This stuff is pretty simple.

1/ do you think children are rational (“sovereign”) consumers and therefore reasonable prey for advertisers? I don’t. And if you think parents control everything a child eats you clearly have no experience of parenthood. Why not target advertising at parents and let them decide?

2/ As for adults, I have no problem if you want to eat the Tim Tams/ McDonalds. I agree addiction is no justification for intervention (except when that addiction is cultivated in childhood – see 1 above). Trouble is that 1/2 Kiwis say they don’t know how to eat healthily. And according to tests, 1/2 of those that think they do tend to be wrong. I just want to see a bit of honesty in food labelling and marketing. We are a long way from the ‘perfect information’ requirement for a market to function. Tim Tams aren’t the problem per se, it is the sugar salt and fat that has crept into everything – like yoghurt.

3/ I am happy to admit taxation is social engineering. This is where things get harder. The fact is that we have a huge wave of diabetes headed our way, and tax is the only thing that works to change behaviour at anything like the scale needed. This will swamp what we saw with smoking, so we need to treat it as we treated smoking. The alternative is to watch our public health system keel over. If you are prepared for that consequence for your ‘freedom of choice’ then all power to you. Society eventually chose to make a different choice with cigarettes, and it remains to be seen how they will treat junk food.

The problem is that we’re not talking about adults with the power to make rational choices all the time (although we know that advertising and marketing are designed to take advantage of the cognitive bias that bridges the gap between thinking we’re being rational and not being rational). GG’s argument is that the products are targeted at children. Children have a lower capacity for being able to tell the difference between a rational want on their hierarchy of need, a lower capacity for being able to defer gratification, and are more impressionable and psychologically malleable. This isn’t just children, either. This goes all the way up to early adulthood. The armed forces prefer younger recruits – why? Because they’re not just physically more able and less prone to injury, but they’re also psychologically malleable.

So the argument isn’t about right here, right now. The argument is about the diachronic effect of marketing. It’s about the brands we grew up with gaining preference, and it’s about associations of good times to processed foods. If children are offered an array of ‘products’ to play with that are high in sugar and saturated fats, or which are marketed by companies with less than perfect records on the environment and human rights, and if they’re offered this on the basis of companies that are able to pay the most to Foodstuffs, then that’s a problem.

These bits of polystyrene wrapped in plastic might not be a problem to an adult familiar with rational choice theory, but an adult familiar with marketing to children and health promotion might see something else in them. While it’s wrong to see these things as entirely sinister, it’s just as wrong to see them as entirely benign, and that rational choice will win.

Parents know that they have ultimate control over what their children buy. But while the parent might only get one chance to say no to something a day, advertising and marketing get hundreds of chances every single day to influence them. When that child starts controlling their own money – which, however limited it might be, could be only a few years down the line – then the idea of the power to choose has to be moderated by the ability of advertising to influence us.

We spend billions a year on advertising and marketing. And companies get more back than they put in. If it didn’t work, and if the battery of psychological techniques that went into constructing campaigns, then they wouldn’t be part and parcel of commerce.

But they are. And you can’t call choice when smaller humans have less of an ability to choose, and it’s preyed on by a whole industry.

You don’t think trick is an appropriate for what they really mean, except what you’re describing is what laymen would far more recognise as being tricked. This is presumably a bad thing for GG to be marrying with their economic framework, but isn’t this also about writing for your audience? The articles include lots of inflammatory language which is presumably there to gin up anger. You need output focus to get things done, even if you don’t want it in your theoretical framework.

I would also hope laymen resolve to have more willpower once they’re aware of the “tricks”. Then again it’s very common for there to be desperate people frustrated by their environment and close family/friends hampering their efforts to change, regardless of nutritional knowledge. Sucks for them to be told their real preferences are the revealed ones.

“[…] in a policy sense gets increasingly close to treating disliked foods in the same way as tobacco and eventually fully banned substances.”

Disliked? Either the evidence is there that something is significantly contributing to a public health epidemic, or it isn’t.

“I appreciate they want to avoid people “tricking me” to make ex-ante choices I regret ex-post, but the more I hear the rhetoric of addiction being whipped out, the more it starts to sound like GG wants to restrict my choice. I love both these guys, but not enough to let you reduce my choice set ;)”

What are the objections to restricting advertising? NY famously had their Bloomberg soda limits, and it was hated, but as far as I’m aware people when surveyed mostly don’t think advertising affects their choices. All the choice, but people are more likely to have to seek out the choices deemed undesirable by public health evidence.