Nutrition Part II: Are the American Poor Starving or Obese?

While discussing his latest book in an EconTalk podcast, Tyler Cowen brought up something I’ve generally believed: the problem with food for the American poor is not that they are starving, it’s that they’re fat. We can see this from the gross proliferation of fast food amongst the American poor. After all, they are eating this unhealthy food because it’s what they can afford. Obviously there are a non-insignificant number of people in America that are malnourished or literally starve, but amazingly obesity seems to be wrecking a historic amount of havoc on the American poor.

With my classroom currently focusing on daily nutrition, the students have been keeping food logs. Although the data keeping is definitely not scientific nor close to being reliable, I have noticed two trends that describe at least 95% of the diets: 1) the caloric intake is not NEARLY close to what they should be having and 2) the food they are having is as nutritious as eating a pair of socks.

For the first issue, it’d be easy to explain it through a lack of financial means to eat. But this explanation isn’t convincing. Most the students at my school qualify for Federally subsidized free breakfasts and lunches due to low income. They are all in the cafeteria when breakfast is served. And although the length of their lunch period is sub-optimal, they still are there and have time to eat more than they actually do. Often times, the students say they’re not hungry. Or maybe they didn’t like the food the cafeteria was serving. But with the help of choosemyplate.gov and its diet tracking technology, I observed that a lot of these kids are getting under 1,000 calories in a given day. That puts them on a level doctors classify as starving. Remember, the food is available to them. It’s being served in the cafeteria they’re sitting in. This lack of caloric intake probably explains a lot of their common exhaustion and grumpiness.

When they do eat, it’s crap. More common than a child bring a pencil to class is a child munching on multiple bags of Takis. For those not familiar with them, take my word that they are absurdly unhealthy and synthetic-tasting. They also like to drink one sometimes two energy drinks in a day. Again, no nutritional value.

Obviously, my experience with an unscientific food log of sixth graders is not a conclusively large sample space. But I have a feeling this is a pattern amongst low-income children: an unfortunate combination of low caloric intake and snack food grossly lacking nutrition.

So what are the possible policy solutions? Even neglecting the public choice issues and feasibility of successful implementation, I really don’t know what to do. Force kids to eat the breakfast and lunch they are fully provided and paid for? Educate them about nutritious options (an easy solution that is obviously easier said than done)? (Relatively) healthy food is being offered to them two meals a day and they are turning it down. We can’t make them eat that food. They’re eating crap, if anything, once they get home for dinner, and that definitely doesn’t seem like an easy place for policy to affect. I really can’t think of anything. I’d like to see when their eating habits change. Is this an adolescent thing where they’re worried about body image? Once they start actually working do they eat more calories out of necessity?

The poor in America are obese (just like a lot of middle-income and wealthy people). I don’t even feel the need to find a link to prove that. But I’ve been struck this last week by the real issue for these kids’ diets being eating enough food. Watching Super Size Me almost seems less relevant than watching some sort of documentary about the dangers of malnourishment.

 

Nutrition Part I: Making Children Eat Not too Much (but keep eating, you’re still beautiful! … but still be nutritious because everyone’s fat)

Now that the life-or-death STAAR test is done in the class I work in, less academic matters have taken over the classroom. Right now, we are focusing on nutrition. In addition to keeping a food log, we are watching Super Size Me. While the merits of the movie are a matter for a later debate, watching the movie renewed an apparent contradiction I’ve always noticed with increasing awareness about healthy eating: we are simultaneously telling people (children, mostly) 1) Americans are unhealthy, we need to be more conscious about what we eat, we need to exercise, and 2) Don’t obsess about trying to look like the air-brushed models in those magazines, we are all beautiful, don’t worry too much about body image. I think both points are valid: people should be more concerned about their physical health – which includes nutrition as well as being active by means of walking more or just outright exercise. People also should stop worrying about the two pounds of arguably excess fat on their bodies, the extra hair on whatever, or how they wish they were .00001 shades less pale than they are. I suppose girls tend to be more bombarded with pressure about body image (though don’t think for a second males don’t worry about their appearance) so I don’t totally understand the pressure for a more-perfect body.

