of oatmeal with a big “100% cholesterol free” banner emblazoned on the package. It’s true, literally, but you know they hope some consumers choose this brand fearing that competing brands of oatmeal _just might_ be cholesterol-laden. The effective market responses are for all brands of oatmeal to start carrying the same silly labelling clutter (and what comes next?), or for someone to undertake (and consumers to be responsive to) an otherwise-needless education campaign. Neither outcome is a good thing. Marketing that is fundamentally misleading, dishonest, or confusing undermines markets and public discourse in general, and I don’t think you need to be a libertarian to dislike it. Especially so when it is effective.
I think there’s a lot of room to argue against unfettered free trade, specially in particular cases. I don’t think the develping world are better off, though, if the received wisdom is that free trade is “unfair” by default. Or at least, if this is how people should enter the debate, I’d like it to arise from more than just an inspired marketing trick.

“I’m referring here to the willingness of many libertarians in the public sphere to argue against fair trade coffee,”

Again, ignoring ‘many’ what do you mean by “argue against”? Are they saying that it isn’t effective in the way that it is advertised and thus is a waste of money? That kind of objection isn’t anti-libertarian.

“but about the fact that many libertarians think markets are teh awesome for solving social problems”

This is super vague. Saying that ‘fair trade’ coffee doesn’t do much actual coffee farmers and thus is more a marketing scheme more than anything else isn’t some sort of damning indictment of the libertarian understanding of free trade so far as I can tell. Do you mean something else?

Again, ignoring ‘many’ what do you mean by “argue against”? Are they saying that it isn’t effective in the way that it is advertised and thus is a waste of money?

Well, they’re saying that the Fairtrade standard prohibits mechanised farming and forbids hiring full-time workers, and they’re using seven-year-old statistics.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough earlier.

Until this post, I was utterly indifferent to Fair Trade coffee. I hadn’t done any research on it, I hadn’t given it much thought, and what little thought I had given might have been stated like this: “I suspect (but I do not know) that Fair Trade coffee makes little or no difference to workers. But at least it’s harmless and I don’t even notice that it costs much more compared to the other premium offerings.”

I still suspect that it may make no difference for a variety of reasons:

1. Extreme difficulty in monitoring, which makes cheating very likely.

2. Signaling. People would pay more to signal that they cared about workers, even if the workers didn’t benefit at all. Fair Trade coffee would likely still exist even if it were just a pleasant-sounding lie.

3. Likelihood of perverse incentives and unforeseen consequences. I didn’t necessarily know what these would be, but there’s a strong habit of mind among libertarians to suspect them, and to look for a disconnect between an act’s intentions and its effects.

In each of these there is a strong parallel to organic foods, incidentally. But it’s your money (or mine), and we all get to do with it as we like. In the universe of priorities, I struggle to think of one that’s lower.

The problem is of course that American-style libertarianism isn’t skeptical about collective results. It’s in denial about them. You can’t, for instance, be a libertarian in good standing and believe that state-directed health care systems work better so reliably that one would be an improvement in the US. You can choose your way out – denying the results obtained everywhere else, asserting some unique factor in American government and society that’s so much worse that we cannot be saved and are damned, asserting that misery is actively desirable. But asserting as a matter of fact that large-scale state effort can produce better results more cheaply and more accountably than private firms is as dis-allowed as dividing by zero.

Likewise when it comes to making a marketplace priority of anything like human rights. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it can’t be seen to work, or suspected of working, because if it did it would destroy the whole edifice.

The criticisms of someone like D^2 matter very much more to me because I know he does believe that priorities other than profit maximization can be important and successful.

Paul 63: I didn’t look up statistics about fair trade in Ethiopia because nobody has made a coherent argument as to why this is even relevant. If Cowen thinks that there should be more fair trade coffee from Ethiopia, he is welcome to start his own fair trade brand or to switch to an existing Ethiopian brand (which I believe there are). My FT coffee is not from Ethiopia and I never pretended it was and I have no idea why Cowen thinks FT is a failure if it doesn’t come from Ethiopia. It seems to be a version of the “doing good is pointless because there is so much more suffering than anybody can possibly alleviate” argument, or perhaps the “we shouldn’t try to solve Global Warming because there are also people dying of malaria, so better let’s do nothing about either of these problems” argument. As far as I can see, nobody here has offered any coherent argument against fair trade that is not based on speculation, resentment, or simply non sequiturs, and I am not willing to even respond to that. I did, in 49, respond to the only effort at making an economic argument, which I showed to be completely baseless. If you still believe that there is a “coherent” argument out there, please let me know.

