Matt Nolan

Hiding value judgments behind economic rhetoric: The case of obesity

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Note:  Renamed this from “Discussion Thursday” as I ended up inadvertently writing a post rather than a comment …

Sorry, a bit busy to do real posts.  Also wanted to get a discussion going on this excellent quote from Eric Crampton about using sugar taxes to pay for the “health care externality” from obesity/sugar consumption:

What happens then if we find that it’s those healthy exercise people who cost the system more, on the whole, because they live longer (costing the superfund) and consume health services over a longer period?

Be careful wanting to tax all the fiscal externalities. You might not like where it leads.

Let me throw up a quick first comment here 😉

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Matt Nolan

QOTD: John Roemer on Equality of Opportunity

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Unrelated note:  I am not around too much atm, so as you may have noticed I am not replying to comments at the moment.  I intend to catch up on the comments I missed later in the week, so please still comment.  Things are a tad busy is all 😉

From the start of his book “Equality of Opportunity” comes the following quote from John Roemer.  Note that the two poles, non-discrimination and leveling the playing field, are described earlier in the book.  Also, equality of opportunity isn’t necessarily the only principle of distributive justice.  However, taking these as given we have:

Among citizens of any advanced democracy, we find individuals who hold a spectrum of views with respect to what is required for equal opportunity, from the nondiscrimination view at one pole to pervasive social provision to correct for all manner of disadvantage at the other.

Common to all these views, however, is the precept that the equal-opportunity principle, at some point, holds the individual accountable for the achievement of the advantage in question, whether that advantage be a level of educational achievement, health, employment status, income, or the economist’s utility or welfare.

Thus there is, in the notion of equality of opportunity, a “before” and an “after”: before the competition starts opportunities must be equalized, by social intervention if need be, but after it begins, individuals are on their own.  The different views of equality of opportunity can be categorized according to where they place the starting gate which separates “before” from “after”.

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Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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Let’s do some inequality stuff.

The wealthier a society is, the less (relative) income inequality it should be willing to accept

Matt Nolan

More rhetoric on restricting the choice of the poor

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I see that leading Stuff today is an article on New Zealand’s “obesity epidemic”, and how we must changes some things because we are “killing ourselves”.  The policy suggestions are:

In a report published today, the association calls for drastic cures for the bulge, including taxing or minimum prices for sugary drinks, restricting food advertising aimed at children, and taking fast food out of schools.

I’ll be honest, I can see a reasonable justification for everything except the minimum price.  I can see a good justification for changing policies around children, based on habit formation.  This isn’t the point.  The point I’m touching on involves the inappropriateness of quotes like this:

Otago University health researcher Professor Jim Mann said he supported the report’s recommendations, particularly a fizzy drink tax. Kiwis were becoming so big that they were almost blind to obesity. “Parents can’t even identify when their children are overweight or obese. Obesity is fast becoming normal.”

New Zealand’s poverty rates, particularly among children, and cheap access to fatty tasty foods were largely to blame, as was a lack of political will. “There is this obsession with the nanny state, that we shouldn’t be telling people what to do.”

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Matt Nolan

On fairy tales

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Dawkin’s believes that fairy tells hurt kids.  Update:  It sounds like I have been unfair, here are the reported comments.  It still makes a cool conversation, so I will leave this up for comments about the ideas 🙂

From the article:

The British scientist, known for his assaults on religion in books such as The God Delusion, has told a science festival audience that parents should ditch fairy tales in order to “foster a spirit of scepticism” in their children.

“I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism,” The Times reports him saying.

I find this troubling, as I have a different view on what fairy tales are:

You may note some similarities in this to how I have broadly discussed economics.

However, I’m interested in your thoughts.  Is the framework I’m using “right”, if not why, if so how can we use that to analyse the efficacy of fairy tales for helping give children knowledge (vs misleading them).  Given all this, what lessons can we take for economics!

Matt Nolan

Top 10 on Global Warming

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So Interest.co.nz allowed me to pop up another one of these “Top 10” links things – where I blatantly use more than ten links to make some arbitrary point about some arbitrary subject.  This time, global warming – go over and give it a look.

However, there are a few links that I missed.

An excellent post by Eric Crampton from 2010, considering NZ policy choices.  I hear he is doing the next Top 10, so it will be interesting to see if he expands on this!  He discusses the idea of what policy we should put in place, given the fact that the lack of an international agreement removes the “externality” argument from play.  Ideas such as investment in technology (risky, with high potential reward, strategy) and investment in adaption and insurance become much more important here – it is an honest conversation we need to have!

Also, the links in this tweet:

Our views, and expectations of, global coordination are an essential part of what is “right” policy here.  Let’s try to be honest about that.  Yes, we can decry the impact on future generations, and we can do things to signal our concern (that is why I support a tax, even though it does nothing to the chance of a GWE).  But these issues are too important to only be controlled by the tyranny of ‘good intentions’, without considering what the actual future impact will be – if we actually believe that global coordination is fraught, we instead need to think about ways to coordination nationally to insure against/limit the impact where appropriate.  Ranting instead will just see us sacrificing future generations of New Zealander’s to make ourselves sound “moral” now 😉