Matt Yglesias

Beware the Couch

Yikes:

The latest findings, published this week in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicate that the amount of leisure time spent sitting in front of a screen can have such an overwhelming, seemingly irreparable impact on one’s health that physical activity doesn’t produce much benefit.

The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. It found that those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week — exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time.

This is the latest in a spate of recent studies that suggest sitting and watching TV is associated with bad health outcomes irrespective of whether or not it crowds out exercise. I started standing for most of the day at work last year, and (for independent reasons)my resolution for the New Year is to do more book-reading and less TV-watching and web-surfing. But I wonder if sitting and reading on an iPad is actually any better than sitting and watching TV.

New Year’s Weight Loss Advice

It’s come to my attention that many people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. I didn’t do that in 2010, but I did weigh almost 250 pounds on March 1, 2010 and this morning I weighed 180 pounds which goes to show that it’s possible to lose weight. So I thought this might be an opportune day to share some advice.

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The Annals of History

From the 1988 Democratic Party Platform:

WE BELIEVE that illegal drugs pose a direct threat to the security of our nation from coast to coast, invading our neighborhoods, classrooms, homes and communities large and small; that every arm and agency of government at every federal, state and local level—including every useful diplomatic, military, educational, medical and law enforcement effort necessary—should at long last be mobilized and coordinated with private efforts under the direction of a National Drug “Czar” to halt both the international supply and the domestic demand for illegal drugs now ravaging our country; and that the legalization of illicit drugs would represent a tragic surrender in a war we intend to win. We believe that this effort should include comprehensive programs to educate our children at the earliest ages on the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse, readily available treatment and counseling for those who seek to address their dependency, the strengthening of vital interdiction agencies, such as the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs, a summit of Western hemispheric nations to coordinate efforts to cut off drugs at the source, and foreign development assistance to reform drug-based economies by promoting crop substitution.

Democrats may not have won the election, but at least they got their “drug czar” job created and it’s policy wins that really count.

Menu Labeling

Had some tacos for lunch in LA and what a pleasure it is to dine someplace you’ve never been in a jurisdiction with a menu labeling law (lesson learned—lengua tacos are low calorie compared to other meats). Readers will know that I’m a bigger booster of free markets than most American progressives, but the utter failure of the unregulated market for lunch to meet the “perfect information” standard of an idealized market seems very obvious. And there’s no real political economy problem with the rule.

Something interesting to think about here is the different kind of equilibria you can reach. One knows from eating lunch in Washington DC that the market doesn’t provide on-menu labeling of calories. But suppose we ran an experiment where DC implemented a menu labeling requirement for ten years, and then the requirement sunset. My overwhelming suspicion is that the vast majority of places would keep doing the labeling once the rule expired. When nobody does menu labeling, nobody seems to want to do it voluntarily. But if there was a pro-labeling norm in place, being the first restaurant to drop it would seem weird, like they had something to hide.

Tax Dollars Going to Subsidize Cheesier Dominoes Pizzas

I wrote about this once before, but the scandal of America’s taxpayer-subsidized initiative aimed at getting people to eat more cheese has made it to the New York Times:

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.

But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.

And Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

Except for the fact that their pizza is bad, I don’t particularly think it’s worth giving Dominoes an especially hard time about their nutritional practices. Their nutritional calculator page is very handy (though the assumption that you’re eating just one slice is a bit unrealistic) and many eateries leave you totally in the dark about this stuff. But there’s just no need whatsoever for a government program of this sort.

And that, to me, is what’s frustrating about a lot of the recent conversation around “government spending” and “are public employees paid too much.” When the government is doing something useless or harmful that it shouldn’t be doing at all then there’s no salary or pension level at which public employees or government contractors are delivering value to the American people. If you’ve got a worthwhile public function, it’s foolish to undermine it by being stingy about spending. But there’s a fair amount of stuff like this in the budget that we could entirely do without. I’d like to think that the new Republican Congress’ budget cutting zeal will give us a chance to re-examine some of these programs, but realistically I think we’ll find that implicit and explicit subsidies to US producers of this sort continue to find favor.

