Ezra hopes that more information would make us thinner:
Contrary to my statement yesterday, the government could certainly reduce obesity by fiat. They could ban vending machines and junk food from schools. They could force all restaurants with more than five locations to post caloric information on the menu. They could subsidize fruits and vegetables rather than grains, corn, and meats. They could orient food stamps and the Women's, Infant, and Children nutritional program towards healthier foods. All these moves would reduce obesity, though it's arguable by how much.If you wanted my pick among them, it would be posting caloric content in restaurants. It's a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information. This, after all, is how markets are supposed to work best. Consumers have better information, can pursue their preferences in a more coherent manner, and the market can provide, adapt, and innovate in response.
Weirdly, this may not always be true--apparently Vernon Smith's team has found that adding more information to markets can make them work less well. Once you've realized the awesome blossom you want is 2,000 calories, you may decide it's as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Indeed, most of the people I know who struggle with their weight are extremely good calorie counters, because they've been on so many damn diets.
But sure, it's worth trying, though I also worry that this will be a barrier to small firms expanding, and will tend to shift the market towards even more highly processed food where the calorie content can be accurately measured. The closer your food is to nature, the more it varies in nutritional content.
How many libertarians do spend a lot of time arguing against this requirement? Most libertarians I know are basically in favor of greater transparency unless the compliance costs outweigh the benefits. Certainly, I think the government should take an active role in making information as accessible as possible, and I don't get a lot of pushback on that from the libertarians I hang out with. It's the "everything not forbidden is compulsory" kind of regulation that we hate.
Reading Ezra Klein makes one more stupid.
Perhaps he needs to put up a disclaimer.
Although I don't disagree that more information can be useful, unfortunately, the nannies do not react well when their initial attempts are not successful. Lists of calorie counts at McD quickly become part of the wallpaper. The nannies then insist that the values need to be printed on the containers themselves, in large enough type that they are unavoidable. Then we go on to adding pictures of obese people, and photos of coronary heart disease.
If you think I am joking, look at what they have done with smoking in the UK. The packages there are quite disgusting. (I hate smoking, BTW)
Trouble is, food is a necessity, and when the nannies do not see the results they expect, they will go beyond McD to the grocery stores, and butter will end up being sold from locked cabinets, only after you have watched a video of how your heart will fail when you eat it.
The basic concept of providing information is not objectionable. It is the way it is driven to excess by its failure to accomplish the goal. Look at the proliferation of warning labels on stuff. My sailboat has a warning label on the mast telling me that I should not contact overhead powerlines because it is dangerous.
Too much information can also produce a society that ignores the warnings, and then the really significant warnings are not recognized.
Why bother with all the half-measures? Government fat police could simply arrest any obese people they see and make them prove they've lost weight since their last weigh-in (held every time you renew your driver's license.) I bet a minimal prison diet would work. On the other hand, where does it say in the Constitution or
Declaration that the government owns your body?
I agree sith rxc. Has anybody seen those nifty anti-smoking commercials they are at dinner time with the gangrene?
Nanny state government in action.
I don't smoke.
I'll be for it as soon as they start making commercials about avoiding sleazy politicians like Craig and Kennedy.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that whenever someone writes “it’s a bit rich” OR “I find it amusing that people who disagree with me about X are doing Y or don’t see the wisdom of Z” that usually the person writing it quickly reveals that they haven’t thought through WHY it is that people who disagree with him about X are doing Y instead and/or don’t agree with him about the purported wisdom of Z?
Megan for example just did a fine job of pointing out the unintended consequences of posting too many warnings and that compliance costs are almost never zero.
Ezra Klein on the other hand missed both of those rather obvious points or perhaps it’s because he lacks the intellectual chops to make an argument that goes beyond “you’re a hypocrite for disagreeing with me, nyahhh!”
If you wanted my pick among them, it would be posting caloric content in restaurants. It's a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information.
I'll leave it to the hardcore libertarians to point out the stupidity of the "It's a bit rich..." part and instead note that these regulations on "restaurants" always seem to be limited to chains, while individual restaurants are free to serve plates full of butter, cream and grease with no warning notices.
