Behavior Economics Can’t Solve Obesity Problem
The fashionable response, based on the belief that better information can lead to better behavior, is to influence consumers through things like calorie labeling — for instance, there’s a mandate in the health care reform act requiring restaurant chains to post the number of calories in their dishes.
Calorie labeling is a good thing; dieters should know more about the foods they are eating. But studies of New York City’s attempt at calorie posting have found that it has had little impact on dieters’ choices.
Obesity isn’t a result of a lack of information; instead, economists argue that rising levels of obesity can be traced to falling food prices, especially for unhealthy processed foods.
To combat the epidemic effectively, then, we need to change the relative price of healthful and unhealthful food — for example, we need to stop subsidizing corn, thereby raising the price of high fructose corn syrup used in sodas, and we also need to consider taxes on unhealthful foods. But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.
Do we really need academic studies to tell us that behavioral economics can’t solve the obesity problem? I already knew that.
So, if I understand correctly, the low obesity rates in North Korea aren’t because of their aggressive calorie labeling laws and superior public health system?
There was a Stanford study that demonstrated that calorie labeling at Starbucks had a significant impact on customer selections. The Times article discussed a study that focused on low income areas. This is simply another example of the well established nutrition education issues in poor populations. Education played a big part in reducing cigarette smoking, why should nutrition be different?
I think the difference is in whether you intend to modify a specific behavior, or to produce a general result that is only partially influenced by that behavior.
A better approach would be to solve the problem of why diets usually fail.