Apparently, Jonathan Gruber says yes. But at Cato Unbound, Christopher Snowdon says no. In response, Russell Saunders says yes. Pointer to the Cato Unbound issue from Jason Collins.
I have not yet read the essays. We decided to take a break from winter and drive down to Florida. As we went through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the population did seem to get older and more obese. I know that many of my progressive friends would be disgusted by the obesity, but that does not make it a public policy problem. You can complain about paying for obese people’s health care, but why not just let insurance companies determine the charge for that, rather than treating it as a tax issue?
People have strong tastes about their associations. San Franciscans have a revealed preference for segregated schools (link from Tyler Cowen).
In Florida, my casual observation is that the buildings with the guards are in affluent neighborhoods in communities that are miles from any urban diversity, and the buildings in the urban diverse neighborhoods have less security. I attribute that to selection bias–people who are comfortable with diversity are less xenophobic.
I can imagine that if it were conservatives rather than progressives who were offended by obesity, then the term obesophobia would be in widespread use in the liberal media.
What’s the price elasticity of obesity anyway? I think it’s probably huge. If poor people tend to be more likely to be fat, could they even afford the tax that would be required to encourage them to be thin without a substantial degradation in their standard of living. Are they judgment proof?
I suppose one could look at programs like Stickk and see whether there is any correlation between ‘stakes’ (perhaps a percentage of income) and eventual successful weight loss, but there’s a lot of bias in that sample too.
This is actually an issue in more radical left circles, the social justice movement and so on. It’s not called obesophobia, but fatphobia or weightism. You can also search for fat acceptance movement.
Yeah, this is where the radical left shows the mainstream left for the superficial hypocrites they are. The mainstream left loves to gloat over obesity stats in red states and being disgusted by fat white conservative men.
And I suspect that a good percentage of the “obesity” in most of the often cited “red” states is due to their larger black and Hispanic population. So the liberals “gloat” at their peril or in convenient ignorance of demographics.
I was also going to comment that Kling doesn’t have to “imagine” progressive anti-obesophobia. Progressives are anti-fat when it comes to taxes but pro-fat when it comes to browbeating entertainment media for promoting “unattainable body images”. Apparently, having a healthy body image means being proud to get penalized with obesity taxes.
oppressor-oppressed + the busybody impulse => left’s views on fat, vaccines, GMOs, etc.
As-in, take away the oppressor-oppressed component and vaccines become just a science issue (although they can still muck up the science because although they are science groupies they don’t know science), GMOs become a way to feed the poor, fat is another science issue (although like all their other hobby horses the science is way less cut and dried than they advertise) and the biology and externalities are so well accounted for and medical costs are such an exact science that we should impose incentives (nevermind that they made medicine a faux public good), etc.
But with oppressor-oppressed added, vaccines are part of the shady Big Pharma, GMOs are ways for Monsanto to exploit monopolies on food, and fat shaming is oppression of a vulnerable group.
So, decomposing the two impulses makes the inconsistencies explainable.
What does this tell us about leftism? Is the far left more likely to sympathize with the granularity of obesity etiology (I doubt it) or is the moderate left more concerned about their/government balance sheets? Or do they convince themselves they are helping people help themselves? Maybe the poor obese are exploited by all the cheap corporate food (Kind of like how they are exploited by both easy and tight credit).
The pro people are predictably pro because it gives them justification for intervention. The more predictable life gets the more depressing. At least the other side has a future of less freedom to look forward to.
I don’t even have to read Gruber’s essay, because it is only going to say what I knew was coming down the pike 15 years ago. Also, we now know, despite the lefty marketing, that smoking actually decreases your draw on the the faux public good of medicine. Since the left thinks the opposite, just that alone would make me bet that the obese also check out quickly and cheaply. His title including “and raise revenue” is just as on-the-nose as Gruber always is. It seems like people like Gruber and Sunstein embrace their archetypal personas of evil. Weird. It doesn’t seem to actually help them.
The science is bound to be very slim, and the more sure they are the slimmer it likely is. For example, the amount of running that an obese person needs to do because that person has the obesity virus or poor gut microbiota might cause some premature oxidative aging (and joint problems) and (close enough for government work) all the expensive diseases are aging-associated.
Or,
http://hms.harvard.edu/news/childhood-obesity-early-intervention-key-9-17-12
“C-sections. A 2012 study by Project Viva researchers found that 3-year-olds who had been born by Caesarean section were twice as likely to be obese as those who had been delivered vaginally. That may be because babies born by C-section have different bacteria in the gut than those born vaginally, and some emerging data suggest that this microbiome could be important for energy balance.”
Twice! Maybe the explanation big fetuses need to be C-sectioned. The salient point is the Harvard pinheads have no clue, so does anyone? The moral of that article is that by adulthood weight largely is a fait accompli so you have to start early, possibly before conception (mother’s health and habits).
We’ve seen The Biggest Loser, so interventions can “work.” However everyone knows (except the perpetually curious Gruber) the question is whether the transformations are sustainable. But has anyone actually done the “we intervened with randomized obese people, got half to lose weight, and then followed them for 4 years to determine the life expectency” study? Have they done it enough times for the results to be firm? I’m gonna guess that no, so far all we have is speculative retrospective correlation.
As I said before, I got the memo that my insurance is going to require a wellness checkup, while none other than Zeke Emanuel says those are less than useless (especially for the only legitimate goal of cutting costs for which they can only do the opposite). So, nobody should assume these people aren’t simply wrong.
Yeah, the knots the healthcare busybodies tie themselves into are hard to keep track of.
They are literally saying whatever they think will get them the powers they want.
Here is the thing, we could “tax” whatever we think affects healthcare. This could go into YOUR health savings account. Then if it doesn’t affect your health, you get the money back. If it does, you spend it on your healthcare from your health savings account.
Simple. But the fact it will never happen tells me what they are really concerned about.
Is there a literature on this?
Sodas con tribute to obesity in some (thanks corn subsidies, but anyway…) so taxing them is a crapshoot.
Taxing the obese assumes both that obesity directly causes health externalities AND that the already heavy are elastic, as the commenter above says, but it does trade out the one crapshoot for the other.
How are other externalities like this viewed? As usual, it is up to us to have the adult side of this discussion.
There are some serious problems with the way the obesity issue is discussed. First, BMI is a bad way to estimate obesity because it doesn’t account for frame size differences or muscle mass.
The fact that obesity is more prevalent among the poor tells us two things.
1) Compared to most of human history, our lives are pretty easy. We don’t have to expend nearly as much energy to get the things we need as we did before. That’s obviously a good thing.
2) People with higher incomes can afford to pay for gym memberships and spend time working out, thus they tend to have lower BMI’s.
Finally, even if we accept the premise that the state should force people to “be healthy,” it should actually pay for gym memberships and protein shakes, not tax people for having high BMIs. After all, muscle mass trumps BMI as a predictor of longevity.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/muscle-mass-beats-bmi-as-longevity-predictor1/
Of course, the reality is that these proponents of gov’t control of fatness aren’t really concerned about quality of life and longevity, they’re concerned about expenditures.
Step 1. Intervene
Step 2. Waste money, go bankrupt
Step 3. Claim that 1. Is required and that 2. Makes it an externality
Step 4. Repeat
It doesn’t take long for those who say, “Everyone has a right to health care,” to jump to “If I’m paying for your health care, I have the right to require that you make healthy choices, or you’re on your own.”
We didn’t want to hold you accountable for making responsible choices in system 1. We assumed that you didn’t buy health insurance or make arrangements for less expensive medical care because you couldn’t afford it. So we create System 2, but we will now hold you accountable. Cracks me up.