But teaching these two lessons walk a fine line. By teaching kids to be more conscious about nutrition, we are implicitly telling them that they don’t look good. In Super Size Me, and most campaigns to raise awareness about healthy eating, the most common image I see is the shock value of showing a morbidly obese person. It makes sense. After all, there is something very convincing about the image of someone that is clearly unhealthy and unattractive in a physical sense. Especially for kids, the idea of being that fat and being prey to the judgmental peers of adolescence is enough to eat fruits and veggies and exercise. Or is it?

Unfortunately what I’m about to say is currently politically incorrect: we should be shamed by people who are five hundred pounds and the image should give us motivation to be healthy. For some reason, as Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine points out in Super Size Me, obese people can’t yet be criticized in society like we criticize chain smokers or drug addicts. Smoking crack or cigarettes to the point of self-deprecation both produce repulsive images of things we don’t want to be. Lack of will power aside, the vast majority of the population has the ability and means to not be a chain smoker, meth addict, or five hundred pounds.

But pushing this “shame” too much then goes into the other murky waters: you don’t want to be like this; these people are bad; these people are so bad that you need to be super skinny. But then kids get so skinny they don’t eat enough and develop eating disorders. Or they just simply starve themselves (the food logs I see of my students have a disturbingly low amount of calories…that will be tackled in part II of this post).

So pushing the idea that you don’t want to look like these fat people has the negative unintended consequence of people overcompensating and being too skinny, by certainly unhealthy means. And then pushing the idea too far that you shouldn’t be concerned at all about body image gives people the impression that it’s ok to totally neglect your health and it’s fine to have the consequences of bad nutrition and lack of exercise.

I don’t have an answer for how exactly to put across these two messages without getting the negative side-effects of both. My main prescription would be to encourage a more active life-style with exercise. Exercise, after all, increases hunger for healthy foods and just improves everything in your physical health.

 

The Next Bubble to Burst

People go to college for a variety of reasons. I’d say the top 4 are:

1. Increase human capital - education makes you more productive.
2. Signaling device - the fact that you can get good grades, follow directions, meet deadlines, etc shows a potential employer that you can probably do the job they’d hire you for.
3. Consumption good - education satisfies curiosities much like reading a book does.
4. Status Symbol - college graduates enjoy prestige and avoid the social stigma of not going to college.

So why do we subsidize higher education? Well, economically speaking, increases in human capital make society more productive which everyone benefits from. That’s the traditional view of college – go there to get smart so you can get a good job and make more money. But people right away assume that an increase in productivity is what causes higher wages in workers. I tend to believe that this is much more of a correlation than a causation. Why? First, almost twice as many people are going to college today compared to a few decades ago yet we’re not really any smarter and definitely not any more productive. How could supporters of #1 above reconcile this fact?

Instead, I tend to believe that college graduates do better in terms of money and employment because of #2. If you go to a great college and/or get good grades, an employer sees you have some level of work ethic. Bryan Caplan brought up a great example:

Take me.  If I’d failed Spanish, I couldn’t have gone to a good college, wouldn’t have gotten into Princeton’s Ph.D. program, and probably wouldn’t be a professor.  But since I’ve merely forgotten my Spanish, I’m sitting in my professorial office, loving life.

The push for everyone to go to college has been misguided. Not everyone should go to college. The exorbitant cost of it today makes it very inefficient for most professions. The reason people are still going is because not getting a college education puts you behind all other applicants who are similarly skilled but have that degree on top of it. So when are people going to stop paying $200k and wasting four years for an experience that doesn’t help their productivity at all? Well hopefully sometime soon. Unfortunately though people are not only wasting that much money and time on undergraduate degrees but also going to more school by the way of graduate school. All to gain a leg up on the competition. Especially in a weak employment market getting a graduate degree can show an employer that you are fully committed to the topic of your degree and can get good grades. Often these graduate degrees can do nothing to improve your productivity.

Yes, I am intending on getting a graduate degree in the future so I am not totally innocent here. But increasingly people are going to graduate school because they don’t know what else to do and/or they just can’t find a job so it seems like a good alternative.

