Quotulatiousness

June 12, 2012

“It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Shikha Dalmia on Bloomberg’s nanny complex and the underlying cause of it:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on big sodas in the Big Apple is generating accusations that he is a Nanny Statist. But that’s not quite accurate. A nanny forces others to do things for their own good. Bloomberg is a moral narcissist forcing New Yorkers to do things that make him feel good.

Under his soda ban, street vendors and restaurants would be barred from selling pop in anything over 16-ounce containers on the theory that limiting access to sugary drinks will help combat the city’s obesity and diabetes “epidemics.” No one — not even Bloomberg himself — believes that the ban will actually work, not least because unlimited free refills will remain legal, as will oversized helpings of apple juice and other “natural” beverages with arguably even more sugar. But workability isn’t the point right now. It’s to get the public used to the idea of the government slurping around in your Slurpee, and then to ratchet up. It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy.

Nor is this Bloomberg’s first foray into minding your own business. He has also cracked down on smoking, salt and trans fats. He has mandated that fast-food joints post calorie counts. He also tried (unsuccessfully) to bar food stamp recipients from buying sodas — one-upping fellow Republicans who want to urine-test welfare recipients to make sure they don’t use their government aid for drugs.

Petty paternalism, “nudging”, and the urge to human perfection

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:15

The Economist looks at the dietary meddling of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other forms of “we know what’s better for you” paternalism:

In defence of Michael Bloomberg’s controversial proposal to ban large servings of sugary drinks, Timothy Noah of the New Republic cuts to the chase and plumps for paternalism:

    The truth is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with paternalistic government or, in the harsher, feminized shorthand of its detractors, the “nanny state.” Parents and nannies can be good or bad. No adult likes to be told how to live his life, but most of us benefit from baby authoritarianism far more than we’d like to admit.

Mr Noah’s argument seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with paternalistic measures as long as they actually benefit us. Philosophers sometimes call the form of paternalism Mr Noah has in mind, concerned with bodily health and mental well-being, “welfare paternalism”. Of course, ideas about the human good routinely incorporate moral and theological suppositions, which can take paternalism well beyond concern for physical health and psychological welfare. For example, Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor, acted paternalistically in torturing individuals to confess their sins insofar as he did so intending to save them from damnation to eternal hellfire, which he believed to be infinitely worse than the pain of the rack. For Torquemada, the true nature of the interests of individuals had been revealed by religious texts and religious authorities, which he no doubt took to be at least as reliable as we take the Journal of the American Medical Association to be. I wonder if Mr Noah would agree that Torquemada did nothing inherently wrong by torturing heretics on the rack in order to elicit confessions and save their eternal souls from infinite suffering. As a matter of fact, the inquisitor’s conception of welfare is false, and so he caused a monstrous quantity of pointless suffering. But what if his facts about our moral and spiritual welfare had been right and that he succeeded in saving many souls? No problem?

June 9, 2012

QotD: Counteracting those irritating “nudgers”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

In the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposes big soda ban, I have some suggestions for paternalistic nudges for economists who advocate such paternalism. One idea is when they go to a restaurant, by default they should be seated at the table that places them in the most proximity to people near the median income level. Or when they turn on their TVs, have them by default turn to awful TV shows popular with the median household, like America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, or some poorly written show about cops. Of course they will need a nudge so that when they rent an apartment or house it comes by default with a TV and cable. Perhaps if we want to escalate from nudge to shove, we could have them signed up to teach one class a semester at a local community college or technical school, so they get exposure to students much closer to the median ability and future income level than they’ll find at the top departments they normally teach at. They can opt out of this, of course, but have them enrolled to teach as a default upon completing their doctorates.

You see, paternalists clearly have a problem with reasoning from their own preferences, and so giving them exposure to the median consumer might help them learn valuable lessons. Paternalist economists, it seems, simply cannot imagine how a “nudge” or a “shove” like buying only 16 ounce sodas or smaller would be any kind of inconvenience to someone. What they don’t understand is that as Ivy League economists with IQs north of 140 their preferences tend to be very far from the median consumer’s, so it should be no surprise that they can’t imagine it being an inconvenience. After all, they also probably can’t imagine wanting to drink a lot of soda in the first place. In the same way, the median consumer probably could not imagine letting their kid not eat birthday cake. So from the start they should be aware that their imaginations and preferences aren’t useful guides

Adam Ozimek, “Nudges for Paternalist Economists”, Forbes, 2012-06-05

The future of dining

Filed under: Food, Health, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

What’s the restaurant of choice for Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama? Watch what happens when Brian tries to order lunch at Nou Nou D’Enfer!

H/T to Nick Gillespie.

