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Comment by Pragmata | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US

>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.

You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.

If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.

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calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis

Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese. We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards

I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here

regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall

>calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis

I didn't say it was a free market. i said it was a freer market in this particular instance, as shown by this article.

The flipside of this is that companies put dangerous chemicals into food, cookware, etc. Not convinced things would be better on net.

Except you can check the differences easily.

China doesn't have the same strict regulations, and yet when we compare life expectancy the difference isn't particularly big.

Thought terminating cliches like "Better safe than sorry" simply don't stand up to scrutiny once you actually check the numbers.

No, eating brasilian beef isn't going to kill you, and stopping imports from there is going to do a whole lot more to make you poorer than it will help your health. Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.

Life expectancy and quality of life are very different things.

Lol.

There are so many confounding variables and long-delay influences, it’s nearly impossible to compare.

Prior generation Chinese tended to eat much less than any generation Americans, which has a proven positive effect on longevity.

Older generation Chinese also tended to (might still?) smoke like chimneys, which has a proven negative effect on longevity.

Older generation Chinese also lived through some crazy ‘population bottleneck’ events like the Great Leap Forward, which can cause very odd one time and unpredictable long term effects on longevity.

China started and enforced their one child policy early on, which has very weird population distribution effects, which will also have weird influences on longevity for everyone (due to excess or lacking societal support, etc).

They have also (relatively recently) been exposed to a wide variety of industrial chemicals, artificial fertilizers and pollutants.

Americans have had rapidly shifting food sources, pervasive but changing exposure to pesticides and artificial fertilizers, a massive shift from rural to urban to sedentary knowledge work, and widely shifting stress factors across a wide variety of areas. And a rather unique ability to spend massive amounts of time in commutes and automobiles.

This is also offset in time; and quantitatively different than Chinese have experienced.

> Except you can check the differences easily

Huh? No you can't. Without regulation or oversight, companies will simply lie about what's in their product.

The libertarian vision really handwaves the practical reality of "I'll simply do a gas spectrum analysis on every single bite of food I put into my body. Easy!"

> Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.

OK, before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and Federal Meat Inspection Act, food was frequently adulterated with e.g. formaldehyde in milk, borax in meat, copper salts in canned vegetables, and chalk/plaster in flour or milk.

Before the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, kids candy was dyed with toxic coal-tar. And on top of that was frequently contaminated with arsenic, lead, and mercury.

So please explain to all of us how taking a walk is going to save us from these issues.

> Except you can check the differences easily.

Have you forgotten the origins of these laws? Around the turn of the 20th century, it was muckraker journalists that alerted the public to the deceptive and unsafe practices that food and drug companies were using at the time. People didn't know -- that's, eh, how deception works.

...but then the other flip side is the government does things that result in contamination, dangerous chemicals in food, cookware, people dying, whatever.

You can't be "not convinced" that things would be better - "we" have a free market and that market produced sunscreen in the first place, without which we would have worse health outcomes. There's nothing to imagine - it happened. Things are better for us.

Not all things the free market produced actually have resulted in better health outcomes than if they had been disallowed (many result in the opposite, in fact) and certainly not better economic outcomes for the people who bought and used them. Regulation, as always, is a balancing act between enabling those who would do good and stymieing those (who with the best of intentions or outright sociopathy) would do harm.

So yes I remain unconvinced. Free market maximalists tend to highlight their favorite part of the story while ignoring history.

Regulation has not always resulted in better health outcomes than if the product had otherwise been regulated either. We don't need to set up this false dichotomy between markets and regulation and then bash markets over the head with the negatives aspects while ignoring negatives outcomes as a result of government action which you seem to be insinuating.

So to remain unconvinced doesn't make sense here. Though I guess I can just say I'm unconvinced of government regulations because why not? Same line of reasoning that you're using here.

Sounds like we just agree then. Regulations are necessary and should be tuned, and the Free Market can operate within those regulations, the best of all worlds is where these things work together.

Sure but then I'm not sure why you disagreed with the OP? I don't think they said anything different than what I've written.

> If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.

Note that I'm not even explicitly disagreeing with OP, you interpreted my "flipside" as a disagreement. It's undeniable that removing regulations in cancer treatments will be "impactful". Possibly even it will have positive impact. But I am unconvinced that this would be a wise pattern to adopt more broadly.

The original does not read to me as a call for tweaking regulations, it reads like an anti-regulation Boogeyman post. Forgive me for possibly over indexing on patterns I've observed from HNers making this type of comment.

They are of course free at any time to come in and declare that my characterization is unfair, at which my point about the flipside is still completely valid.

Oh, I didn't read it that way at all which is why I interpreted your flip side comment as I did. You seemed to be defending regulation for no good reason in that context where the OP was pointing out how regulation seemed to (and I have done no research on this so I don't know) be holding the United States back, and then pointed out areas where we also have in their opinion regulations that are too strict.

More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.

This isn't really the issue, most of the cost of reviewing new drug applications is covered by user fees. And most of the cost and time required for getting a drug approved is in the clinical trials. FDA resources aren't really the bottleneck, the FDA is generally faster than its counterparts in other countries.

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