Reader mailbag: censorship edition

Loyal reader Lliam Munro sends me the following:

Hi, Eric.
I know you periodically blog about censorship so I thought I’d alert you to this in case you’d not seen it.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/9018880/Retailer-fined-over-banned-movies 

I wondered what sort of movie would get banned in NZ so checked IMDB for the two films that generated the fine, which were Megan Is Missing and I Spit on Your Grave.

Without debating the artistic merits of the films, neither of which score very well on IMDB, I did think it noteworthy that one of the banned films Megan Is Missing, which is apparently a found footage film about two girls being murdered by a psycho they meet online, is endorsed by a father whose daughter was murdered by someone she met online and who has become an advocate for online safety.  He thinking it should be required viewing for teenage girls.

So, I thought it was interesting that in New Zealand, Fishpond are being fined $4,200 for providing access to a film that the father of a murdered daughter thinks could raise awareness of safe online behaviour.  Admittedly, by the sound of it, you’d be just as likely to scar your daughter for life, but I still found it noteworthy.

Cheers,
Lliam Munro

I'm not likely to watch either. But I hate that I can't watch either. This is entirely inside-the-asylum kind of stuff. How much better are we really than parts of Alabama that ban sex toys?

Control Yourself

My column on the economics of self-control is up at CANTA. A few choice excerpts:

If the psychologists and the behavioural economists are right, then we effectively have warring factions inside our head, all the time. There's the me who wants to check Twitter rather than finish this column and the me who wants to finish the column so I can get on to other things. They're currently yelling at each other. The same battle plays out in diverse forms for most of us. The preferences revealed then by our actions are the emergent outcomes of the minor battles inside our heads for control.

Some critics of individual choice take this as reason for government intervention to favour one faction over the other in our internal battlefields. In these models, we help smokers by taxing cigarettes and help the obese by forcing them away from food. But remember Baby Pareto's crying: if you really do prefer to stop the short-term hedonist in your head from harming your longer-term interests, some clever entrepreneur can profit. And indeed, when we go out in search of self-disciplining mechanisms, we find that the market provides. There are myriad programmes to block you from surfing the web when you should be working. Problems sticking to an exercise regimen? Hire a personal trainer to mock your lack of effort. If you want to quit drinking, you can get a prescription for a drug that will make you violently nauseous if you do drink.

...

Should we ban Twitter when you can buy the Twitter-blocking programme Freedom for $10 with a 90-day money-back guarantee? Hardly.

Further, people often want excuses for doing embarrassing or disapproved things. While it's true that people are more likely to engage in risky sex after a night out drinking, they're also more likely to report positive sexual experiences after drinking. Should we conclude that drinking made them go out and do bad things, or that people sometimes drink to give themselves an excuse?

If we want to help people exercise self-control and make good choices, we should encourage the use of the readily available market solutions that work to those ends: voluntarily chosen constraints are far less likely to make Baby Pareto cry than are those paternalisms imposed from on-high. We otherwise require government to choose sides in the war inside your head when non-interventionism is likely best. 

You have got to be freaking kidding me

So New Zealand put in mandatory bicycle helmet laws a few years back. Every study on this kind of law winds up showing strongly negative effects on the number of people who choose to cycle. And so it wasn't surprising that school-kids flipped over to using scooters instead. Scooters have existed for a long time, but I never much saw kids riding them until they mandated bike helmets. I'm not sure I trust my observational ocular least squares here, but it would be fun to study.*

Our five year old got his first scooter about a month ago. He rides it every morning from the parking lot near his sister's daycare over to Ilam School; I walk with him as my office is next door. Then I get to borrow it for the day for runs across campus. It's great.

And, predictably, when somebody sees kids having fun, we have to get a freaking movement to ban it.

Safekids director Ann Weaver said requiring children to wear a helmet would reduce the risk of serious head injuries.

"We do want children to go out and have fun and learn and develop and take risks but we want them to do that safely and the issue is, once you damage your brain you can't get it back. There's only one chance."

A Safe2Scoot campaign will be rolled out in August, providing a template safety policy for schools and urging them to introduce a "no helmet, no scooter" rule.

The call has been supported by research conducted by Waikato University social science student, Trish Wolfaardt.

Her report - Scootering on: an investigation of children's use of scooters for transport and recreation - recommended amending the cycle helmet legislation to include "all wheeled recreational devices, irrespective of the age of the rider".

It also recommended introducing a minimum age for scootering to school.

"Wearing protective gear will not exempt children from injury, but it will minimise the harm," the report said.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!? Absolutely nothing stops Ann Weaver from bundling her kid up in a helmet and padding if she wants to. The DSM really screwed up by failing to include this particular kind of impulse to ban things in their new catalogue of mental illnesses.

At least MoT and the Police have been sane so far:

Ministry of Transport land transport safety manager Leo Mortimer said it was unlikely that legislation would be changed.

"In the same way that we have not considered compulsory helmets for skateboarders.

"Scooter riders must comply with all the rules applying to other road users, however, unlike cyclists, they don't need to wear a helmet or use a light at night."

...Waikato acting road policing manager Inspector Rob Lindsay said there had been an obvious increase in children using scooters but it hadn't become a safety issue.

Meanwhile, in Canada, some half-wit's suggested mandatory helmets for playing soccer. SOCCER. Where the biggest injuries are from people hurting themselves while pretending to have hurt themselves. Andrew Coyne re-tweeted a few dozen submissions of the things folks my age got up to when we were kids. I don't endorse each and every one of these, but I sure as hell prefer the world where these things are POSSIBLE to the one where we force kids to wear helmets when riding scooters and playing soccer. Here are some of the most fun ones from the list. Note that Monte Solberg, who has a particularly interesting submission, is a retired Member of Parliament.

First, the sad state of the current world:

@acoyne @sungriwkowskyc You should have seen the looks I got when I forgot my son's helmet when his class went curling. I was Bad Mom.
— Erin Chrusch (@erinchrusch) June 11, 2013

I can't believe they're making them wear helmets for curling. It's whisky that should be mandatory for curling, not helmets. For those 16 and up.

@chingychinge @acoyne don't forget that snowball throwing is prohibited at most if not all elem schools now
— Paula Roy (@paulajroy) June 11, 2013

We had massive snowball wars in elementary school. The school dumped all the town's collected road snow in the school yard. We dug tunnels all the way through them, hauled dozens and dozens of buckets of water from the school to the tunnels, and iced the down-tunnels. There were pop-up spots throughout. Then, snowball wars with Viet-Cong tunnels.

@acoyne My school banned all playground games involving balls or other projectiles - no tetherball, hopscotch, hackeysack... :(
— Nat M. (@NatticusMaximus) June 11, 2013

@acoyne my elementary school tore down monkey bars while we screamed in terror watching from the classroom...also banned slapshots
— Mitch Jackson (@Mitch_Jackson_) June 11, 2013

This is the world Ann Weaver is helping to bring into being. I moved here to get away from people like her.

