Some time ago I challenged those who don’t believe that paternalistic regulation is characterized by a slippery slope to provide some examples of regulation that would prove them wrong. The problem I saw was that paternalism fans always deny the slippery slope exists by claiming that new regulations are just reasonable policies. But of course this is how the slippery slope works, as today’s new policies will be used to justify future policies and to make them look reasonable. After all, every new step is only a small distance from where we are currently standing, but what are we walking towards? Nobody took the challenge, but pivoting off of San Francisco’s Happy Meal ban I did makee some predictions about future likely paternaism:
Making fast food less attractive may protect parents when they happen to be near a McDonalds with their kids, but it doesn’t protect them from having McDonalds reach out to children in the first place and getting it into their heads that their food and toys are awesome. If you’re going to stop this problem, it must be at the root. One way to do this is to ban advertising of fast food targeted at children. This would probably start with children specific magazines and TV shows, but move to a general ban.
Now regulators are helping to make my predictions come true, as they attempt to place limits on advertising by food companies to children. Here is how Ad Age describes the guidelines:
…the rules would start in 2016 and only allow foods that contain no trans fat and not more than one gram of saturated fat and 13 grams of added sugar per “eating occasion” to be marketed to children. Also, the foods could not contain more than 210 milligrams of sodium per serving. The sodium restrictions would tighten by 2021. In a concession to industry, the rules do not include “naturally occurring” nutrients. Additionally, the foods must provide a “meaningful contribution to a healthful diet,” including from at least one major healthy food group such as fruit, vegetables, whole grain, fish, eggs and beans.
The guidelines are said to be “voluntary”, but as Ad Age points out this is a little murky:
Although not binding, whatever emerges in the final report to Congress will likely be adhered to in some fashion because the rules are put forth by a quartet of agencies that have strong sway over marketers, including the FTC, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Agriculture. “Despite calling these proposals ‘voluntary,’ the government clearly is trying to place major pressure on the food, beverage and restaurant industries on what can and cannot be advertised,” the ANA said in a statement.
I would be interested in reading more about the “strong sway over marketers” that these agencies have, and exactly how the nominally voluntary guidelines would be non-voluntary in practice. This will probably come to light, as Ad Age says that this announcement is only an “opening salvo in what will be a lengthy debate between government and industry on how to solve the growing childhood obesity crisis”.
If paternalists truly were concerned about reducing childhood obesity and not simply trying to make themselves feel good, then they should be willing to include in these regulations a sunset provision that repeals them if they don’t have a demonstratable impact on childhood obesity rates in 5 years. My guess is that paternalists wouldn’t go for this, because deep down they know this isn’t going to make much if any difference in children’s health and are really interested in banning something they find distasteful.
The slippery slope from here is pretty obvious: strictly non-voluntary guidelines that require any food packaging or advertising of must be approved by a regulatory agency and subject to standards similar to those above. But we know that advertising isn’t the only way that companies influence purchasing decisions. Why shouldn’t the color of packaging be regulated? I’m sure behaviorlists can tell us which colors children like most, and I’m sure regulators would be happy to insist on gray boxes for unhealthy foods. Children are also probably more drawn to items low on grocery shelves or in the checkout aisle, so why shouldn’t regulators determine where in a store products can be placed?
I’ll repeat my challenge to paternalists: if this isn’t evidence of the slippery slope of paternalism, then what would be?
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Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Benjamin Dykstra
In addition to influencing purchasing decisions, there’s another way these limits can reduce childhood obesity. In 2006, Ofcom, Britain’s broadcasting regulator, enacted a similar ban. Cereal manufacturers decided marketing was more integral to their brands than their actual ingredients, so many high sugar cereals like Coco Pops were reformulated to meet the new advertising requirements.
In the end, breakfast cereals became healthier and sales were unaffected. Ingredients make up a very small percentage of a cereal’s cost, so the price of children’s cereals didn’t change significantly either. If you accept that unhealthy breakfasts contribute to childhood obesity, the regulations were effective and relatively painless.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Adam Ozimek
And what has the impact been on childhood obesity? I’d wager that it is unchanged.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 3:21 pm
BSE
*sigh*
First, I want to reiterate something: the entire slippery slope style of argumentation is flawed. You need to argue that there is a slip and a slope. Saying that there is a slope– an incentive to go further once the policy is in place– proves nothing. One might call it “policy experimentation”.