“Well, they’re saying that the Fairtrade standard prohibits mechanised farming and forbids hiring full-time workers, and they’re using seven-year-old statistics.”

The lot size and mechanised farming mistakes (presuming that they are mistakes) were mistakes of the source (the guardian) not of the libertarian in question.

If you’re aware of more current statistics, you can argue that they are avoiding them, but you appear to be saying that the statistics are just a bit old with no suggestion or point to the ‘proper’ ones.

But none of these questions really go to Henry’s main thesis, which appears to be that criticism of fair trade is

a) incompatible with libertarian thinking [at least as applied]

b) offers some useful critique along the lines of: “If market mechanisms are poorly suited to promoting public welfare in situations where the profit motive is mixed up with the desire to do good”

So far as I can tell, a is pretty much completely wrong in theory and he hasn’t done much for it as applied.

I’m not even sure b makes sense enough to try to debate. Which market mechanisms is he talking about? What kind of promoting public welfare does he mean? Because if he thinks libertarians aren’t allowed to call out marketing ploys as potentially touting more than they actually provide, I suspect he just doesn’t understand libertarians at all.

And if instead he means things like in #56 (which honestly seems like a completely different issue than the one he raised initially, but at the initial level of abstraction I guess he could have meant almost anything), I’m not really sure what he is talking about. The usual libertarian examples are things like Underwriters Laboratory for electrical safety standards on consumer products–and even that isn’t really “self-certification”. But I’m not specifically aware of the environmental self-certification he talks about nor the libertarians who tout it. But if it is like UL I’d probably be for it. If it is just a meaningless marketing gimmick I would be for exposing it as such. As for fair trade coffee, I didn’t think of it much before, but it looks like it is an in between case–mostly marketing gimmick, with a couple of bones thrown toward coffee growers to make it look a little better.

As for Henry’s high level critique, my response would be (as someone who leans toward the libertarian side) that if you think innovation tends to be a large component of the general welfare, you tend to think that constant government meddling in the market on the one hand, or monopolistic control of it on the other is (usually) stultifying rather than leading toward innovation. (The major long-term exception being military innovation, which suggests that government can do innovation, but can’t do it cheaply. Although it farms a lot of the innovation out even there, so I’m not sure how that cuts–should Lockheed-Martin be seen as a private company for this analysis or basically an arm of the government? I don’t really know.)

How fairtrade coffee bears on either Henry’s side of that discussion or the libertarian side, is mysterious to me. It seems so divorced from the question he poses that I have to think that he has in mind some specific proposal which makes it all make more sense. But he is alluding to something which hasn’t come across my radar.

And what Barry, Ceri and moe have said. To clarify further, I used to be rather knowledgeable about FT, I was involved in one of the early campaigns to get FT into Universities close to 20 years ago, I educated myself about trade issues, terms of trade, the power of the multinationals and the situation of small Third World growers etc. and I can only laugh when I see libertarians like bxg 58 with their cute romantic ideas about trade always being fair just, which only somebody can believe who is completely bereft of economic knowledge at all. As I said this was a long time ago, FT was a grassroots thing, corporations like Starbucks hadn’t entered the equation. I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about the current state of FT, I haven’t paid much attention to the issue recently, I couldn’t tell how much the FT premium per pound of coffee currently is and I don’t care enough to look it up. But none of the wannabe FT critics here seem to know what they are talking about and that speaks for itself.

Piglet,

This struck me, when I quoted it above, as a fairly clear argument on the basis of the data:

“Fairtrade pays to support relatively wealthy Mexican coffee farmers at the expense of poorer nations”

And, subject to those data being accurate, I’d say it still is.

Daniel, if you’re going to make a series of posts complaining that someone’s argument is in bad faith because their data is old, you really have to be able to show that newer data is available and reveals a relevantly different situation.

My sense is that you are engaging in libertarian-punching first, and an interesting discussion of fair-trade second.

Piglet, demand for coffee is a scarce resource, and when a system of selective subsidies diverts that demand from a relatively poorer nation to a relatively richer one we tend to expect that the people who make a living from supplying that demand, and the economy around them, will experience a loss disproportionate to the benefit received by the richer nation.

Now, you might reasonably respond:

a) That Fair Trade coffee generates additional demand where none would otherwise exist – so that people don’t buy Mexican coffee instead of Ethiopian, but instead of not having coffee at all. This is probably true in a very few cases, but I doubt it’s enough to make much of a difference to the original thesis

b) That the wealth of the nations in which coffee farmers farm is a poor proxy for the wealth of the farmers themselves and that the production of coffee adds little to the wider economy.

