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Solving Obesity Externalities

​It doesn't matter whether you listen to Bill Maher on the left or Sean Hannity on the right,  you'll hear guests on their show arguing that something should be done about obesity because one's weight imposes a cost on others.  Obesity, they argue, is an externality, and therefore requires government regulation to make private costs equal social costs. 

Many of these argument surround the health care expenses incurred by Medicare and Medicaid.  I don't think that is a particularly good argument, but I don't want to get into that in this post.  Rather, I want to remind readers of what the Nobel prize winner, Ronald Coase, taught us regarding externalities.  ​In particular, if your behavior is harming me, I now have an incentive to negotiate with you to lessen the harm done.  

​It appears that at least one airline, has taken this lesson to heart.  According to the CNN story:

The head of Samoa Air has defended its policy of charging passengers by their weight, arguing such a system is not only fair but the future for other airlines.

and:​

What makes airplanes work is weight. We are not selling seats, we are selling weight.

and:

According to the airline's website, "your weight plus your baggage items is what you pay for. Simple."
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I suspect there will be quite a few folks who don't like this policy.  Yet, we already have to pay airlines if we want to check bags or sit in the seats with more leg room.  You're free to bring several bags or stretch out your legs, but the airline is going to make you pay for that privilege rather than charging it to all passengers.  

But, surely this isn't fair because (some) people can't affect their weight.  Yes, but I also can't affect my gender, my height, my age, or my race - all of which have been shown in various studies to affect wages, employment outcomes, and so on.  Men pay more for life insurance than women because we're riskier.  It is hard for me to see that it would be "fair" to force women to pay more for life insurance (to partially pick up men's cost) simply because men are likely to die sooner for some reasons under their control and some that aren't.       

It is almost certainly true that heavier passengers cost the airline more money (and thus raise the prices of airline tickets for everyone else).  ​Ultimately, the airline isn't discriminating against over-weight people, they're simply applying equality to every pound that enters their plane.  To do otherwise is to ask the thin to pay more than their "fair share."  

How is it that I can support an airline trying to solve an obesity-externality problem when I'm skeptical of the government ​doing the same?  Competition.  If you don't like Samoa Air's policy, don't fly their airline.  Moreover, if their policy turns out to be one that people (thick and think alike) don't like, there will ultimately be another airline that enters the marketplace to offer passengers a more desirable deal.  Samoa Air may ultimately find that trying to regulate their obesity externalities simply isn't worth the effort, and if that is indeed the case, I suspect you'll see a rapid reversal of policy after a few poor quarterly earnings reports.

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Is Organic Sustainable?

I ​ran across this really interesting blog (via Tyler Cowen's blog) post on nitrogen use in agriculture by Adam Merberg, who says he is a "reformed food reformer."  

Merberg's main point is that, aside from a small handful of crops, nitrogen is a key limiting ingredient in growing more food.  ​Much of the nitrogen used in modern commercial agriculture comes from the air!  Well, it's taken out of the air by a "synthetic" process that prohibits its use in organic agriculture.

Organic agriculture, like all agriculture, requires nitrogen.  Soil (regardless of how you farm) looses fertility after a while and requires replenishment to continue productivity.  Organic seeks nitrogen in cover crops (like clover and soy) but mainly through use animal manure.  Merberg asks a reasonable question: where does the manure get it's nitrogen.  The answer is that it largely comes through conventional agriculture and the "synthetic" process invented by Haber.  The manure spread on many organic farms comes from cows/hogs/chickens that ate grains grown using "synthetic" fertilizer.  

When we read that organic can "feed the world" we need to ask where all the nitrogen will come from to make it happen.  ​

Here are a few snippets from Merber's article (the back-and-forth in the comments was interesting too):​

By identifying manure as a source of nitrogen, Vasilikiotis dodges the issue of nitrogen fixation entirely. However much nitrogen exists in manure today, much of it has been fixed industrially before being taken up by corn plants and laundered through the guts of conventionally-farmed animals. Vasilikiotis does not explain how that manure might come to be in an organic world. To do so would require demonstrating the potential for sufficient biological nitrogen fixation

​and

Natural processes, like atmospheric nitrogen deposition, can help replenish some nutrients, but the fact remains that the nutrient cycle remains open. Maintaining modern yields generally requires inputs of some kind to replace nutrients removed in crops. For instance, Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm–which Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma identifies as a model for sustainable agriculture and describes as “completely self-sufficient in nitrogen”–actually brings in nitrogen in conventionally-grown grain, which is fed to chickens whose manure fertilizes the pasture.

