Club Troppo

From Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity, by Charles Courtemanche and Art Carden, Journal of Urban Economics 69 (2011) 165–181

Researchers have linked the rise in obesity to technological progress reducing the opportunity cost of food consumption and increasing the opportunity cost of physical activity. We examine this hypothesis in the context of Walmart Supercenters, whose advancements in retail logistics have translated to sub- stantial reductions in the prices of food and other consumer goods. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System matched with Walmart Supercenter entry dates and locations, we examine the effects of Supercenters on body mass index (BMI) and obesity. We account for the endogeneity of Walmart Supercenter locations with an instrumental variables approach that exploits the unique geo- graphical pattern of Supercenter expansion around Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. An additional Supercenter per 100,000 residents increases average BMI by 0.24 units and the obesity rate by 2.3% points. These results imply that the proliferation of Walmart Supercenters explains 10.5% of the rise in obesity since the late 1980s, but the resulting increase in medical expenditures offsets only a small portion of consumers’ savings from shopping at Supercenters.

You’ll be pleased to hear that the Mortgage Industry Association of Australia is on a campaign to ramp up the qualifications of mortgage brokers.  Just because all they do is sell loans and fill out forms – and otherwise manage the process by which you apply for a loan – is no reason we shouldn’t want them to have higher and higher levels of qualification. There’s already a process of professional development, according to which mortgage brokers must get something like 14 professional development points per year.  Peach’s brokers can get 8 points for learning how to write commercial loans, and since we don’t do commercial loans, it will be totally useless.  But at least it will be a quick way of getting within striking distance of the yearly requirement. A couple more days of workshops where you are told of some lenders’ products (it’s much better to get it live from an instructor, even if you can read) with a nice afternoon’s golf and Bob’s your uncle. Next stop university degrees for all mortgage brokers. And why not?

I never fully understood Google Health.  It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintaining all your records and doing so accurately boggles the mind.  I can’t see myself wanting to do it.

But its real power, surely, would come from the way in which it might operate as a unit patient record, and if it was going to operate as one of those, you needed to get buy in from health systems. Then you could really be cooking with gas with the system inputting data, you doing likewise as well as controlling the permissions that allow people to access your data at different levels of intimacy. With a lot of people included in the system the data would really be powerful when aggregated.

Given that, I thought Google’s strategy would be to build the best consumer app they could but then go hell for leather to get some health systems to interface with them.  Then once some health systems demonstrated the power of the approach, Google would be sitting on top of the incipient standard and – they’d be happy campers, and given that the health systems would not agree to do this without assurances of the portability of data, it’s hard to see how we all wouldn’t be happy campers. I don’t know how much they tried to engage health systems if at all.  They do talk about “adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts”.

“But” Google reports, “we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people,” and so they have just announced the closure of Google Health.

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Last night Jen prevailed on me to watch an episode of the doco series The First Australians.  Such programs tend towards the irritatingly sanctimonious and question-begging in my experience, and that may well be true of many of the episodes of this series too.  However the one Jen had me watch (see YouTube video above – also see part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) was really excellent.  It emphasised dramatically just how adaptable Aboriginal culture once was to to the dominant culture of the White invaders.  Simon Wonga and William Barak of the Wurundjeri clan near Melbourne were truly heroic figures about whom all Australians should know more.

Those same features of adaptability (and in particular willingness to move and work to take advantage of economic opportunity) were also evident in the initial responses of Northern Territory Aboriginal people to European encroachment.  Among other things they became the economic backbone of the pastoral industry.

Eventually the relentless racism of individual and systemic responses to Aboriginal people suppressed that inherent adapability and reduced most Aboriginal people to a state of sullen, despairing  passivity.   Even when racist responses began to be replaced by entirely benignly-motivated self-determination policies over the last three or four decades, the results were anything but positive.  In fact the conditions of Aboriginal people in Australia’s north have continued to deteriorate on just about all objective measures.  Attempting to understand why, and what might be done to change the situation for the better, is a question that has obsessed me for much of the 28 years I’ve lived in Darwin.  I can’t comprehend how that would not be the case for anyone of conscience surrounded by the evident misery, violence and despair of so many Aboriginal people.

I’ve observed in previous posts that the answers are unlikely to be simple or short term, and that they will certainly involve Aboriginal people themselves in taking responsibility and confronting and adapting aspects of their own culture which militate against successful adaptation.  What the story of Wonga and Barak brought home for me, though, was the extent to which Aboriginal society once did possess the necessary adaptive qualities.  Moreover, and despite the appalling health and educational outcomes for two successive generations of contemporary Aboriginal adults, there is no reason why those qualities of adaptability should not manifest themselves again, if we remove the perverse incentives in our education and welfare systems which create and perpetuate welfare dependency.  Although, as I say, solutions will be both multi-faceted and long-term, thinking about Wonga and Barak convinces me that Noel Pearson’s identification of welfare dependence as the key issue may well be correct.  On the other hand, ANU’s David Martin persuasively argues that Pearson overstates the extent to which Aboriginal people will succeed in achieving the necessary adaptation unaided, and underestimates the extent to which co-ordinated but respectful government interventions will continue to be necessary.

