The problem with nudging

Jeremy Waldron in the New York Times Review of Books has one of the best critiques of the "Nudge" approach advocated by Sunstein and other behavioral economists (HT: Tyler Cowen).

After discussing the problem with the elitism inherent in "we" (i.e., the experts) making decisions "them" (i.e., the laypeople), he gets to the issue of dignity:

“Consider the earlier point about heuristics—the rules for behavior that we habitually follow. Nudging doesn’t teach me not to use inappropriate heuristics or to abandon irrational intuitions or outdated rules of thumb. It does not try to educate my choosing, for maybe I am unteachable. Instead it builds on my foibles. It manipulates my sense of the situation so that some heuristic—for example, a lazy feeling that I don’t need to think about saving for retirement—which is in principle inappropriate for the choice that I face, will still, thanks to a nudge, yield the answer that rational reflection would yield. Instead of teaching me to think actively about retirement, it takes advantage of my inertia. Instead of teaching me not to automatically choose the first item on the menu, it moves the objectively desirable items up to first place.

I still use the same defective strategies but now things have been arranged to make that work out better. Nudging takes advantage of my deficiencies in the way one indulges a child. The people doing this (up in Government House) are not exactly using me as a mere means in violation of some Kantian imperative. They are supposed to be doing it for my own good. Still, my choosing is being made a mere means to my ends by somebody else—and I think this is what the concern about dignity is all about”

and

“Choice architects nudge almost everything I choose and do, and this is complemented by the independent activity of marketers and salesmen, who nudge away furiously for their own benefit. I’m not sure I want to live in nudge-world, though—as a notoriously poor chooser—I appreciate the good-hearted and intelligent efforts of choice architects such as Sunstein to make my autonomous life a little bit better. I wish, though, that I could be made a better chooser rather than having someone on high take advantage (even for my own benefit) of my current thoughtlessness and my shabby intuitions.”

Sounds somewhat similar to how I ended my chapter on behavioral economics in the Food Police

“The economist Robert Sugden says the paternalists are wrong: “There is a viable alternative to paternalism. It is what it always has been – the market.” I don’t know about you, but when I walk into a cafeteria, I want the managers to tempt me – to offer me what looks good at a price I’m willing to pay. Yes, this kind of world might require more will-power and self control, but the alternative world of the paternalistic food police would deprive us of the noble act of making a wise choice when we had the freedom to do otherwise. ”

One thing nudging defenders often say is something like: "but companies nudge us all the time . . ."  That is true, but one must recognize that we can opt-out of a company nudge.  Companies are in competition with each other, and if we don't like the results of the company-nudge, another entrepreneur will come along.  Not only that, if the company nudges aren't really in our best interest, why doesn't another company come along, tell us that and sway us to buy their product?  In short, the difference between a company nudge and a government nudge is the the abundance of competition and op-out ability for the one and the lack of competition and monopoly in the other.  

My most recent piece on the topic came out recently in the European Review of Agricultural Economics.

How novel are the genes introduced during genetic engineering?

It is often asserted that genetic engineering (or GMOs) are different and should be regulated differently because they introduce "new" genes that couldn't have been introduced "naturally."

A piece at the genetic literacy project by Curtis Hannah, a plant geneticist, however, questions that wisdom: 

“The remarkable advances in the way DNA is sequenced have made the sequencing of all the genes in a particular organism (termed the genome) extremely cheap. Thousands of genomes from different organisms have been decrypted and comparative genomics is a thriving field of scientific endeavor. Investigators have also sequenced different members of a particular family and unexpectedly found that the two different members of the family did NOT contain the same genes. Some genes were found in some members of the family but not in others. This phenomenon of plus/minus genes is particularly rampant in plants.

An exceptionally striking case of this was published recently in the journal Plant Cell. Of 8681 corn genes studied at the DNA level by this group, only a small fraction, 16.4 percent, were found in all 503 lines examined. The vast majority of these genes (83.6 percent) were found in some BUT NOT ALL lines. Corn is not an exception since similar cases of plus/minus genes have been found with other important food crops. Hence, new non-GMO or conventional varieties of food crops appearing on the market this year likely contain genes that were not in those same crops the year before. Also, the new ones likely lack genes that were present the year before.

Where do these genes come from? There are several sources. First, most food plants underwent a duplication of most if not all their genomes during their course of evolution. This duplication then allowed some relaxation from Darwinian selection such that the one gene copy was free to diverge in sequence and take on a new function.”