But now for the better ones:

@acoyne My daughter, as part of her Queens Scout @ 13 yrs old, did a 2-night camp in a December blizzard 1.6 km from the nearest adult.
— Joanne Cook (@johalifax) June 11, 2013

@acoyne We had some demolished cars near our house with shattered windows. Our parents encouraged us to play in them. Wait...that WAS bad...
— Kristi Colleen (@KristiColleen) June 11, 2013

NO it wasn't bad. Parts cars out in the pasture were hella-awesome.

@acoyne my parents & grandparents encouraged us around 5-7 to build own sail boats out of scrap to "sail" on the lake - happiest memories :)
— Robert Cooper (@RobACooper) June 11, 2013

We built rafts at my Grandparents' place out of old rotten plywood and inner tubes, sailed on the puddled meltwater (that's maybe 4 foot deep, being Canada)

@acoyne Running the booms on the Ottawa River (10 yrs old). Do recall my Dad telling me to avoid loose logs, but chained border ok!
— Burnt Butter(@burnt_butter) June 11, 2013

@acoyne we used to play murderball. Whipping partially deflated volleyballs at opponents in a school gym. We always aimed at the face. #80's
— Danielle (@DanieMontreal) June 11, 2013

@acoyne I grew up in rural Ontario where anything went; no holds barred. Seriously. Well, except murder ball. That lasted onlycouple weeks
— Vance Duke (@glayson76) June 11, 2013

Some of the folks from Kenora in our halls of residence in undergrad talked about how they used to hunt each other in the bush with pellet guns, and then pick the pellets out of each others' backs.

@acoyne my friends and I built two tree-houses. The first collapsed while we were inside. My dad just gave me proper lumber for second try
— Sébastien Perth (@sebastienperth) June 11, 2013

@acoyne we used to whip cattails at each other and jump off boathouses into snow banks during Ontario winters. Darwin declares us fit!!!
— Tom Stewart (@lancasterperch) June 11, 2013

@acoyne in winter we used to hook a tow rope on the back of a snowmobile and with small plasic skis go snow sking at 50kms/hr.
— Mark Ball (@Rangiferi) June 11, 2013

Dad would hook our toboggan up to the back of the skidoo. Did the same thing with the horse except slower.

@acoyne my fave was "king of the hill." Get to top of snowplow-created hill beside school parking lot, push everyone else off. Then, hold on
— Francis Doyle (@franciswthwolvs) June 11, 2013

@acoyne in gym class we played tackle basketball - no equipment - gym teacher thought it was a character building exercise
— George Browne (@GCBrowne) June 11, 2013

.@acoyne I missed the beginning of this convo but fwiw we used to play tackle duck-duck-goose.Which is exactly what it sounds like.
— David Mader (@DavidMader) June 11, 2013

@acoyne we also strapped life jackets to our BMX bikes and built a ramp to jump them into the river.
— LeMule (@TimLeMule) June 11, 2013

@acoyne My phys. ed. teacher would turn off all the lights in the gym, plug in a strobe light, and let us run around screaming for 20 mins.
— Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) June 11, 2013

@acoyne also briefly caught my jacket on fire lighting fireworks with hairspray bottle. And shot pellet guns at each other's backs.
— Mark Cluett (@Cluett) June 11, 2013

Bet he's from around Kenora.

@acoyne Filling model airplanes with lighter fluid and seeing how far they would "fly" after lighting them was quite popular as I recall.
— sjglass (@UrquhartMP) June 11, 2013

I remember soaking hard snowballs with petrol and seeing whether we could light them.

@acoyne @apalanca We used to put each other in used earthmover tires and roll them downhill. Bonus points if you hit the wall.
— 1967ers (@1967ers) June 11, 2013

Tractor tires, but yeah.

@acoyne We invented a game called DodgeBrick. Suffice to say it lasted three quarters of a lunch hour, and got two of us suspended.
— Justin Bumstead (@JBumstead87) June 11, 2013

Um... think I agree with the teachers on this one.

.@acoyne We used to deliberately toboggan into trees and let the momentum from the impact throw us further down the hill.
— Rob (@leaningcowboy) June 11, 2013

@acoyne Our version of murderball was one guy whipping a tennis ball at the rest of us who willingly lined up against a wall. In winter.
— Ryan Wright (@WrightRyan) June 11, 2013

@acoyne 2L bottles, fill with water, ripped up tin foil balls and Drano in that order. Cap it, shake, toss and run. Called them Drano Bombs.
— Bryan Regehr (@b_regehr) June 11, 2013

That'd be a felony these days. Think I'm kidding?

And here's Monte Solberg:

@acoyne I've been missing the fun. We used to put a handful of wheat down the barrels of our pellet guns and shoot each other in the legs.
— Monte Solberg (@montesolberg) June 11, 2013

@acoyne Once we threw glass pop bottles in the air and would run under them to see how close we could get without getting hit. Four stitches
— Monte Solberg (@montesolberg) June 11, 2013

Again: I'm not saying that the kids should be trying each and every one of these things. But I sure prefer the world where it's possible than one where none of them are. New Zealand is still mostly outside of the asylum on this stuff. But outfits like SafeKids are trying to end it. We shouldn't let them. There has to be ONE place in the world that doesn't succumb to the madness.

Jason Sorens's Coalition for Fun: needed now more than ever.

Update: Final word goes to Steve Sheere, restoring my faith in New Zealand.

@ericcrampton My kids school banned helmets for scooters. Logic is it leads more & more pads etc which leads to irresponsible scooter riding

— steve sheere (@ssheere01) June 11, 2013

* As ACC is reporting scooter accident claim numbers have been rising, there's at least data that could allow for this kind of test. If there's US data on scooter and bicycle injuries that we could use as proxy for rider numbers, then this could be rather fun.

And we're the irrational ones?

If just about any deviation from blackboard rationality is enough to declare market failure and say we need be subject to state control by rational bureaucrats, what are we to make of this?

One bunch of state bureaucrats tries to ban or limit sugar intake.

Another bunch of state bureaucrats advance loans to sugar processors and then have to buy a pile of US sugar to prop up prices to avoid those processors' defaulting on the loans. I suppose you could view the "pushing prices up" part as consistent with limiting consumption. But the initial loans wouldn't have been. And what are they going to do with the 400,000 tons of sugar they're planning on buying? More ethanol?

And doesn't the state try to stop people smoking while subsidising tobacco growers?

It's not unreasonable to view individual decision-making as being the outcome of warring homunculi within the brain. It's never been clear to me why even a rational unitary state might think itself in a position to overturn the outcome of that conflict, never mind a state that has battling-homunculi issues of its own.