EZ-Pass Saves Lives

I firmly believe that future people are going to regard the level of traffic congestion tolerated by the people of the early 21st century as slightly bizarre. I only rarely drive, so it’s not a big issue in my life, but perhaps that makes the persistence of this solvable problem more salient to me. At any rate, further evidence that it’s a hugely underrated issue is provided by Janet Currie’s paper “Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from EZ Pass”

This paper provides evidence of the significant negative health externalities of traffic congestion. We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, or E-ZPass, which greatly reduced traffic congestion and emissions from motor vehicles in the vicinity of highway toll plazas. Specifically, we compare infants born to mothers living near toll plazas to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways but away from toll plazas with the idea that mothers living away from toll plazas did not experience significant reductions in local traffic congestion. We also examine differences in the health of infants born to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were “exposed” to E-ZPass. We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 6.7-9.1% and 8.5-11.3% respectively, with larger effects for African-Americans, smokers, and those very close to toll plazas. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of mothers or in housing prices in the vicinity of toll plazas that could explain these changes, and the results are robust to many changes in specification. The results suggest that traffic congestion is a significant contributor to poor health in affected infants. Estimates of the costs of traffic congestion should account for these important health externalities.

The small issue here is that public policy should more strongly encourage people to get EZ Pass. Indeed, I would say that the use of some form of electronic toll-paying system should probably be made mandatory and other options phased out. That’s in part because universal use of EZ-Pass would make it much easier to tackle the large issue here which is that taking up space on a crowded road at a crowded time imposes large costs on other people. People should be charged for the right to do so, which could massively reduce traffic congestion with large economic and public health benefits.

Dairy Checkoff

We have a program in this country called the “dairy checkoff” which levies a kind of tax on dairy producers and uses the funds to promote dairy products. But what specifically does that entail? Marion Nestle delves into the latest USDA report and finds, among other things:

— Focusing on dairy health and wellness by helping to combat childhood obesity by encouraging schools to implement physical activity and good nutrition, including dairy.

— Partnering with Domino’s Pizza to develop pizzas using up 40% more cheese than usual. This worked so well that other pizza chains are doing the same thing.

— Partnering with McDonald’s to launch McCafe specialty coffees that use up to 80 percent milk, and three new burgers with two slices of cheese per sandwich. The result? An additional 6 million pounds of cheese sold.

— Creating reduced lactose milks in order to bring lapsed consumers back to milk. The potential result? An additional 2.5 to 5 billion pounds of milk each year.

— Partnering with General Mills’ Yoplait to develop yogurt chip technology that requires 8 ounces of milk.

— Maintaining momentum for single-serve milk by offering white and flavored milk in single-serve, plastic, resealable bottles.

40 percent more cheese! This was sent to me by a reader who suggests, rightly, that it’s probably relevant to the discussion of why there are no ads for brocoli.

The Tragedy of Government Health Advice

Awesome looking Scottish highlands cow (cc photo by foxypar4)

Jane Black reminds us that government efforts to dispense nutritional advice are often compromised by interest group politics:

Policymakers have long seen the wisdom of this strategy. And when they have strayed from it, the political heat has been intense. In 1977, a Senate select committee led by Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) was forced to beat a hasty retreat after it initially recommended that Americans could cut their intake of saturated fat by reducing their consumption of red meat and dairy products. Its revised guidelines suggested choosing “meat, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

McGovern, whose constituents included many cattle ranchers, lost his seat in 1980. Since then, in case after case, the guidelines have refrained from suggesting that Americans eat less of just about anything.

I don’t think we should be 100 percent fatalistic about this, there are countries whose political systems are able to function better than this. But the US is a major agricultural producer, so it’s semi-inevitable—in a bad way—that agriculture-related endeavors are going to disproportionately reflect producer interests. Which is really too bad because we obviously spend a fortune in this country on health care expenditures whose purpose, presumably, is to improve health outcomes. And yet we all know perfectly well that improved nutrion is a more cost-effective way of achieving this goal.

Exercise and Weight Loss

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes some about losing weight:

I am sure this approach works for some people, but not for me. I’ve never been able to stick to a diet. I love bread, rice, potatoes and, to a lesser extent, sweets. I also fail at doing exercise that I don’t actually enjoy. A little pain is good. But it can’t be the kind of pain that makes me say “I’m glad that’s over.” In short, I couldn’t macho my way out of being fat. I couldn’t out-muscle obesity. [...]

It’s interesting seeing people on the street these days. The common reaction is “What did you do?” And the only honest response is “Shove less shit down my throat.” Weight loss, for me, is depressing in its essential passivity. When we talk about an obesitity epidemic, I strongly suspect that what we’re talking about is the cost of societal lifestyle choices presently made manifest. If we want to have food that is pleasurable, but we don’t want to expend time now–either in the form of money, or the form of actual time preparing and cleaning–expect that we will have to expend time later in the form of health problems.

