Well that was fast! A few weeks ago I was wondering where we would land next down the slippery slope of paternalism after San Francisco moved to ban toys from Happy meals with more than 600 calories and 35% of the calories from fat. I’ll confess that I did not predict that the next step would be the State of California banning all happy meal toys, widening the ban in both geography and scope. Via Megan McArdle, here is the scoop:
With perfect Grinch timing, a consumer group has sued McDonald’s demanding that it take the toys out of its Happy Meals.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, claims it violates California law for the hamburger chain to make its meals too appealing to kids, thus launching them on a lifelong course to overeating and other health horrors. It’s representing an allegedly typical mother of two from Sacramento named Monet Parham. What’s Parham’s (so to speak) beef? “Because of McDonald’s marketing, [her daughter] Maya has frequently pestered Parham into purchasing Happy Meals, thereby spending money on a product she would not otherwise have purchased.”
….she’s suing because when she said no, her kids became disagreeable and “pouted” – for which she wants class action status.
As the New York Daily News reports, the “allegedly typical mother of two” who is bringing the suit, Monet Parham, is actually not a typical mother of two:
…she is in fact the same person as Monet Parham-Lee, who is a “regional program manager” on the state of California payroll for child nutrition matters.
Specifically, she works on a federally funded program that campaigns to exhort people to eat their vegetables and that sort of thing.
My question is this: is someone who admits she is unable stop herself from buying McDonalds for her children really the kind of person we want as regional program manager for child nutritional matters? Isn’t this a little like putting an admitted drunk driver in charge of a states anti-drunk driving program? Or a gambling addict in charge of gaming laws?
It sounds like the lawsuit is in early stages right now, here’s to hoping the good people of California come to there senses and trim down the insane consumer laws they must have that make this lawsuit even thinkable.
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Thursday ~ December 16th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
sardonic_sob
As ever, the difference between truth and fiction is that fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.
Thursday ~ December 16th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Hal
Perhaps you should try to frame this differently. Rather than using emotionally charged words, you should take a tip from the “think like an economist post” and stop using emotionally charged words to describe things (e.g. paternalistic, etc).
This is a system. Like any system of even trivial complexity, it has a variety of systems that regulate its behavior. As we’ve discovered through our examining of these systems throughout history, there are various ways the system itself tries to regulate itself. This is one way.
You don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to think it’s ideal, but for “Bob’s” sake, just treat it like a system, without bringing in all these emotions.
I mean, you’re an economist, right?
Thursday ~ December 16th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Matt
The idea is paternalism is bad with choices and self control being good. I get that and agree to a large extent. However, when fast food owns such a large market share that it begins to dictate the quality of food available to the public we lose our choice. Sure we can vote w/ our wallet but the cards are stacked against the public with the lack of transparency on the sides of corporations like McDonalds. Heck, they have a well produced commercial out now where they essentially say their food is produced by fairies in some magical place (not a California field so full that the only way to keep it working is to pump the cattle w/ hormones and antibiotics). And that magical food comes at the low, low price of 99 cents! No mention of the hidden costs to the public in the form of health and the environment. Until we price these externalities in the market place we’ll continue to need paternalism.
Thursday ~ December 16th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Hal
Matt, you hit the essence of why this post is so bizarre. But even a price signal would seem to be hard to come up with. We’re talking biology here, where we’re fighting perhaps millions of years of evolution which created organisms that love fat and unfortunately have evolved in the last couple of thousand years an environment where they simply don’t need it any more – rather, it’s horrible for their health.
So, given what we know about how people are horrible at controlling their own habits – not to mention the massive system effects that aren’t accounted for which we know lead to such #fail behavior in humans wrt dealing with their long term health – it’s amazing to come to the conclusion that if we simply price things right, then all the information needed for an organism to make the “right” decision and to – perhaps most amazingly at all – instill within them the necessary self control, is all encoded within a monetary exchange amount.
But hey. I suppose if you bow down before any god low enough, one can easily be led around by the nose.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 10:08 am
Happy Meal lawsuit, cont’d
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Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Brian
I want to say three things:
1) Can we stop with the “paternalism” arguments when the policy in question is, you know, relating to kids. Who, you know, need parenting. Remembering that parents do not always necessarily have their children’s best interests at heart (even if they usually do) and who do NOT own their children. Why shouldn’t society be “paternalistic” toward children?
2) Can we not impugne the motives of this lady who started the lawsuit? Even if you disagree with her, that does not give you the right to suggest that she’s a bad parent who should not be listened to. It seems to me that, logically, the fact that she deals with nutrition issues on a day to day basis strengthens her case. But I guess I’m one of those weirdos who thinks that expertise matters. This does not mean you have to agree with her.
3) Finally, can we do away with the lazy “slippery-slope” line of argument? A “slippery-slope” requires TWO things, the direction AND a means to generate an accelerating problem. The question is what exactly is down the slope and why on earth is this leading us there? Otherwise, you sound like those people who warned us that Medicare was on the slippery slope toward socialism. I’m still waiting on that one.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
sardonic_sob
If she can’t make her children eat nutritious food because she’d rather buy them food she believes to be unhealthy than listen to them whine, she’s a bad parent. Period. Dot.
