What We Can Learn From Chicken Economics

Poultry is on our minds this week. Businessweek’s food columnist, Deena Shanker, writes about what the nominee for secretary of health and human services can do to regulate the food industry, among other changes aimed at improving Americans’ health. And Odd Lots is making a whole mini-series about the mighty chicken. Plus: the difficult math ahead for Donald Trump to fulfill his promises, and what tech billionaires get wrong about the “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.” If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

You can learn a lot from the economics of poultry. First, let’s look at a chicken fight from a few years back. As Bloomberg’s Deena Shanker writes in today’s Extra Salt column, President Barack Obama took a big swing at helping chicken farmers who were battling the big companies that controlled the industry. Obama wanted to make rules so it would be easier for the farmers to sue and to change the way they were paid. But then Donald Trump took over the White House: