Canice Prendergast on How Prices Can Improve a Food Fight (and Help the Poor)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2015

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

If you have 250 million pounds of food to give away every year to local food banks how should you do it? Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how he and a team of economists created an artificial currency and a daily auction for the national food bank Feeding America so that local food banks could bid on the types of food that were the most valuable to them. Prendergast explains the results of the new system and the cultural and practical challenges of bringing prices, even artificial ones, to a world accustomed to giving things away.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:09.2	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:18.7	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.7	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done
0:25.8	going back to 2006.
0:28.2	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:30.7	We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.0	Today is November 17th, 2015, and my guest is Canis Printergast, the W. Allen Walls Professor
0:43.0	of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
0:47.3	Canis, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:48.7	Thanks for having me.
0:50.8	Our topic today is a bit unusual.
0:52.6	You were part of a team that introduced market forces to how food is distributed from
0:58.3	a national food bank to local food banks.
1:01.2	So what was the problem to begin with that got the team involved?
1:06.1	So the not-for-profit organization that asked us to see if we could help is co-feeding
1:12.5	America, which is a very large not-for-profit space, tear, and Chicago.
1:17.4	And part of their mandate, I should say, is to receive food typically from distributors
1:24.8	or manufacturers, think crap, Walmart, whatever.
1:29.0	And their job is to allocate a large amount of food to regional food banks all around
1:35.7	the country.
	...

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