Just because a problem exists does not mean that a new regulation will solve it
“Each time I visit the city the food gets worse and worse.” Tyler Cowen, economics professor, foodie and author of An Economist Gets Lunch, despairs of Paris. Cowen isn’t the only person to lament the state of French cuisine. This may be why – in a quintessentially French move – the nation’s government has introduced a new law in an attempt to improve standards.
The quixotic law in question is public decree No. 2014-797, more popularly known as the “fait maison” rule, in which restaurants may use a new saucepan-with-a-roof-and-chimney logo on the menu beside any dish that is made on the premises. More accurately, the restaurants must use the saucepan-with-a-roof symbol to denote house-made dishes, but the definition of house-made is rather whimsical, thanks to French legislators.
The entire affair seems unlikely to improve French cuisine but it does provide a nice lesson in practical economics: regulation is a superficially appealing answer to life’s problems but often fails to provide real solutions.
The first difficulty is that regulations are developed by politicians, and politicians pay close attention to lobbyists. In the case of the fait maison rules, it is perfectly legitimate to buy industrially prepared ingredients, provided the dish itself is assembled on the premises. Frozen fish is fine. Skinned and boned chicken is fine. Onion powder seems to be fine. Certain types of factory-made pastry are fine, although others are not. Exceptions are baffling: frozen pommes frites are not allowed unless, of course, the fries are to be oven-baked. Diced, vacuum-packed vegetables are fine but be sure to add a home-made sauce. Eliminating prepared sauces was a priority – but still, it is hard to understand these rules as anything other than the outcome of a prodigious lobbying effort by industrial food companies.
Even if the rules were more logically laid out, the French government would still be committing a classic managerial blunder. To borrow the title of a 1975 article by management professor Steven Kerr, they are engaged in “the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B”.
What France demands, naturellement, is good French food. But insisting on home-made food ensures neither quality nor Frenchness. Freshly prepared food can be terrible, while some food prepared elsewhere is superb. (My brother-in-law is a master baker operating out of an industrial estate by Oxenholme station in northwest England. I’d back his frozen sourdough loaves against fresh bread baked by a more generalist kitchen any day.) The French parliament presumably hopes that by rewarding house-made food it will indirectly improve quality. This is optimistic.
A third problem is that the regulation may produce unintended consequences. Consider a chef who offers a fresh fruit crumble alongside a selection of factory-made cakes and puddings. By law, he or she must display the fait maison logo beside the crumble, implicitly damning all his or her other dishes. Such chefs might decide to offer no house-made dishes at all, rather than bring unwelcome questions to the forefront of their customers’ minds.
Policymaking is flawed and crude while the world is subtle and unpredictable. That is why regulations are often rigged from the start, are only peripherally related to the real matter of concern and have a tendency to backfire.
“There is no substitute for consumers who demand the right kind of food and who otherwise won’t buy it,” says Cowen. This is true. The British surely get the food we deserve, and because we have become less clueless about food, our food has become less appalling. (Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Tony Blair passed a law back in the late 1990s outlawing prawn cocktails and tinned vegetables, and I missed it. But I suspect not.)
Yet if informed and demanding consumers are essential for food, they are essential for other markets too. In banking, there is no substitute for consumers who refuse to be sucked in by teaser rates and fines in the small print. In investment, there is no substitute for consumers who avoid high charges and are unmoved by selective claims about past performance. In medicine, there is no substitute for consumers who can tell the difference between an expert doctor, a defensive pusher of scans and blood tests, and an outright quack. But such customers are rare. In fairness to the customers who struggle, it is far harder to identify a good pension than a good pizza.
Regulators, then, must muddle through. Sometimes they outsource the job to professional bodies who will punish egregious offenders. Sometimes they try to outlaw particularly troublesome practices. Sometimes (too rarely) they decide that anything they did would make things worse.
There are few easy answers. Regulations are sometimes essential; they are also sometimes both burdensome and useless. The UK’s planning laws should ensure an adequate supply of elegant, well-built homes. They do not. International rules on financial stability did not give us financial stability. Just because a problem exists does not mean that a new regulation will solve it.
This summer I went to Italy for my summer break. I have always found the food there far better than in France or Britain. I doubt that the credit for that should go to the Italian parliament.
Also published at ft.com.