He concludes:

“To summarize, the new methods to rapidly, accurately and cheaply decipher genomes have uncovered hitherto unimaginable variation in the genetic material of all organisms, including the ones we eat. Hence, labelling plants and their derived foods GMO and non-GMO is clearly a distinction without a difference.”

Economics of Meatless Monday

I ran across this article published last week by Katey Troutman entitled the Economics of Meatless Monday, which cited some research by Bailey Norwood and me on vegetarianism.  

The article makes a number of good points, but also some that are a bit off base.  After discussing per-capita beef consumption in US, the author writes:

“New trends in consumption, however, suggest that things might (slowly) be changing; per capita consumption of meat in the U.S. has fallen in recent years, though we still consume more meat than either our parents or grandparents did, according to The Huffington Post.

Americans are choosing to eat less meat, or in some cases, turning to an entirely vegetarian diet, for a number of reasons. Animal welfare activists champion vegetarianism as a way of boycotting factory farming and animal cruelty, while environmentalists point out the environmental benefits of forgoing meat. Still other Americans belong to religious traditions which either forbid or look favorably upon vegetarianism, particularly those which originated in ancient India, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Yet worldwide many people are vegetarian for an entirely different, often overlooked reason: economics.”

The author, however, never discusses the the biggest economic reason why per-capita consumption of meat is down.  Is he supply-side not the demand-side.  As I've previously discussed, cattle inventories are at the lowest levels they've at been in decades, largely because of drought and prior high feed prices, resulting in substantially higher beef price.  To put it plainly: consumers are eating less beef because there is less beef being produced.  The fact that prices have risen dramatically means many consumers still want the now scarcer beef and are bidding up the price for available supplies.

I don't see much evidence of a rapid rise in vegetarianism.  For over a year and a half, we've conducted a monthly survey of US consumers as a part of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS).  Self-declared vegetarians have been at about 4-5% of the sample since it began (and this is probably an overstatement given other research suggesting people "over-declare" vegetarian status) with no evidence of a trend.  Unlike the claim in the article that vegetarianism in general and meatless Monday in particular will save you money, my analysis of the FooDS data shows that self-declared vegetarians spend the same amount of money on food at home and on food away from home as do meat-eaters.  

The author also writes:

“Jayson Lusk and Bailey Norwood, perhaps the first researchers to study the economics of vegetarianism, concur with advocates of eating less meat. In their 2009 study they found that “it is significantly more expensive to produce a pound of meat (or milk) than a pound of commodity crops.””

I suppose it's nice to be pointed out for being one of the first to tackle a subject (the published paper is here; there were some mistakes in the published paper that are corrected in this document).  The key word in the above quote, however, is "commodity crops."  As I've noted in the past, people generally don't like to eat the commodity crops directly, and if you look at the cost of non-commodity crops (for example, see this USDA study), they can be more expensive on a per-calorie or per-gram-of-protein basis (think about the cost of lettuce on a $/kcal basis).  Finally as we argue in our published paper, economics is about more than just cost, it also involves value, and most Americans are willing to pay quite a bit to have meat in their diet.  

Assorted Links

Which food words each US State (and political party) obsesses about on Twitter

Cool maps of the most and least profitable farming counties in the US (watch the video at the bottom of the link)

I wondered about this when I first walked into French grocery stores

Cow-free milk

Famine Food

Pierre Desrochers, one of the authors of the great book The Locavore's Dilemma, has a new article in Spiked on one of the latest food fads - a fad Desrochers says harkens back to foods our ancestors would have eaten during a famine.

He writes:

“Yet one wonders what our remote ancestors would think of this culinary fad. . . . Although wild ingredients might be free, the attendant foraging and preparation costs are significant. What they would probably find most amazing, however, is that what they typically knew as ‘famine foods’ are now commanding a significant premium over plentiful and convenient things that actually taste good rather than ‘wild’.

Unfortunately, for many of our remote ancestors, the absence of effective transportation, such as railroads and container ships, meant that they had no choice but to survive on a local diet and, in the process, put all their agricultural eggs into one geographical basket. This was always a recipe for disaster. ”

and

“As the ‘visionary’ haute cuisine of Redzepi and Patterson reminds us, wild foods typically display one or a combination of flaws when compared to cultivated ones, be it lower yields or nutritional value, less interesting taste or greater difficulty to harvest, store, process and preserve the produce. ”

He concludes:

“The fact that food snobs now need to revert back to the famine foods of old should not be viewed as an indictment of our modern food production system, but rather as astounding proof that, today, that system feeds middle-class consumers better than most kings in history. ”