Lobbying isn't everything

Conspiracies and power struggles everywhere. Here's Auckland's Boyd Swinburn on the New York soda ban being overturned.

Boyd Swinburn, the University of Auckland's professor of population nutrition and global health, said the court battle's significance was in the power play it represented between government and industry, "the power politics between public health versus private profit".

"It does show the enormous power of the food industry. It seems to be marching from victory to victory around the world, including New Zealand."

Justice Tingling, if I read the ruling correctly, basically said that the Health Board hasn't the legislative authority to regulate this kind of thing unless New York City Council enacts legislation allowing it. I'm no lawyer, but I've no reason to expect Tingling has this wrong.

I'd also expect that if Bloomberg really wanted the ban and thought he had the votes on Council to do it, he'd be trying to get the ban through Council rather than talking about judicial appeals. If he hasn't the votes to get it through City Council, maybe it's because Swinburn's "power of the food industry" hypothesis, or maybe it's because a bunch of people in Brooklyn are fed up with this kind of nonsense and would punish their Councillors for it. I've not been following the poling on this closely; a quick Googling suggests that it's hardly a policy drawing unanimous appeal and that would have passed but for Big Sugar. Instead, there's a slim majority in opposition to the policy.

But Swinburn's all about the framing here: "public health versus private profit". Voter preferences don't enter into the story because they're all on his side, never mind the polling. Expect this framing to be used here when Swinburn's type push for similar policies here.

Morning roundup

Item the first: New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling blocked Bloomberg's ban on Big Gulps. I agree with the Judge here:

Judge Tingling found the Board of Health's mission is to protect New Yorkers by providing regulations that prevent and protect against diseases. Those powers, he argued, don't include the authority to "limit or ban a legal item under the guise of 'controlling chronic disease.' "

The board may supervise and regulate the city's food supply when it affects public health, but the City Charter clearly outlines when such steps may be taken: According to Judge Tingling, the city must face imminent danger due to disease.

"That has not been demonstrated," he wrote.

Judge Tingling also suggested that Mr. Bloomberg overstepped his powers by bringing the sugary drink rules before the Board of Health, which is solely appointed by him. The City Council, he wrote, is the legislative body "and it alone has the authority to legislate as the board seeks to do here."

But a malicious part of me really wishes this had gone ahead. The ban looked to be an intractable nightmare that New York, having elected Bloomberg, really deserved to endure. They could have served as example unto others. Instead, the lesson is that judges will bat back things that are entirely too crazy, so there's no harm in electing Bloombergs. Sometimes, the electorate does deserve to get what it wants, and that right hard.

Item the Second: Rasmussen polls show 36% of Americans think it's at least somewhat likely that Fukushima radiation "did significant harm to the United States." I would bet that a survey of scientists specialising in radiation would find no more than 1-2% thinking it did significant harm to the US, and those would be saying that the negative effects were through reduced public acceptance of nuclear power. I really really wish that polls of this sort, where there is a right scientific answer, or at least a likely strong consensus among scientists, would mention it. The survey doesn't mean that there's a 36% chance that it did harm, it means that 36% of Americans are scientifically illiterate.

Blind to others' ends

Marion Nestle's op-ed in the New York Daily News is breathtaking.

She begins:

If we want Americans to be healthy, we are going to have to take actions like this - and many more - and do so soon. It's long past time to tax sugar soda, crack down further on what gets sold in our schools, tackle abusive marketing practices, demand a redesign of labels - and extend the soda cap, no matter how controversial it may seem. This must be the beginning, not the end, of efforts toward a healthier America.

In short, we need a series of serious changes to make the healthy choice the easy choice. The soda size cap is a nudge in that direction. You will still be able to drink all the soda, and down all the sugar, that you want. The cap on soda size makes it just a tiny bit harder for you to do so.

...Most people eat whatever size is in front of them - the "default," in public health-speak - and are content with that amount. So a reasonable goal of public health intervention is to change the default drink to a smaller size. Hence: Bloomberg's 16-ounce size cap. From my nutritionist's perspective, a 16-ounce soda is still generous. Just one contains the equivalent of 12 packets of sugar. Just one provides 10% of the daily calorie needs of someone who typically eats 2,000 calories a day. Just one contains the upper limit of sugar intake that health officials recommend for an entire day. Once you down a 16-ounce soda, it's best to stop right there.

From my perspective, as someone who regularly shares a soda with his wife at the movies, having to leave a movie for a refill is more than a minor inconvenience and no longer being able to share a drink with your wife adds more than a minor cost. But Nestle either can't see the diversity of ends sought by those wishing larger sodas, or considers them irrelevant collateral damage.

So-called "nanny-state" measures - like bans on driving while drunk, smoking in public places and, now, selling absurdly large sugary drinks - help to level the playing field. Such measures are about giving everyone an equal opportunity to live a safer and healthier life.

I'd thought the point of drink-driving laws was the protection of other drivers. And that's how bans on smoking in public were sold, though that always seemed really rather a stretch when they started pushing for bans in outdoor areas.

The column doesn't get better.

At the moment, it is up to you to make healthier choices, but that's not easy in the face of relentless soda marketing. Governments have a responsibility to provide healthier environments for their citizens.

Yes, we're all helpless in the face of marketing. I think she needs some theory explaining why ads for soda are that much more persuasive than ads for milk and kale.

Here are some additional actions New York City should take, if only it were allowed to. Close the loopholes. The city does not have jurisdiction over sales of sodas in convenience stores and supermarkets. The state does. Gov. Cuomo denied Mayor Bloomberg's request to extend the size cap to those stores, not on principle but because he hadn't thought about it. He should, right now. Let's keep all sugary drinks to 16 ounces or less.

And what of larger families who like to share larger-sized drinks? Or buying soda for parties?

Fix the price differential. A 7.5-ounce can of soda costs twice as much per ounce as a two-liter bottle, and you can't buy just one; it comes in an 8-pack. Price determines sales. If a 16-ounce soda costs a dollar, a 32-ounce soda should cost two dollars.

Hey, let's extend her price control regime to everything. If a single toilet paper roll costs $0.25, there's clearly no reason that a 24-pack should cost anything other than $6.00. If a half-dozen eggs costs $4, then a dozen should cost $8. If a single drumstick at KFC is $1, then a 20-pack should be $20. If a night at a hotel is $100, then a week should be $700. There's no reason anybody might provide volume discounts except to foster addiction and overconsumption. If a motorbike with two wheels costs $10,000, then a car should cost $20,000 because it has twice as many wheels. Just put Marion Nestle in charge of the "Setting the price of everything" committee. It'll be great.

Tax sodas. Most people wouldn't dream of eating candy all day, but soda companies have made it seem normal to drink sodas from morning to night. Raising the price of sodas would discourage sales, especially among young people most susceptible to marketing efforts and most vulnerable to weight gain. A one-cent tax per ounce should do the trick and raise plenty of needed revenue besides.