We can have any one of those arguments, and, other than (a), I wouldn’t be stunned to find that one or more of them was accurate. But, to be honest, talking about trade subsidies without at least a prima facie understanding of trade diversion is a pretty monumental waste of time.

Daniel, if you’re going to make a series of posts complaining that someone’s argument is in bad faith because their data is old, you really have to be able to show that newer data is available and reveals a relevantly different situation.

That was the purpose of “Let me google that for you”, a website that lets you Google terms like “Ethiopian Fairtrade Coffee” and thereby discover how much things have changed in the last seven years for Ethiopian Fairtrade Coffee.

“Piglet, demand for coffee is a scarce resource, and when a system of selective subsidies diverts that demand from a relatively poorer nation to a relatively richer one “

Please provide evidence that this is happening. I. e. that without FT, Ethiopia would sell more coffee. Once again, this is completely bogus.

Piglet,

On the demand side there are three possibilities in relation to any given unit of fair trade coffee:

(a) (as above) the costumer makes the decision to buy coffee only because fair trade coffee is available. In this case, mexico will gain sales and Ethiopia will not lose sales. This case is consistent with your hypothesis but, I submit, likely to be unusual.

(b) the customer would have chosen Mexican coffee whether or not it was fair trade certified. In this case, fair trade does not effect sales as between ethiopia and mexico.

(c) the customer would have chosen ethiopian coffee in the absence of a mexican fair trade option, but opts for mexican coffee out of a preference for the fair trade product.

Now, if I had to guess I would think that (b) and (c) would break down roughly in proportion to mexico and ethiopia’s share of the world market pre-fair trade, but slightly favouring (c), because ethiopia’s coffee is better-regarded (AFAIK) and therefore likely to appeal to some of the same customers as fair trade coffee generally.

You, on the other hand, seem certain that (b) accounts for roughly 100% of fair trade sales, and (c) for roughly 0%. I’m comfortable in rejecting that hypothesis.

Now, we can augment this discussion with an analysis of the supply side (briefly: increased prices for some producers in mexico will tend to increase output there, and some of the extra coffee they produce will result in reduced prices or sales in ethiopia) but I think we’re talking past each other. I’m genuinely unclear which bit of my argument you don’t like.

Since nobody is going to come up with data if I don’t do it myself, here’s the FAO statistic about the 2008 global green coffee harvest in tonnes (http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/default.aspx#ancor):
Africa 909,995
Central America 1,029,368
Caribbean 102,032
South America 3,836,624

Central, South, and Caribbean America produce more than 5 times what Africa produces. “181 of the 300 Fairtrade coffee producers were located in South America and the Caribbean”. So what?

Again I don’t think your argument would be valid even if South America were indeed overrepresented. I reject any reasoning of the form “if you help X but not Y, you hurt Y, so it is better not to try to help anybody in the first place”. And as I pointed out before, any FT critic concerned about Ethiopia is welcome to start their own FT operation.

On the union distraction:

“If the market demands 5 union workers at a wage for which 10 are willing to do the job, then something other than price will clear that particular market. The general way this works in the empirical work I’m familiar with is that “in-groups” will limit worker supply from outgroups.”

In the world I’m familiar with (and part of), there are many qualities to which an employer can turn to choose 5 union workers from the 10 willing to do the job when price is prohibited. There’s productivity, skill, training, certifications, work ethic, looks, age, size of truck, identity of uncle, talkativeness or lack thereof, safety record, criminal convictions, mood of employer, seniority, in-group status, etc., etc.

In the construction trades, where I have been a union employee for 7 years and a foreman with hire-and-fire responsibilities for 1, all these factors are taken into account by someone at some point. But the productivity, skill, training, and work ethic are more enduring.

One could argue that an employer forbidden to choose on price will therefore choose a factor (like in-group status) that isn’t relevant to performance. And that will happen sometimes, I’m sure, because employers are frequently not rational actors. But I can’t see any reason to argue that that is what will happen, especially if you’re a libertarian and you think everyone acts in enlightened self-interest.

Obviously I’ve got my “X’s” and “Y’s” backwards up there. D’oh.

Paul: I will henceforth treat you as a troll and stop feeding you. For those who still think there might be something to his reasoning, observe that he changed my “if you help X but not Y, you hurt Y” into ““if a policy harms Y and helps X”. Yet after a zillion requests to provide evidence for harm done to Y, none was provided. Case closed.

tomslee: “But (a) Fair Trade is not a policy” To libertarians, everything that liberals do is some form of Big Government and every outcome must have been planned in advance by some Politbuero. Consumer choice and market mechanisms are only value-free when exercised by libertarians. As soon as liberals make a choice, they are inadvertently hurting somebody.

