Month: December 2003

Economist Ed Glaeser, a trim man, is a vigorous partisan of the Atkins Diet. Nonetheless he argues that McDonald’s brings social benefits, not social costs:

Glaeser’s rationale for suggesting that convenience foods are a social good is that, to judge from consumer behavior in the marketplace, people seem to prefer saving time to being thinner. And in economics, by and large, getting what you want is a good thing. Glaeser notes that until relatively recently, cheaper food (in terms of money as well as time) made us taller and healthier. Only in the past 25 years or so have diminishing returns set in.

Now that less is more when it comes to increased calorie intake, Glaeser expects the marketplace to correct the excesses he attributes to self-control problems. For one thing, food technology can’t advance much farther, “short of direct injection,” whereas weight-loss technology is only in its infancy, with vast room to grow. Glaeser can understand the need for regulation in the schools, or if food companies are misleading people. But he says: “I don’t think anybody ate at McDonald’s and thought it was good for them. I take a dim view of these lawsuits.”

Thanks to newmarksdoor.com for the link, and Daniel Akst for the article itself. See also Alex’s post on Three Oreo Cookies.

Ralph Nader’s Commercial Alert group seeks to restrict or prohibit commercial research into neuroscience. You might recall that researchers at Emory are hard at work on this problem:

Neuromarketing research uses a magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI, to determine which parts of the brain react to different types of advertising in an effort to help marketers develop more effective marketing techniques for selling their products or services.

The critics charge that the research is directed at finding a “buy button” in the mind. Critics also raise the specter of mind control and the loss of individual autonomy. Commercial Alert makes the following threat:

“It is wrong to use medical research for marketing instead of healing,” Ruskin said. “If Emory University doesn’t stop this immediately, we will do everything in our power to shut down Emory’s federal funding.”

My take: The neuroscience techniques remain unproven, but in the meantime corporations are subsidizing an important science. Many of our most significant scientific discoveries have been by accident, when people were looking for some other result altogether. The support for research may well have a real long-run payoff.

Furthermore the worries are overblown. Let’s say we found such a buy button and that corporations could use that knowledge in their ads. Would it really shift the marketing balance of power in favor of sellers? Over time I would expect buyers to compensate, as the knowledge would not stay secret for very long. We could imagine lists of products that were sold by manipulative techniques, and customers would know to stay away from such products. A technological arms race would be set off. We could imagine private entrepreneurs selling “counter-persuasion” techniques to customers, perhaps in the form of drugs, warning buzzers, or counter-subliminal images flashed into your eyeglasses (the latter product is already under development!). Or how about programming the microchip credit card embedded in your arm to discourage or prevent such manipulation-induced purchases? Or how about if consumers use neuroscience to learn how to be truly happy staying at home and cultivating their gardens?

Sellers seem to have the biggest advantage when manipulation techniques are less than transparent. So neuroscience research into buyer behavior may be a classic prisoner’s dilemma problem. Various sellers may pursue such knowledge, hoping to get a leg up on the competition. The long-run result may be an evaporation of business advantage and an empowering of consumers.

Thanks to Kevin McCabe for the pointer on this issue, check out his neuroeconomics blog.

The flu vaccine is now running very scarce, you can wait for weeks and there is no guarantee of getting it at all. Most of the supplies are already in the hands of doctors. Note also the following:

Random immunization is almost useless because, for many viruses, more than 95% of the population must be vaccinated to prevent the disease’s spread.

But things are not as grim as they might sound. First:

An alternative to the flu shot is FluMist, a more expensive inhaled version of the vaccine, which is recommended for healthy people between the ages of 5 and 49. There are about 4 million doses available of FluMist, health officials said.

Although those below 5 and over 49 are the at-risk groups, they are less likely to catch the flu if the rest of us are healthy.

Second, we could administer flu shots more wisely by targeting superspreaders, here is one proposal:

Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues propose a simple modification of random vaccination that is more effective, according to their computer simulations. The idea is to randomly choose, say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances. Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20% of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.

Using the team’s vaccination strategy, a disease can be stopped by vaccinating less than 20% of the individuals, in some cases, according to their computer model of a human population. The method can also be tweaked: if a larger sample is asked for names, and those named twice are vaccinated, the total number of vaccinations required can be even lower.

The trick may be getting these people to take the shots, but surely economists can come up with a useful incentives scheme for that, I would prefer a subsidy over a tax.