June 8, 2012

Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

Terence Corcoran is too kind in his discussion of Toronto’s new ban on plastic bags:

In star-struck liberal green Los Angeles, it took a full-court press by environmental groups, major propaganda efforts, endorsement by the roll-over editorialists at the Los Angeles Times, and deployment of Hollywood stars, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Fonda, to work up the political steam needed to prompt L.A.’s city council to vote last month to ban plastic bags.

In starless Toronto, all it took was a bunch of dumb city councillors who suddenly decided — seemingly out of the blue — to stage a surprise vote.

“Ban the bags,” somebody said. “Good idea. Let’s vote!” Passed: 27 to 17.

No study, no research, no public review, no thought, no concept and no brains. What’s the environmental and fiscal impact of the ban? Nobody knows, although many people say the cost to both the city and the environment will be greater than the cost of using plastic bags.

As I think Adrian MacNair mentioned, one of the most likely outcomes is that people will end up buying less. It’s those little impulse buys that will be curtailed the most, as many folks — especially tourists — won’t have realized they need to bring their own carry bags.

June 7, 2012

Reason.tv: Obesity in America

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

June 5, 2012

“We do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

You’ve undoubtedly heard lots of recommendations to reduce the salt in your diet, right? The western diet — especially the North American variant — has “too much salt”, and it’s killing us. At least, that’s what has been drummed into our heads for the last twenty years or more. The problem is that is may not actually be true, and in fact may create other health issues:

Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

[. . .]

When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

June 1, 2012

Bloomberg’s latest “nudge” experiment

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

In his Maclean’s column, Colby Cosh explains the problem with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to solve the obesity problem 32 ounces at a time:

Stopping people from exercising preferences is harm. You say Internet Commentator X doesn’t think having a Big Gulp is an important freedom? Does he not see Commentators Y through Upsilon standing right behind him, making the same case against marijuana and hijabs and labour unions and skiing?

This innate prejudice against social engineering for its own sake, which ought to be strong in liberals but is utterly absent in Bloomberg, is paired with an empirical prejudice against social engineering because of the near-inevitable consequences — chief among them being that the institutions created to enforce a for-your-own-good law wander very quickly from anyone’s good but that of the enforcers. I stacked the deck a little by mentioning the Eighteenth Amendment, because it shouldn’t form part of the justification for anything: it took literally six years [for] the U.S.A. to go from “Let’s roust these poor addicted creatures out of the saloon” to “Let’s deliberately poison thousands of Americans to death, that the majesty of the law may be respected”. But the Eighteenth Amendment is worth mentioning, because modern-day prohibitionists never feel the need to accept its lessons or even acknowledge its existence.

When Bloomberg and his deputy mayor for health are ridiculed and their volumetric crusade is ignored, whom do you suppose will end up crucified by bureaucrats in defence of their “nudge’? The logic requires it. If soft drinks really are prematurely killing thousands, and a ban on large containers is the magic answer, how far will be too far when it comes to encouraging compliance? When it comes to “nudges”, we have to recognize a distinction between what is being enforced and the means of enforcement; the mildness and restraint of the former does not guarantee that of the latter.

He also links to this wonderful piece at Hit and Run by Jacob Sullum saying “The mayor’s own pretext for the program had logical holes that Reason‘s Jacob Sullum quickly drove five tanker trucks of frappuccino through.”

May 31, 2012

Old worry: the “digital divide”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

The good news is that the much-feared “digital divide” between the rich and poor never came to pass. Now the worry is rather different:

Remember the “digital divide”? Back in the 1990s, the problem was that poor people did not have enough access to computers and the Internet. Today the problem is that they have too much access. Evidently the digital divide has given way to the “time-wasting gap.” I shit you not. The New York Times reports that bridging the digital divide “created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government [naturally] now wants to fix”: “As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites.” Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure? Something must be done

May 28, 2012

Playing definitional games to demonize ordinary people as quasi-alcoholics

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Most reasonable people would agree with the notion of using the government’s powers to help “problem drinkers” to drink less. It sounds like a good idea, unless you’re a weirdo libertarian type. Or a “problem drinker”. Building on this, the Scottish government recently passed a minimum alcohol price law with the stated intent of helping “hazardous” drinkers to drink less. But what’s the definition of a “hazardous” drinker? It’s almost certainly not what you’d expect:

A model of the possible effects of minimum pricing by the University of Sheffield has often been drawn upon by the media due to a lack of definite information on the effects of MAP. On the surface, the results look relatively reasonable to someone in favour of minimum alcohol pricing. At 50p per unit, the study suggests that the average ‘harmful’ drinker would be most likely to reduce their intake, followed by ‘hazardous’ drinkers, with ‘moderate’ drinkers suffering least, which, of course, all sounds very fair.