A few FT facts:

Only Co-operatives can be FT certified, not individual farmers.

Coops tend to sell about half of their total production on FT markets, and half through regular channels. The two beans are identical.

There are no FT “subsidies”. There is a price floor, and a FT premium of 5-15cents depending on if the coffee is also organic. If the market price exceeds the general price floor, then there is a new floor set at a few cents over market price, plus the premium. The current NY “C” commodity price is a little above the general price floor.

There has been almost no evidence found of “cheating” the FT system. Transfair USA certifies all FT in the United States, and they oversee the use of the FT logo. I was somewhat surprised that there has been no documented cheating, but I know some Berkeley people who went out looking for it, and they were surprised not to find it too.

So, given the first two points:

The “problem” of over-supply in the face of FT “subsidies” is not really a problem at all g. The FT market is limited (it can only buy about half of what certified producers produce). Certified cooperatives then sell the rest of their coffee on the regular market. Total coffee supply remains unchanged, only the fraction sold as FT/Non-FT changes.

Entry into FT (certification) has increased rapidly. DeJanvry, McIntosh, Sadoulet have a working paper with an argument that this constitutes a kind of “tragedy of the commons”, where producers race to grab at the increasingly small FT premiums (because each coop can now sell a smaller percentage of their beans on the FT market, reducing average premium per pound). The greatest risk to increased FT certification is not increased aggregate supply, but decreased FT “benefits” to individual coops.

Follow up to previous long post, short version:

“piglet”: I challenge you to respond with a post including these word: “Readers, please read bxg @58 and my response @72. I stand by my response @72 as a sensible and justifiable personal opinion.”

“We” (>=1 reader :-) anxiously awaits your confirmation. (If you can’t say this, I would really like to know what the problem is.)

On cheating: one of the features of the FLO International standard is that it requires either union recognition, or failing that, employee representation of some other form, and joint control of what happens to the Fairtrade premium. So to some extent it should be self-enforcing with regard to Fairtrade producers, although there is still the risk that non-Fairtrade producers would pass off their products. That is of course the point of the certification process. (This has been a broadcast from Britons for Reading the Fucking Document, Already.)

(actually just further to that, I’ve just noticed that Griffiths also makes a quite strong version of the “production of Fairtrade coffee affects the world price” claim, even saying that it actually kills farmers[1]. I don’t endorse this because I don’t think the empirical evidence remotely supports it. But a number of his other criticisms, relating to the opacity of the FLO and the fact that not much of the Fairtrade premium makes it to the farmers, are on point).

[1] Or rather, he says that this would happen if Fairtrade worked as it claimed to – actually he thinks the subsidy doesn’t really get through to farmers, and so there is no effect on the world price. At least he notices that these two criticisms are actually inconsistent – lots of people in this thread seem to be arguing that “the Mexican farmers never get the Fairtrade money! And because of this subsidy they don’t get, they overproduce!”.

I am spending too much time on this nonsense. Well I finally checked the Griffiths web site. I can’t figure out why anybody, even dsquared, would recommend it. It looks like any other nutcase web site and it is. The Prospect article rambles about Vietnam’s entry into the coffee market – an event completely unrelated to Fair Trade – which depressed world coffee prices, and then continues to say that Fair Trade is doing the same. What’s the connection? There is none. Well this was just a short article. What about the 38 page document “Ethical objections to Fair Trade”? Afaict it does not contain a single piece of empirically verifiable evidence about the alleged damage done by Fair Trade. The only “argument” is the one already discussed ad nauseam: “If aid/charity money is spent on high-cost, low-impact projects in the Third World, instead of on low-cost high impact projects, then there will be an increase in deaths and destitution.”

Fair Trade is not charity and it does not divert any money that would otherwise have been available for Third World aid projects. This claim is about as nonsensical as the claim that people are starving because I buy food for my cat.

So, I haven’t seen much in the way of libertarians actually coming up with the objections attributed to them.

I’ve seen some libertarians object that it is just a marketing scheme with little or no actual pass through effect. And I’ve seen that the evidence on that question seems kind of sketchy from both sides, such that even after all this I can’t have a firm opinion on FT’s effects. (Dsquared’s position appears to be “You can’t prove that it doesn’t pass through” which may be true, but he definitely doesn’t seem to be saying “They pass through”) Anyway, that doesn’t seem hypocritical or cognitively dissonant for libertarians or whatever.

And I’ve seen one Tyler Cowen post suggesting that if FT worked as intended in the short run, it would tend to undercut itself in the medium run. Which doesn’t seem like an anti-libertarian objection either.