So will the bubble burst? I sure think so. Over 42% of Undergraduates are attending community colleges. I believe this reflects that while most people see college graduation as necessary for certain careers, spending $200k on a four-year all-things-included experience is just not financially worth it. Community colleges provide essentially the same experience as all those expensive liberal arts schools, even if they don’t have the glitz and glam. Soon, as the costs of college get to the point where the wage benefits are exceeded by the time and money of college attendance, people will realize the stupidity and go to more community colleges, trade schools, and apprenticeships.

Bottom line: the government shouldn’t be subsidizing higher education. It only over-saturates the market of college students and makes college even more expensive.

 

Profiling at Airport Security

I’m not sure what inspired me to write this, but here it is anyways:

I have always thought that airport security is a bit of an idiotic thing. It seems like people sneak onto planes all the time with dangerous things and the whole thing is set up to just convince people they’re safer. That being said, I generally support less security than is currently in place.

Some people (typically conservatives) tend to agree with this to the extent that we should profile certain people for extra security searches. A three year old kid or an old granny probably won’t be a threat, so let’s not give them as much of a security pat-down as that odd-looking maybe-Muslim Middle Eastern guy. Opponents rightly criticize this as racist. Institutionalizing certain groups as more threatening because of their religion, age, or ethnicity is a terrible thing to do.

In addition to this, I think it logistically will not do anything to deter more dangerous people from getting on planes. If those dangerous groups know security is going to look harder at the middle-aged Middle Eastern guy, they;re just going to enlist people that don’t fit this mold to do their tomfoolery.

So profiling based on these things is wrong, right? Well the opponents of profiling typically also scoff at security doing anything to the 90 year-old who takes 15 minutes to take their shoes off, or the non-threatening small child who gets a body cavity search. These things are ridiculous, but if we didn’t apply the same scrutiny to these people that we did to the able-bodied flight passengers out there, wouldn’t we be profiling them? Discriminating against people that are seemingly non-threatening so as to give them less of a look at security is still discrimination nonetheless. Along those lines, if we didn’t search infants and centenarians wouldn’t Dangerous People just hide their nonsense in those people?

 

Immigrants

I have always been pretty in favor of legal immigration. The most relevant immigration debate in America, of course, is Mexican immigration. The “data” shows that immigrants provide a benefit to the American economy as a whole. Any claims of job-stealing seems to be overpowered by the net impact immigrants have on the overall economy. Most importantly, the immigrants themselves are so much better off that any employment loss to natural-born Americans seems to be trivial from an overall human welfare standpoint. But I have come to see a different side of Mexican immigration in my current job. First hand I can see the frictions that widespread Mexican immigration can cause in a city like Austin.

75% or so of the students at my school are Hispanic, almost all second or first generation Mexican immigrants. What this means is that a significant portion of the students have parents that know little to no English. This means that communication between the teachers/faculty and parents can be very difficult. It also means that the kids are learning an English that is dumbed-down and almost never reading English.

The school of course accommodates this by providing bilingual classes and sending any note home in English and Spanish. But the English illiteracy is probably the greatest hurdle to overcome in the Title I school where I work. While the children are relatively competent at math operations, when it comes to word problems they can do almost nothing. “Plot” as in “plot the coordinates on the grid” means something totally different than “plot” as in the direction of a story. Without speaking anything close to academic English outside of school, how are they supposed to pick up on this difference?

The important thing for policy is how to adapt to this. It makes sense to have bilingual classes. But it crossed my mind that this gives too much of a coddling atmosphere to immigrants. Move to America and don’t worry if you don’t try your best to learn English – the “system” will take care of it. The public school system is obviously largely funded by the parents not sending their kids to these bad schools. Is it right for immigrants to be able to move to America and assume that public schools will do everything they can to make sure your kid can get by in an English-speaking America? The alternative I suppose would be to do everything at school in English. No flexibility for Spanish speakers. You can’t use dictionaries on standardized tests, we won’t have bilingual classes, and if you don’t get the English we’re speaking you better do something about it.