It’s *not* being a bad parent to let your children eat unhealthy food once in a while as a treat, but that’s not why she says she does it. Out of her own mouth she is condemned.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 11:21 am
q
as a parent, i know there are a lot of things i can’t control, but i’d pay a lot of money to not have my kid screaming for things i don’t think he should have. happy meals are one of those. in fact i’m of the opinion that the marketing practices of corporations like mcdonalds are awful and exploitave. in the starkest terms, they try to sell crap food to our kids by playing to our kids and thereby putting a wedge between us and our kids. so is it not obvious why a parent might be upset about this? (i am not sure what the best solution is to this — the lawsuit sounds out of bounds to me.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
sardonic_sob
Solution?
Don’t take your kids to McDonalds’ if they’re insufficiently disciplined not to “scream for things you don’t think they should have.” That should just about do it.
And before somebody accuses me of child abuse, it’s not necessary to beat them or scream at them to discipline them: if you have to do that, it means you’ve already lost. All you have to do is convince them that you mean what you say and you say what you mean, and the rest will follow. If they don’t believe you say what you mean and you mean what you say, beating and screaming will not only not help, they will actively make things even worse.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Hal
I don’t think anyone would accuse you of child abuse, but you certainly clearly demonstrate the utopian sensibility of libertarian thought.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
sardonic_sob
O brave new world that has such people inn’t!
When for suggesting that people discipline their children sufficiently that they don’t “scream for things” in public, one is denounced as a utopian!
Somewhere the Adversary giggles.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Hal
As I seem to recall, the history of our organism is that we evolved from proto-slime and are still desperately in need of a shower.
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t have self discipline and raise our offspring far better – collectively – than evidence suggests we do. What I’m commenting on is that any strategy which critically relies on people doing the right thing, acting rationally and having self discipline that has never been witnessed in recorded history… well, that’s pretty obviously a failing strategy we can simply throw on the piled trash heap of all the other utopian strategies.
It’s a nice world to shoot for. The problem is the delta between where we are and where you want us to be is measured in parsecs, not millimeters.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
sardonic_sob
It’s one thing to say that utopia is a good name for the place, ’cause it’s not real. It’s quite another to say we need to pass a LAW – to put the force of government and the threat of legal sanction into enforcing it – to prevent McDonald’s from giving away toys with meals. Because mark my words – mark them, I say – at some point, even if McDonalds’ capitulates, some poor schlub running a little restaurant will give some child some knickknack with their food, and that person will suffer negative consequences. It may be unimaginable to you, but eventually said poor schlub will be fined, may lose their food service permit, may go to JAIL. For giving away. A toy. With some food.
Honest question: will that bother you? Or do you think it is a reasonable use of authority? You don’t have to justify either answer. I’m just curious.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Hal
Well, if you actually read the proposed laws n’ such, you’ll find that – rather than the urban legend style interpretation you have – it’s actually pretty clear what constitutes breaking the law. It isn’t simply giving toys away with food. It’s using toys to promote children’s meals which have over 600 calories of which over 40% of those calories come from fat.
Perhaps you think this is a fable right that springs from the brow of Zeus – or where ever you think these rights come from – but I don’t. Rights are human inventions and they are whatever we want them to be. Myself, I believe that complex systems – especially extremely successful complex systems – have complex regulation mechanisms. These regulation mechanisms – in the case of law – come about through negotiation, debate and trial and error.
At least in the world I inhabit. Sadly, I’m not in possession of the “Way Things Are” book that seems to have been issued to those the libertarian persuasion. Further, as I pointed out, I don’t think “rights” are anything more than human constructs and consequently I don’t feel proscribed from changing them to suit our collective fancy.
I’m sure there’s a lot of stupid laws, but there’s also a lot of stupid freedoms. Laws can be abused, and so can freedoms. The point here is that McDonalds isn’t some guy down the street selling hot dogs or the family ethnic restaurant you discovered which serves the best heart attack on a plate you simply have to tell your friends about.
It’s a massively successful, astoundingly wealthy global organism that isn’t bound by mere human constraints. And maybe I’m a dirty communist for suggesting such, but I strongly believe we should be regulating these alien organisms we call multi national corporations. It seems like only a fool allows a parasitical organism to run rampant throughout its ecosystem.
I’m certainly not against corporations and their multinational ilk, but likewise I don’t think they’re composed of Unicorns and gingerbread. Magic fairy dust doesn’t work on them, and – as has been extremely well documented through their recent history – neither does “self regulation”.
You can disagree with the proposed laws, but as others have mentioned, please leave aside the emotional overtones as well as the fallacies of slippery slope. It’s unseemly and just makes us wish there was a mental shower in the place.
Friday ~ December 17th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Adam Ozimek
Leave aside emotional overtones? You mean like this “And maybe I’m a dirty communist for suggesting such, but I strongly believe we should be regulating these alien organisms we call multi national corporations. It seems like only a fool allows a parasitical organism to run rampant throughout its ecosystem.”
Right, because “paternalism” is emotionally charged, but “parasitical organism” isn’t.
Saturday ~ December 18th, 2010 at 1:53 am
Sardonic_sob
And if you read the article cited, you find out it’s not about the stupid but limited law you want to talk about, it’s about a different stupid and allegedly much less limited law. Since you neither want to answer direct questions nor discuss the topic at hand, I’m done talking to you now.
Saturday ~ December 18th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Hal
Toodles
Saturday ~ December 18th, 2010 at 2:25 am
Sardonic_sob
I’ll go you one or two better on the snark-o-meter: if you look, you can find a video of an interview with Ms. Parham-Lee, and the real question, as opposed to the one you ask in your second to last paragraph, is whether a person who can’t manage their *own* weight should be allowed to sue third parties when it turns out her kid wants unhealthy food too? Let alone whether such a person should be telling OTHER people how to manage their health and their children’s?