I think that’s largely true. The biggest gym-related thing I’ve done to lose weight is that I did some sessions with a personal trainer who warned me up front that you can’t really lose weight in the gym—you need to eat less food. He helped me build some muscle and feel better about myself, but most of all the admission contrary to interest got me to focus more on what matters.

It is worth pointing out, though, that for all the apparent gluttony of the contemporary American lifestyle, Americans actually don’t consume a particularly large number of calories in historical terms. Estimates I’ve seen of medieval calorie consumption often go up to 4,000 a day or more. But it’s not that medieval peasants were fat, or that they were really rigorous about doing 40 minutes on the elliptical machine every day. Instead, they were engaged in constant physical activity for their daily livelihood. Check out the staggering number of calories you could burn by hand-chopping wood all day long.

I’m not really sure there’s any usable personal or policy advice in that insight, except to say that perhaps at some point in the future we’ll all be working at treadmill desks and possibly much healthier for it. The bulk of human history was spent with our bodies operating at a generally higher metabolic level than happens nowadays.

In Praise of Frozen Vegetables

Kim Severson writes about America’s tendency to not eat our vegetables and ends up discussing issues of convenience:

The nation has long had a complicated relationship with vegetables. People know that vegetables can improve health. But they’re a lot of work. In refrigerators all over the country, produce often dies a slow, limp death because life becomes too busy. “The moment you have something fresh you have to schedule your life around using it,” [Harry] Balzer said. [...]

Melissa MacBride, a busy Manhattan resident who works for a pharmaceuticals company, would eat more vegetables if they weren’t, in her words, “a pain.”

“An apple you can just grab,” she said. “But what am I going to do, put a piece of kale in my purse?”

I sometimes feel like California-based foodies have produced some kind of mass hallucination around the subject of fresh vegetables. But if you poke around your local supermarket, you’ll find that they have tons and tons of big freezer full of little conveniently portioned bags of vegetables. Just like pizza or egg rolls. But healthier. Is it 100 percent as tasty as farm-fresh locally grown in-season produce? No. But it’s convenient as heck and very very inexpensive. Part of my recent weight loss strategy (down a bit over 60 pounds since the beginning of March) has been to try to adopt microwaving frozen vegetables as a go-to quick meal for one option.

Now of course my suspicion here is that this is just an excuse. My previous go-to quick dinner for one option involved Taylor Gourmet Deli which, being located on the ground floor of my building, is very convenient. But it’s always been less convenient that microwaving some brussel sprouts. The actual issue is that an Italian sub is more delicious. But insofar as people are really getting tripped up by convenience issues, stockpiling frozen vegetables is just about the most convenient thing you can possibly do.

Obesity in International Context

I’m seeing a lot of headlines based off a new OECD report showing America is the fattest country on earth (which will be no surprise to anyone who’s traveled anywhere) but I think the real story here is that the trends are universally upwards:

What you’d like to see in international data is some example of a prosperous country where obesity isn’t just at a lower level than in the United States, but where there’s no rate of increase. But we don’t have one. And the mechanism isn’t necessarily all that mysterious. Historically speaking, the smart way to live is that when food is plentiful you eat more calories than you burn and that way when food is scarce you don’t die. But as objective food scarcity vanishes, this approach leads to some not-so-hot public health outcomes. It’s clear that some local food cultures are healthier than others, but that’s not the same as saying that they’re immune to the underlying forces.

Licensed to Booze

The Saloon, Washington DC (cc photo by Jenn Larsen)

Rend Smith updates on some of the latest liquor license follies:

Three faintly lit watering holes, Jo Jo Restaurant & Bar and The Saloon on U Street, and Bobby Lew’s Saloon in Adams Morgan, are getting scrutinized by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board today because their customers don’t order enough grub. The businesses failed to meet food sales of either $2,000 per occupant or 45% of gross annual receipts. That’s not okay if you happen to have a restaurant-class license.

Now obviously if you have a restaurant-class license you need to comply with the rules governing restaurant-class licenses. It wouldn’t make sense for the ABCB to simply ignore violations. Still, as Bunch observes the reason these scenarios keep arising is because the city makes it so difficult to obtain liquor licenses in general and the less strict tavern licenses in particular to obtain. The proponents of strict licensing have their reasons, but something that always frustrates me about community-level debates on these topics is the failure of the proponents to acknowledge that any kind of costs come with this scheme.