Retiring senior NT bureaucrat Bob Beadman outlines the welfare dependency syndrome succinctly, as The Australian‘s Nicolas Rothwell writes:

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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin. "Now the best they can hope for is ‘extending opportunity‘."

Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley, Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party stood for both full employment and social security.

Attitudes to poverty had changed in the wake of the Great Depression and both parties saw a need to take action. In 1941 the Menzies government established a cross party Parliamentary Joint Committee on Social Security. The committee’s first interim report declared:

For long it was held that poverty was the fault of the individual and was solely due to inefficiency, improvidence, dishonesty, drunkenness and the like. More modern opinion is that poverty is mostly not the fault of the individual but the environment in which he lives. Social services were developed largely because of the conviction that it is misfortune, not inherent evil, which brings people into want, and therefore it is the duty of the community to mitigate the worst effects of that want.

As always, the responsibility of the community was balanced by the responsibility of the individual: "to contribute to the community welfare to the utmost of his physical and mental capacity."

After Labor won office later in 1941 the committee continued its work. And in 1943 Minister for Post-war Reconstruction, Ben Chifley wrote:

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Joshua Gans can’t imagine how staff and students at The Spot would be blocking the toilets with paper towels. It turns out that the problem may be caused by toilet ‘nesters‘. As commenter Alister explains "students and/or staff are using paper towels as seat-liners."

And, as Eli points out, the one thing worse than nesters who clog the plumbing by flushing their nests down down the toilet, it’s nesters who don’t. Some bloggers take a keen interest in these issues. Lauralee explains how she combines nesting with ‘hovering’ while, Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants has a complaint about poor hovering technique.

On the subject of externalities … at Menzies House commenters are complaining that Clover Moore’s bike paths will mean more traffic congestion in Sydney. The same argument erupted earlier this year when the New Yorker’s John Cassidy started complaining about the proliferation of bike lanes in Manhattan. At Reuters, Felix Salmon argued that Cassidy had the externalities issue "embarrassingly wrong".

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"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said. Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he’d made a mistake about what was true and what wasn’t.

Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes: "When I read an interview, I should have the right to assume that what it has been reported that the subject contemporaneously said is what they actually said". And with Johann Hari interviews that’s not always the case. As Hari explains:

When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.

Hari now admits this is wrong: "Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee."

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Tonight’s 7:30 Report featured a story on gay marriage (yes, I know the “report” bit has been deleted, presumably to signal the new post-Red Kezza regime).

Strangely though, it didn’t even mention in passing the fact that there is significant doubt as to whether the Commonwealth Parliament even has constitutional power to legislate for gay marriages.

The Commonwealth only has power to enact laws on areas of activity listed in the Constitution itself.  One of those is “marriage” (Constitution s 51(xxi)).  But what does “marriage” actually mean?  There’s no doubt what the vast majority of the “Founders” understood when they used the expression way back before 1901.  They meant a union for life between a man and a woman.  They didn’t mean a union between two blokes or two women.  They would have agreed emphatically with Paul Keating’s trenchant observation that “two jokers and a cocker spaniel don’t make a family”.

But does that mean the Commonwealth doesn’t have power to legislate for gay marriage?  It depends how the High Court majority end up viewing their task of constitutional interpretation.  Is it simply to decide what the drafters intended (which would clearly preclude gay marriage)?  Or is the task more complex than that?  The predominant High Court view is that it is strictly bound by the central or core meaning of constitutional expressions, often referred to as the “connotation” or “concept”, but has some flexibility in relation to the peripheral or expanded meanings, sometimes referred to as the “denotation” or “conception”.  But what the hell does than mean?  Certainly the dominant High Court approach seeks to avoid Justice Michael Kirby’s Humpty Dumpty or “living tree” approach to constitutional meaning:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Justice Michael McHugh mused about the scope of the Commonwealth’s marriage power at some length in Re Wakim in 1999, and precisely in the context of gay marriage:

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I’m thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I’d promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by referring their clients to the site I’d match them. They proceeded to come up with some substantial and one very large donations. This took me to my maximum exposure – which was bounded by half the amount needed to fund all the kids shown which took Troppo’s contribution to over $11,000 with the final result being over $30,000 for the kids of Kibera. Pretty good huh? And thanks to all for participating.

And of course it’s not to late to give. Just download this pdf for the bank details and follow the instructions on the previous post and off you go.

I love finding links between equity and efficiency – there are lots around. Here’s another . . . . (it seems).

Early Non-marital Childbearing and the “Culture of Despair” by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine

This paper borrows from the tradition of other social sciences in considering the impact that “culture” (broadly defined as the economic and social environment in which the poor live) plays in determining early, non-marital childbearing. Along with others before us, we hypothesize that the despair and hopelessness that poor, young women may face increases the likelihood that they will give birth at an early age outside of marriage. We derive a formal economic model that incorporates the perception of economic success as a key factor driving one’s decision to have an early, non-marital birth. We propose that this perception is based in part on the level of income inequality that exists in a woman’s location of residence. Using individual-level data from the United States and a number of other developed countries, we empirically investigate the role played by inequality across states in determining the early childbearing outcomes of low socioeconomic status (SES) women. We find low SES women are more likely to give birth at a young age and outside of marriage when they live in higher inequality locations, all else

equal. Less frequent use of abortion is an important determinant of this behavior. We calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates both across U.S. states and across developed countries.