Red meat tax?

Boyd Swinburn's group wants rather a lot more controls on what we all get to eat. 

Radio NZ covers his report here; Chris Snowdon's summary of it is best.

The lead author of the report is Boyd Swinburn, a New Zealand doctor and food campaigner who declared last week on Twitter that the EAT-Lancet report shows where diets need to get to while his report shows how to get there. They are two sides of the same coin and whilst there is no shortage of policy suggestions in the EAT-Lancet document, including rationing and the outright prohibition of certain food products, the Lancet Commission takes it a stage further by calling for a global treaty.

Swinburn is obsessed with the web of corporate interests he sees all around him, thwarting his efforts to get the public to eat their greens. In 2017, New Zealand’s Ministry of Health commissioned the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research to look at the pros and cons of taxing sugary drinks. When the economists concluded, accurately, that ‘the evidence that sugar taxes improve health is weak’, Swinburn wrote a furious article denouncing ‘economists steeped in last century’s economic theories’, ‘merchants of doubt’ and the ‘vested interests of the food industry’. It is a theme he returns to with tedious regularity in the Lancet report.

...

Swinburn et al. seem to believe that the only barrier to governments leaping headlong into an extensive systems of taxes, warnings, bans and restrictions is ‘Big Food’. Whilst it would be naive to think that the various food lobbies have no influence on government policy, the authors never consider the possibility that this is because the industry’s arguments about trade, jobs, choice and prices appeal to politicians and, ultimately, to the public. ‘Big Food’ may not want tobacco-style regulation, but it is a logical fallacy to infer from this that politicians who reject such an approach have only done so because of ‘powerful lobbying’.

Whether or not the authors actually believe this narrative, it serves two useful purposes. Firstly, it allows wealthy activist-academics in the multi-billion dollar ‘public health’ industry to view themselves as plucky underdogs fighting Goliath. Secondly, it absolves them from answering difficult questions about whether their demands are reasonable, fair, or even realistic

Do read Snowdon's whole piece. Stuff has some of the government's response:

Associate Minister of Health Julie Anne Genter​ said the Government did not plan to tax red meat "at this stage", but an increase in awareness about climate change was affecting people's behaviour.

"Obesity and climate change are often framed as problems for individuals to change. This report shows it has been a failure of public policy and we need government action to protect our health and our climate."

The commission called for a global treaty, like those established for climate change and tobacco, to help governments restrict the influence of the food industry on policy and the establishment of a global philanthropic fund of US$1 billion (NZ$1.46b) "to support social movements demanding policy action".

The Lancet editor-in-chief Dr Richard Horton said the business model of large international food and beverage companies led to over-consumption of junk food in both high-income countries and, increasingly, low and middle-income countries.

Genter said she was "interested to learn more about how a global treaty would work, as politicians need to play their part too".

Swinburn said the food industry should be excluded from the "policy-making table" as the profit motive would always win out over improving health and reducing climate change.

There's a very good case for agricultural emissions globally coming under emission trading schemes or carbon taxes. In the absence of international coordination, the case gets tougher because you have to worry about whether production gets displaced to places where meat production is more carbon-intensive. Animal product prices would go up after agricultural emissions were included in the ETS, or in carbon taxes, but it would be a mistake to call that a red meat tax. It's more like, if you had a GST that excluded food products, getting rid of the exemption isn't a "food tax".

Going beyond that though, to tax and regulate and nudge and force everyone into eating and drinking only Boyd-Approved products - no thanks.

Previously:

• Sweet release
• The voice of presumption
• Winning hearts and minds

Small effects

Here's Boyd Swinburn defending sugar taxes in the Herald, in his usual charitable style:

A report by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) concluded that a sugary drinks tax by itself would not significantly reduce obesity. This has fuelled the merchants of doubt who are opposed to including it in a multi-strategy approach to reduce our appallingly high rates of childhood obesity and dental caries.

The report drew the wrong conclusions because it dismissed the estimated changes of body weight as trivial when in fact, applied across the whole population, they are substantial. For example, an 800g reduction in weight from a 20 per cent tax would have an impact equivalent to halting the rise in population weight gain for three years.