Partly that's because it would be unworkable to make them comply, but one suspects that the food nannies also just don't seem to like chain restaurants...
rxc made a valuable point, which I'm astonished an economist (that would be you McArdle) has overlooked. There is a serious opportunity cost associated with absorbing information, since our onboard mental "bandwidth" is pretty low.
Not surprisingly, people develop strong filters for what information they're going to take in, let alone process. When you say oh it does no harm to provide people with more information, you're totally missing this. It certainly may do them harm, because, as a rule, all of our information bandwidth is presently occupied -- very few of us are standing around, in line at fast-food joints or not, wondering how we can find something to read or think about because our brain is just bored, bored, bored.
So if you add information to the pipe, then you are going to push something else out. What do you push out? What's the trade-off? You need to ask these questions before you know whether adding information causes harm or not. It's not enough to know that adding your information won't do any harm -- you have to know that you also won't do any harm by blocking out some information that used to get through before you started hogging up a bigger share of the consumer's attention.
More perniciously, as rxc said, if you keep pushing stuff into the pipe, you are going to retrain the rules people use to filter information coming in. You have an excellent chance of training them to ignore any warning messages that come from the government, if most of your warning messages are ultimately perceived, by the end user, as worthless or not germane to his goals. In that case, you certainly would do harm by adding what amounts to spam to the consumer's mental inbox.
There's no doubt some information that the government could provide would greatly enhance the freedom of the market. And the way we figure that out is: what information do people already want, already look for, already value, but maybe can't get because of collective-action problems? That's the kind of stuff government can usefully do. But sending down stuff various experts think people ought to care about (but don't, in fact), is just as stupid as sending people food stamps instead of cash supplements.
"...Megan for example just did a fine job of pointing out the unintended consequences of posting too many warnings and that compliance costs are almost never zero."
'...instead note that these regulations on "restaurants" always seem to be limited to chains...'
It is because for chains, the compliance costs really are very near zero.
For fast food, it is a matter of giving you your Big Mac wrapped in paper printed with nutritional information instead of 20 iterations of "Big Mac".
In chains 1 step up, it is a single line of text added to the annoyingly cutesy trifold laminated menus.
These are cost increases of less than 1/1000 of a percent. The real question is then one of competitive fairness. Should "Joe's Greasy Spoon" be exempt because it would be a non-negligible cost to Joe? If he gets more customers because they don't like being reminded of the calories in "Denny's" food, that's a problem. The diner and "Denny's" should have the same rules. If it's too onerous for "Joe's Greasy Spoon", don't lay the burden on "Denny's" either.
If he gets more customers because they don't like being reminded of the calories in "Denny's" food, that's a problem.
I think "reminded" underestimates the real problem, which is that it reinforces completely unrealistic notions that a Big Mac and fries are unhealthier than kung pao chicken or foie-gras-stuffed duck. But conflating aesthetic and class values with health isn't a bug, it's a feature.
But what if the government obesity-fighters are wrong about obesity's underlying cause?
Many anti-obesity reformers - CSPI and others - seem to think that a healthy diet is one that is low in fat, low in saturated fat, low in sodium, and high in fiber.
Gary Taubes, in his wonderful book "Good Calories Bad Calories," explores the hard science behind obesity. He concludes that obesity is caused not by overeating, inactivity, or a diet high in fat or saturated fat. Instead, obesity is caused by carbohydrates, particularly easily digestible (refined) carbohydrates, because they cause insulin secretion. Sugar (or high-fructose corn syrup) is especially harmful.
If Taubes is correct, posted calorie counts would be a misleading measure of how fattening a menu item is. Instead, an indication of the glycemic impact of a menu item might be the best indicator, but I don't think there's a standardized way to measure that and even if there was, good luck educating the general public about how to interpret it.
Anyone who thinks removing vending machines will keep junk food out of schools has never actually been to school.
Anyone who thinks posting nutritional information in a restaurant is even remotely possible has never actually cooked a meal.
How's this for a reason?
If I cook someone a hamburger and hand it to them, and they hand me a dollar, that should not be a criminal act.