I rather doubt that a one-cent-per-ounce tax would satisfy her thirst.

It goes on in this vein for a while. She concludes:

Actions like these will evoke ferocious opposition from the soda industry, and it will spare no expense to make sure such things never happen. We would surely hear more and more howls of "nanny-state" from those who insist Bloomberg has led us to the brink of a public health police state. Polls say that many New Yorkers oppose the 16-ounce cap and would oppose measures like this, too.

But I can't tell whether the opposition comes from genuine concern about limits on personal choice or because soda companies have spent millions of dollars to protect their interests and gin up histrionic, misinformed opposition.

Oh, those illegitimate howls of "nanny state" against a woman who wants to ban advertising of soda (if it looks to her like the marketing targets kids), ban vending machines in schools, mandate great big calorie warning labels on the front of containers, and ban 2-litre bottles from supermarkets.

Microeconomist Club has rules

First rule of Microeconomist Club: commit yourself to methodological individualism and respect the world's rich diversity of utility functions. Consider that others' actions may be inspired by the optimisation of a utility function the likes of which is beyond your ken.

Second rule of Microeconomist Club: cast into the outer darkness those doing violence to the first rule.

Swarthmore historian Timothy Burke would perhaps have fewer complaints about 'neoliberal' economics if there were greater adherence to the rules of Microeconomist Club. Burke despairs that public health discourse has put such focus on social cost arguments:

Or maybe the math works out and yes, I should try to live a little longer and be injured somewhat less…in order to avoid costing society some slightly higher amount for my careor some fraction of lost productivity. And here we have arrived deep in the belly of the neoliberal whale, just in time to watch the experts and technocrats hand out machetes to we, the swallowed. If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

We are offered a thousand reasons to complain of other people’s behavior (and to excoriate and loath our own) on the grounds that it will cost us too much. That we should talk about what is good and bad, right and wrong, mostly in terms of the selfish consequences, or at best, in terms of the kind of closeted idea of a collective interest that neoliberalism dare not directly speak of–sort of the nation, sort of the economy, sort of the community, but really none of those directly or clearly.

The large majority of purported social costs tallied in health measures are really the costs individuals impose upon themselves. It has never been 'neoliberal' economics to force people to internalise costs that are already internal. It's just bad economics that ought be cast into the outer darkness.

Burke continues:

For another reason, because it’s harder to just keep hammering at some change in an inflexible and unreflective way. When I was in seventh grade, I once screwed up my courage to tell my intelligent, sensitive, very queer, 50-something chainsmoking English teacher that he should stop smoking. He winced, teared up a bit, thanked me for caring, and said, “But darling boy, I think it would hurt me worse at my age to try and stop”. Which at seventh grade I was not prepared to understand, but now I can. When we care about others, we also know that there are reasons why they ride motorcycles without helmets or serve chicken nuggets three times a week, reasons that are profoundly built into their specific humanity or are at the least not really worth the harm and cost of the persistent harassment that might push a change in habit.

Which is another reason the technocrat avoids this mode of argument. Because to see people in this way is to be seen. If it’s about the empirical evidence and the abstract costs of acting or not acting, the expert can stay invisible and outside. But when we sit down to persuade through love or affection, we are naked and vulnerable ourselves. Our bodies and habits are as seen as those we are looking upon. The worst of all worlds is the person who borrows the grandiose certainty and intensity of public health and imports its rhetoric into more intimate kinds of observing and commenting upon others. [emphasis added]

I'd go further than this. I have some insight into the utility functions of the people I love, but even there my simulations often err. I have a partial and limited understanding of the utility functions of other acquaintances and friends. I can imagine being able to persuade a close friend that some chosen course of action is not the best way of achieving his ends as he sees them - being able to imagine the ends, understanding the constraints, and weighing appropriately the chances that I just had simply misspecified the utility function. I couldn't imagine doing the same for a stranger unless he asked me for advice while specifying the desired ends.

But the State cannot see our diverse ends. I can imagine a particularly good social worker perhaps having some useful advice for beneficiaries in that worker's case file. But it's not the place of the State to persuade with love and affection. We rightly laugh at corporate ad campaigns purporting that some logo loves us. Pity the fool who believes those ones, right? But how is it more plausible that the State can love us or that we can love each other through the State?

Burke gets the bolded bit above entirely right. As individuals, we have some limited insight into the utility functions of our friends and loved ones, and into the constraints they face. We can tailor our advice or admonitions accordingly, and refrain where we can see the costs of change as being in excess of the benefits while trying to account for the costs and benefits as they are viewed by the target of our affections. The state cannot do that. It simply cannot tell what comprises the good life for each of us given the diverse set of "good things" and the myriad ways of trading them off against each other at the margin.

And while voluntary organisations can harness altruistic love for charitable purpose, it's awfully hard to channel that impulse through State bureaus: bureaus predicated on love fail where you can't be sure that you've hired staff that are always motivated by it and will continue to be so after extended contact with clients; the tick-box process rules that act as substitute make it hard for those actually motivated by love to achieve much.

No slippery slopes

Here's public health advocate Michael Daube on Australian Health Minister Nicola Roxon's legacy.

There is always more to do in prevention, and public health advocates will always press for more action to reduce unnecessary deaths and ill health. The Prevention Taskforce report provides an evidence-based blueprint for action on alcohol and obesity, as it did for tobacco: there is now a clear basis for action by governments and advocacy by the public health community. The alcohol and junk food industries are as powerful as tobacco (maybe even more), and there is great need for action in these areas as in others. But a realistic assessment must recognise that, especially in a minority government, there is a limit to the number of hard targets any Minister can take on at once.

Nicola Roxon’s prevention legacy is secure. She put prevention on the map, provided legislation and funding, led the world in tobacco control, took on and defeated Big Tobacco as both Health Minister and Attorney General, and developed the roadmap for action on alcohol and obesity. She can take pride in her record, and we can take pride in a Minister who achieved so much for public health.

There's no slippery slope, there's no slippery slope...there's always more to do and there will always be more action and we can only take on targets one at a time. Indeed.

And I would bet against the incoming Coalition government's* rescinding anything she's done. She's built a new quango to permanently advocate for stronger public health interventions, and conservative governments  never seem bright enough to destroy these agencies when they take office. And so we must offer her congratulations. She has very effectively moved policy in her preferred direction and embedded institutions that will keep it on that track for a rather long time.

* Yeah, yeah, the election hasn't happened yet. But look at the betting odds, or at least until Xenophon gets them banned in Oz. My hope: Labor gets demolished but Andrew Leigh survives to rebuild the party in his image, Leigh's Labor comes close to winning in the next election in a surprise, then takes office.

