Steve Levitt

You'd think that the yield per hive should have doubled or tripled.

But what you just described is that it's maybe half of what it used to be.

Why is that?

Interestingly, the gap between the retail price and what's paid to the farmer, that's really grown a lot over time.

Why do you think that is the case?

Way back in 2001, the Commerce Department concluded that China was dumping honey on the U.S.

market at artificially low prices.

So can you explain what dumping means in this context?

Because it's actually being used in a different way than we usually define it in economics textbooks.

That's like one-tenth of the price that it would cost you to make a pound of honey.

Is that right?

That's still five or six times cheaper than you could have made it.

Correct.

What seems strange to an economist is what would be the motivation for a Chinese honey producer to make a bunch of honey and then sell it in the US way below the cost of making the honey?

That seems to fly in the face of what we think businesses should try to do.

In academic economics, when we talk about dumping, it's a very strategic thing that a company will do to try to drive out their competition.

But the kind of dumping that the Commerce Department was talking about was, I think, really something very different, which is

Chinese producers were calling something that was in a barrel honey, but really it was something really different than honey.

So in 2001, when the Commerce Department decided that China was dumping, what was their response?

What kind of tariffs were levied on the Chinese producers?