And it should not become a criminal act because I haven't had a lab test my hamburger to give me an exact breakdown of its calorie count and nutritional content.
See how simple that is?
Njorl, the Big Mac box does have nutritional information. Flip that box over.
EK wrote: Contrary to my statement yesterday, the government could certainly reduce obesity by fiat. They could ban vending machines and junk food from schools. They could force all restaurants with more than five locations to post caloric information on the menu. They could subsidize fruits and vegetables rather than grains, corn, and meats. They could orient food stamps and the Women's, Infant, and Children nutritional program towards healthier foods. All these moves would reduce obesity, though it's arguable by how much.
I just had a wobbly vision of a smiley face wearing a comb mustache.
Really? I just had a picture of a pale rather pathetic little boy after getting his third atomic wedgie of the week vowing “I’ll show you, someday I’ll write for a major magazine and get them to take away all your junk food!” as the chess team dips his head in the toilet.
Larry, the "glycemic index" for food is an excellent way of measuring glycemic impact.
Unfortunately, many people will be forced by their choices (i.e. T2 diabetes) into getting to know the glycemic indexes of food.
Expanding on Larry's point, part of the problem with "information" is that it doesn't speak for itself. It needs to be interpreted properly. Do the nannies really know that this or that particular vector-breakdown of line-item constituents of the food is useful information, and will be interpreted as such, for reducing weight? Of course not. Another example that comes to mind is the "low fat" revolution of the late 80s/early 90s. You buy a box of "low fat" cookies and therefore you will get less fat. Does this really work? I do not observe a marked decrease in weight amongst your typical Snackwell's buyer since the low-fat philosophy hit. Just the opposite. Indeed, if Seth Roberts is correct, low-fat diets may actually be counterproductive if the goal is to lose weight.
Yet the nannies say: "you MUST print the fat grams". Fine, but how are the #grams of fat being interpreted? It's all in the interpretation.
The larger problem here, as usual, is that the nannies/soviets have a lack of humility about the limits of their knowledge. People who don't suffer from the misapprehension that they know everything are not as tempted to propose limitless/open-ended nanny regulations.
Just to piggy back on Sonic Charmer, there is also the example of providing information about Calories. Calories are, in fact, just units of energy. They are neither inherently good nor inherently bad - it all depends on whether you are trying to gain, lose, or maintain weight, how active you are, etc. But because of the way in which most people chose to interpret data on calories (amongst other obvious reasons), the mantra became "calories bad."
I suspect that this in turn contributed to people exercising less since, by definition, people who eat fewer calories have less energy to expend.
Posting calorie charts, taxing fatty foods and all the rest are terribly inefficient -- they target huge numbers of people who aren't fat, and do even that ineffectively.
They are unjust too. Why should someone with 8% body fat who works out two hours at the gym each day pay a punitive tax on his Monster Thickburger just because other dumbos are too lazy to lift their torpid butts up off the couch from watching cable reruns?
It's hugely more efficient, cost effective and just to simply tax the fat on people's bodies, a proposal made by both the serious and the mad.
Peoples' intellects will have no problem processing that information.
And if this sounds like crankery ... some serious people are saying this now, just wait 20 years or so until when the diabetes epidemic is compounding the Medicare/Medicaid fiscal crisis that's making everyone empty their pockets to the tax man for real ... you may hear this idea again.
Megan,
I am disappointed that you, as a libertarian, didn't point out the absurdity of these measures on economic principle. People are rational actors. The government provides all sorts of subsidies to make sugar cheap and abundant. Therefore people eat a lot of sugar. Then they become fat. If the government stopped paying Nebraska farmers to grow corn and stopped paying ADM to turn it into high fructose corn syrup, a Snickers bar would cost a lot more. Do you think people would buy junk from vending machines with the same frequency if a ding-dong cost 5 dollars? Much more effective than restrictive legislation is simply letting the market bear the true cost!
Actually, I believe the U.S. domestic price of sugar is significantly higher than the world price already, due to import quotas and profit guarantees. The subsidies aren't actually going to consumers.
