Obesity is a serious health problem. This article demonstrates that using behavioral economics to guide regulations is both misguided and can be counterproductive to obese and nonobese citizens alike.
That's the conclusion of an article in Regulation by Michael Marlow and Sherzod Abdukadirov. I have a whole chapter in the Food Police on precisely this topic.
One of the bright graduate students in my department alerted me to the graph below - shown on the Keep it Local OK web site (the figure appears to have been taken from this publication). The figure purports the following. For every $100 spent at a local business, $73 stays in the economy and $27 leaves. But, for every $100 spent at a non-local business, $57 leaves the economy.
Here are my questions:
What are you most worried about? Kevin Kelly, the editor at Wired, weights in on this question with many other thinkers at Edge.org. Kelly took a twist on the title of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book, Population Bomb, which spread paranoia about over-population. That obviously didn't pan out the way Ehrlich predicted. Kelly argues that the bigger problem now confronting us might be under-population.
Here is Kelly:
Here is the challenge: this is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We've never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It is hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now.
His response comes at the same time as a story in Slate that discusses a prediction that the world population may actually fall in the future.
Perhaps it is my optimistic nature, but I'm not too worried about under (or over) population. We humans are amazingly adaptable. We seemed to have staved off the Malthusian nightmare predicated by pressures caused by a growing population. I suspect we'll find our way around this dilemma too.
This is especially true in light of the fact that we are less dependent than we once were on nature. As argued in a recent issue of Policy Analysis by Indur Goklany:
By lowering humanity’s reliance on living nature, fossil fuels not only saved humanity from nature’s whims, but nature from humanity’s demands.
Last night I went to the fridge to grab a bite of cheese. We have bought the same brand of tasty cheddar cheese for years, but for some reason I've never before noticed all the labels appearing on the package. There was one label in particular that caught me by surprise. I took a picture of it and posted it below (sorry for the grainy quality!).
It says "Keep Local Farms.org." On the front of the package, I can read that the cheese comes from "farm families in New York & New England." What is the "local" label supposed to mean? I haven't the faintest idea.
I'm sure the dairy farmers in New York are fine people. But, they certainly aren't local to me. I bought the cheese at Walmart in Stillwater Oklahoma. A dairy in Mexico is probably closer to me than one in New York. Other than the taste of the cheese, it isn't at all clear to my why I should prefer to support the dairy farmers in New York as compared to the ones in California or the ones in Oklahoma or Texas.
When I click to the link advertised on the package, I come to a web site promoting dairies in the New England and New York. That's all fine and good, but what does it possibly have to do with "local"? Last time I checked, Oklahoma isn't in New Engand! Maybe they want me to buy their cheese so they can stay where they are - in their locale - irrespective of where I happen to be. But, I still don't get it. Why should I care more about keeping them in their locale than keeping anyone else making cheese in Wisconsin, California, or New Mexico (who presumably don't want to move either) in their locale?
A likely explanation for this label is that the marketers know most people see the word "local" and conjure up all kinds of positive images without much conscious thought. Yet, when "local" starts being trumpeted as a national cause or brand, it loses some meaning - because my local isn't your local and vice versa. By all means, tout the merits of cheese from New York or New England but local has nothing to do with it.
This little example wouldn't be worth mentioning if it weren't symptomatic of a larger problem of a lack of critical thinking among many of those who religiously promote the buy local movement.
Are healthy grocery items more expensive than their regular within category counterparts? How do purchases of foods with positive health attributes change given negative unemployment shocks? To answer these questions, I supplement five years of multi-market, multi-chain scanner data with additional information on positive health attributes to create a unique dataset. First, this enables a robust descriptive analysis of the price of products with positive health attributes versus their regular within category counterparts; I find no evidence that products with positive health attributes are systematically more expensive or promoted systematically less.
That's from the job market paper of Jessica Rider in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley.
This is an interesting contribution to the debate between some folks at the USDA, who argue that healthy foods are not more expensive, and the work of people like Adam Drewnowski who say the opposite (here is just one example of many news stories on the debate).