A Quasi-Paternalist Takes on Paternalism

Cass Sunstein has a really interesting review of Sarah Conly's new book ​in the New York Times Review of Books.  Conly advocates strongly for paternalism in her book: Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.  The interesting thing about this review is that Sunstein had a very popular book promoting his own version of paternalism.  Sunstein's version (libertarian paternalism) is admittedly among the least objectionable (though still found several reasons to object in my forthcoming book - the Food Police).  

Here are some of Sunstein's key critiques of Conly's work:​

in my view, she underestimates the possibility that once all benefits and all costs are considered, we will generally be drawn to approaches that preserve freedom of choice. One reason involves the bluntness of coercive paternalism and the sheer diversity of people’s tastes and situations. Some of us care a great deal about the future, while others focus intensely on today and tomorrow. This difference may make perfect sense in light not of some bias toward the present, but of people’s different economic situations, ages, and valuations. Some people eat a lot more than others, and the reason may not be an absence of willpower or a neglect of long-term goals, but sheer enjoyment of food. Our ends are hardly limited to longevity and health; our short-term goals are a large part of what makes life worth living.

​and

Conly favors a paternalism of means, but the line between means and ends can be fuzzy, and there is a risk that well-motivated efforts to promote people’s ends will end up mischaracterizing them.

​and

Freedom of choice is an important safeguard against the potential mistakes of even the most well-motivated officials. Conly heavily depends on cost-benefit analysis . . . Officials may well be subject to the same kinds of errors that concern Conly in the first place. If we embrace cost-benefit analysis, we might be inclined to favor freedom of choice as a way of promoting private learning and reflection, avoiding unjustified costs, and (perhaps more important) providing a safety valve in the event of official errors.

Assorted Links

• Kids are eating fewer calories

• Parke Wilde reports on some (not so) funny business with the pork checkoff (I am astounded that this hadn't been reported in the mainstream media)

• 82 potential causes of obesity (file this one under: "we have no idea what caused the rise in obesity")

• Joe Queenan at the WSJ is fed up with studies telling us what is and isn't healthy to eat (​my favorite lines were: "The settlers at Jamestown did not come here dreaming of a steady diet of walnuts and olive oil. Those guys loved fats and carbs and sugar. America was built by men and women who never ate arugula.")

•  Why is eating out more responsive to income than eating at home?  Ori Heffetz has an interesting answer to the question in a paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics (an earlier ungated version is here).  The answer: eating out is visible to others; eating at home isn't.  

• Libertarian paternalism at work in school cafeterias (I have to admit that when I read stories like this, I think "libertarian paternalism" is just a fancy way of saying "advertising and promotion")​

No Need to Fear the Horse Meat Burger

Today, the Oklahoman (the largest newspaper in the state), ​ran an editorial I wrote on the European horse meat scandal.  I also touched on the consequences of the end of horse slaughter in the US.  Here are a few snippets:

An expanding European horse meat scandal has left many Americans wondering whether the same could happen here. Americans are unlikely to find a horse burger. Before celebrating, it might do some good to learn why.

Because horse slaughter ended in the US in 2007.  The consequences?

Unable to find a home for aged or crippled horses, ranchers faced high prices for euthanasia and disposal. Many horses were abandoned and left to starve. Investigations into horse abuse, for example, increased 60 percent in Colorado following slaughter cessation. Our research suggests that slaughter cessation caused a 36 percent drop in horse prices at a major Oklahoma auction and resulted in losses of $4 million per year in the yearling quarter horse market.

and

Americans are unlikely to find horse meat on their plate because we no longer produce any. It's possible that mislabeled products could be imported, but about 90 percent of the beef eaten by Americans is homegrown. If mislabeled products were found here, the answer wouldn't be, as we've seen, to ban horse slaughter. However much we are culturally predisposed to abhor eating horse, the reality is that it's safe and perfectly tasty. Just ask the French

and:​

. . . if a food retailer lies, there are legal remedies. The mere knowledge of liability, not to mention lost reputation, incentivizes truth telling. More vigilance might have stopped the faux beef sellers in Europe. But no government can prevent us from all harm. Nor should we want it to. Vigilance is costly and our governments are already doing too much.

in conclusion

The lesson from these equine scandals isn't necessarily that the government should have been doing more. Rather, politicians should learn what every good horse intuitively knows: Look before you leap.

The Food Police

My new book The Food Police: A Well Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate officially goes one sale April 15, 2013.  You can pre-order a copy now in hardcover or kindle or nook.

​To whet your appetite, the front and back covers of the book jacket are below

Here is an early review from Kirkus, the book review magazine:​

Why Do People Want Local Food?

That was the question motivating some research ​I conducted with a couple co-authors that is forthcoming in the journal Ecological Economics.  A lot of the previous research in this area had simply interviewed people at farmers markets and asked why local food was desirable.  This sort of approach is problematic for a number of reasons.  For one, people at farmers markets are not a random sample of the population and likely have different preferences and desires than the average consumer.  Another problem: we don't always know why we do what we do even though we're good at making up post hoc stories.  

To address these challenges, we conducted some research with a randomly recruited group of German consumers (located in Bonn Germany) who spend real money to buy real food.  ​Our research strategy was to pick two different kinds of foods for which freshness is related to distance traveled for one but not another.  The idea is that this would let us sort out the extent to which desires for freshness are driving desires for local food.  We picked apples (where distance traveled is related to freshness) and wine (where distance traveled is not related to freshness) and asked how much people were willing to pay (WTP) for different apples and bottles of wine that had traveled different distances.  

Here is our key result:​

These findings imply that ‘a mile is NOT a mile’. The data in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 indicate that discounts for km traveled (especially in percentage terms) are higher for apples than for wine — a fact that suggests freshness is one driver of demand for ‘local’. In fact, comparing the change in bids across apples and wine suggests that of the total drop in WTP that occurs from moving from 20 to 1000 km, about 28.5% can be attributed to freshness (i.e., (1 − 0.35 / 0.49) ∗ 100 = 28.5%). In the following we will present additional evidence that people perceive freshness to be more related to distance traveled for apples than wine . . .