Nanny's drinking problem

Christian Kerr wonders about the Australian public health lobby.

In May 2011 the Cancer Council released a position statement that warned "any level of alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing an alcohol-related cancer." Last March chief executive Ian Olver baldly stated "the risks from alcohol start from zero consumption upwards". Just days ago the council, Diabetes Australia and the Heart Foundation launched an advertising campaign pushing for a tax on soft drinks and advertising restrictions.

"They're deliberately replicating the tobacco campaign," one source says. "Their latest target is alcohol, with their secondary target obesity. They're trying to do so in a way to keep the alcohol industry out of the debate by trying to say anything that the alcohol industry touches is corrupt."

The source is not a lobbyist for the liquor companies. Instead, this individual is a former senior Labor Party figure who helped develop some of the most influential anti-smoking and other public health campaigns Australia has seen.

After saying a few nice words about my work on Australian social cost figures, he wonders why dodgy numbers get produced.

Why do the activists play this game? There is considerable public funding and academic prestige at stake. Small and often overlapping teams of researchers at the University of Sydney received well over $2 million for projects beginning between 2009 and last year looking at smoking, "What is influential public health research" and "Corporate influences on media reporting of health".

Sydney and two other unnamed institutions were awarded just under $2m for a project not only aiming to improve "media literacy" but also "the potency of policy advocacy among health professionals". Industry also charges an ideological element is involved.

"The Australian preventative health industry regards itself as the medical wing of the progressive left movement," one long-serving industry figure says.

Those grants typically come from government agencies and so cannot possibly influence the work that gets done.

And, again, what crisis?

Last May the Australian Bureau of Statistics said our apparent per capita drinking peaked at 13.1 litres of pure alcohol a person in 1974-75, remained relatively steady for the next five to 10 years, then fell over the following decade, to 9.8 litres a person in 1995-96.

Consumption gradually rose to 10.6 litres in 2006-07 and 2007-08, but fell to 10.0 litres of pure alcohol a person in 2010-11.

In October the Bureau also reported "Australians are . . . drinking less, with a drop of 1.4 percentage points in the number of people drinking more than two standard drinks on average per day."

One alcohol industry figure flings a particularly sharp barb at the anti-alcohol brigade off the back of these figures.

"These people are the climate change deniers of the health sector," he says.

Read the whole thing....

HT: Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy Files; Simon Grose. Thanks!

No, you can't tax your way to happiness

Imagine that you have a meta-preference against smoking, but your day-to-day preference is always to delay quitting. If only you had some way of stopping yourself, you'd be better off. In the absence of other commitment mechanisms, regulatory or tax measures can make this particular type of smoker better off: the smoker who seriously and honestly wants to quit and who hasn't been able to figure out how to use any of the available pre-commitment mechanisms or other stop-smoking aids.

As consequence of behavioural models of this sort, some folks have pushed for tobacco restrictions based on the idea that they make the smoker himself better off - they allow him to do what he's always wanted to do anyway but couldn't do on his own. 

But there are big problems.

First, even if the model holds for that class of smoker, there are other classes of smokers who will be made worse off. Some smokers don't even claim they want to quit: they love smoking and wouldn't quit if there were a free and effective way of doing it. Even if the model works, the policy only works if the gains to the winners outweigh losses to the losers. And, it's never quite been clear to me how we know that the alleged meta-preference is the thing that should be respected rather than the demonstrated preference. It's possible that some smokers who claim to want to quit are lying - they know that smoking draws social disapproval, and claiming that they really do want to quit alleviates some of the stigma. And even if there were a real me-tomorrow who wanted to beat up me-today, why does the government get to step in and take that guy's side? It seems just as reasonable to say that me-tomorrow discounts too heavily the fun I'm having today.

Second, there are other precommitment devices available that could let those smokers who really do want to quit do so. Go to Stickk, make a commitment, and start using e-cigarettes instead. The ones who really want to quit get to do it; the ones who don't, don't have to. Or, pick up a copy of Jon Elster's Ulysses Unbound and consider alternative precommitment mechanisms. 

James Zucollo at TVHE points to a new study by Odermatt and Stutzer showing that hikes in cigarette taxes make likely smokers worse off in life satisfaction surveys. They even hurt those smokers who want to quit. 

From the paper:

Higher cigarette prices are related to overall lower reported levels of satisfaction with life, ceteris paribus. The partial correlation is, however, measured with a large standard error. Still, the effect is economically meaningful (and corroborated by our differential analysis for people with different smoking propensities). For a fifty percent price increase, we estimate a reduction in average life satisfaction of 0.02 points (on a four point scale). This is about one tenth of the effect of being unemployed rather than employed or equivalent to the effect of a 2.4 percentage points higher rate of unemployment on the population at large. This finding does not lend support to the effectiveness of cigarette taxes as an internalization strategy.

And public smoking bans only improve outcomes for smokers who recently tried to quit smoking and failed; some specifications show harms to other smokers, others don't. Finding benefits for wants-to-quit smokers is consistent with some behavioural models where a wants-to-quit smoker is made worse off by seeing people smoking. But, again, we have to wonder why those smokers didn't choose non-smoking establishments prior to the ban. 

Social Costs of Healthy

Chris Auld was prescient. If we require corrective policy to internalise pecuniary costs running through the public health system, then we have to do it across the board. And what if it turns out that healthy people wind up costing more because they have a longer retirement in which they consume lots of subsidized health services? He wrote:

If healthy behaviors wind up increasing lifecycle health care costs, we should either subsidize less than we otherwise would, or perhaps even tax, healthy behaviors. Healthy behaviors in this scenario benefit the person exhibiting the behavior but impose costs on everyone else, and this logic demands that we discourage healthy behavior relative to whatever policies we would otherwise have enacted.

This argument does not sit well with me.

A new article in PLOS Medicine finds that the lifetime health costs of the healthy are indeed highest:Non-smokers of moderate BMI imposed the highest lifetime costs. [HT: @Dick_Puddlecote, who points to the Telegraph's report on the study.] Update: I'd missed the date on the PLOS online study; it's from a few years ago. So Auld's prescience may have been overstated. Thanks to Chris Snowdon for the correction.

From the article's conclusion:

In this study we have shown that, although obese people induce high medical costs during their lives, their lifetime health-care costs are lower than those of healthy-living people but higher than those of smokers. Obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes and coronary heart disease, thereby increasing health-care utilization but decreasing life expectancy. Successful prevention of obesity, in turn, increases life expectancy. Unfortunately, these life-years gained are not lived in full health and come at a price: people suffer from other diseases, which increases health-care costs. Obesity prevention, just like smoking prevention, will not stem the tide of increasing health-care expenditures. The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases toward less lethal, and therefore more costly, diseases [9]. As smoking is in particular related to lethal (and relatively inexpensive) diseases, the ratio of cost savings from a reduced incidence of risk factor–related diseases to the medical costs in life-years gained is more favorable for obesity prevention than for smoking prevention.