And then I’ve seen some links to people I’ve never heard of who just seem unbalanced in general. Which I’m pretty sure you can do for nearly any proposition at all.

So, I guess we’ve proved what?

So, I haven’t seen much in the way of libertarians actually coming up with the objections attributed to them.

I don’t remember clearly enough to attribute this to libertarians specifically, but wasn’t there an argument about some Economist article on Fair Trade coffee over at Obsidian Wings years ago? I remember mixing it up with Andy Olmsted, who I think was libertarianish, at least, if not a libertarian. And he’s dead at least two years, isn’t he? So longer than that ago.

I miss Andy — he was great to argue with.

As an aside, I don’t see that Rodrik (cited in the original post) formulates a critique of FT, coherent or otherwise. He is not sure how FT works and asks for information. Some of the responses are worth reading though.

That’s very funny, Henry. You were so sure that there was libertarian opposition to fair trade coffee that you spent five seconds on a google search and rushed over here to post the results–only to find that the articles you linked to didn’t actually represent opposition to fair trade coffee. Maybe next time you should read the pieces before you present them as evidence in favor of your thesis.

parse – I’m happy to keep you amused (especially because it clearly isn’t very hard). This is a post that I’ve nearly written half a dozen times over the last few years – and two or three of those times it’s been in response to some libertarian or another making these claims.

Which claims?

And sincere thanks for keeping me amused. You’re right; it’s not that hard, but you deserve credit for provocative writing nonetheless.

There’s a certain degree of differentiation between the words “opposed to” which I used, and “want to outlaw,”

There’s a similar difference between “critical of” and “opposed to.” I think Sebastian’s correct to say most of what you’ve pointed to so far is more accurately described by the former.

You’ll happily stipulate what to Weber? That he isn’t really opposed to fair trade even though you cited him and linked to him as a clear example of someone opposed to fair trade?

He pretty much makes the points that I’ve said are typical libertarian points throughout this thread. If he is what you mean by “opposed to” than you really seem to agree with my pot example from comment #50:

I think that smoking weed every day would be a stupid choice for most people. I don’t smoke weed myself and I suspect I wouldn’t if it were legal. I would be willing to tell one of my friends if I thought he was smoking weed too much. I don’t think the government outlaw or even very strongly regulate the smoking of weed.

Does that make me a libertarian ‘opposed’ to smoking weed?

Do you really use a definition of ‘opposed’ which is so broad? I mean you can, but that is why I’ve been asking for you to explain what you mean by it all this time. Pointing out imperfections or unintended consequences in a system isn’t a contradiction in libertarian thinking. Using the persuasive power of pointing out that something isn’t working as intended isn’t anti-libertarian.

Your original post, and all of the comments you wrote after, suggest that libertarians want to thwart fair trade or something, but on actual inspection most of the cases look like libertarians suggesting that fair trade in practice tends to be mostly marketing scheme, or otherwise not very effective.

I’m not sure I’d even say Weber is ‘critical’. He kind of thinks that there are some good things about it, but that large parts of it are misleading/for show. He also seems to think that it broadly has good aims, and that it might be possible to get it to work in certain circumstances.

The funny thing is that if I had raised his piece, you probably would have dismissed it as non-representative. But what are we supposed to do when you raise it as representative and it turns out like that?

As for Brink, I think he uses it more as a prop than anything else. Kind of like how for Chomsky any discussion can be turned into a topic on American Imperialism. And even then, Brink is basically suggesting that it doesn’t work. You have some sort of mysterious linkage between this and a suggested contradiction about markets and social forces, which doesn’t appear to be illustrated in the Brink essay at all unless I’m totally misunderstanding your point. (Which is possible as you mostly allude to it, rather than actually sketch it out).

I guess that is my whole problem with this post. You allude to a bunch of things that are quite apart from my experience with actual libertarians, but don’t really point to good examples of what you want to talk about. Now I’m certain that if you look hard enough you can find a crazy person on the internet who could sort of illustrate your point. But so far, most of the examples seem like reasonable criticisms which aren’t even real opposition. And that is especially true of one of the two that you yourself offered as a representative. Which is just weird.

The funny thing is that I strongly suspect that Weber really is the most typical representative of how libertarians approach fair trade: they tend to think it is well meaning, but mostly a marketing ploy.

So you were right to include him as representative, but it undercuts your point about loony libertarians.

Well at least you are clearer in your points. We could have used some of that in your original post. But you’re still maddeningly vague in certain areas.

