Defining Fat Down

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Americans are more overweight than ever but Burke, Heiland and Nadler find:

…that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly
lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling
for objective weight status and other factors….The shifts in self classification are not explained by differences between
surveys in body fatness or waist circumference, nor by shifting demographics. We
interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms
related to body weight, and propose various mechanisms to explain such a shift,
including: (1) higher average adult BMI and adult obesity rates in the later
survey cohort, (2) higher childhood obesity rates in the later survey cohort,
and (3) public education campaigns promoting healthy body image. The welfare
implications of the observed trends in self-classification are mixed.

The decline of chewing

by  Tyler Cowen in

According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.

That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.  This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic.  It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date.  I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.

Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:

Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces,
determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette
pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot
impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the
notion that food should melt in the mouth .

Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any
more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their
carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not
collaborating in their own cultural demise?”

…According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time – usually
between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C – by 60 seconds or more in
search of a less crusty crust.

The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process
occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness,
that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.

Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.

Why is there an IQ test for many contest winners?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bob Baxley, a soon-to-be-loyal MR reader, asks me the following question:

In considering entering in an online drawing for a bicycle, I read the complete rules. The contest is billed as a random drawing of those entered. But what struck me is that "Before being declared a winner, the selected entrant must first correctly answer, unaided, a time-limited, arithmetical, skill-testing question."(http://www.cervelo.com/contestrules.aspx)

Curious about the occurrence of this rule in other contests, I Googled this long phrase and it turns out it is very common in contest drawings: (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US305&q="correctly+answer,+unaided,+a+time-limited,+arithmetical,+skill-testing+question."&btnG=Search).  Shorter snippets of this phrase return even more Google hits.

Any thoughts on why this stipulation is listed in the rules?

Maybe his contest is offering up this question to me.  But I cannot answer it unaided.  Help!

The health care costs budget fallacy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Today's report is this:

The financial outlook for Medicare and Social Security
has significantly worsened, as the bad economy and mounting job losses
have pushed both programs years closer to insolvency, according to a
grim report issued Tuesday by the Obama administration.

Maybe you once argued that "Social Security is fine," but dollars are fungible and the budget must be judged as a whole.  The consumption tax is coming, I am sorry to say.

I'm seeing nascent signs of a new (but actually old) fallacy, namely that since health care costs can (will?) crush the budget, we don't have to worry so much about other expenditures.  The mental story runs something like this: "if we don't cure health care cost inflation, it doesn't matter; if we do cure health care cost inflation, we can afford it."  That's exactly the kind of false mental framing that behavioral economics identifies as irrational in other settings.

Here is some stupid TV.

Elsewhere, Richard Posner makes many concessions.  I do not disagree; it's a mistake to think that a political movement can be very smart, especially after extended years in power.

The law of one price?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jason Kottke informs us:

Ticket prices at the new Yankee Stadium are so high that if a New
Yorker wants to watch a Mariners/Yankees game from the best seats, it would be a lot cheaper to fly to Seattle, stay in a nice hotel, eat fancy dinners, and see two games.

Was it not Mises who said that the purchasing power of money is the same everywhere?  Some of the price differential will come from the greater value of the business connection in New York.  And maybe those seats are really good.

Elsewhere from kottke.org, here is a post on breeding rats to be better stock traders.

Mauritania fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Women in Mauritania who press charges for sexual assault face the risk
of jail time because of poorly defined laws and stigma that criminalise
victims rather than offenders, according to a local UN-funded
non-profit.

Here is the story.  The twittering of RachelStrohm is actually the best "Africa blog" I've seen, ever.  (I very much like Chris Blattman but I would describe his blogging as broader than that.)  Her blog blog is here.  Her Google profile is here.

Medical care without third party payment: the autism example

by  Tyler Cowen in

It's a common claim that health care would be more efficient and cheaper if not for third party payment.  Sometimes, yes, but often these claims are overstated, especially when the link between treatment and improvement is murky. 

To consider one example, for the most part autism-related services are not covered by private health insurance.  Government aid is often scarce as well.  Also in Canada medical benefits for autism-related services are quite limited.  So when it comes to autism, this is a fee for service setting for the most part.

And what does this world look like?

1. Services are not especially cheap nor do they seem to be falling in price. 

2. Market participants are not well informed about what works.  Many parents of autistic children pursue hopeless treatments or unvalidated or even refuted theories.  Some of the treatments, such as chelation, are harmful in many cases and yield no benefits.

3. There is lots of innovation — in terms of advertised methods of treatment — but it is unclear, to say the least, what percentage of these innovations succeeds.  Very often it is parents "buying hope."

The point is not that insurance coverage would solve all these problems.  Third party coverage would slant the relative prices toward more mainstream treatments and away from the fads; how good or bad this would be depends on your point of view as to what brings better (worse) outcomes. 

