Health-Obsessed, Depthless, and Moralistic Is No Way To Go Through Life
I enjoy Don Boudreaux's many clear, incisive, and biting letters-to-editors that routinely smack down economic illiteracy and/or latent authoritarian arrogance running wild on the pages of our media. The latest comes against food nanny Elizabeth Newton, who seems to think we do not get enough information about good nutrition, and that if we did we'd choose healthy food to the exclusion of unhealthy food. Don shoots this down but, frankly, he must've been pressed by other priorities as this rebuttal falls short of his normally devastating critiques.
Newton is wrong on both counts. First, our society receives inordinate information on nutrition. We receive nutrition information (indoctrination?) from a very young age via a barrage of posted guidelines and mandated lessons that pervade the school system. As we get older, we have no shortage of information available to us about nutrition as evidenced by a simple search for books on nutrition at Amazon yielding 55,222 results. (If anything, we have too much information because much of it is contradictory, indicating that there exists some level of scientific disagreement in the field, which indicates that Newton is even more arrogant than Don illuminates because she presumes to know which is the "correct" nutritional information that we should be internalizing.) Newton's second, and greater, error is to presume that we would all respond to "perfect education" in the same way. Just because Newton might respond by demanding healthier fare after absorbing nutritional truth, I might not respond that way after absorbing the same instruction. I might understand the lesson but I might not heed it. In economic jargon, my "utility function" might differ. I might not attach as many "utils" to healthy food relative to unhealthy food despite having perfect knowledge of nutrition. I might know that I ought to choose a salad with a small portion of grilled fish for lunch, but I choose a double cheeseburger anyway (and that surely unnecessary extra glass of wine after a nice meal that "perfect education" would compel me to forgo, well...). This could be for any number of reasons from a confidence in my own robust metabolism to a conscientiously sybaritic outlook on life. Who, as Don rightly points out, is Elizabeth Newton to second guess my response to the same nutritional information that she has? Nobody of true standing of course, but rather just an arrogant elitist who would dictate behavior to her fellow citizens. That she attempts to cloak her petty authoritarian impulses in economics - highly flawed and amateurish economics - does not obscure those impulses.
In reference to Ms. Newton I am reminded of Dean Wormer's admonition to John Blutarsky ("fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son") and am compelled to alter it: "health-obsessed, depthless, and moralistic is no way to go through life, lady."
Newton is wrong on both counts. First, our society receives inordinate information on nutrition. We receive nutrition information (indoctrination?) from a very young age via a barrage of posted guidelines and mandated lessons that pervade the school system. As we get older, we have no shortage of information available to us about nutrition as evidenced by a simple search for books on nutrition at Amazon yielding 55,222 results. (If anything, we have too much information because much of it is contradictory, indicating that there exists some level of scientific disagreement in the field, which indicates that Newton is even more arrogant than Don illuminates because she presumes to know which is the "correct" nutritional information that we should be internalizing.) Newton's second, and greater, error is to presume that we would all respond to "perfect education" in the same way. Just because Newton might respond by demanding healthier fare after absorbing nutritional truth, I might not respond that way after absorbing the same instruction. I might understand the lesson but I might not heed it. In economic jargon, my "utility function" might differ. I might not attach as many "utils" to healthy food relative to unhealthy food despite having perfect knowledge of nutrition. I might know that I ought to choose a salad with a small portion of grilled fish for lunch, but I choose a double cheeseburger anyway (and that surely unnecessary extra glass of wine after a nice meal that "perfect education" would compel me to forgo, well...). This could be for any number of reasons from a confidence in my own robust metabolism to a conscientiously sybaritic outlook on life. Who, as Don rightly points out, is Elizabeth Newton to second guess my response to the same nutritional information that she has? Nobody of true standing of course, but rather just an arrogant elitist who would dictate behavior to her fellow citizens. That she attempts to cloak her petty authoritarian impulses in economics - highly flawed and amateurish economics - does not obscure those impulses.
In reference to Ms. Newton I am reminded of Dean Wormer's admonition to John Blutarsky ("fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son") and am compelled to alter it: "health-obsessed, depthless, and moralistic is no way to go through life, lady."
posted by Donny Baseball at 11:19 AM
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