Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:
On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.
The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.
Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?
As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.
Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.
Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.
The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.
Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.
Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …
The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.
[…] From Quotulatiousness, via MeWe: “An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are” an excerpt follows. […]
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