FWIW, George Orwell gave the standard left wing explanation for this demand phenomenon in The Road to Wigan Pier:
"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."
People in the UK today are vastly better off than Wigan Pier, and yet they are way fatter.
People in Japan and South Korea, which have a lower standard of living then people in the UK, have very low obesity rates.
I'm not sure where "blaming society" for poor peoples bad habits gets us. Even if we improved society by a factor of ten, it doesn't seem to do much to improve these habits. It may even work in reverse, abundance makes vice easier.
It seems likely to me that you just need to change the incentive structure of the poor. In Japan they charge extra for health insurance if you're fat, much like they do if you smoke. Universal Basic Ozempic would probably makes sense to.
It seemed like you were approaching a key point but then you veered away. If people in the UK aren't fundamentally different in their preferences to 90 years ago, but are much fatter, then the key factor that has changed is the nature of the food available.
This is the standard explanation, but it's more likely a selection effect. People who like "doing the right thing" and improving themselves tend to do well; people who like indulging themselves don't. Not a perfect metric but probably a good one
The personal finances and fitness/health decisions are correlated in an utterly intuitive way: some people optimize for the short-term over the long-term: they favor things like ultra palatable and convenient food with long-term bad health consequences (such as ultra processed carbs with lots of added refined sugar). They favor things like frivolous consumption over saving and investing. They congregate in certain areas. Others take short-term costs -- bothering to make healthy food that is great long-term but less convenient and palatable. Consuming a lower percentage of their income to save and start businesses with long-term potential. They live elsewhere. Both are perfectly fine. You get what you get. So the fitness and finances should pretty much go together. And for profit businesses designed to serve respective groups should go where they're demanded.
The only annoying thing about this wholesome and expected pattern is when people pick the short-term over the long-term then want to re-trade when you get to the long-term. Hell no! You got cheesecake for breakfast and spinning rims on your car ten years ago. Those were the prizes. I hope that they made you happy. But there should be no surprise or scandal if they result in obesity and poverty. It was a decision to be fat and poor. Behaviors, habits, and decisions are not 100% of the story. Perhaps only 99%. But they're the 99% that you can do anything about so the part worth focusing on. Perhaps grocer treachery is some (certainly <1%) of the story but the evidence looks pretty sparse; instead it looks like the effort to make short-term decisions then complain when you get to the long-term and got your prize a long time ago.
I think the big lesson is that there is no long term. When the long term gets here, if a sufficient % of the population has fucked up, they are just going to use their numbers to loot you.
So if everything must be short term, then good long term habits have to be enforced by short term carrots and sticks. Like how LKY used caning to suppress crime because criminals can understand a beating a lot more directly then reduced future employment prospects.
In a previous role, I spent a fair bit of time talking with colleagues about food deserts, in the context of population health. I was struck by the lack of consistent criteria to define a food desert. It always seemed to come down to “this area is a food desert because we say so”, even when you could point to other areas near by with similar or even worse access to healthy food options that weren’t being called deserts.
There was a recent flurry of local media interest in one particular street in my city, where the grocery store that once existed had closed 40 years ago, and the property was then sold with restrictive covenants saying that no other grocery store could ever open on that site. Despite the fact that the rest of the street had no such restrictions, nobody ever opened another grocery store, and so it has been labelled a food desert, even though there are two major grocery stores about 4 easily walkable blocks away, both served by multiple bus routes, and both with plenty of parking for those who wish to drive. Meanwhile, where I used to live, in suburbia, we were miles from a grocery store, with crappy sidewalks and minimal bus service, but it wasn’t considered a food desert.
One thing that food desert studies seem to generally ignore is the availability of a domestic-service role in households in so called food deserts. That is, even if you make groceries available, many poorer households cannot afford to have a dedicated "home-maker".
When every adult in a household is working full time (sometimes more than full time), it's a whole lot harder to find time and energy to cook. Fresh cooked food is time and labor intensive; on top of shopping for groceries, there's also prep time, cooking time, the cleanup afterward... It certainly makes sense that there are cultural habits involved, but I think it's at least partly a chicken-and-egg problem.
Maybe lack of demand drove local food sources out of business, or maybe habits and family structures informed by the local environment make it hard to break out of the cycle. Either way, it seems like simply making affordable-but-healthy grocery options available isn't going to suddenly change the cultural momentum without a lot of other supporting changes.
Think of it this way. If you're a low earner, there is less incentive to earn. Especially when like all household income below 60k basically gets evened out by the government.