Consider, a policy p that is parameterized on the interval [0,1] (in reality, policy will be a nontrivial lattice, but for the sake of argument, this is good enough to make the point). Suppose that there is a welfare maximizing policy, p* on (0,1) (that is, there is an interior solution). If a change in policy takes p from 0 (call it the minarchist utopia) to p*/2, then I certainly hope that there is an incentive to increase p, otherwise policy is inefficient. But that does NOT mean that p will slip all the way to 1 (let’s call that the socialist dystopia).
Even if p is greater than p* and there is an incentive to further increase p (because of interest group politics, say), this still does not imply that p will go to 1; it could be that there is a maximum p-bar it could be that countering political coalitions step in and cut off further policy development.
If you want your specific example, I would point to post depression financial regulation. Without getting specific; regulation of finance expanded, halted and then even reversed.
If we agree on one thing, it is that specific rules are likely left on the books too long. An ideal political system would be constantly reevaluating and replacing old rules. But then, this is a problem that every civilization in history has had to deal with since the discovery of bureaucracy. Frankly, the alternative is worse.
Finally, I also would like to reiterate for a policy aimed at children, “paternalism” is by definition reasonable. Not to get too dopey, but if “children are the future” then society has a vested interest in their parenting. And don’t give me that “parent’s rights” nonsense. Parent’s have no right to do their children harm. To think otherwise is to reduce children to little more than their parent’s property.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Adam Ozimek
I agree we almost certainly won’t end up at 1, or what you call a socialist dystopia, but that’s a straw man. And there are a lot of bad and quite possible outcomes the the left (on your scale) of complete socialist dystopia.
Likewise pointing out that children should have some protections is also a straw man. I’m not against all paternalism, and I haven’t said such. In contrast, you do seem to be for all paternalism towards children, since you say it is “by definition reasonable”. Does this mean that you’d support banning parents from feeding their kids junk food at all? After all, we know it is “by definition reasonable”, and if allowing them to be exposed to marketing for junk food is to do them a harm that the state should forbid, then actually feeding them the junk food must be a far worse harm.
I’m also not claiming all regulations are on a slippery slope, deregulation clearly does happen. Pointing that out doesn’t really cut against my point. I’m arguing that there is a slippery slope when it comes to paternalistic regulation.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 6:40 pm
DJ Any Reason
This is less evidence of a slippery slope of paternalism than evidence of confirmation bias.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Andy Harless
It would be evidence of a slippery slope if you could actually give an example of a country that slid into totalitarianism. But as far as I know, totalitarianism has only ever been the result of discontinuous changes (revolutions, coups, declarations of martial law, etc.), and in no case have those discontinuous changes been the culmination of a drift that was already in progress. All roads lead to Rome, but apparently no roads lead to serfdom: you have to be flown in by helicopter.
Sunday ~ May 1st, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Adam Ozimek
This is not a theory of how you get to totalitarianism. It’s a theory about how you get too much paternalism.
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 8:07 am
Andy Harless
So it’s a slippery slope but it’s a short one? As a general theory, that seems kind of silly. I could state it as follows: “In any environment where paternalism is an issue, the only equilibria involve either no paternalism at all or too much paternalism.” Of course that’s trivially true if you think that any paternalism is inherently worse than no paternalism, but otherwise it seems like nonsense, unless you can outline a well-reasoned theory as to why it should be true in general. I can kind of imagine such a theory, but it is one in which the paternalistic equilibrium is totalitarianism, and therefore (as per my first comment) the theory is empirically rejected. Otherwise, the theory needs to explain why you stop at the paternalistic equilibrium and don’t go all the way to totalitarianism. Maybe the sand trucks came in from an adjoining road that was halfway down the slope?
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 8:59 am
Adam Ozimek
Think of the slippery slope bias as a form of status quo bias. Rrelative to other considerations, people overweight current laws when evaluating future laws, and at current levels this generates forward momentum. But other considerations, e.g. people’s other voting preferences, matter as well. At some point these preferences outweigh the slippery slope bias.