But the costs are quite real. There are many, many, many vacant storefronts in Washington, DC. There are also a lot of unemployed low-skill workers. Employed people and functioning businesses pay taxes, whereas unemployed people and vacant storefronts do not. And I never hear anyone say “what this city needs is more vacant storefronts, more unemployment in working-class neighborhoods, and higher tax rates on the rest of us.” But it’s apparent that there are many spaces in the city for which the economically optimal use involves having a liquor license. Hence the more regulatory barriers to getting one, the more vacant storefronts and the fewer jobs you will have.

Now quality of life and neighborhood character matter to people. And that’s fine. But people who want certain rules in place should understand the tradeoff they’re making. One reason is that if people understood the consequences of their wishes better we might be able to find less damaging ways of achieving what they want. Any effort to favor restaurants over bars and non-restaurants over restaurants is going to be economically inefficient. But implementing such an effort via regulatory mandates is, perversely, a gigantic implicit subsidy to incumbent holders of liquor licenses. If you instead eased up on the licensing and just taxed alcohol more, you’d have a similar deterrent effect on booze-selling as a business model but taxpayers rather than license-holders would capture the surplus. That, again, might allow for lower taxes on other commodities and would actually achieve the goal of bolstering non-bar economic development.

But as long as people insisting on painting their efforts at urban central planning as cost-free, and any effort to draw attention to the costs as part of a stealth rightwing agenda, it’s very difficult to make the kind of win-win policy changes that make the world a better place.

What Not to Eat

The best part of Rachel Saslow’s article on health-destroying chain restaurant meals:

Uno Chicago Grill’s Chicago Classic deep-dish individual pizza, which is topped with sausage, tomato sauce and cheese.

The numbers: 2,310 calories, 165 grams of fat, 54 grams saturated fat, 4,920 milligrams of sodium.

Equivalent of eating: The fat in 45 strips of bacon.

Expert evaluation: Although Uno counts this smaller pizza as having three servings in its online nutritional information, Scritchfield says that when someone orders an “individual” pizza, they are likely to see it as a meal for one.

Yikes. The point I would make about this, however, is that though it’s true that many American chain restaurants offer many extremely unhealthy dining options, the whole reason we know this is the case is precisely because they are chains. Many such places already disclose nutritional information (albeit at times in misleading ways) and even if they don’t it’s the very scale and standardization of the chains that makes things like Center for Science in the Public Interest’s “XTreme eating” survey a tractable endeavor. As Saslow observes, an under-discussed provision of the Affordable Care Act will mandate calorie count labeling on the menus for all restaurants with more than 20 branches.

One of the big challenges of eating healthier is that it’s genuinely hard to know what’s what. Obviously, McDonald’s isn’t the healthiest option on earth but if you’re on the road and stop there for dinner I don’t think there’s anything intuitively obvious about the fact that a Quarter Pounder With Cheese has fewer calories than a Premium Grilled Chicken Club. But you can look it up (PDF) and in the near future thanks to an under-discussed provision of the Affordable Care Act the information will have to be disclosed right there in the restaurant. I have no idea whether this will actually work to promote healthier eating—I believe the early results from menu labeling requirements aren’t all that promising—but it’s difficult for me to think of a more plausible mechanism. If people decide they want to eat healthier, then reasonably large-scale operations whose food’s nutritional content can be analyzed and verified would be the places where the healthier eating happens.

The Inevitability of Big

I’m glad that Tom Philpott took the bait on my praise of chain restaurants and went in with a bit of snark:

A few weeks ago, Think Progress star blogger Matt Yglesias penned a paean to mediocre strip-mall chain restaurants, calling for “more Olive Gardens” and deeming the the faux-fancy steakhouse chain Capital Grille “excellent.” So impressed is Yglesias by the food system that he would apparently like to model the education system after it!

Well that’s not really what I said about education, and the Capital Grille is neither mediocre nor located primarily in strip malls. I’ve been to locations in downtown DC and downtown Pittsburg, and their Porcini-Rubbed Delmonico is both delicious and—at $45 a pop—seems genuinely fancy to me.