I lived in West Philadelphia until recently, which certainly has a dearth of supermarkets, particularly further from the Penn campus. Crime is also a major part of it. Even the supermarkets that do exist often have restrictive anti-theft measures like giant metal poles that you can't get the shopping trolley through, or a rule where you have to check your backpack at the entrance. I'm sure it's less financially feasible to run a low-margin supermarket in high-crime areas
Food preferences are a big part of your culture, which explains the OFFENSE people take at any comments about their food choices. Being picky about food ingredients is the punchline of a joke to show someone is a yuppie . People also eat meals together, so changing what you eat requires a shift in what others eat - there is inertia. Middle class people often claim McDonald's is "disgusting" when objectively people love to eat it. And people love it because it tastes great.
Our cultural narrative believes that all people are equal and all unequal outcomes are due to systemic factors, so the "food desert" claim MORALLY has to be true for people because the alternatives imply that people are to blame.
Just like you are morally forbidden from curiosity about black crime rates because it *must be* systemic factors.
I think again and again you look down to the root cause of various problematic phenomena and it's just human behaviour. While there's definitely an outsourcing of responsibility in our cultural narrative, it's also pretty difficult to extract generational habits.
The problem might not be that people literally can't get healthy food - but perhaps they couldn't at a young age and have internalised unhealthy eating habits. Or perhaps their mother and great grandmother did, and an extra grocery store is not going to unlearn that.
Nothing will shock an upper class white person more than diving into a working class urban area feet first and seeing, firsthand, that people end up where they are as a consequence of their own choices, almost across the board, for every person in every facet of their life.
Wonderful piece. The facilitation of bad habits and vices can only succeed within those communities that are teeming with the types of individuals wishing to facilitate it. Birds of a feather flock together.
there's no such thing as food deserts? I can name like 3: doughnuts, goobers, n sugar cubes. mama always told me my sugar tooth would rot, but i can always count on the neighbors hummingbird syrup, toof or no teef
FWIW, George Orwell gave the standard left wing explanation for this demand phenomenon in The Road to Wigan Pier:
"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."
People in the UK today are vastly better off than Wigan Pier, and yet they are way fatter.
People in Japan and South Korea, which have a lower standard of living then people in the UK, have very low obesity rates.
I'm not sure where "blaming society" for poor peoples bad habits gets us. Even if we improved society by a factor of ten, it doesn't seem to do much to improve these habits. It may even work in reverse, abundance makes vice easier.
It seems likely to me that you just need to change the incentive structure of the poor. In Japan they charge extra for health insurance if you're fat, much like they do if you smoke. Universal Basic Ozempic would probably makes sense to.
It seemed like you were approaching a key point but then you veered away. If people in the UK aren't fundamentally different in their preferences to 90 years ago, but are much fatter, then the key factor that has changed is the nature of the food available.
This is the standard explanation, but it's more likely a selection effect. People who like "doing the right thing" and improving themselves tend to do well; people who like indulging themselves don't. Not a perfect metric but probably a good one
The personal finances and fitness/health decisions are correlated in an utterly intuitive way: some people optimize for the short-term over the long-term: they favor things like ultra palatable and convenient food with long-term bad health consequences (such as ultra processed carbs with lots of added refined sugar). They favor things like frivolous consumption over saving and investing. They congregate in certain areas. Others take short-term costs -- bothering to make healthy food that is great long-term but less convenient and palatable. Consuming a lower percentage of their income to save and start businesses with long-term potential. They live elsewhere. Both are perfectly fine. You get what you get. So the fitness and finances should pretty much go together. And for profit businesses designed to serve respective groups should go where they're demanded.
The only annoying thing about this wholesome and expected pattern is when people pick the short-term over the long-term then want to re-trade when you get to the long-term. Hell no! You got cheesecake for breakfast and spinning rims on your car ten years ago. Those were the prizes. I hope that they made you happy. But there should be no surprise or scandal if they result in obesity and poverty. It was a decision to be fat and poor. Behaviors, habits, and decisions are not 100% of the story. Perhaps only 99%. But they're the 99% that you can do anything about so the part worth focusing on. Perhaps grocer treachery is some (certainly <1%) of the story but the evidence looks pretty sparse; instead it looks like the effort to make short-term decisions then complain when you get to the long-term and got your prize a long time ago.
In a way the people didn't get to choose their iq level which drove their bad short term decision making. They are their own victims in that regard.
I think the big lesson is that there is no long term. When the long term gets here, if a sufficient % of the population has fucked up, they are just going to use their numbers to loot you.
So if everything must be short term, then good long term habits have to be enforced by short term carrots and sticks. Like how LKY used caning to suppress crime because criminals can understand a beating a lot more directly then reduced future employment prospects.
I’m reminded of an episode of the Simpsons where Homer ate a whole jar of mayonnaise and excused himself by saying it was a problem for future Homer.