Classic article here: http://reason.com/news/show/36207.html
Want to know how effective such food "warnings" will be? Check out California Proposition 65 warnings about cancer-causing chemicals, which are bloody *everywhere* these days. As a result, nobody pays the slightest attention to them anymore. Net result? Wasted $.
Back when my father was working in aviation safety and cockpit design, he fought continuous battles over audible & visual warnings. Many crashes were essentially *caused* by the crew being distracted at a critical moment by multiple alarms, and forgetting to *fly the plane* for just long enough to matter.
Effective, appropriate, correct information transfer cannot be achieved by simply flinging more data into the air. And that's assuming you even know what the "correct" info is, which anyone who has followed the various "food pyramid"-type arguments over the decades can tell you, is vanishingly unlikely.
Clay,
You are close, but you missed the mark. The article references cane and beat sugar, which is the kind you buy at the grocery store. Most processed foods contain sugar made from corn, aka high fructose corn syrup. It is in everything from Coca Cola to Snickers to cheese dip. And the government subsidizes it, and it is especially cheap. Hence the handringing over vending machines is misleading. If sugary foods were priced accordingly, high sugar foods would be more expensive, people would eat less, and there would be less obesity and adult onset diabetes. Just go to the grocery store and look at the ingredients in food. Everything from yogurt to salad dressing lists it as an ingredient, and usually fairly high on the list. So even though cooking sugar in the bag is expensive in the grocery store, consumers eat a lot of cheap sugar in a processed form, usually from government subsidized corn.
"Although I don't disagree that more information can be useful, unfortunately, the nannies do not react well when their initial attempts are not successful. Lists of calorie counts at McD quickly become part of the wallpaper. "
Hmm. My experience has been that
(a) The fast food restaurants that DO have lists of nutritional facts inevitably have these lists as seriously out of date. Whatever they are heavily promoting is pretty much guaranteed not to be on the list.
(b) There are PLENTY of fast food restaurants that do not provide this information. A notorious example is Quiznos, but I've also, to take another example, never seen such a list at Paneera.
(c) Regardless of what McMegan might claim, I look for the list at every restaurant I go to, use it to guide my purchasing, and have very little idea from raw intuition of what the calories in a meal might be. Something like a hamburger, for example, might be anywhere from 400 to 800 calories depending on the details of the cheese and condiments used.
How about we get the companies to actually follow the law in the spirit in which it was intended before you start raising strawman arguments about how the evil liberals are never satisfied?
Maynard,
Your comments do not respond to the points that I was trying to make - you are just explaining that you seem to be one of those people who reads all of the information that is presented to you, including all of the warning labels. Good for you. You probably only cross streets at the conrners, only when you have a green or walk signal, and you generally do not take any risks in your life. You like spectator sports, as long as they are not too violent or dangerous, but you would never do any sailboat racing or open ocean cruising, or rock climbing. The closest you would get to this would be a catered white-water rafting trip.
Don't take this as criticism. You are a good citizen, and the people who lead us would like us to all behave the way you do. Unfortunately, relatively few do. And when our leaders see that the simple methods do not work for the majority of people, or for a large fractional minority, they turn to stronger measures. It is happening right now in Britain, with the increasing enforcement of social order laws. The tobacco packaging laws were the first step in this direction. You have to see them to believe them. Any rational person would immediately stop smoking, but the world is filled with people who are NOT rational, at least in this sense. And it should not be.
Also, I would say that most people do not read all of the warning labels that have proliferated, because they have become part of the wallpaper - meaning that they fade into the background noise. You are the exception, not the rule.
Do you avoid everything that has the California Prop 65 warning label on it? I sort of doubt it. You seem to be more reasonable than that.
Do you ever go out to any higher-end non-chain restaurants and ask then for a calorie/nutrition report on the specials of the day? I cannot imagine that you do.
This is not a strawman argument - it is an argument built on observation of the behavior of the nannies over the past 30 years. From telling us to stop eating butter, to the dangers of various artificial sweeteners, to the current chemophobia, eventually to fear of civilization itself. (The current CO2 crisis is a good example).
These people need to be able to tell other people how to live their lives, and they will not stop with simple lists in McD.