But the real point I want to make is that if we ever see the kind of changes in agriculture and food consumption that Philpott and I would like to see—something healthier and more ecologically sustainable—it’s likely to happen largely through the mechanism of chains and branding. As long as technology keeps advancing, human time and human labor will keep getting more valuable. That means that people will increasingly want someone else to do their food preparation for them, and also that innovations that allow food prep to be done with less labor power will be more and more rewarded. That means chains and franchises that can rationalize the production process and who have sufficient scale to reap the rewards of investing in organizational innovation.

From a public health standpoint, there’s a lot to like about chains. Since they have scale and standardization, you can get them to disclose nutritional information and many already do so to at least some extent voluntarily. What’s more, there’s nothing impossible in principle with the idea of a chain serving organic food—I get salads from these guys all the time. And with large chains and brands it’s actually feasible to monitor the claims people are making about their supply chain. It’s pretty well known at this point that a lot of “big organic” stuff is in many ways fraudulent, but the whole reason we know that is that we’re talking about large-scale producers whose operations people took the time to look into.

None of this is to say that people should be dupes for the status quo. It’s mere to observe that there’s a certain inevitability about important things happening at large scales. What’s more, insofar as good things happen at small scales, the best thing that could happen next is for them to scale up and get bigger. New ideas tend to start small, and when the status quo is bad that means you’ll often find good ideas at small shops. But to change the world, you need some combination of changing big institutions and turning good institutions into small ones.

Old Enough to Serve, Old Enough to Drink

(cc photo by viZZZual.com)

Here’s a bipartisan initiative I could get behind:

Younger troops have grumbled for years that America trusts them to carry a weapon and fight for freedom overseas, but until age 21 they can’t be trusted with a bottle of beer. Now a Georgia lawmaker is looking at changing that.

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., introduced legislation recently which would allow servicemembers as young as 18 to enjoy alcoholic drinks at restaurants or clubs on any stateside military base. The bill would not allow anyone under 21 to buy carry-out cases of beer from base stores or allow younger troops to keep beer in their barracks.

Of course what would be even better would be to more systematically revisit the policy that led to this absurd outcome. The idea of raising the drinking age to 21 was that it would prevent drunk driving. But there are a whole variety of contexts in which this isn’t a relevant consideration. Where I grew up, for example, kids never owned cars. It would make sense to allow a lot more local variation in this policy, so that decisions can be made that relate to actual circumstances. And insofar as the drunk driving is the target here, the policy should be more tailored to driving.

Like maybe a 19 year-old should be allowed to choose between a license to drive and a license to drink? A fair number of 18, 19, and 20 year-olds are in an institutional setting—be it a military base or a college campus—where it’s more plausible to imagine separating them from the need to drive around at night than from their desire to have a beer.

Body Mass Index

The “body mass index” gauge of obesity is easy to calculate, but that very same simplicity means it has some obvious limitations as a metric. Still, it seems to me that it’s a very useful one and much of the criticism misguided for reasons that Monica Lastnameunknowntome explains well at Feministe:

Here’s my response: of course it is. It’s an index. This is what indexes do, they aggregate individual pieces of information to tell you something about a whole. The BMI was never intended to be used as a measure of personal health, but was instead meant to tell us something about entire populations. It’s usefulness on that score remains intact: you can broadly say that, if America’s BMI average is increasing, Americans are getting fatter. Unless it can be explained by something else, like a population-wide protein-shake/weight-training-routine frenzy, which is unlikely to happen.

Similarly, these international comparisons of BMI are telling us something meaningful:

It’s simply not the case that very-high BMI is so much more common in the United States than in France because Americans are all incredibly muscular compared to French people. Admittedly, it would be nice to have more sophisticated information on this subject, but public health is an important subject and it’s necessary to draw some conclusions based on available data.

Alcohol Regulation

Conor Friedersdorf reminds me of one of the odder regulations out there, New York State’s rules about who can sell liquor:

In New York, supermarkets aren’t allowed to sell liquor. What possible reason could there be for this? Were members of the New York Legislature to tour California, they’d see that supermarkets are the most responsible sellers of alcohol, and that high school kids with fake IDs always seek out small liquor stores.

As I recall the rule is actually even odder than that. You can’t sell liquor in a supermarket or deli in New York, but you also can’t sell beer in a liquor store! Rules that make it inconvenient to buy hard liquor are arguably a form of public health paternalism, but the no beer in a liquor store rule doesn’t seem to pass muster on any kind of grounds other than that the current sellers of beer like it that way.

