Longer School Lunch = Less Obesity?

A while back, I wrote:

. . . many school children have to eat lunch as early as 10am! In many schools (including my own kids’ school), children have to be run through the cafeteria so quickly they hardly have time to eat. Couple that with the new federal guidelines limiting the number of calories that can be served, and it is no wonder many kids are starving by the time school gets out and beg to go to McDonalds!

In addition all the above, I'd also add that because of increased curricula requirements, PE has been cut to the bone in most schools.

Alas, it seems most of the discussions I hear about improving childhood health in schools revolve around "sexier" headline-grabbing issues like serving more fruits and veggies, serving more local foods, zoning rules, banning sodas, teaching gardening, and so on. It may just be that the less "sexy" (and potentially less costly) issues like encouraging exercise, increasing cafeteria time or size, or giving a small afternoon snack, may be more promising.

Of course, we'd want empirical evidence that length of lunch had a substantive impact on dietary choice and weight.  I see one piece of evidence was just published in the Southern Economic Journal this month.  The piece is by Rachana Bhatt entitled "Timing is Everything: The Impact of School Lunch Length on Children's Body Weight."  The abstract

The large number of overweight children in the United States has prompted school administrators and policy makers to identify practices in schools that contribute to unhealthy weight outcomes for children and develop strategies to prevent further increases. Advocates for school nutrition reform have suggested that it is important for children to have an adequate amount of time to eat meals in school in order to maintain a healthy weight. This article examines whether the length of time children are given to eat lunch in school has an impact on their weight. I find evidence that an increase in lunch length reduces the probability a child is overweight, and this finding is robust across various econometric specifications, including a two-sample instrumental variable model and difference-in-differences model that account for the potential endogeneity of lunch length.

The paper indicates:

extending lunch length by 10 minutes is associated with a 1.2% reduction in BMI, and it reduces the probability a child is considered overweight for his/her age and gender by 2.4 percentage points.  

I'll be curious to see if these results hold up in randomized controlled trials.  

Want to legalize dope but outlaw transfats?

An editorial in Politico by William Bennett and Christopher Beach highlights the irony of the policy positions held by many people on the progressive left (something I also point out in the Food Police).

They write:

The very same year, for example, that Colorado legalized marijuana, the Colorado Senate passed (without a single Republican vote) a ban on trans fats in schools. Are we to believe eating a glazed donut is more harmful than smoking a joint? California has already banned trans fats in restaurants statewide, but now is on the brink of legalizing marijuana statewide come November. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg supported New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s effort to decriminalize marijuana in New York State, while at the same time supporting a ban on extra-large sodas. A 32-ounce Mountain Dew is bad for you, but pot isn’t?

The logic is dumbfounding. For many years, health-conscious liberals have waged a deafening, public war against cigarettes. Smoking bans in public places like restaurants and bars have been enacted in states all over the country. Recently, New York City, New Jersey and several other cities and states have extended those bans to include the newest tobacco fad—e-cigarettes. Yet, when it comes to smoking marijuana? Crickets.

What explains this obvious paradox?

They don't actually answer their own question - later saying simply that "The answer is not clear, and there may not be a good answer at all."  I think there is an answer.

One way to think about these sorts of issues is to turn to ideology scales.  A common view is that people's ideologies can be explained by where they fall on two dimensions related to views about economic freedom and personal freedom and willingness to use government force in these two areas.  In this framework, a "liberal" wants personal freedom (abortion, gay rights, etc.) but wants to restrict economic freedom (by, e.g., setting minimum wages).  Conversely, a "conservative" wants to restrict personal freedom (outlaw abortion and prohibit gay rights) but wants economic freedom (e.g., no minimum wage).  I think one has to augment this model to provide an account of what's going on in this case.   

Here we have two health-related issues: smoking marijuana and eating transfats.  What would possibly rationalize supporting the legalization of one and the prohibition of the other?  I think it has to with people's heuristic thinking about whether companies are good or bad and whether government is good or bad - or stated differently whether businesses or government is more likely to be corrupt.  I think many on the left see transfats as bad because they're sold by big-bad food companies who will kill us just to make a buck, whereas marijuana (at least at present) doesn't have ties to big business.  Thus, it is interpreted as a personal freedom issue by many on the left.  Conservatives, by contrast, are probably less likely to want to ban transfats because it is seen as an intrusion of "bad" government into the economics sphere.  Conservative's support for marijuana prohibition likely comes about from their willingness to use government force to regulate personal/social issues.

Interestingly, Bennett and Beach attempt to resolve their paradox in the Politico piece by seemingly arguing both transfats and marijuana should be banned.  The other seemingly logically consistent stance is to suggest both should be legal, which is the position of many libertarians. 

I suppose the economist could logically support one and oppose the other based on the results of a cost-benefit analysis or considerations of the extent of externalities, etc.  Stated differently, a consistent utilitarian (or the economist who will use cost-benefit analysis as the final word on whether a policy is "good") could very well end up supporting one of these issues and opposing another.  

The challenge, from the economic standpoint, is that many of these policies are advocated on paternalistic grounds - arguing that somehow people don't know what is in their own self interest, which seems to degrade the ability to know what is "best" from the consumers perspective, and thus the ability to even do a legitimate cost-benefit analysis.

My own view is that there is a legitimate role for government to play in researching and informing the public of the risks of smoking marijuana, eating transfats, etc.  But, to step in and decide which choice should be made goes too far.  It supplants the judgement of "experts" and politicians for the judgement of each person.  If we are willing to dismiss people's ability to decide whether to smoke dope or eat transfats, it seems a short step to say that they also can't be trusted to make their own health care choices, or decide where they should live or what job they should take.  Heck, why even allow these people to vote?  That might seem a bit extreme, but I'm simply following the chain of paternalistic thinking to its logical conclusion.