On point 1, my problem is that if you inspect most of the examples of which I’m aware, they don’t map well onto the fair trade example . Take Underwriters Laboratories, which is the classic example. They verify certain safety standards in products. That is MUCH easier to verify and test than claims about how workers are treated in third party countries well back in the production chain. You can always look at the product as it IS, rather than make claims about what happened earlier. It is much harder to game, or make spurious claims about. Or take carbon trading. Libertarians tend to argue that if you want to limit carbon through government intervention, carbon trading is least distorting because it uses market functions to allocate the scarce resource such that it will tend to encourage those who can easily go to alternatives to do so, and will tend to encourage innovation more easily than alternative methods. This doesn’t map well onto Fair Trade either, which is more cartel like if effective, more advertising ploy if not.

As for point 2, I think you are still overplaying opposed to. What does ‘opposed to’ mean now that you have stipulated “don’t want the government to ban”? Willing to say that it doesn’t always work as intended? Hell, I say that about Tylenol, but that doesn’t make me opposed to it. But I’ll move on from there.

How about we just focus on “They point to the many ways in which fair trade coffee schemes may have perverse consequences, and not achieve the kinds of the benefits that they purport to.” which is certainly true.

“But looked at properly, fair trade coffee shares much in common with the market and self-regulatory mechanisms that libertarians usually prefer. The same criticisms can be applied to both.”

Looked at properly, this may be true. Unfortunately you haven’t helped us look at it properly. You just keep asserting the obvious parallels, which frankly aren’t obvious.

You are either misunderstanding the libertarian critique, or you have some example of libertarian proposals in mind that you aren’t willing to share for some reason. But the standard ones, the ones that leap to mind when I think of libertarian proposals, don’t actually share much in common with Fair Trade.

My main points on this:

1) FT makes claims about distant production, not actual product. These claims are harder to verify than claims about the actual product.

2) To the extent that FT accurately represents practices, it is unobjectionable for consumers to decide that they value it and are willing to pay a premium for it. How this intersects with UL-style verifications or market mechanisms like carbon trading, is unclear.

3) You seem to be conflating libertarian claims about market allocation of scarce resources and how that produces innovation (say carbon trading) with claims about market segmentation/specialization. Those aren’t particularly similar claims. Problems in one area are not the same as problems in the other. Fair Trade criticisms have very little to do with nearly all of the libertarian informed proposals I can think of in that realm. You either have something in mind that I’m not thinking of (which is very possible) or you are treating allocation and segmentation issues as the same (which is also possible). If the first, I wish you would just come out and identify the proposals you think are similar to FT and we could inspect them for similarity and/or typicality of libertarian claims. If the second, in my opinion they are different enough to require different analysis.

My analysis of market segmentation claims would be something along the lines of: they depend on verification problems. Verification of the end product (i.e. UL or long term safety of a pharma drug for example) is easier and more concrete than verification of a process. Even process oriented verification (say meat packing) is still subject to end product checking–if they fake it too much you verifiable bacteria in the end product. If you fake FT coffee, you get the exact same end product–coffee. So it is more subject to gaming or spurious claims.

Some? Sure. But more specifically, the major objection from d-squared was that the information was old. Not that it was wrong. And two of the items which are suggested to be wrong (I can’t independently verify) came from the guardian (Cowen is quoting the guardian) and as such can’t really be said to be from “libertarian-leaning authors”.

“They tend to be suspicious of arguments that emphasize how resort to market mechanisms may have perverse or unexpected social consequences. ”

No that isn’t a good characterization. Libertarians are perfectly willing to accept that markets may lead to unexpected social consequences (say how the introduction of the automobile changed US rural life). They tend to be suspicious of arguments that emphasize how wonderful it would be if governments try to further correct those–especially when advocates of the same are unwilling to investigate how those ‘corrections’ also lead to unexpected social consequences.

“However, when it comes to fair trade coffee, a variety of libertarian critics seem interested in finding a variety of reasons why market mechanisms in this particular instance have pernicious and perverse consequences. Something doesn’t give here. ”

Yes, but what doesn’t give is that you just gave a poor characterization of libertarian economic thought and then found a contradiction which exists because of the poor characterization.

“Unless there is some very strong reason why the market mechanisms underpinning the choice to buy fair trade coffee are uniquely awful, then we may expect that similar problems may plague other efforts to turn market mechanisms to the task of achieving broad social benefits. ”

“Broad social benefits” is another super-vague one. At that level of abstraction you are almost certainly right, or arguably wrong, or pretty much anything. Markets are great at providing certain kinds of social benefits, and mediocre at others, and badish and others still. But again, your sense that libertarians haven’t heard of unexpected market outcomes is just wrong, so you’re going well astray here.

“One plausible example that I can speak to from my own research is the insistence of libertarians at Cato and elsewhere on setting privacy rules through a combination of self-regulatory standards and reputational incentives.”

