There Is No Big Salt

Sometimes you can guess what's a lie just by following the economics

Let’s say that you’re the purveyor of some toxic foodstuff and want to keep selling more of it. To be fair, the foodstuff you’re selling isn’t always toxic: It’s fine in small quantities, and under some circumstances can be a lifesaver, but in large quantities it’s demonstrably bad for almost everyone. You being a sociopath view ruining the health of the entire society you’re a part of as less important than your sales profits and want to generate some kind of PR campaign to cover for the evils of your product. How do you go about doing it?

A standard practice of toxic people is to preemptively accuse someone else of doing exactly what it is that they’re doing to try to make it look like the other party is making an identical counter-claim out of retribution when they finally get busted. It can be truly comical how specific these accusations can be, to the point of giving away details of their own misdeeds which others haven’t even looked into yet. In our foodstuffs example, what would you want to demonize? You’d want to find some other foodstuff which is critically important to health but you could plausibly claim is bad in large quantities. On top of that, you want to demonize something which won’t fight back. Something which has magically gone from a bottleneck in the population of the human race to so cheap that there’s no industry of producers or lobbying group in charge of promoting it.

You may by now have guessed that I’m talking about sugar and salt. Sugar is of course at the core of the obesity epidemic. Salt on the other hand has gone from something whose trade was a big part of the economy of all inland societies to essentially free thanks to improvements in transportation technology. While in the short run measuring increase in GDP or ‘value creation’ can be a good measure of how well off society is as a whole in some cases it can miss the big picture because it isn’t a direct measure of the ‘value’ of what’s being created, it’s a measure of the friction which is still left. If some new technology is so good that instead of the size of the market with the amount friction left going up proportionately it makes the amount of friction go to near zero then optically the economic measures make it look like society is worse off. This effect becomes overwhelming over the long run.

One of the most dramatic examples of this in history is decrease in costs of salt, which made it the ideal punching bag for the sugar industry. There is no Big Salt. That fancy salt you buy in the store is a luxury version whose costs are completely unnecessary. Even the cheap seemingly nearly free versions you get the cost mostly comes from putting in in the packaging and stocking it on store shelves. If you were to truly optimize the cost of salt then when a baby was born you’d buy them a lifetime supply of salt for $5 and they’d never worry about it, and that’s including the labor cost of transportation supply chain in a first world country. Salt isn’t quite the most dramatic example of a cost drop ever - if you value internet bandwidth usage at what telegrams used to cost you’ll get truly ridiculous numbers - but it’s up there.

And demonization of salt is exactly what happened. For decades official guidance from doctors, the government, and seemingly all forms of authority was that the big thing everybody should do to improve their health is to cut back on salt while sugar was ignored, or even outright promoted with processed desserts advertising ‘fat free’ as if being pure sugar was healthier. I’m not going to go into the details of whether excessive salt is actually bad for you, the point is it is not and never could be the scourge which sugar is and it was made the fall guy for that.

But then what do I know, I’m an unabashed shill for Big Probability.