This would inevitably cause some kids who are so illiterate in English to just totally get discouraged and lose all hope. Inevitably these kids end up being picked up by “the system” anyways through welfare and what not. I think this would be bad and pretty wrong from a social justice perspective.

But the fact still remains – the lack of English proficiency of the students at my school is the source of a tremendous amount of resources and teacher-time. Is it right for any immigrant to move to America – legally or not – and expect the government-run system of public schools to totally acclimate their children and prepare them to be successful in an English-speaking America?

 

Consequentialism and World Poverty

Will Wilkinson:

If, like [Peter] Singer, we are utilitarians, we need not be too vexed by the problem of identifying the best morality. The best morality–the one that produces the largest sum of happiness–is the morality of liberal market societies.

I find Wilkinson’s argument compelling, because liberal market society is the main source of moral progress in the modern world (some people disagree, but I think this is pretty obvious). As Peter Singer and many others have convincingly argued, global poverty is one of the most important ethical issues of our time. Innocent people (including children) suffer and day everyday from preventable causes, such as hunger, disease, and lack of clean water. Singer, being a utilitarian, argues that we all must give substantially more money to charity than we currently do. This seems right. But consider the historical evidence on people escaping severe poverty. How many lives have been saved by the kinds of charitable donations that Singer advocates? Relatively few. How many lives have been saved by societies transitioning toward market liberalism? An astronomical amount. In China alone, virtually the entire population (at the time just under one billion) was in severe poverty at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Thirty-five years later, according to Singer, just over 200 million Chinese (out of a population of about 1.3 billion) are living on less than $1.25 per day. In China alone, a shift toward market liberalism has brought many hundreds of millions of people out of severe poverty in just a few decades. So if you care about poor people, spreading market liberalism seems like the way to go more so than donating to charity (although the two are not, of course, mutually exclusive).

However, there’s good reason to think that consequentialism and the  morality that serves as the foundation of market liberal societies are mutually exclusive, because the morality of market liberalism is not consequentialist. As David Schmidtz points out, the utility-promoting institutions of market liberal societies depend in large part on their ability to create “conditions under which people can trust each other not to operate in an act-utilitarian way.” Effectively promoting utility depends largely on not acting on the motivation to promote utility.

 

Affirmative Action for College Males

People support affirmative action from a variety of perspectives. Some popular talking points:

• Affirmative action creates a “level playing field.”
• Affirmative action rights historical wrongs.
• Affirmative action attempts to engineer some sort of politically correct reality where equality of results is the only acceptable end-goal.

So for a while now a significantly higher number of women than men are graduating from college. Does it make sense then to discriminate in favor of men (which, because this is a zero-sum game, means discriminate against women) in order to balance out the gender-ratio in colleges? Ilya Somin comments on and quotes an Engage article discussing some of the current events related to the topic:

My wife Alison and University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot have just published an article in Engage on the apparently growing practice of sex discrimination on behalf of men in college admissions. Heriot serves as a Commissioner at the US Commission on Civil Rights, where Alison is her special assistant/counsel. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“While some news reports indicate that discrimination against women on the basis of sex in college admissions is increasingly common, there has been relatively little public discussion about it—especially compared to the much more heated public debate concerning race-based affirmative action. Not surprisingly, therefore, there have been few attempts to study the extent of the problem systematically….

Multiple news reports indicate that some colleges and universities, both public and private, have what they regard as “too many” women applicants and are therefore discriminating in favor of men—largely because more women than men apply to college and their academic credentials are in some ways better. Several colleges have more or less openly admitted to discriminating against women – including the University of Richmond (a private institution) and the College of William and Mary (a public institution). Others—including Southwestern University (Texas), Knox College (Illinois), Brandeis University (Massachusetts), Boston University (also Massachusetts), and Pomona College (California)—shy away from admitting directly that they are discriminating, but admit that maintaining an optimal gender balance by non-discriminatory means is difficult….

Sex discrimination in admissions at public universities is illegal under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. But under federal law, it is perfectly legal for private institutions to engage in sex discrimination in admissions—though once both sexes are admitted, neither may be discriminated against….

