johaneriksson.se

Paternalism of the Bloomberg soda ban kind gets my blood boiling like few other things — perhaps because of its combination of pettiness and arrogance — and I wrote about it a little while ago. In part, the NYC mayor, has rested his arguments on studies conducted by Brian Wansink and David Just. They are not at all pleased:

On June 1 — National Donut Day — New York City’s mayor proposed a restaurant ban for any soft drink over 16-ounces. The hope is that by banning big drinks people will drink less and weigh less. He and others cited our research as the science behind the policy. Indeed, a dozen of our studies show when you randomly give people large sizes of food like popcorn and French fries, they overeat. Another of our cited studies showed that people ate 73 percent more soup when eating from a soup bowl that secretly refilled itself.

There’s a critical difference between the lab and Lexington Avenue that the mayor’s office didn’t account for: when Joe the Plumber and Bob the Banker buy soft drinks, they buy the size they want. They aren’t randomly forced to take a 44-ouncer when they really wanted a 12-ouncer. Moreover, their Coke or Pepsi doesn’t magically refill itself. If that happened, they’d overdrink. Instead, most restaurants give us a choice of a small or large drink — just as nearly every fast food outlet gives us a choice of small, medium, or large fries, and every movie theatre gives us a choice of small, medium, or large popcorn. People who want a little buy a little, and people who want a lot figure a way to get it.

Yes, we have found that when people are given larger portions, they do drink or eat substantially more. But to claim that these results imply that the ban will be effective is to ignore our larger body of work. In our experiments, subjects were given larger or smaller portions of food in a dining or party setting, where they were unlikely to notice portion size. It is exactly because participants weren’t paying attention that we got the results we did.

Not only is the ban an unjust restriction of liberty, and unvirtuous attack on low-status people. It is also highly unlikely to be effective at achieving its stated aims.

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