Finally we get to an example. Is this what you had in mind all along? Because it isn’t the most obvious example (I would have guessed you meant carbon trading). But comparing it to Fair Trade, it seems to me on first blush that it is easier to verify failures in the privacy case. Either than information becomes public (and thus the failure is revealed) or it is semi-public (but still subject to being noticed) or it is being used for marketing (in which case it will be noticed). Now it isn’t AS easy as the Underwriters Laboratories case which I have already raised numerous times (and you either ignored or don’t understand) but it is certainly easier than the Fair Trade case which A) takes place almost entirely in outside countries and B) has no consumer side effects whatsoever which combined seem to make it very difficult to verify.

Furthermore, we should note that the ‘libertarian’ arguments which most on this thread find so objectionable are those regarding second order effects regarding long term supply and demand issues (suggesting that it impoverishes one third world country’s farmers to help others). So far as I can tell those issues do not exist at all in the privacy case.

So what is left?

A few suggestions. Libertarians don’t like Fair Trade because liberals are into it and libertarians don’t like liberals (aka the identity politics argument cf. why libertarians don’t like health food, France and hippies). Other than that, for a libertarian any trade is fair, as long as there’s on force or fraud involved, even if it’s paying someone $1.50 for 12 hours work on a coffee plantation so the term is meaningless, or even a kind of false advertising. Other than that, ‘it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher etc’ that the market works its magic; once market actors start worrying about being nice rather than getting the best price they can all hell is likely to break loose and we’re halfway to communism.

Seriously though Fair Trade isn’t really a ‘market mechanism’, at least in the purist’s sense of a system that generates beneficial collective outcomes from the _self-regarding_ behaviour of individuals (Smith’s invisible hand) so I can see why it might make libertarians a bit queasy. (Compare Milton Friedman’s disparagement of ‘corporate social responsibility’…)

“You seem to be all about generalities and very little about specifics.”

Sebastian, it is you who chooses to ramble on in the abstract rather than responding to specific arguments. E. g. your statement in 120: “You seem to be conflating libertarian claims about market allocation of scarce resources and how that produces innovation (say carbon trading) with claims about market segmentation/specialization” Observe how this hand-waving is totally disconnected from the preceding debate. It would probably be fair to characterize this as trolling. The point that everybody except Sebastian understands is that libertarians have a tendency to mischaracterize Fair Trade (FT as a “subsidy” etc.) in order to find fault with it.

Engels:

If individuals have preferences for the welfare of coffee farmers, then FT is a perfectly fine market mechanism. In fact, if Western consumers have those preferences, and FT does NOT exist, then there is no market for the altruism of the consumers, and thus we would not necessarily reach a Pareto optimal outcome.
People are still “self-interested” in the proper way, they just have preferences such that their self-interest is in part determined by the welfare of others. This is not some radical idea. Clearly, our preferences are determined by the welfare of others: friends, family, community, even without believing that generosity is ever likely to come back and help us (meaning: we don’t just care about them to insure ourselves against future misfortunes, we actually care about their well-being and are willing to pay for it).

Otoh if you want to _define_ ‘self-interested so that all behaviour, including altruistic behaviour, is self-interested then yes, it’s self-interested ‘in the proper sense’. Likewise if I define cheeseburger to mean blog commenter then you’re a cheeseburger in the proper sense. I’m doubtful that either of these points really advances the discussion, though.

engels, are you being facetious? I seem to remember Adam Smith wrote something about altruistic emotions being inherent to human beings. Maybe you should read every page of The Wealth of Nations and get back to us when you’ve verified that there’s no reference to any motive other than self-interest in that book. It would be interesting for a historian of science to investigate when the idea that narrowly defined rational self-interest was the only permitted motive in economics thinking became widely accepted.

(Smith wasn’t a libertarian. I cited that passage, not because I think it sums up his views, but because it is a kind of mantra for some libertarians. I didn’t say anything about the whole book or his work as a whole, which is more nuanced.)

Well Bianca I guess I’ll just have to live with you believing I’ve said something obviously ignorant again.

I should have put in a smiley or a “Seriously” or some other verbal marker to liven up the academic sounding prose with something emotional.

piglet, I think we’re working from somewhat different traditions. Most strikingly, what you describe as “libertarianism” and characterize as “left,” is totally impossible in the United States, I think. That “all these selfish actions miraculously add up to further the common good” sounds a lot more emphatic than I think is warranted from anything I’m aware of in what I know of classical economics.

piglet,
The question here is a human institution called “fair trade coffee”: people got together and came up with a plan to provide a product. They decided what the product would be, how it would be priced, and who would do the work, under what conditions. They hired or contracted with people who voluntarily offered their labor at the price offered, for the purposes offered. They offered the product to customers under prevailing market conditions.