Perhaps the most attention-getting piece on this topic was a 2006 New York Times op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, in which she admitted that her office often gave preferential treatment to men. Some admissions insiders wrote in response to Delahunty Britz’s piece that these preferences were quite common—what was shocking was only Delahunty Britz’s candor in airing this information publicly. Inside Higher Ed noted that “[w]hile few admissions officers wanted to talk publicly about the column, the private reaction was a mix of ‘of course male applicants get some help’ along with ‘did she have to share that information with the world?’” Several years later, after the wave of chatter over Delahunty Britz’s piece had died down, Columbia University law professor Ted Shaw referred to such discrimination as an “open secret.”
[footnotes omitted].”

The article also discusses the interconnections between admissions preferences for men and Title IX rules for college sports teams (the latter may have the unintended effect of incentivizing the former by making it harder for colleges to entice male students through increasing the number of men’s sports teams). Alison previously wrote about Title IX and sports here.

This issue is actually one of the rare points of political disagreement in the Somin household. I am less hostile than Alison to gender-balancing admissions policies that seek to keep the sex ratio (very roughly) even for the purpose of improving the social environment on campus. The problem of gender imbalance may be more serious at some institutions than others, and I don’t think it can justify very large gender preferences anywhere. As Gail and Alison point out, it’s a bad idea for colleges to admit “mismatched” male students whose academic skills are vastly inferior to those of the other students at the same institution. But, in some situations, I think there is a case for modest admissions preferences for the less numerous gender on campus. Some women students themselves may be dissatisfied with life on a campus that is, say, 70% female, and the same goes for male students at an overwhelmingly male institution. Obviously, other students probably couldn’t care less about the sex ratio at their university. But I don’t advocate that all universities with a gender imbalance should resort to admissions preferences to deal with it. I merely want the option to be legally available, at least at private institutions. Be that as it may, I do agree with Alison that such policies at public institutions are legally dubious under Title IX.

 

What Makes a Setback of Interests Wrongful?

(Continued from here.)

According to Feinberg, A harms B when “A acts… with the intention of producing the consequences for B that follow, or similarly adverse ones, or with negligence or recklessness in respect to those consequences; A’s acting in that manner is morally indefensible, that is, neither excusable nor justifiable; and A’s action is the cause of a setback to B’s interests, which is also a violation of B’s right” (106). Thus, for A to harm B, A satisfy four conditions in addition to setting back B’s interests (for five total necessary conditions). A must act, A’s act must be done with the intention of setting back B’s interests (or be negligent with respect to B’s interests), A’s act must be morally indefensible, and A’s act must violate B’s right. It is these four conditions that make a setback of interests wrongful, and it is the combination of wrongfulness and a setback of interests that establishes a harm.

An act is morally indefensible when there is no justification or excuse for it. An excuse involves denying responsibility for conduct that is, without considering the context in which it was performed, bad. Though the act was bad, the person who carried it out shouldn’t be blamed for it. A justification for an action involves an argument for why the action was right, or at least permissible, considering the circumstances in which it was performed. Thus, in order to qualify as a harm, an act must be neither excusable nor justifiable (108).

Feinberg defines a right as “a valid claim which an individual can make in either or both of two directions. On the one hand, some of a person’s rights are claims he can make against specific individuals for assistance, repayment of debts, compensation for losses, and so on, or against all other individuals… to noninterference in his private affairs.” Rights can on the other hand be claims an individual makes “against the state, not only for specific services and promised repayments, and noninterference in his private affairs, but also claims to the legal enforcement of the valid claims he has against other private citizens” (109). A rights violation occurs when one of these valid claims is not met.

Of course,  establishing what counts as a right and what does not is a philosophically formidable task. However, thanks to Feinberg, we at least have a framework which can guide us in establishing whether something counts as a harm.