Here's the graph of the expected costs and benefits of smoking and obesity prevention, imagining a costless intervention that would switch the obese or smokers into normal-weight non-smokers. For the first few decades after the assumed-costless intervention, all's great. And then...

If it were free to turn smokers into non-smokers, and if we ignore tobacco excise revenues entirely, they say the costless intervention only passes a fiscal cost-benefit analysis for discount rates higher than 5.7%. If we remember that tobacco excise revenues are heavily front-loaded, being paid often decades before the health costs obtain, then you're not going to find a discount rate where the costless intervention saves the government money.

They warn that they've only focused on health care costs and have left aside productivity costs. But the bulk of productivity costs are borne by the drinker, smoker, or eater himself: they're reflected in lower wages.

Smokers remain the benefactors of the rest of us - voluntarily paying ridiculous levels of tax and then dying before taking much out of the superannuation system.

It's a mistake to model governments as unitary agents. The zealot parts of government want to ban tobacco; the sane parts worry about revenue consequences. I wonder, as does Lionel Shriver, whether worries about lost excise motivate government antipathy towards electronic cigarettes. The zealot side of government doesn't like them because they let smokers keep having fun without moral consequence; the fiscal side doesn't like the lost revenue: bootleggers and baptists in different government departments.

Meanwhile, the British Labour Party contemplates bans on sugary breakfast cereals. I agree entirely with Alex Masse's piece at the Spectator. Alex writes:

Yet one of the features of our society is the steady accumulation of influence – and increasingly of power too – of what might be termed the Government-Health-Security Complex*.

Sometimes slippery slopes really do exist. Some folk warned that the public health industry – that is, the Government-Health-Security Complex – would never be satisfied with its battles against tobacco and alcohol and that it would, in time, launch fresh offensives against fast food, soft drinks, and all things salty an sweet.Don’t be silly, we were told. That’s different. Well, who looks stupid now?

Like so much else this is also, in the end, a question of power and class. The NHS – treated as some kind of secular religion – is to be used as a means of shaming the population (especially the bestial lower orders) into behaving in a more comely, acceptable fashion. The class prejudice inherent in all this is rarely far from the surface. The common people are revolting. Their pleasures must be taxed or, wherever possible, suppressed entirely (see extending the ban on smoking in working-class clubs for example).

And, always, the message is simple: the people – poor, lardy, wheezing, sods – are too stupid to make their own choices and it is government’s role to save them from themselves.

Next step then is plain packaging for breakfast cereals....

Pluralism and health

I've critiqued the public health crowd for being too willing to set health as the only value, or at least one that is accorded the presumptive right to trump any other element of someone else's more pluralistic vision of the good.

Australia recently implemented tobacco plain packaging legislation. The new packages are not particularly pleasant, with pretty prominent pictures of diseased lungs and the like. Box Wrap offers a sleeve that wraps around the uglified tobacco packs with more pleasant images. In short, it's a sticker. It's a sticker that happens to be the right size to wrap around a cigarette carton. And so:

The Australian Medical Association has urged the federal government to ban stickers being sold to wrap around cigarette packets to sidestep tobacco plain packaging laws.
...
A Department of Health and Ageing spokeswoman said they would be "immediately investigating this product to evaluate its status" but refused to speculate on what actions could be taken.

The AMA wants the government to ban a sticker. DoHA wants to see whether they're able to ban a sticker.

Any bets on whether they'd be trying to ban it if the exact same product were sold without the anti-nanny-state rhetoric? I mean, look at all of the similar products that exist and have not yet roused DoHA and AMA ire. Here's an Australian Ebay list of cigarette cases. Here's another set. And some more. Does the AMA and DoHA hate the sticker because it's perhaps an easier way to route around their packaging law than buying a cigarette case? Or because it's bundled with a freedom of choice message and a deliberate thumb-in-the-eye to the anti-tobacco movement?



The Australian Medical Association wants to ban a sticker. What a world.

Update: Chris Snowdon caught this one before I had. He also points to other Australian wackiness. The Director of the Centre for Research & Action in Public Health at the University of Canberra, Rachel Davey, lauds Britain's wartime and post-war food rationing as an example for reducing obesity.

Wartime food shortages and government directives forced people to adopt different eating patterns. They ate considerably less meat, eggs, and sugar than they do today.

Rationing was enforced in Britain for 14 years, and continued after the war had ended. Meat was finally derationed in June 1954. Petrol was also rationed, so people stopped buying and using cars, and public transport was limited. There was no “obesity epidemic” as food supply and travel was limited, meaning people ate less and did more physical exercise (walking).

Interestingly, during the years when rationing was enforced, the prevalence of obesity was negligible in the United Kingdom. And waste was minimised as both individuals and government agencies were busy finding new ways of reducing the waste of food resources to a minimum (sustainable consumption).

Is it conceivable that some form of food rationing and portion control may help address the dramatic rise in obesity and the sustainability of our foods supply? If we continue to over-consume foods in unsustainable ways for both our health and our planet, we may be left with no other choice.

Wow.

Healthist fantasizing

I'd put low(ish) odds on these fantasies coming true. But that they're getting airtime in the New England Journal of Medicine is a tad worrying [HT: Chris Snowdon]. Mello and Cohen there argue that the Supreme Court decision in ACA gives the federal government more scope for achieving public health objectives through the tax system, and that this is a good thing.

The federal government has long used taxes to achieve public health goals, but in fairly limited ways. Taxes and tax penalties for individuals have generally been confined to products that cause health harms and associated social costs, such as tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and pollutants. Taxing of activities is rarer and confined to economic transactions; most recently, the ACA imposed a 10% tax on tanning-salon services. Broader use has been made of tax penalties and incentives to influence corporations to refrain from activities that threaten health, such as environmental contamination, or to engage in health-promoting activities such as subsidizing health insurance and wellness programs.

Roberts's opinion appears to invite more targeted, assertive interventions to promote public health. For example, instead of merely taxing tobacco sales, the federal government could require individuals to pay a tax penalty unless they declare that they haven't used tobacco products during the year. It could give a tax credit to people who submit documentation that their body-mass index is in the normal range or has decreased during the year or to diabetic persons who document that their glycated hemoglobin levels are controlled. It could tax individuals who fail to purchase gym memberships. It could require taxpayers to complete an annual health improvement plan with their physician in order to obtain a tax credit, though that might be challenged under other parts of the Constitution. These strategies depart from traditional uses of taxes by targeting omissions and noncommercial activities that are important drivers of chronic disease.