and, interestingly . . .​

In recent years, the US government has begun allowing the recycling of human waste by authorizing the use of treated sewage sludge, called biosolids, as fertilizers. However, in 1998 organic advocates successfully protested proposed guidelines which would have allowed application of biosolids in organic agriculture. Whatever the merits of their objections, it is ironic that the movement for a more “natural” agriculture now opposes ending the waste of nutrients that Liebig once decried as “a sinful violation of the divine laws of Nature.”
​

For the record, I'm not against organics.  But, I am against the mis-truths that are often spread in their defense.  ​

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The Making of the Obesitiy Epidemic

That was the title of this really interesting article by Helen Lee.

She starts with something I don't recall ever having previously read: ​researchers at meetings of the American Public Health Association hand-wringing over obesity - in 1952!

​Read the whole thing, but here is a bit that matches very closely with some of the major themes in my book The Food Police (coming out in only 2 weeks!)

. . . more than a few pundits, philanthropists, and advocates have homed in on the idea that the proliferation of fast, cheap, and unhealthy foods had a significant impact on the rise of obesity; that the industrialization and subsidization of agriculture had made foods artificially inexpensive, and food companies responded by supersizing and vastly expanding snack and beverage options. Like the tobacco industry before it, the food industry­­ was profiting by selling slickly marketed products that were dangerously addictive, particularly for the poor, who lacked grocery stores offering healthier food options. Much of the American public health and medical establishment came to believe that one of the most powerful ways to overcome the epidemic was to radically remake our school and neighborhood food environments­­, reducing­­ access to unhealthy foods and increasing access to healthy ones.
But in their rush to condemn corporate agribusiness, food marketers, and neighborhood food environments, public health advocates have too often allowed their policy and ideological preferences to race ahead of the science. This has fostered a reductive story about obesity that appeals to liberal audiences but doesn’t comport particularly well with much of what we know about why people choose to eat unhealthy foods, what the health consequences of being overweight or obese actually are, or why health outcomes associated with obesity are so much worse among some populations than others.
Against the current popular discourse, obesity is better understood as an unintended consequence of affluence than as a disease epidemic.

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Do Scientists Mislead?

"Yes" seems to be the unfortunate conclusion that stems from this paper by Mark Cope and David Allison published in the International Journal of Obesity.  ​Scientists may not (or may) distort their own research findings, but Cope and Allison show, pretty convulsively, that there is a general pattern of distorting the findings of others.   

They attribute this to a "white hat bias":​

which we define to be bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends.

Cope and Allison found two studies related to soda consumption that:

had both statistically and non-statistically significant results on body-weight, body mass index (BMI) or overweight/obesity status which allowed future writers to potentially choose which results to cite, and were also widely cited, permitting quantitative analysis of citations.

​Then, they looked at how other scientists subsequently cited the findings in their published papers.  Did they focus on the negative findings (that soda doesn't affect weight, etc.) or the positive findings (that soda does affect weight, etc.): ​

The majority, 84.3% for [2] and 66.7% for [3], described results in a misleadingly positive way to varying degrees (i.e., exaggerating the strength of the evidence that [nutritively-sweetened beverage] reduction showed beneficial effects on obesity outcomes). Some were blatantly factually incorrect in their misleading statements, describing the result as showing an effect for a continuous obesity outcome whereas no statistically significant effect for continuous obesity outcomes was observed. In contrast, only four papers (3.5%) were negatively misleading (i.e., underplayed the strength of evidence) for [2] and none were negatively misleading for [3]. Only 12.7% and 33% of the papers accurately described complete overall findings related to obesity outcomes from [2] and [3], respectively.
​

They went on to document a similar pattern for studies on the effects of breastfeeding. They ​conclude:

Evidence presented herein suggests that at least one thing has been demonized ([nutritively-sweetened beverage] consumption) and another sanctified (Breastfeeding), leading to bias in the presentation of research literature to other scientists and to the public at large, a bias sufficient to misguide readers. Interestingly, while many papers point out what appear to be biases resulting from industry funding, we have identified here, perhaps for the first time, clear evidence that white-hat biases can also exist in opposition to industry interests.

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