Renegotiate NAFTA, get baby formula shortage

America's baby formula shortage is the result of Donald Trump's cunning approach to the politics of trade. He kept his promise to renegotiate NAFTA by putting sweet deals for all his favorite corporate interest groups into NAFTA's replacement, the USMCA. The dairy farmers wanted the US baby formula market to themselves, and they got it.

Why were they so focused on baby formula? The main ingredient in baby formula is powdered milk, the unusual dairy product that lasts forever. Dairy producers have natural advantages in their local fresh milk markets since the product is perishable, but powdered milk can come from a much wider range of places and times. So they want trade restrictions to block out foreign powdered milk. (This is from Sarah Taber, a wonderful source of agriculture-related political information.)

What happens when you've restricted baby formula imports, and one of your major baby formula production plants gets contaminated? We're finding out now.

Carrick Flynn, cryptocurrency, and pandemic prevention

Carrick Flynn is running for Congress in Oregon, with a focus on preventing pandemics. Many Southeast Asian countries protected their people from COVID-19 better than America did, because they had faced the threat of SARS and come up with a plan for addressing the next pandemic. As COVID-19 continues infecting people in 2022, America remains far short of the leadership it needs on the issue. Congress is full of ex-military people who can advise on war, but it’s light on experts in preventing viruses from killing us. 

Carrick worked on preventing pandemics and other world-destroying disasters as Research Faculty in Emerging Technology at Georgetown. He contributed to the Biden Administration's Pandemic Prevention Plan. This expertise convinced me to donate to his campaign earlier this year. 

It’s also why Carrick has attracted the financial support of cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam and his brother Gabe are heavily involved in anti-pandemic causes, and are influenced by philosophical views that I share. As Bitcoin looks like a useless bubble, and pandemic prevention is one of the things the world needs most, cryptocurrency money focusing the US government on pandemic prevention is trash becoming treasure. Of course, it looks like lots of other things to other people who have an understandable fear of cryptocurrency billionaires funding obscure causes. 

I was gearing up to write a blog post explaining the situation, but Ian Ward at Politico did it for me. I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to figure out what’s going on here. The article even explained longtermism! (And now there's yet another good article on the matter – an interview of Carrick by Dylan Matthews and Miranda Dixon-Luinenberg.) This is one of the deep philosophical reasons why I’m so heavily focused on pandemic prevention. Ward does a good job, but I’ll briefly explain it in my own terms.

As COVID-19 showed, the world isn’t well-defended against pandemics. And with technology getting cheaper and more easily accessible, the ability to design your own highly transmissible lethal virus at home might soon be widely available too. There’s a serious risk that the human species ends soon after that point. 

While it’s pretty important to prevent lots of people from dying, it’s extra important to prevent literally everyone from dying. That cuts off any possibility of a future where the human species makes massive technological and social progress, and achieves a stable high-tech peaceful society where everyone is happy. Obviously that’s a long way off, but if we get there in maybe a thousand years, the next millions of years could be loely. We could use our futuristic technology to enjoy ourselves, explore space, and make all the other earthly beings happy too. If you count value in bits of happiness as we utilitarians do, and you don’t care about when that happiness exists in time, creating that future looks like the most important thing to do.

That’s why preventing humanity from ending just as we acquires the technological power to destroy ourselves looms as the greatest task of our era. We survived nuclear threats in the Cold War. We’ll spend this century grappling with the threat of climate change, and while powerful forces block progress on that issue, there are also many powerful people who understand its seriousness and how to address it. On pandemics, we’re woefully underprepared. If money from the cryptocurrency bubble is going to defend humanity from destruction by killer viruses, so much the better.