 

 

Schools as a Silver Bullet Solution

A lot of factors can help make a student more “successfully” educated:

• They have parents that are supportive of their education.
• They have parents that have high expectations of their children and stress a hard work ethic.
• They have a solid home-life that leaves them relatively unscarred emotionally so that they are able to focus on education instead of using schools for attention they don’t get at home.
• They are fluent in the language that school is being taught in (English, in America).
• They have financial resources to buy supplies, get to school on time, have food in their stomachs, and participate in extra-curricular activities that allow them to get into colleges.
• They have financial resources to pay for tutoring or preparation materials for standardized tests that increase their likelihood of going to a good college.
• Their genetics make them more pre-disposed to like learning and be able to focus in school.
• The school that they can afford to go to has quality teachers, small-enough class sizes, etc. (They can go to a “good” school)

This list obviously isn’t exclusive. There are tons of things that factor into whether a child is well-educated by the time they become an adult. However, these aspects are often things that a lot of people, progressives especially, claim to be the reason for a gap in human capital today between the rich and the poor. Better-educated people that usually go on to make more money are only the way they are because they are able to fulfill the characteristics above. I don’t doubt that all of this is true. I don’t think I would have turned out like I have if it wasn’t for parents that had high expectations for me, could financially support my endeavors, and send me to high-quality schools.

So I’ve realized that a lot of the kids I teach at my middle school don’t have these things. And this fact seems to be (perhaps rightly so) a scapegoat for many of the kids’ educational shortcomings. How can you expect Kid A to do well when he can’t even understand the directions because Spanish is his first language? Or his parents don’t care enough to register him for a charter school or magnet school? Or he doesn’t have money to wear a coat in the cold? Or he’s beaten at home by an alcoholic father so he obviously finds it hard to concentrate? Or so many of his relatives are poor and/or in gangs that he finds it impossible to see a future at all?

But all of these problems seemed to have been dumped on schools. More than that, I think progressives are convinced the welfare state can successfully replace everything that Kid A is lacking compared to his more privileged peers. No food in his stomach? Dederally-provided free lunch. That makes sense. But English proficiency of a five year old, essentially? Should schools really be dumped with that burden? An alcoholic parent that beats them? Doesn’t really care about them (I have had more than one of my students tell me that they think no one cares about them – “my mom just cares about work and her boyfriend”)? Deep emotional issues related to family life?

Some of these things maybe can be solved by more funding. Lunch and breakfast. Perhaps better language training is possible, too. The language training is such a tremendous effort – I’m going to have to sympathize with anti-immigration folks here and say that it maybe really places an undue burden on the system if foreigners expect to come to America and have our public education system (which I see as a huge extension of the welfare state) be the ones to assimilate them and teach them English.

Moreso, I guess I was thinking of how family life affects a child’s education. By no means do all of the students I work with have terrible family lives. A significant number have very engaged parents that really are invested in their child’s future. However, kids in my school definitely disproportionately have a lacking home life. But should we be surprised then that these kids aren’t as successful? I’m not saying we should throw them into the wind and that’s all. But so much of education policy is focused on those kids who have negligent parents. Is the welfare state really in a position to replace hard-working, invested parents?

One common objection against charter schools is that only students with really interested parents will reap the benefits. Another against school competition is that only the kids who have invested parents will even apply for transportation vouchers that enable them to go across the city to a better school. I don’t doubt that these are true and, in fact, there is empirical evidence to support these ideas.

But what are we to do? When we talk about “equal opportunity” are we really hoping that the welfare state can, through essentially monetary funding, replace good parents? The parent who sets an example by waking up early every morning to get to work even if they don’t want to because that’s what adults have to do in the real world, the family who will go to the band concerts and basketball games. Do we really expect enough finagling in education policy to be able to replace these things? I sure don’t.

Again, I’m not saying to throw these kids into the wind. But the idea of “equal opportunity” and equalizing all of the factors that go into the quality of a child’s education seems to be a much too ambitious task to overcome. And unfortunately, almost all of this responsibility is being placed on our public education system. I sort of just thought about this on the bus ride home today so I’m willing to say that my opinion might change and/or that I’m open to any criticisms.

 

Mill’s Harm Principle

I’m working on a paper for a philosophy of law seminar which has focused on John Stuart Mill. Specifically, a central topic of discussion has been Mill’s harm principle. I’m starting to work on a paper on this (specific topic to be determined), and I figured I’d try writing a little bit here to clarify my thoughts and develop some ideas.