"Do you avoid everything that has the California Prop 65 warning label on it? I sort of doubt it. "
Prop 65 is a stupid worthless law not because disclosure is bad, but because it discloses nothing useful. It does not involve any sort of thresholds, any sort of quantitative information; and as chemical instrumentation improves, the pool of materials containing (in the most miniscule amounts) chemicals "known to the state of california to cause cancer [in any of a dozen lab animals, but not necessarily in humans]" grows ever larger.
Prop 65 tells us something about the stupidity and scientific illiteracy of the bulk of the voting population, but that's all it does.
Nutrition labels are more analogous to the price and weight/volume markings on other items you buy. Some , heck many, people ignore price information or volume information completely. Others note them, but don't weigh them much. Still others base their buying decision on pretty much nothing else.
But I assume you are not seriously in favor of abandoning displaying prices, weights, volumes and similar such on items?
"Do you ever go out to any higher-end non-chain restaurants and ask then for a calorie/nutrition report on the specials of the day? I cannot imagine that you do."
Only because it would not be useful. I would like to know this information.
What you say about there being a class of American snobs regarding chain restaurants is true. That doesn't change the fact that I appreciate nutrition information; it pisses me off when it's not available or out of date; and if I had my druthers all restaurants would make it available it, including high end establishments.
The fact that some of the people agitating for a law are morons or even evil does not ipso facto make the law wrong; it was Nixon that got most of the environmental legislation in this country passed. One needs to look at the laws themselves, not only at the character and motivations of those who want it passed.
Maynard,
I do not advocate elimination of all of the nutrition/weight/volume/content labeling on packages. I think that the nutrition labels are pretty factual, and even the allergy labels serve a useful purpose, even though they are often quite vague ("this product prepared on machinery that also handled tree nuts"). This labeling does not take up a lot of space on the packaging, and the factual weights and measures are just that.
I have seen too many laws, including especially the ones passed during the Nixon administration, used by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum to further their political ends, and in the process they have made this society much less livable. The drug war gave us all sorts of new search and seizure rules, one of which is that there is absolutely no warrant required at any time for any law enforcement officer to board my boat and search it. These laws have also led to the incarceration of a disproportionate number of minority men, because their choice of recreational drug happened to be one (crack) that is considered to be particularly evil. The environmentalists are using the endangered species laws to try to shut down our civilization by tying the number of polar bears to CO2 emissions.
The nannies have made smokers pariahs (OK for me - I don't smoke), but their next target is foodies like me, who want to eat stuff that offends them and their sense of morality. If you don't watch how they do it, you end up on the short end of the stick. If the law is likely to be interpreted in "creative" ways, then it should not be enacted until it is fixed. I am not going to quietly sit by and let them take over my life.
Maynard,
One last comment. Most of the people who are pushing for this also probably do not like the overall concept of chain/corporate restaurants. They really like the idea of mom/pop operations, charming country inns, exotic on-of-a-kind restaurants where the food is "authentic". When you have to make sure that your food is appropriately tested, and you have to maintain you portion sizes and ingredients the same, to conform to the tested product, you inevitably end up with standardized products. No mom/pop operation can provide the sort of standardization that a corporation like McD does.
Over at Reason, there is some discussion about how one chain seems to have become a bit "creative" with the number of calories in one of its offerings. This, you may say, argues against my point above. I would argue that the fact that this discrepency was discovered will lead to tighter regulation on the corporate restaurants, and a call for some sort of information from the smaller operations. You said it yourselff - "if I had my druthers all restaurants would make it available it, including high end establishments". All it takes is for more people like you to say this to your elected officials, and it will happen.
There goes your favorite mom/pop/quaint country inn - next week they will only be serving standardized portions that come from the same central commissary that serves the airlines...
After all, children's lives are at stake here, and no cost can be too great to bear when we are talking about our most precious resource...
Is his argument really "if only fat people knew how many calories were in a Big Mac they wouldn't eat them?"
That is simply absurd and besides, most chain restaurants have this information readily available. We fat people eat Big Macs cause they taste good, not because we are ignorant of the health effects.