I suppose that's the conclusion you get if you think the world's a Manichean struggle of heroic public health people against some evil conspiracy.

Let's leave the battles of good and evil and go back to the study. The NZIER report surveys a pretty wide literature.

The specific one that Swinburn is here citing in from John Gibson at Waikato. The Gibson study takes a prior simulation model of Grogger's and corrects an overestimate of the demand elasticity. Grogger doesn't really look at obesity though. Grogger rather estimates the effect on obesity of a reduction in soda consumption using models of energy intake and expenditure.

Gibson shows that Grogger massively overestimated the effect of tax on consumption, and so Grogger's modeled effects on obesity were too large. The steady state weight change should have been about 0.4kg, not Grogger's 2-4 pounds. The Mexican tax has been characterised as a 10% tax (close, but it's really a peso-per-litre excise), so I guess doubling that gets you the 800 grams.

Gibson corrects the demand elasticity part, but doesn't look at the soda-to-obesity part. He just says that if Grogger's model of the consumption-obesity relationship is right, then the effect of tax on obesity is much smaller than Grogger estimated.

NZIER cites a pile of studies that do try to get more direct links from consumption to obesity outcomes.

NZIER cites Maniadakis et al, 2013, a metastudy of 55 studies on sugar taxes. NZIER summarises:

The relationship between prices and taxes on food and beverage items and health outcome measures was found to be very weak. Results suggested that a 10 percent increase in prices (including by imposition of a tax) would be expected to reduce energy intake by a maximum of 50 calories per day, resulting in a weight loss of up to 0.3 kilograms per year, which was deemed to be insignificant.

But it would be a misreading to say they deemed it insignificant because 300 grams per year is small. They deemed it insignificant because it was the largest effect found in the eleven studies in that category, with other ones finding smaller effects or zero effect. Here's Maniadakis et al:

Moreover, six studies 28,29,31–34 and five studies 35–39 examined the association between beverage/food prices and taxes and energy and weight outcomes, respectively. These studies indicated that there is a very small impact of prices and taxes on energy intake and weight outcomes. These studies indicated that the caloric effect of a 10% increase in prices or a corresponding imposition of a tax reduces energy intake by a maximum of 50 calories per day, 450 per month, and up to 0.3 kilograms or 1.5 pounds per year, which cannot be considered significant. The specific studies also indicated the regressive nature of taxes and that their use is promoted mostly in order to generate revenue for the public purse.

NZIER also cites Backholer et al, another metastudy suggesting insignificant effects. Here's NZIER:

Backholer et al. (2016) reviewed studies estimating the effects of an increase in the price (or a tax) of sugar-sweetened beverages on purchases or consumption and weight outcomes regressivity, within high-income countries. Price elasticity estimates varied considerably across studies as did resulting consumption changes and weight changes. The review found that few studies statistically tested differences in outcomes between socio-economic groups. Seven studies reported on changes in weight outcomes for the total population following an increase in SSB prices. Studies either found no association between a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages and BMI or a very small association, with insignificant weight loss implications of up to less than 2kg over ten years. Some found similar reductions in weight for all socio-economic groups while others found greater reductions for lower income groups compared to higher income groups. A tax on sugar-sweetened beverages was associated with a wide range of estimated impacts on the population obesity rate: from a less than 0.1 percentage point decrease in obesity prevalence to a more than 10 percent (3 percentage point based on a 30 percent obesity rate) prevalence reduction. All studies that examined the average household tax burden reported that tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would be regressive, but with small differences between higher and lower income households (0.10-1.0% and 0.03%-0.60% of annual household income paid in tax by low- and high-income households, respectively). 

The problem isn't that 2kg over ten years is deemed small, it's that it's the largest effect in a field of either smaller effects or no effects.

Swinburn then goes on a bit of a rant about the inapplicability of rationality models, but I don't see the relevance - or at least I don't see that it goes the way Swinburn wants it to go. Whether people are wholly rational, or completely barking mad, the studies aren't showing any particular effect of sugar taxes on sugar consumption - at least in the ranges that have been tried so far.