Driving through New Hampshire last week also reminded me that I find some states’ habit of insisting on a state-owned liquor store monopoly to be pretty weird. Whatever this is supposed to accomplish seems like it could be accomplished much more easily by simply taxing alcoholic beverages and leaving the actual operation of the businesses in the hands of the private sector. Indeed, my general view is that booze in the United States should be more taxed but less regulated. Rules that aim to promote public health by restricting the availability of alcohol create a large regulatory surplus that accrues to license-holders. If you try to do the same thing through booze taxes, then the surplus accrues to the state and can be used to finance lower sales taxes or better public services.

Zero Tolerance Done Right

The commonplace scenario in the United States when people decide to “get tough” and implement a policy of “zero tolerance” for infractions of the rules is to in practice tolerate the majority of infractions by not catching perpetrators and then hit a minority of violators with extremely harsh sanctions. For years now, Mark Kleiman has been pushing the reverse approach—make sanctions relative mild, but make them swift and nearly certain. He teams up with Kirk Humphreys to describe a version of this that’s led to a sharp reduction in South Dakota’s drunk driving fatalities:

The efforts against drunk driving include checkpoints, steep fines, and Breathalyzer-locked cars. But alcohol-related road deaths have held steady for a decade—except in South Dakota. Under the state’s four-year-old 24/7 Sobriety Project, people convicted of repeated drunk-driving offenses are forced to go dry for at least three months, during which time they submit to police-observed Breathalyzer tests twice a day—no excuses. If they fail, refuse, or no-show, sanctions begin with an immediate night in jail. Now the results are in: drunk–driving fatalities fell from twice the national average, 70, in 2006 to just 34 in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. And program veterans are half as likely as other DUI offenders to be arrested again.

If you wrestle with any kind of addiction issues in your life, I think the logic of this kind of swift, certain sanctioning should be clear enough. Personally I’m glad that my problems are with cigarettes and don’t threaten anyone’s life other than my own, since Lord knows I’ve slipped up a time or twenty in the past 3 and a half years. But drunk drivers, without really meaning anyone any harm, are a really serious hazard to the general public and it’s very important to do what we can to help them avoid hurting themselves and others.

Humphreys follows up with the observation that part of what’s made South Dakota’s implementation successful is maintaining a respectful attitude to the subjects so they remain inclined to cooperate and non-resentful. That’s as it should be. Sanctions are a crucial element of crime control, but most people involved in dangerous activities are also people wrestling with serious problems that they’d almost certainly prefer not to have.

Extended Learning Time

Bloggingheadsing with Katherine Mangu-Ward, Dana Goldstein posits that longer school days could help reduce childhood obesity by providing kids with an extra meal a day in a controlled environment where, in principle, you could be ensuring that people get nutritionally sound food:

On her blog, she clarifies:

When I say “longer school day,” I am not at all envisioning kids sitting in rows looking at a blackboard for three or four extra hours. Rather, I’m imagining something like what the best public, private, and charter schools are already doing: a mix of additional instructional time and mealtimes with small group break-out activities like reading clubs, sports, board games, supervised computer time, library browsing time, and art and music lessons.

I think there’s a lot to be said for spending resources on increasing schooling time for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But this nutrion/public health mechanism is a bit bank shotty. There’s just substantial research indicating that longer school days help poor kids overcome demographically-predicted achievement gaps. For example, in her well-known study of high-performing New York charter schools, Caroline Hoxby “found that the strongest predictor of high student performance among charter schools was a longer school year. She also discovered that a longer school year is highly correlated with a longer school day within the schools she studied.” CAP did a big thing at the start of the year about how to make expanded learning time programs work.

The Fear

(cc photo by richardmasoner)

Warren Strobel on the latest terrorism stats:

There were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide. (The US government definition of terrorism excludes attacks on U.S. military personnel). While we don’t have the figures at hand, undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.

The State Department’s figures on “Death of U.S. Citizens Abroad by Non-Natural Causes” are available online. They represent an undercount since they only include deaths that were reported to State. Playing around with the numbers a bit I see that 26 Americans died in vehicle accidents in Mexico between 1 August 2009 and 1 January 2010, so it’s safe to say you’re dramatically likelier to die abroad in a traffic accident than a terrorist attack. In general, I’m a believer that we should be more alarmed by motor vehicle fatalities than we are so the message isn’t simply “calm down about terrorism.” The point, however, is that it’s important for public priorities to be brought into closer line with objective risks.