But on closer inspection, it appears as though my own drinking is hazardous. If you’re male and drink more than a pint a day of fairly standard lager on average, yours is too. If you’re female, you’re entitled to even less before you abandon moderation. ‘Binge drinking’ can be any more than 8 units in a single session, or three pints of lager. No, this is not a joke. Millions of British people, who certainly wouldn’t think of themselves as dangerous consumers of alcohol, are in this category. The words ‘hazardous’ and ‘binge’ seem almost bound to bring to mind serious, tabloid-beloved alcohol abuse. This isn’t the case.

[. . .]

Alcohol addiction is a serious social problem. Like all addiction, it’s closely associated with more severe health risks, mortality and crime, and requires the attention of government. Whether price increases help is debatable. An enormous 2009 meta-study of the effect of price on alcohol consumption certainly shows that alcohol consumption is inversely responsive to price. As the cost of alcohol rises, all groups drink less.

But the study also shows that heavy drinkers are significantly more inelastic than others, reacting less to price. This might well seem logical, as the group contains people who are addicted to alcohol. Alcoholics are less likely to consider increases in prices in the same way that casual drinkers do. Will some of the most dependent drinkers simply increase the amount they spend? We don’t yet know. Scotland is about to find out.

So aside from the basic nanny state meddling, the price hike won’t actually produce the reduction in alcohol consumption by the very folks it’s intended to target. It will increase profits for the producers of the cheapest forms of rotgut booze. What’s that old saw about unintended consequences again?

May 27, 2012

The anatomy of the standard “kids these days” moral freak-out story

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

Nick Gillespie explains what the next media meme intended to alarm parents will look like (because they all do):

Don’t you dare think just because no one is actually doing something that it’s not about to become the next big thing: “Although there’s only been a few cases, county public health toxicology expert Cyrus Rangan says it could signal a dangerous trend.”

The hand-sanitizer story is a classic of the particularly powerful news narrative that might be called “The Kids These Days” story. The recipe is as simple as it is intoxicating: Take kids, a wholesome product or activity (cleanser, say, or a sleepover), throw in drugs, booze, or sex (preferably all three), some form of vaguely scary technology (teh Interwebz, cell phones), and shake vigorously (like Mentos in a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi, or maybe Pop Rocks with a Coca-Cola chaser), and let it rip!

While we await the next fake news trend about teens and sex and drugs — and the coming federal ban on so-called bath salts and fake marijuana — here are five classic freakouts to contemplate.

May 19, 2012

The politics of the school lunch

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Baylen Linnekin examines the school lunch issue, and finds yet another example of experts and government officials trying to override parental input and childrens’ own wishes “for the children”, of course:

School food is always a hot topic, and is perhaps more so now than it’s ever been. From a publicity standpoint, school food has taken off as an issue largely due to the efforts of [British chef and food nuisance Jamie] Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama. But viewed from the standpoint of edibility, cost, and healthiness, food served by public schools via the USDA’s National School Lunch Program was already an issue because that program and its food have a decades-long track record of sucking. And in spite of the best efforts of Oliver and Mrs. Obama, along with new rules set to take effect in the coming months, I’m not optimistic that the quality of school food is likely to change anytime soon. Why?

If you’re one of those who thought all this talk about the National School Lunch Program had translated into better food, think again. Contrary to any visions you may have of expensive reforms leading to school kitchens serving as virtual clearinghouses for fresh fruits and vegetables, that just isn’t the case. Expensive reforms? You bet. They crop up every few years. But schools are still serving kids nachos. And sometimes — as happened last week at a public school in Ohio — those nachos are full of ants.

Issues like ants in food are hardly rare. And other systemic problems persist.

I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).

As a 12-year-old army cadet, my first experience of army cooking was a huge shock: it was actually good! I didn’t know that cafeteria-style cooking didn’t have to be bland, boring, or nauseating. Schools couldn’t seem to manage the trick, but the army could.

School lunches also neuter the ability of families to make dietary choices their children. Consider the pink slime controversy earlier this year. Whether you were up in arms over chemically treated meat or thought it was completely fine to eat, the truth is if you’re a public school parent whose child eats a school lunch you still have little say over whether or not your child eats pink slime — or genetically-modified foods, sugars, starches, and a whole host of other foods about which decent parents (and experts) disagree.

Another good example of how school lunches usurp family decision-making took place in Chicago last year, where a seventh grader named Fernando Dominguez helped lead a revolt against his school’s six-year-old policy that banned students from taking their own lunch to school. According to the Chicago Tribune, the principal argued that the policy was put in place “to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.”

[. . .]

These anecdotes help illustrate the point that food served in public school cafeterias has — along with prison food — long been one of the best arguments against the singular notion that big, mean corporations are responsible for all of the food problems we face in America. After all, public-school lunches are government creations. They’re subsidized by government, provided by government, served by government, and paid for by government. And they’re often gross, unhealthy, and wasteful.

But supporters of the National School Lunch Program, not surprisingly, argue that what’s needed are reforms, improvements, rejiggering, and — of course — more money.