State and local governments, too, can pursue such strategies. Levying taxes to achieve regulatory aims — even taxes resembling mandates with penalties — is well within their police-power authority. They've wielded this power to impose various “sin” taxes on unhealthful products, as well as in more innovative ways, such as the insurance mandate with an SRP that Massachusetts pioneered. The Court ruling makes clear that the federal government can enter territory historically dominated by the states.

Sin taxes are unbounded in domain when anything that's less than perfectly healthy is a sin. So far so awful. But this next paragraph... egads.

Taxes are an appealing mechanism of public health regulation for several reasons. They proffer “nudges” and market-based solutions as alternatives to rigid mandates. Tax-based policies like the SRP retain an element of voluntariness, especially since lawmakers can calibrate the tax penalty to the importance of the desired behavior change. There's strong evidence that taxes affect consumption decisions. Finally, tax strategies are “win–win” for governments, either leading people to take health-enhancing steps or collecting revenue to fund health or other programs.

I hope that Richard Thaler goes and smacks these guys around. This isn't a nudge, it's a shove. Much ill is advocated in Thaler's name. Constrained to the exact mechanism that Thaler laid out, his libertarian paternalism recommendation can hardly be faulted. But it was never, ever, ever going to be constrained to that range. Thaler himself has never been clear enough on the line between a nudge and a shove.

As always, the healthists see the main obstacle as being the powerful moneyed interests:

Yet even when proposed taxes make sense, they can be soundly defeated. Although tax credits, exemptions, and deductions tend to be well received, new taxes and penalties do not. Strong industry opposition is a formidable obstacle even when public sentiment isn't. Aggressive lobbying by the beverage industry, for example, defeated a soft-drink tax proposed for inclusion in the ACA, and a blitzkrieg by the tobacco industry sank California's Proposition 29, which would have hiked cigarette taxes by $1.00 a pack, with revenues allocated for cancer research. States, however, have sometimes had remarkable success in enacting new taxes; for example, New York passed a $1.60-per-pack increase in its cigarette tax in 2010, bringing the total state tax to $4.35 per pack, and 47 states have collectively increased their cigarette-tax rates more than 100 times in the past decade.4

And, finally, the beast that slouches towards Washington to be born:

Although no constitutional barriers block expanded federal use of tax-based strategies, political obstacles remain. Some interventions we've outlined would never survive the political process, given prevailing antitax sentiment. But such sentiment may fade as the economy recovers or become less important if Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives. Moreover, the Court decision affirms that Congress can facilitate passage of a tax by calling it something less controversial. The Court has highlighted an opportunity for passing creative new public health laws, authorized by the taxing power; this opportunity now awaits its political moment. [emphasis added]

My odds-on bet for the path that leads to the political moment:

1. More reports come out on the costs of unhealthy behaviours, either to the government directly via the public health system, or to the public via insurance mandates that insurers cannot fully internalise the costs of individual health-related decisions via actuarially fair premiums.
• A bunch of these are highly inflated by including costs totally internal to the individual, but journalistic accounts never ever ever parse out the costs to the public versus costs to the individual; they're all "social costs" by virtue of assuming that unhealthy decisions can never be rational.
2. Change in framing: it's not individual choice, it's internalising the costs that unhealthy decisions impose on others.
3. Properly nudge-style policies will fail to make enough headway against the purported costs. Harder nudges then are needed, the grounds for intervention already having been conceded. 
4. Tax measures then are proposed to internalise the externality, even though the purported externality is mostly, well, not an externality of any kind. These get described as nudges as well (see NEJM, above). 

That's the path we've been seeing here in New Zealand and Australia around alcohol and tobacco. 

Do costs matter?

Sandra Jones says that optimal alcohol policy is invariant to measured social costs:

I think Dr Crampton is missing the point. I for one will not vote for (or against) government policy because the costs of death and suffering have been estimated at $5 billion, any more than I would if they were estimated at $10 billion or $100 billion.

As an Australian, I care that alcohol is second only to tobacco as a preventable cause of drug-related death and hospitalisation, with an estimated 3,000 deaths per annum; I care that our emergency rooms are clogged with people suffering from the immediate effects of their, or others, misuse of alcohol; and I care that every year almost 600 Australians aged 65-74 die from injury and disease, and 6,500 are hospitalised, as a result of drinking above the NHMRC guidelines[3].

I also care that 43% of Australians perceived physical assault in a public place to be a problem in their neighbourhood[4]; that alcohol is a significant contributing factor in domestic violence[5]; and that alcohol abuse is an important risk factor for child abuse, maltreatment and neglect[6].

As a parent, I care that 13% of all deaths among Australians aged 14-17 years – that is one per week – are a direct result of alcohol consumption; and that alcohol is responsible for the hospitalisation of 60 teenagers each week.

Perhaps Dr Crampton – and the alcohol industry – could spend a little less time arguing the exact calculation of the financial costs of alcohol and think about the real costs.  I am sure that every parent who has lost a teenager from alcohol misuse would estimate that single cost at much more that $15 billion.

Let’s stop pretending we don’t have a problem with alcohol.

In one important sense, I agree with Sandra. As we wrote in the introduction to our paper:

We argue that the standard economic case for intervention, which relies on identifying instances in which the marginal social costs of consumption exceed marginal private costs, is not established by Cost of Illness studies. First, these studies summarily ignore the differences between marginal and total costs. Even were it the case that total external cost exceeded total collected taxes, feasible interventions including excise tax increases can remain undesirable where marginal external costs are less than the excise rate.

You can have worlds where the measured social costs are orders of magnitude higher than collected excise revenues but no intervention passes cost-benefit analysis because harms are relatively inelastic to intervention; you can have other worlds where the measured social costs are orders of magnitude lower than the collected excise revenues but particular interventions pass cost-benefit analysis because particular categories of harmful activity are relatively elastic to intervention.

The only reason that I started caring about the measure of the total social cost of alcohol use is that bad estimates of it build demand for intervention on what look like sciency economic grounds when the sciency veneer is actually pretty thin. When BERL came out with its big shiny number, I just shrugged - another dodgy number in a world of dodgy numbers. Until Sir Geoffrey started citing it as motivating his call for much tighter regulations around alcohol and BERL's analysts refused to inform him that their figure was not fit for that purpose.

I'm sure that Sandra Jones' opposition to alcohol is completely invariant to the measure of the social cost. But I don't believe that's true of many voters who are deceived by cost of illness studies that present costs drinkers impose upon themselves as 'social costs', which then are interpreted in public debate as costs to the taxpayer.

It's worth perhaps also having a bit of perspective on where Sandra's coming from on alcohol, and here I'll part company with her rather more substantially.