Overall I don't view the autism example as a good selling point for the view that third party payment is the basic problem behind U.S. health care.  Nor do I see critics of third party payment citing autism services as a model example for their ideas.  (By the way, it is an open question how much autism should be an education issue and how much it should be a health care issue; de facto it is often a health care issue but this should not be taken for granted.)

Another lesson is this: the more emotional the issue, the less effective any health care system will be.  Policy discussions of "health care" often require more disaggregation.

Addendum: There is, by the way, a movement afoot to require that private insurance cover some autism-related services, such as ABA.  Given the costs of the treatment, and the unclear link between treatment and results, I would be curious to hear if "universal coverage" advocates would include this in their ideal public policy.  I would say they should admit that any notion of "universal coverage" is value-laden rather than purely descriptive.

New issue of Econ Journal Watch

by  Tyler Cowen in

Find it here.  The contents are described as follows:

Occupational Misfeasance of Labor Textbooks: Frank
Stephenson and Erin Wendt report that textbooks neglect occupational
licensing.

Do Economists
Believe American Democracy Is Working? A new survey by William
Davis and Robert Figgins indicates that Democratic, Republican, and
Libertarian economists are all of but little faith.

Adam Smith’s Invisible
Hand–Is That All There Is? Gavin Kennedy argues that it was
just a casual metaphor; Dan Klein dissents.

Guns and Crime, Round 2: Carlisle Moody and Thomas
Marvell rejoin, and Ian Ayres and John Donohue reply.

Intellectual Hazard:
97 quotations about our wanton ways.

“Administration plans to strengthen antitrust rules”

by  Tyler Cowen in

That's the headline and Greg Mankiw comments.  My point is a simple one: if this administration is so pro-science, should they not attempt to move major antitrust trials away from the jury system?

Some commentators are suggesting that the demonstrated political clout of the banking lobby suggests a growing need for antitrust enforcement.  Yet the pre-crash banking system was not a prime candidate for legal strictures on the grounds of competition policy.  Citigroup arguably is too big in absolute terms, and had too many contacts in high places, but antitrust policy, and the underlying theory and legal precedents, puts far more emphasis on relative market share.  In fact the unfolding of the crisis is an object lesson in how antitrust policy doesn't target the real competitive abuses much at all.  Furthermore the sin of Citigroup has been to lose money and become insolvent (or nearly so), not successful monopolization.  Those are close to being exact opposites.

Cultures of sleep, and which is the “most awake” nation?

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is plenty of talk in the blogosphere on who spends the most time eating, but other takes on the new OECD leisure time study focus on who spends the most time sleeping:

France is the industrialized country where people spend the longest
periods sleeping, according to a series of surveys on social habits
conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation
& Development.

The French sleep a daily average of 530 minutes, compared with 518
for Americans and 469 for Koreans — the OECD's "most awake" nation,
according to the study.

The most sociable OECD nation is considered to be Turkey.  Some of the New Zealand stereotypes are wrong (they don't play so much sport) and:

Young British girls drink the most for their age. Austrian teens smoke the most.

Look under "Risky Behavior" for information on teenage drunkenness but for teenage boys the U.S. has the lowest rate.  Here is a brief summary with a link to the main study.

Standard dishes for testing the quality of a restaurant

by  Tyler Cowen in

Joshua Johnson, a loyal MR (and TCEDG) reader, asks:

If you are going to a new ethnic
restaurant, what staple items do you order that for you, let you know
if the restaurant is worth coming back to and trying more of their
offerings? It would be nice if you could make some sort of list for
Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Turkish, etc.

Here goes:

Japanese: One bite of the tempura tells all.

Chinese: Ma Po Tofu, or for some kinds of Chinese places Hainan Chicken with Rice.

Thai: Almost any dish shows the true colors of a Thai restaurant immediately.

Turkish: Doner Kebab, taking special care to ponder the tanginess of the yogurt and how it interacts with the meat.

Vietnamese: Anything with lemon grass, which is hard to use well.

Ethiopian: Kitfo or barring that lamb tibs.

Peruvian: Lomo saltado, taking special care to check for the right amount of cilantro in the sauce and the correct sogginess of the french fries.

Bolivian: Silpancho, and check the liquidity and consistency of the egg on top.

Afghan: Kadu (pumpkin) and is it too sweet?

Korean: Seafood pancake and in general the quality of their kimchees.

Indian: Most dishes will do (see "Thai"), although avoid the Butter Chicken as a metric of quality.  Lamb with spinach is my do-or-die default judgment dish for an Indian restaurant, if only because you get to taste both the lamb (less likely to be tender than the chicken) and the spinach.

Restaurant, general: How's their chili crab?  If it's not outstanding, or not on the menu, press eject immediately and get yourself to a different country.

Can you think of others?