Tuesday ~ May 3rd, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Andy Harless
Why doesn’t the status quo bias apply in both directions? It ought to make the slope less slippery rather than more so.
Wednesday ~ May 4th, 2011 at 7:12 am
Adam Ozimek
Oh sure it can, it’s just not nearly as common. I would say the slow decline of marijuana prohibition is a good example of a slippery slope in the other direction (and a good one too). People who favor marijuana prohibition should have considered that allowing medical marijuana raised the probability of decriminalization and legalization.
In general I would say this is far less common than the slippery slope of paternalism. This is probably because there are many other mechanisms pushing towards more paternalism, and the slippery slope is the road they take to get there, one step at a time. I believe Glen Whitman and Eugene Volokh have written about these mechanisms and why paternalism is particularly succeptible to the slippery slope.
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 12:33 pm
Ken S
I can say with certainty that I would have supported any of these measures by themselves without knowing about the others… the fact that one came after the other doesn’t seem very relevant in evaluating their merits.
The happy meal law seemed more of a sideshow to me, perhaps a policy test for the bigger forms of this type of legislation. This is hardly a slippery slope if the target was the bigger policy in the first place and the smaller one was just for the purposes of feedback, but that might be giving politicians too much credit.
I will admit the salt example would be a good lead for evidence of a slippery slope. I’m sort of in the dark over the history of salt regulation and it might take a unusually high level of boredom for me to learn enough about it to determine what happened… my first objection would be that our view of how bad salt was might have changed.
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Adam Ozimek
Your second paragraph is exactly an example of a slippery slope. Your mechanism to connect them is more explicit, but the effect is the exact same: if this passes, we are likely to end up with a more expansive form of this type of regulation. Yours is actually a stronger form of the slippery slope argument, since the justification of larger policies by smaller ones is pre-planned and the actual purpose of the smaller policy. If they were explicit about this, then people like me wouldn’t need to cry “slippery slope!” from the rooftops, since we could just point to the politicians promise that “this is just a trial balloon for something more expansive…”. That would be much preferred.
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Sister Y
Slightly tangential but this:
If paternalists truly were concerned about reducing childhood obesity and not simply trying to make themselves feel good, then they should be willing to include in these regulations a sunset provision that repeals them if they don’t have a demonstratable impact on childhood obesity rates in 5 years.
seems like a blueprint for a move toward evidence-based regulation in general. Should all laws have provisions like this? Which ones shouldn’t, if any? Which laws have had results-linked sunset provisions, and how have they worked out?
Monday ~ May 2nd, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Adam Ozimek
Good question. Has this ever been done before? I have no idea. I’d like to see laws come with these provisions and be designed to be testable. I wanted to see some randomization built into the stimulus so we could know whether it worked or not. I think the lack of support for these ideas suggests a Hansonian notion of policies, where they’re actually not about getting results… I think you have inspired a future blog post.
Tuesday ~ May 3rd, 2011 at 8:08 am
How would you know if politics was about policy? « Modeled Behavior
[...] to the always insightful Sister Y for inspiring this [...]
Wednesday ~ May 4th, 2011 at 9:44 am
smithy
I work in public health, marketing though. It is a temporary position and I don’t like it because of the paternalism. There is no question of a slippery slope. The people at work plan decades in advance-I do not lie, this is what they say- to pass more extreme legislation. They believe they have to pass small measures first and continue to lobby until they can get what they really want, which is usually a complete ban. People learn to accept cultural changes slowly over time. This is a well known technique.
I really like this series on obesity. The research suggests that we really don’t know what causes it or how to treat it, outside of invasive stomach stapling surgery. We have gotten a lot of money to try to treat childhood obesity, but small changes are not effective for many. For example, we put pedometers on children to measure how much they move around. Increasing PE in school only decreases the amount they play after school. These changes help some so on a population level it helps save money, but people need to realize this is not a well understood illness and stop being moralizing about it. Being thin doesn’t make you a better person.
I do disagree about the salt content in food. I think the author should reexamine the research on that. Too much salt is bad for most of the population. Even most 20 years olds show signs of stress on their hearts and a third of babies born today are projected to get diabetes. I think we need to be more worried about these people than the small number with thyroid problems, ect.