Ozempic is not new anymore, and my friend is now losing weight on Wegovy. The miracle of science has been incredible to watch, because I know how difficult it was to lose weight by just trying to change habits before while the cravings persisted. (None of this is medical advice. These drugs are not for everyone.)
I have written about how the global apparel industry created something historically remarkable: a world in which almost everyone has abundant clothing in many styles. For most of human history, clothing was expensive and scarce. Today, Shein sells a dress for $8 and ships it to your door in a week.
The critics of fast fashion focus on the downsides: textile waste, carbon emissions, and low-wage labor. These concerns are prompting efforts to restrict or tax this abundance, as French lawmakers are now attempting with Shein.
Food abundance has some parallels with textile abundance. Once food became cheap, many people started complaining that we consume too much of it. We cannot seem to get it just right with consumption.
For most of human history, the primary nutritional problem was not having enough to eat. Famine was recurring and childhood hunger was normal. Innovation and globalization resulted in food abundance for most people. Caloric availability per person has risen dramatically.
The unintended consequence of that success is the fast-food era: a world in which cheap calories are engineered for palatability in ways that overwhelm the body’s natural satiety mechanisms. We solved scarcity, but now we have to deal with the abundance paradox.
These two abundance problems (clothes and calories) are at different stages of resolution.
The fast fashion critics are still waiting for their solution. The alternatives to disposable clothing seem to be either to get more expensive clothes or to change an entire culture (which rarely happens without violence). The political response of implementing bans or taxes amounts to restricting the abundance rather than addressing its side effects. Nobody has invented the equivalent of a metabolic thermostat for textile waste.
Fast food, by contrast, has just received something extraordinary: a drug that quietly recalibrates the neurochemical machinery driving overconsumption.
The Wegovy pill, the FDA-approved oral version of semaglutide, now available at around $150 a month, is not a willpower supplement. It changes, at a neurochemical level, what the patient wants. The cravings that the food system spent decades engineering into processed food lose much of their grip. My friend on Wegovy is not fighting his appetite.
This is not what the behavioral economists predicted. The dominant framework for addressing diet-related obesity over the past two decades was choice architecture: redesign menus or put the salad at eye level. These interventions assume the problem is a decision-making failure, correctable by adjusting the environment in which decisions are made. Semaglutide suggests the problem was a physiological one. The body’s hunger signal was miscalibrated for an environment of abundance that evolution had no time to anticipate.
It is worth noting and hopeful to note how the solution arrived. Nobody set out to solve the obesity crisis with a diabetes drug. As Alberto Mingardi observed in a piece on Matt Ridley’s work, innovation is often serendipitous, with “use preceding understanding”. Novo Nordisk was studying GLP-1 receptor agonists for glycemic control in type 2 diabetics. Researchers noticed, following their data carefully, that patients were also losing remarkable amounts of weight. They followed the signal. Years of clinical trials, regulatory submissions, and manufacturing investment followed. The obesity drug emerged from a diabetes research program that was following a thread it had not anticipated.
This is the standard operating procedure of markets under conditions of intellectual freedom and patent protection. The economics of innovation tells us that what Schumpeter called the diffusion stage depends on the incentive structures now surrounding GLP-1 drugs. Novo Nordisk profits from the patent. Competitors have entered with their own molecules. Biosimilars are coming. The price is falling. The oral pill, which removed the barrier of weekly injections for many patients, launched in early 2026.
If people are seeking an alternative to the current textile industrial complex, then there is one promising avenue that aligns with profit incentives. More women I know are renting nice clothes from websites like Nuuly. They get the variety from abundance but don’t have the problem of getting rid of clothes they do not need to keep. Men can rent, too, although they might not have been as prone to impulse fast fashion purchases. I think men have already been doing the “rent a tux” route for one-time fancy events.
Economist Writing Every Day 