There are several objections someone might make to this. Some people think the conditions under which labor is offered make the offer less than fully voluntary. Some people, on the contrary, think product planning, pricing, and so forth, should be done centrally. From the fact that someone objects, I can’t tell why. Here, though, people who object keep making the same argument (I mean here on this thread–I don’t know what Henry has been reading), so we know what the objection is. The objection is that the motives of the people who planned the organization were the wrong motives. The only motive that is acceptable is to be a market actor, someone who sells a commodity at market prices and pays market wages, making profits for investors.

They don’t argue for this, they don’t provide their sources, they don’t suggest books to read. They don’t welcome efforts by others to do that. They imply (falsely) that everybody who is qualified already agrees with them. They also imply that their sources (when they acknowledge them) made claims they never made: for example, if someone treats problem X, they may claim the person had principled reasons against being interested in problem Y. Only someone who believed lies could miraculously be turned to good purpose (ironically!) would feel any obligation to take what they say seriously.

On Preferences and Efficiency:

I think we are having a word problem. There is a conception that Classical economics relies on “self-interested” individuals. So let’s be precise:

A self-interested agent maximizes utility based on her own preferences. Many kinds of preferences can be represented with Utility functions. The components of this utility function (the variables and parameters) are not in any way specified by the theory of economics, only certain properties that these preferences must have in order to be representable by a utility function. These properties are not on the things people have preferences over (consumption, altrusim, etc) but on the ways people prefer them (preferences are smooth, transitive, defined across all goods).

A firm maximizes profit in a competitive market.

When firms maximize profits and individuals maximize utility, and there are no missing markets for anything people have preferences over, then (assuming production has decreasing returns to scale at some point and a few other things) markets achieve a general equilibrium that is Pareto optimal.
**Note: also no public goods, externalities, and symmetric information.

So: people have preferences for altruism. They maximize their utility, in part, by buying FT coffee. Because they prefer the bundle they choose with FT coffee over the bundle they choose with non-FT coffee and whatever other goods they could afford with the price difference.

So, in this example, classical economics is all perfectly happy with FT, and if the FT market did not exist, the market outcome would NOT be Pareto efficient, because individuals would have no mechanism through which they could consume altruism.

This is Micro Theory 1 in any graduate school.

The interesting point is the one that Bianca made: when did Utility Maximizing come to mean “All that should matter to you is your own consumption”.
I have a feeling that, in a general sense, even the Chicago people think that is a pretty gross twisting of what the theory actually says.
My guess is that this is a result of the modeling decisions Economists have made over the years. Modeling consumption of goods is easy, and empirically measurable too. Modeling altruism and measuring it are very difficult. So everyone who takes Econ sees only models where preferences are defined only over a couple of consumption goods, and they come to think that that is what makes people “self-interested” in the utility maximizing sense.
It is not.

j

jrc:
Thanks for the explanation.

I had gotten the impression that maximization of profits is only a modeling assumption, and that micro-economics doesn’t have normative implications (at least on that point) for firms (though it may have practical implications on how they should behave in the market). I didn’t know this was required by the macro theory (though maybe I would have known if I had been reading John Q.’s posts).

But this is exactly the point that Amartya Sen was responding to in his famous essay on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal (which John Holbo notably misunderstood last year.) The logic above only has bearing on a world where the states of the world people have preferences over, and the states of the world there are markets in, are the same. But in reality, the only dimensions of states of the world there are markets in is the distribution of goods (and that small subset of human activity we call services.) So for Classical economics to get any purchase, people’s preferences must also be limited to choices between states of the world distinguished only by the distribution of goods. And in particular, there aren’t markets in the states of mind of others — liberalism (not to mention common sense) categorically rules out binding contracts on others’ mental states. So if such preferences are common, then Classical economics is irrelevant to the world we live in.

Libertarians, to their credit, are interested in the world we live in. They’re committed to the idea that allocation by markets really does lead to efficient (i.e.) good outcomes. It’s not enough for them (or for anyone except first-year grad students, really) that some abstract mathematical system whose components we might happen to label markets has a formal property we might happen to call equilibrium. That system has to have some correspondence to the markets we observe in the real world. In which case, you really do have to assume that people’s preferences are only over states of the world distinguished by the allocation of goods, and people who claim to be taking others’ states of mind into account in their purchases are perversely acting against their own interests and moving the world further from optimum.

You suck for making me guess what the error on the message was