When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner Page B
Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
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the year-average price in 2010 for a barrel of oil was eighty dollars, or seventy-one dollars adjusted to 2005 dollars. Sadly, Matthew Simmons died in August of that year, at age sixty-seven. “The colleagues handling his affairs reviewed the numbers,” Tierney wrote, “and declared that Mr. Simmons’s $5,000 should be awarded to me.”
Does Obesity Kill?
(SJD)
There is so much noise these days about obesity that it can be hard to figure out what’s important about the issue and what’s not. To try to keep track, I sometimes divide the obesity issue into three questions.
1 . Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of them having to do with changes in diet and lifestyle (and, to some degree, the changing definition of obese ). An interesting paper by the economists Shin-Yi Chou, Michael Grossman, and Henry Saffer sorts through many factors (including per capita number of restaurants, portion sizes and prices, etc.) and concludes—not surprisingly—that the spike in obesity mostly has to do with the widespread availability of very cheap, very tasty food. They also find that a widespread decline in cigarette smoking has helped drive the obesity rate. This seems sensible, asnicotine is both a stimulant (which helps burn calories) and an appetite suppressant. But Jonathan Gruber and Michael Frakes have written a paper calling into doubt whether a decrease in smoking indeed causes weight gain.
2 . How can obese people stop being obese? This, of course, is the question that sustains a multi-billion-dollar diet and exercise industry. A quick look at Amazon.com’s top fifty books reveals just how badly people want to lose weight: there’s Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works; The Fat Smash Diet: The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need; and Ultrametabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss. All these books make me think of the argument that every story in human history, from the Bible up through the most recent Superman movie, is built from one of seven dramatic templates. (FWIW, Superman and the Bible are plainly cut from the same template: baby Superman and baby Moses are both rescued from certain death, sent off by their desperate parents in a rocket ship/wicker basket, and are then raised by an alien family but always remember the ways of their people and spend their lives fighting for justice.) This seven-template theory is even more true of diet books. They are pretty much all the same idea with some scrambled variables.
3 . How dangerous is obesity? This is, to me, the toughest question of all. The conventional wisdom holds that obesity is like a huge wave that is just starting to break across the U.S., creating an endless swamp of medical andeconomic problems. But there is a growing sentiment that the panic over obesity may be as big a problem as obesity itself. Among the proponents of this view is Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic . Oliver argues that the obesity debate is rife with lies and misinformation. The book purports to show, as the jacket copy says, “how a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats, and health researchers, with financial backing from the drug and weight-loss industry, have campaigned to misclassify more than sixty million Americans as ‘overweight,’ to inflate the health risks of being fat, and to promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease. In reviewing the scientific evidence, Oliver shows there is little proof either that obesity causes so many diseases and deaths or that losing weight makes people any healthier.”
Well, even if Oliver is right, and putting aside for a moment Questions 1 and 2, obesity seems to be the culprit in at least twenty recent deaths. Last October, a tour boat carrying forty-seven elderly passengers sank on Lake George in upstate
Does Obesity Kill?
(SJD)
There is so much noise these days about obesity that it can be hard to figure out what’s important about the issue and what’s not. To try to keep track, I sometimes divide the obesity issue into three questions.
1 . Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of them having to do with changes in diet and lifestyle (and, to some degree, the changing definition of obese ). An interesting paper by the economists Shin-Yi Chou, Michael Grossman, and Henry Saffer sorts through many factors (including per capita number of restaurants, portion sizes and prices, etc.) and concludes—not surprisingly—that the spike in obesity mostly has to do with the widespread availability of very cheap, very tasty food. They also find that a widespread decline in cigarette smoking has helped drive the obesity rate. This seems sensible, asnicotine is both a stimulant (which helps burn calories) and an appetite suppressant. But Jonathan Gruber and Michael Frakes have written a paper calling into doubt whether a decrease in smoking indeed causes weight gain.
2 . How can obese people stop being obese? This, of course, is the question that sustains a multi-billion-dollar diet and exercise industry. A quick look at Amazon.com’s top fifty books reveals just how badly people want to lose weight: there’s Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works; The Fat Smash Diet: The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need; and Ultrametabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss. All these books make me think of the argument that every story in human history, from the Bible up through the most recent Superman movie, is built from one of seven dramatic templates. (FWIW, Superman and the Bible are plainly cut from the same template: baby Superman and baby Moses are both rescued from certain death, sent off by their desperate parents in a rocket ship/wicker basket, and are then raised by an alien family but always remember the ways of their people and spend their lives fighting for justice.) This seven-template theory is even more true of diet books. They are pretty much all the same idea with some scrambled variables.
3 . How dangerous is obesity? This is, to me, the toughest question of all. The conventional wisdom holds that obesity is like a huge wave that is just starting to break across the U.S., creating an endless swamp of medical andeconomic problems. But there is a growing sentiment that the panic over obesity may be as big a problem as obesity itself. Among the proponents of this view is Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic . Oliver argues that the obesity debate is rife with lies and misinformation. The book purports to show, as the jacket copy says, “how a handful of doctors, government bureaucrats, and health researchers, with financial backing from the drug and weight-loss industry, have campaigned to misclassify more than sixty million Americans as ‘overweight,’ to inflate the health risks of being fat, and to promote the idea that obesity is a killer disease. In reviewing the scientific evidence, Oliver shows there is little proof either that obesity causes so many diseases and deaths or that losing weight makes people any healthier.”
Well, even if Oliver is right, and putting aside for a moment Questions 1 and 2, obesity seems to be the culprit in at least twenty recent deaths. Last October, a tour boat carrying forty-seven elderly passengers sank on Lake George in upstate
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