May 17, 2012

Official response to UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

As you’ll know if you’ve been visiting the blog for a while, I’m not a cheerleader for the federal government and I often disagree with their policies and statements. However, I can’t find much to disagree with in this:

May 16, 2012 (OTTAWA, ON) — The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health, and Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, today issued the following statement:

Today I met with Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

As an aboriginal person from the North, I was insulted that Mr. Schutter chose to “study” us, but chose not to “visit” us.

In fact, Mr. De Schutter confirmed to me that he did not visit a single Arctic community in Canada during nearly two weeks of travel within Canada.

I asked him what stance he would take in his report on uninformed, international attacks on the seal and polar bear hunt that make it harder for aboriginal hunters to earn a livelihood. I told him that I would be reviewing his final report closely, to see if he makes any recommendations to activist groups to stop interfering in the hunting and gathering of traditional foods.

I was concerned that he had not been fully informed of the problems with the discontinued Food Mail program that subsidized the shipping of tires and skidoo parts, as opposed to Nutrition North, which improves access to nutritious and perishable foods.

He made several suggestions that would require the federal government to interfere in the jurisdiction of other levels of government. It was clear that he had little understanding of Canada’s division of powers between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government despite his extensive briefings with technical officials from the Government of Canada.

Our government is surprised that this organization is focused on what appears to be a political agenda rather than on addressing food shortages in the developing world. By the United Nations’ own measure, Canada ranks sixth best of all the world’s countries on their human development index. Canadians donate significant funding to address poverty and hunger around the world, and we find it unacceptable that these resources are not being used to address food shortages in the countries that need the most help.

-30-

This month’s prize-winner for bureaucratic over-reaction goes to…

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… Indiana’s Dr. Patrick Spray, superintendent of Mill Creek Schools for his breathtaking performance of over-reactor in an educational role:

So here’s the story: Five high school seniors in Indiana went into their school after hours, when it was officially off-limits, and decorated it with 10,000 Post-It notes. They used the notes to create a big, cheery “2012″ on the gym floor, for instance. They made bright patterns on the doors, and another big “2012″ on some windows. And for this, they were suspended for two days (during finals) and the janitor who supervised them got fired.

What kills me most, though, is how the superintendent described the event: “It was just Post-It notes: no damage, thank goodness, occurred. Nobody was injured, thank goodness. It’s the unintended stuff that sometimes causes issues…”

The five kids who were suspended got vocal support from their classmates, so another over-reaction was called for … and delivered:

Here’s an update on today’s story about the five seniors suspended from Indiana’s Cascade High School for decorating it, at night, with Post-It Notes. Now a whopping 67 students have been suspended, because they were protesting the suspension of the Cascade Five.

As you can hear in the TV report — presented by the stations “Crime Beat” reporter (making you wonder what exactly constitutes crime in Indiana) — the kids who did the “prank” got permission from a school board member and the head custodian. And even if they didn’t, I agree with one of the commenters on my original post: While it’s being labeled a “‘prank” it could just as easily have been labeled a beautification effort, or a morale booster.

May 16, 2012

Scotland’s latest moral panic, soon to spread to England

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

A spectre is haunting Scotland: the spectre of cheap booze and binge drinkers. The most recent regulatory answer, raising the minimum price of alcohol, won’t solve the problem.

Scotland announced minimum pricing for alcohol this week, at 50p a unit; the price of the cheapest spirits will now rise by almost 50%. It will arrive in England soon, although possibly at the more timid rate of 40p per unit. It will only make a tiny difference, says the government, as it contemplates raising prices for a commodity almost all citizens enjoy (86% of the adult population drink alcohol), and at a time when prices are rising everywhere.

So why bother doing it? The government says it will save lives, even as it announces the speed limit on some motorways will be raised to 80mph, which will cost lives. I am not sure if the deaths created on the roads will be offset by the lives saved from gin, but it seems that more deaths on the roads are acceptable, but more deaths from alcohol are not. Do I smell snobbery? David Cameron says that alcohol “generates mayhem on our streets and spreads fear in our communities” — so I suppose I do.

Minimum pricing is a result of a national moral panic about alcohol, which follows on the trail of moral panics about tobacco and obesity, which are created by the tabloids and their beloved pictures of girls vomiting into gutters with their skirts hitched round their waists; there is a whole crocodile of moral panics, squeezing its way into Downing Street as more important issues are ignored.

[. . .]

Drinking is something that terrifies some but delights many. Drinkers can be ghastly, but so can politicians, and so can sober politicians. Minimum pricing comes from an ancient place – the desire for a neat society – and it expresses Cameron’s desire to appear to be doing something, while he does nothing elsewhere. Where one stands on minimum pricing depends entirely on whether you believe it is a person’s unalienable right to get shit-faced drunk at the market price, no matter what your income. When so many rights are threatened, who would dispute it?

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