Peter Carstensen, Dr. Pangloss as an Agricultural Economist: The Analytic Failures of the U.S. Beef Supply Chain: Issues and Challenges, 68 S.D. L. Rev. 458 (2023).
Abstract
In 2020, the House Committee on Agriculture requested the Department of Agriculture to fund research on the marketing of beef cattle. This request resulted in the publication of a volume containing nine chapters on the marketing of cattle. This essay critically reviews that volume. With only some partial exceptions, the authors, all agricultural economists, presented an unreflective defense of the status quo in beef marketing. This is remarkable because of the long history of concern with many aspects of those markets. The authors largely ignored alternative ways to accomplish what they claimed were the benefits of the current system. Thus, they generally seem to have committed the error of assuming that only the present marketing systems would be capable of producing those benefits. The resulting analyses are reminiscent of the view of Voltaire’s famous Dr. Pangloss for whom this was “the best of all possible worlds.”