Nice Profile of Keith Coble

A couple months ago a  blogger at Delta Farm Press ran a piece about my friend and co-author Keith Coble.

It was no surprise, therefore, when earlier this year Senator Thad Cochran, R-Miss., asked Keith to come to Washington as chief economist for the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, which Cochran serves as ranking minority member.  Keith continues a line of MSU ag economists, including the university’s president Mark Keenum, who have participated in the process. 

“This government shutdown has been déjà vu all over again,” said Keith, back at MSU to speak at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Agricultural Economics Association. “I was in Washington for five years before I came to MSU, including the 1995 government shutdown, when I was deemed ‘non-essential’ and told to go home and do no work. During this shutdown, I got a phone call telling me I’m essential — an upgrade from the last time — but to stay home until discussions started again.”

Keith astutely points out of the key challenges with developing  a new farm bill:

And this time around, “There have been a lot more groups, and a lot different groups at the table that weren’t players 10 years ago or 20 years ago — environmental interests, food interests, etc. They’re all players now, and they do matter; it’s a very different dynamic.

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Food

The "food movement" has a long and varied history, but it seems to me that much of the force behind the modern calls for action came from writings during the early to mid-2000s (think Supersize Me or Fast Food Nation or Omnivore's Dilemma or Food Politics, which ultimately lead to more recent things like Food Inc and Salt Sugar Fat and Pandora's Lunchbox).   

The interesting thing about this time period is that food commodity prices were historically very low.  As a result, a common mantra developed that goes something like the following.  Food is too cheap.  This cheap food masks costs to health and the environment.  These masked costs represent externalities, and economics tells us that externalities justify government action like food taxes, subsidies, etc.  This line of thinking reached such a level that the CDC and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has held a couple meetings on the issue (I participated in one of those; more on that in a moment).   

There are two problems with this like of reasoning.  First, in the US, we witnessed extraordinarily run-ups in commodity prices in 2008 and again in 2011.  Worldwide, food prices are higher today in real terms than has been the case for almost 40 years (e.g., see this UN FAO graph).  One might argue that certain types of foods are "too cheap" but to broadly make such a claim is no longer consistent with the facts.  Second, I think outside circles of trained economists, there is often a deep misunderstanding of the nature of externalities, and even within economic circles a lack of critical thinking about the ability of taxes/subsidies to solve externality problems.  

This second point was the focus of an invited talk that I gave to the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association this summer in Ithaca, NY.  That address has been published in the association's journal, the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review.  The paper is now available online.  

Here is the abstract:

Social critics have taken aim at modern production agriculture using a common theme: many food, health, and environmental problems are explained by corporate farms, agribusinesses, and fast-food restaurants failing to account for the full costs of their actions. How accurate is this diagnosis? How feasible is the assumption that these externalities are most effectively mitigated via Pigovian taxes and subsidies? Drawing on my experiences at a National Institute of Medicine meeting on the subject, I seek to clarify the definition and nature of externalities and discuss situations in which public policy is most and least effective in efficiently making "hidden” costs of food visible.

A few snippets:

One of the striking observations that emerged from the conference was
the wide disconnect between the views held by participating economists
and noneconomists about the nature and role of externalities. Among many of the noneconomists, it seemed that any “bad” outcome that resulted from food production and consumption—heart attacks, obesity, the low pay of slaughterhouse workers, soil run-off, animal welfare problems, climate change— was evidence of an externality that required regulation, typically in the form of some sort of tax. I also learned in the process that some of my views about externalities were perhaps a bit unorthodox relative to those of other economists.

and

Clearly, the case for regulating externalities is more complicated than first
meets the eye. Indeed, as the preceding examples illustrate, one is apt to
see externalities everywhere. The sheer abundance of examples that fit the definition of “externality” coupled with our unwillingness to tax them all
away is suggestive. As Coase put it, “The ubiquitous nature of ‘externalities’ suggests to me that there is a prima facie case against intervention”

and I start the conclusions with the following:

This essay arose from my failed attempts to explain externalities to
noneconomists and my desire to challenge fellow economists to think more seriously about the real-world implications of policy advice derived from simple textbook models. In popular writing about food and agriculture, there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the types of externalities that reduce welfare and of the difficulty associated with crafting corrective actions that actually increase the size of the pie. Moreover, the concept of externality is often used to advance a particular cause or point of view. There is a lot of talk about the “hidden costs” of our modern food production system. What about the “hidden benefits?” Failing even to mention, let alone seriously address, that question suggests that one is not willing to think seriously about externalities as anything more than academic-sounding justifications designed to garner enough power and support to enact a faction’s preferred policy.

I learned a lot writing the essay, I hope readers might learn something too.

When Is Reliance on Voluntary Approaches in Agriculture Likely to Be Effective?

That's the title of a paper by Kathleen Segerson recently published in the Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy.  Although I think she under-estimates the power of factors like reputation and over-estimates the ability of government solutions to efficiently coordinate actions, she offers a useful discussion that we ought to have more often.  The abstract:

Voluntary approaches have been used in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes in agriculture, including voluntary conservation programs and product labeling. This paper provides an overview of some of the general principles that emerge from the literature on voluntary approaches and their application in agriculture. The literature suggests that, to be effective, voluntary approaches must provide sufficiently strong participation incentives to a targeted population, clearly identify standards for behavior or performance that ensure additionality and avoid slippage, and monitor outcomes. Thus, reliance on voluntary approaches in agriculture is likely to be effective only if there is sufficient market demand for certain product characteristics, significant public funds are committed to pay for voluntary actions, or the political will exists to impose regulations if voluntary approaches fail.