Bug Burgers and Broken Feedback Loops
Monday Dispatch — 2025/06/02
Welcome to Monday Dispatch, a bonus edition for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support—it means a lot and helps me keep writing.
This week, I share a selection of articles connected by a common thread: how emotion-driven policy and unaccountable managerial elites threaten real progress. Plus, some highlights from my recent reading.
Selected Articles
In Mythbusting MAHA: A Reality Check on Glyphosate, Emily Bass from The Breakthrough Institute explains why the looming possibility of a ban on the glyphosate, a key ingredient in herbicides, would be devastating.
Banning or restricting glyphosate use in the U.S. will either force producers to incur higher costs by turning to alternatives or worsen the environmental impacts of agriculture.
For some additional background on glyphosate misconceptions see Glyphosate and Behavioral Economics: How misinformation spread over one of the safest herbicides becoming known as one of the most harmful, by
on sketpoid.com.My understanding of the debate over glyphosate is that it’s rooted in bad data and amplified by emotionally charged messaging—and therein lies the problem.
What is the explanation for banning a compound that “has lower toxicity to humans than 94% of all alternative herbicides”? Moreover, what would the consequences of this ban be? What will happen to crop yield? Which herbicides will farmers resort to?
But the self-defeating pressure against crop abundance does not come only from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement. As
warns in Cornpreneurs Save Us From Davos Elites, under the guise of caring for the environment, the World Economic Forum is pushing for replacing meat production with bugs.Despite this abundance [of corn for animal feeding], the Davos crowd would have us believe that our survival hinges on swapping steaks and burgers for worms and insects. Under the banner of “sustainability,” they propose shuttering our Texas Roadhouses, Dickey’s Barbecue Pits, and Chick-fil-As to make way for bug burgers.
I’ve got nothing against bug burgers. In fact, I wouldn’t mind trying one. But I worry about being forced to eat one because someone has a stake in propping it up while kneecapping alternatives.
Who knows—if we let agricultural entrepreneurs innovate freely, with respect for the environment but without red tape, and let people choose what to put in their patties, bug burgers might become the new fancy meal.
Related, and again from Brian Dunning: The Effects of Mandated GMO Labeling: We have good evidence for what to expect from mandated labeling of GMO foods, and it’s not good.
The articles above illustrate the danger posed by policy driven by emotion and shallow data analysis.
But errors are inevitable and we are bound to make mistakes. The real problem occurs when we as a society cannot learn from our mistakes nor try alternative experiments.
This breakdown in error correction happens when unelected technocrats and managers are in charge of more and more policy making. They’re not accountable to the people whose lives they affect, and they’re insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
explains this clearly in his talk Managerial Bureaucracy’s Threat to Democracy and HumanityI hope you’ll find these posts thought provoking.
Progress depends on criticism, competition, and course correction. Without those, even good intentions will not translate into good policy.
Let me know what you think.
Book Highlights
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