Here's Hoek and Jones in the Journal of Social Marketing last year. First, some definitions:

The dominant approach focuses on individual-level behaviour change, or what is now described as downstream social marketing. This approach regards behaviour change as voluntary and relies on offers that create greater value than continuation of the risk behaviour. By contrast, "upstream" social marketing focuses on policy and regulation, with the aim of altering environments so these support and promote behaviour change. "Upstream" initiatives have much in common with work public health researchers undertake, suggesting that many benefits could be gained from stronger social marketing and public health alliances.

So upstream social marketing is regulation. Ok. So why do we need that rather than efforts that focus on individual responsibility? Let's check the section of the paper called "The Myth of Individual Responsibility" for some answers.

By promoting individual behaviour change, downstream social marketing campaigns risk reinforcing the impression that consumers themselves are responsible for their own choices, irrespective of the powerful stimuli that promote and reinforce these. Furthermore, individually oriented actions deflect attention from the companies manufacturing, distributing and marketing products known to cause harmful social and health problems and imply these cannot (and perhaps should not) be held responsible for their products' effects. Efforts to relocate responsibility back to these corporations thus require environmental changes that both recognise and ameliorate the influence marketing stimuli exert. 

Is this just tobacco and maybe alcohol?

For example, McDonald's and Coca Cola have undertaken extensive sponsorship of sporting events, from major international gatherings such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup right through to smaller local activities, such as support of junior football codes. These activities indicate their endorsement of sporting activity and exercise, which is clearly part of a healthy lifestyle for all individuals. However, it also supports their claim that no foods are "unhealthy", that a sensible diet has room for "treat" foods, just as it should also include "everyday" foods, and that the way to enable inclusion of these treat foods is to undertake sufficient exercise. Individuals, therefore, need to manage their diets so these represent an appropriate balance of foods.

This reasoning has a powerful intuitive logic and few would deny individuals have an important role in selecting the foods they consume. However, this argument overlooks entirely the role food companies have in shaping individuals' food environments.

 And individual choice?

...far from limiting individuals' freedoms, regulation shaping consumers' choice contexts is actually the means of liberating those environments, thus enabling them to make free choices. Only by balancing environments so the voices of public health are not overwhelmed by the cacophony of commerce can individuals begin to make choices that are in their long-term interests. Without regulation to create these more even choice contexts, consumers faced with unremitting commercial stimuli are, understandably, likely to be swayed by these rather than longer-term social or health interests.

The Ministry of Freedom could maybe be in charge of making sure the choice context is just right.

In a paper section entitled "Tobacco control - daring to dream", they note how regulatory policies denormalizing tobacco use made downstream social anti-smoking campaigns more effective; this is meant to serve as example for the effectiveness of this partnered approach for other industries.

They conclude:

If high-risk behaviours such as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and consumption of high fat, salt and sugar foods are to change, social marketers need to recognise, then manage, the environmental determinants of risk behaviour. This implies that they explore upstream measures and work alongside public health researchers to create a context where downstream interventions may flourish. [25] Jochelson (2006) summarised this approach when she argued that: "Legislation brings about change that individuals on their own cannot, and sets new standards for the public good". Because upstream measures affect the environments that shape and support behaviour, they should be regarded not as constraints diminishing voluntary behaviour but instead as the pre-requisites enabling full and free choices.

It's like the No Logo movement has bred with the public health movement. Count Chocula should be worried; his days may be numbered.

It's at least mildly amusing that Jones, who views people as massively subject to advertising in their roles as shoppers, seems to dismiss that voters' preferences might be corrupted by shonky cost of illness studies.

At least I have a framework for why I worry a lot more about the latter than the former: individuals bear the costs of getting things wrong in their shopping decisions and so pay a bit more attention there than they do when weighing up political choices where each vote has only a trivial chance of changing anything.

Watching the slide down the slippery slope

For now, it's just a proposal from the New Zealand healthists.

Health officials worried about an obesity epidemic want fast-food advertising dropped from public property, including bus shelters, and are questioning fast-food and soft-drink sponsorship of public events.

They have also raised concerns over the lack of political power to stop fast-food restaurants being built near schools and in poor areas.

What about McDonald's sponsorship of things like Ronald McDonald House? Says Auckland Health Board Clinical Director Robyn Toomath:

"We've reached that purist approach with tobacco, completely hardline. There's no way in the world we would have a Rothman's Centre for Kids in Hospital. You start off saying we won't promote the sale of goods, then the next step is [not allowing] sponsorship of these companies."

McDonald's, Rothman's, no logical difference. No slippery slopes, 'till you're close to the bottom.

For a more reasonable take on McDonald's and the miracles wrought by careful supply chain management, consult Blunt Object [language warning].

Australia's fun police

New South Wales (Australia) Police Chief Andrew Scipione wants restrictions on violent video games because he thinks they cause crime.

There exists a literature on whether violent games affect crime rates. The best evidence I've seen says that while violent games get violent people excited about violence, they also reduce crime. How? By keeping violent people in their houses playing violent video games where they'd otherwise be going out to do violent things. They call it "voluntary incapacitation"; prison is "involuntary incapacitation". Or see this one.

At least the technology section of News.com.au is a bit less credulous of Scipione's claims.

It's worth remembering that Scipione also reckoned that the Collins and Lapsley measure of the social costs of alcohol use, a $15 billion figure largely based on costs heavy drinkers impose upon themselves via lower life expectancy, lower wages, and spending on alcohol, was actually a measure of the costs of alcohol-caused crime. I don't know whether he still thinks that the Collins and Lapsley number represents crime costs, but he's still pushing for some fairly serious restrictions on alcohol availability.

The Chief of the Fun Police?

No slippery slopes, nothing to see here

Never a slippery slope to be found.

The Health Select Committee, which is to hold an inquiry into the UK Government’s recently published alcohol strategy, will look into a series of proposals including plain packaging for alcohol sold in shops, similar to a plan being considered for cigarette packets. Yesterday MPs were warned that removing well-known trademark images such as Johnnie Walker’s striding man and the Famous Grouse on bottles, could damage the Scotch whisky industry, which is worth £4 billion in exports alone. Labelling of alcoholic products is currently reserved to the UK Government, which means that if Westminster eventually agreed a ban it would affect shops and products across the whole of the UK, including Scotland. It would hit all parts of the alcohol industry, but whisky producers believe it would be particularly damaging for them.

Chris Snowdon helpfully points to assurances that they're not planning plain packaging for food.

As I'd said a couple years ago, in a different context:

I always find it depressing how folks like NORML think beating up on alcohol makes marijuana legalization more likely rather than just making for tighter regs. The hospitality industry lobbies for more restrictions on supermarket-bought alcohol to boost sales in bars; small brewers push for more punitive tax rates on big brewers... the only winners are the healthists who get support bit by bit for more regulations on everything. It's like a bunch of folks on the scaffolds complaining that the other guy's noose isn't quite tight enough. Y'all might instead direct your attention to the hangman sometime and try helping each other cut those ropes.