The synthetic lamb
(… I take advantage of your solicitation to line up some "dots" scattered throughout the corpus of the blog, whose meaning perhaps now, with a little perspective, we can better grasp …)
A few days ago one of you posed an interesting topic: what guarantees of safety does the so-called synthetic meat give us ? Four days later Marco Cosentino, to whom I had reported the issue, published this interesting review article on his Telegram channel (to follow). In extreme synthesis: the doubts expressed by our friend about the increased biological risk posed by the reproduction of cells in vitro compared to the sexual one are well founded and were already widely known and discussed. The review dates back to three years ago, but the debate was already vital seven years ago (and in fact it was talked about tangentially here as well ). However, it is confirmed that nothing is invented here (and we have never claimed to invent anything ) and that common sense and a minimum of education will take you, if not before, not long after, where science will arrive. The article from seven years ago, among other things, poses an interesting facet of the problem: how do you propose synthetic meat in a world that increasingly aspires to a life and natural products (the famous zero kilometre)?
But this is only one facet of the problem, in fact, easily unhinged with the well-known mechanism of the call to a higher urgency: the new FATE SOSTRA! environmental, Gretino, can easily sweep away the bucolic aspirations of another type of environmentalism, the one less financed by multinationals.
The crux of the problem seems to me instead to be that highlighted by Gabriele Bellussi : the oligopolistic concentration that this type of supply chain necessarily brings with it, given the high technological barriers to market access, and the consequent control by a few of the lives of all others. This is the direction in which we are going, that of control, but this is far from new (it is no coincidence that you have mentioned the classics: 1984, and so on), and even on this we allowed ourselves in times not suspected of launching multiple alarms . Nor is it a great novelty, but gaining ever greater prominence in this matter is the fact that the European Union, a project born, in the immortal (?) words of the Ventotene Manifesto, to fight "effectively" (?) "all the monopolistic tendencies", is simply the armed wing, the amplifier of these monopolistic tendencies.
Of course, the Cathar and cryptogrill line expressed by the Ventotene manifesto ("the existence of the absolutely parasitic class of absentee landowners and rentiers who contribute to social production only by cutting the coupons of their titles, of the monopolistic classes and chain companies that exploit consumers and make the money of small savers, plutocrats, who, hidden behind the scenes, pull the strings of politicians, to direct the whole state machine to their exclusive advantage…" etc. etc.) suffers from various analytical weaknesses, and also from a certain wear and tear of time, as we have repeatedly noted . Among the many weaknesses, one of the most relevant for the purposes of what concerns us here is the lack of a reflection on the endogenous nature of these monopolistic tendencies, which derives from the nature of technological progress, as Sylos Labini would later explain . Precisely for this reason, precisely because of their somewhat endogenous nature, these tendencies would require, as a counterweight, a strong and legitimate policy, which is capable not only and not so much of regulating how , but above all where we want to go. Because if someone else offers you the where , then, depending on the case, the choice of how may not be vast or easy. Therefore exactly the type of policy would be needed which, due to a series of coordination problems on which we have dwelt at length over the years, the EU cannot "deliver" (as the good ones say).
In fact, some recent news reports confirm what we have always said to each other here : if not the only one, the main economy of political scale achieved by the European "big brush" is that to the advantage of lobbying, which is an absolutely physiological activity for the functioning of a democracy (in the end, Governments must represent and defend interests expressed by society, and companies also belong to society), but which degenerates more easily if it operates, in fact, in conditions of (political) monopoly, such as those created in re ipsa by the European project.
And so what?
And therefore, as usual, as in other fields (here we started dealing with international monetary economics), if a story has been going on for decades, and if there is a lack of institutional conditions, even before political ones, to counter it, even if common sense and its sublimation which is science, advise against taking a certain path, that path will be taken, and behind it there is not the "S" of Satan (sorry for the many folkloric friends whose naive and involuntary attempt to discredit our work) but that of money.
Does that mean we can't do anything?
I would like to answer, even if it is not good manners, with a question: what have you learned from twelve years of battles?
It would be useful for those who didn't give up, those who have been here since the beginning, to answer. There is someone. The others are welcome, but obviously see a journey of years under the distorting lens of current events. Because if we haven't learned anything, then the war is lost. If we have learned anything, then we must recognize the little progress made and the many defeats suffered and draw lessons from them: those lessons that I have tried, unsuccessfully, to share with the latest wave of zerovirgolists (those who crashed in Friuli Venezia Giulia )…
In any case: bon appétit!
(… the eternal return of the same! We are more or less eleven years ago: they unleash their strolling players – do you remember Donald?, they return to the fray with the same arguments – do you remember when we sent to draft the CCF and the "positive" coins?, without anyone asking the simplest of questions: "but this political posture – that is, that of anti-politics – what results did it give us the first time?" The organic alliance with the PD of "rights", that is, rights! Nice result! And then, it's not the first time! Anti-parliamentarism – because that's what it is about – is a constant in our political landscape, a chronic phenomenon that becomes more acute as fascism, indifference, grillismo… The next "ism" we don't know what it will be called, but it is of interest to the right: the problem is not the label that is given to it, the problem is that in this madness there is a method, there is a rationality, which we have here discussed many times , taking our shovelfuls of manure, but we were right, in the limited sense that what we predicted then happened . The fact is, and I know that saying it exposes me to criticism, predicting what would have happened was not entirely useless. It didn't stop it, sure, but now some of us are closer to where things settle down. Claudio regularly insists on this point: crap like the "European affiliation", or simply the increase in the IMU, didn't go ahead because we were there. Of course, we are far from the goal of recovering full strategic autonomy, but nevertheless I don't think that our being there is irrelevant: this is shown by the effort made by our enemies to validate the idea that the purpose of a parliamentarian is mere testimony, whether setting himself on fire like a Buddhist monk [by reading the article you will learn that even that photo had been prepared, as well as those of the gretino smearers], or the retreat on the Aventine [which ended up as you know]. Don't fall for it! The results require patience and perseverance, they require not burning yourself out, either literally or figuratively. We understood this. If the strollers are sorry, we'll deal with it …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/04/lagnello-sintetico.html on Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:23:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.