But it's worse than that. The rationality assumptions are what make sugar taxes a plausible intervention in the first place. If people are completely irrational, there's no necessary relationship between demand and prices except through an income effect. And in that world, why would we even be thinking about sugar taxes?

The voice of presumption

Here's Boyd Swinburn:

In an editorial co-written for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, published yesterday, Dr Boyd Swinburn says scientists who represent the voice of the public in policy-making are being shouted down by large commercial interests and their views suppressed by attack campaigns.

In what sense do public health researchers, as earnest and honest as they may be, in any way represent "the voice of the public"?

At their best, public health researchers provide useful scientific data that can help individuals in assessing trade-offs, and that can also help inform policy as one of many considerations in the policy process.

But "the voice of the public"?

I suppose if that self-perception is common on the public health side, it explains a bit of how they come to the policy debate.

I'm far from convinced that either elections or polls can provide "the voice of the public", or that such a thing can even exist. People's views are too varied - thankfully. And there's that whole set of impossibility theorems on aggregating social preferences into any kind of "voice of the public".

As for being shouted down, it would be an interesting exercise to compare newspaper column inches of "large commercial interest attack campaigns" versus column inches of public health campaigners complaining about WhaleOil blog posts.

Swinburn continues:

In the article, co-authored with Australian professor Michael Moore, Swinburn said: "A blanket of suppression is insidiously descending on the voices for public health."
First, there were the interests of transnational corporations, and then there was the Government, which wanted to control public health information and messaging, Swinburn said.
While working in Australia's Deakin University, Swinburn said he experienced efforts to have reports cancelled or watered down and funding pulled, and he said that had started happening in New Zealand.
"There needs to be voices that are based in science standing up to that and speaking on behalf of the public," he said.
"There are plenty of voices on behalf of the commercial interest. But the number of voices on behalf of the public are getting fewer and weaker."

This is actually a tough one.

Suppose the government honestly contracts for some piece of research, the researcher produces and honest and true answer, and the government then suppresses it because politics. That by all accounts is bad.

Now imagine a contrary case where the government contracts for some piece of research, but the researcher produces a report that is, frankly, embarrassing: it would fail to withstand any rigorous scrutiny. Worse, the government's having funded the work could give it imprimateur if it were released. If the contracting agency then demands changes or wishes that the report not be released, that's different from efforts to water things down.

From the outside, a report's suppression in the two cases looks identical. The researcher in the second case would claim that the first case obtained, and the government in the first case would claim that the second case obtained. I suppose requiring rigorous truly external peer review on reports - and not just rubber stamps - is one way of preventing the latter but not the former.

Lobbying isn't everything

Conspiracies and power struggles everywhere. Here's Auckland's Boyd Swinburn on the New York soda ban being overturned.

Boyd Swinburn, the University of Auckland's professor of population nutrition and global health, said the court battle's significance was in the power play it represented between government and industry, "the power politics between public health versus private profit".

"It does show the enormous power of the food industry. It seems to be marching from victory to victory around the world, including New Zealand."

Justice Tingling, if I read the ruling correctly, basically said that the Health Board hasn't the legislative authority to regulate this kind of thing unless New York City Council enacts legislation allowing it. I'm no lawyer, but I've no reason to expect Tingling has this wrong.

I'd also expect that if Bloomberg really wanted the ban and thought he had the votes on Council to do it, he'd be trying to get the ban through Council rather than talking about judicial appeals. If he hasn't the votes to get it through City Council, maybe it's because Swinburn's "power of the food industry" hypothesis, or maybe it's because a bunch of people in Brooklyn are fed up with this kind of nonsense and would punish their Councillors for it. I've not been following the poling on this closely; a quick Googling suggests that it's hardly a policy drawing unanimous appeal and that would have passed but for Big Sugar. Instead, there's a slim majority in opposition to the policy.

But Swinburn's all about the framing here: "public health versus private profit". Voter preferences don't enter into the story because they're all on his side, never mind the polling. Expect this framing to be used here when Swinburn's type push for similar policies here.