In a previous role, I spent a fair bit of time talking with colleagues about food deserts, in the context of population health. I was struck by the lack of consistent criteria to define a food desert. It always seemed to come down to “this area is a food desert because we say so”, even when you could point to other areas near by with similar or even worse access to healthy food options that weren’t being called deserts.
There was a recent flurry of local media interest in one particular street in my city, where the grocery store that once existed had closed 40 years ago, and the property was then sold with restrictive covenants saying that no other grocery store could ever open on that site. Despite the fact that the rest of the street had no such restrictions, nobody ever opened another grocery store, and so it has been labelled a food desert, even though there are two major grocery stores about 4 easily walkable blocks away, both served by multiple bus routes, and both with plenty of parking for those who wish to drive. Meanwhile, where I used to live, in suburbia, we were miles from a grocery store, with crappy sidewalks and minimal bus service, but it wasn’t considered a food desert.
One thing that food desert studies seem to generally ignore is the availability of a domestic-service role in households in so called food deserts. That is, even if you make groceries available, many poorer households cannot afford to have a dedicated "home-maker".
When every adult in a household is working full time (sometimes more than full time), it's a whole lot harder to find time and energy to cook. Fresh cooked food is time and labor intensive; on top of shopping for groceries, there's also prep time, cooking time, the cleanup afterward... It certainly makes sense that there are cultural habits involved, but I think it's at least partly a chicken-and-egg problem.
Maybe lack of demand drove local food sources out of business, or maybe habits and family structures informed by the local environment make it hard to break out of the cycle. Either way, it seems like simply making affordable-but-healthy grocery options available isn't going to suddenly change the cultural momentum without a lot of other supporting changes.
Your hypothesis falls down as (on average) households in low-income neighbourhoods have lower work intensity than high-income neighbourhoods.
Thanks for replying! I had no idea that the number of household earners was actually positively correlated with pay rate per earner! I was under the misconception that the opposite was true! Thanks to your reply, I found this Pew study that confirmed your correction: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/
Highly respect you for changing your mind + extra research in face of new evidence!
Think of it this way. If you're a low earner, there is less incentive to earn. Especially when like all household income below 60k basically gets evened out by the government.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B6FrgMhGkjk/UvWJJUMRMJI/AAAAAAAAD_8/RfyM-aIyTSg/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/071212welfare.jpg
Sloth breeds sloth. People who work are actually used to being productive and it carries over into the home.
I lived in West Philadelphia until recently, which certainly has a dearth of supermarkets, particularly further from the Penn campus. Crime is also a major part of it. Even the supermarkets that do exist often have restrictive anti-theft measures like giant metal poles that you can't get the shopping trolley through, or a rule where you have to check your backpack at the entrance. I'm sure it's less financially feasible to run a low-margin supermarket in high-crime areas
Food preferences are a big part of your culture, which explains the OFFENSE people take at any comments about their food choices. Being picky about food ingredients is the punchline of a joke to show someone is a yuppie . People also eat meals together, so changing what you eat requires a shift in what others eat - there is inertia. Middle class people often claim McDonald's is "disgusting" when objectively people love to eat it. And people love it because it tastes great.
Our cultural narrative believes that all people are equal and all unequal outcomes are due to systemic factors, so the "food desert" claim MORALLY has to be true for people because the alternatives imply that people are to blame.
Just like you are morally forbidden from curiosity about black crime rates because it *must be* systemic factors.
I think again and again you look down to the root cause of various problematic phenomena and it's just human behaviour. While there's definitely an outsourcing of responsibility in our cultural narrative, it's also pretty difficult to extract generational habits.
The problem might not be that people literally can't get healthy food - but perhaps they couldn't at a young age and have internalised unhealthy eating habits. Or perhaps their mother and great grandmother did, and an extra grocery store is not going to unlearn that.
Nothing will shock an upper class white person more than diving into a working class urban area feet first and seeing, firsthand, that people end up where they are as a consequence of their own choices, almost across the board, for every person in every facet of their life.
People were not evolved to resist the super stimulous of the Cool Ranch Dorito.
Wonderful piece. The facilitation of bad habits and vices can only succeed within those communities that are teeming with the types of individuals wishing to facilitate it. Birds of a feather flock together.
there's no such thing as food deserts? I can name like 3: doughnuts, goobers, n sugar cubes. mama always told me my sugar tooth would rot, but i can always count on the neighbors hummingbird syrup, toof or no teef
They are selling it for $300/month cash including doctors appointments. If you got true societal level scale it could be even cheaper.
If Trump wins he needs to authorize an operation warp speed to get rid of fatties with UBO.