There has been a lot of text spilled involve New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s soda ban in New York City. A lot of the commentary, seems to miss what I consider to be the central points.
The central dilemma is, or should be, one of Freedom vs. Health.
Supporters of the ban have argued that health is at stake. They tout the smoking ban as an example of something that made an impact. And compared to the benefits, the sacrifice in freedom is worth it. And critics of the ban argue that it is not worth it.
My two questions about the ban are:
- Will this have any measurable impact in lowering obesity rates and increasing the public health?
- If there is no discernable impact, what further measures might be required to achieve the desired ends?
I’m not saying that the soda ban is a failure if obesity rates are cut but remain higher than we would like. I believe the smoking bans, for all of their faults, did have an impact. As the bans have proliferated, smoking rates have decreased. Correlation is not causation, but as a smoker I can tell you that convenience and inconvenience do play a role, and that I know people who have cited inconvenience as a reason for quitting or finally being able to.
I can also say that if freedom were not at stake, I would shrug off the lack of impact. I still have no objection to calorie counts on menus. That is some freedom lost (by restaurants) but freedom gained by others and comes out basically a wash.
But soft drinks are not to obesity what smoking is to… well… smoking. It is my experience that cutting soft drinks out of a diet leads to calories gained elsewhere, while cutting smoking in public places does not actually lead to more smoking elsewhere. (Okay, pushing them out of bars does lead to smoking on sidewalks, but still less smoking in the overall. Trust me on this.)
If I’m wrong, though, then this ban should have some sort of measurable impact of some sort, some where. If it doesn’t, and if it’s not expected to, that poses a problem for me. The dilemma is no longer Freedom vs. Health, but Freedom vs. Something Else.
I would nominate: Freedom vs. Symbolism. The socially acceptable disdain for this guy. The unpleasentness of having to sit next to the fat guy on the plain that you are just sure drinks this crap (though, if they drink Diet Coke, that’s a punchline). Exasperation on the part of health-conscious Americans towards their fellow countrymen. The loss of freedom involved being not just a biproduct of the attempted aims, but rather the goal at hand. You can’t make them aesthetically pleasant, but you can damn sure take that Big Gulp out of their hands.
To be honest, I am not impervious to this. I’ve struggled with my weight, but even I have to watch myself at the Golden Corral, looking at these people who obviously eat way too much eating way too much. I would not lament the Golden Corral closing and their having to eat elsewhere.
The upside to this, if it passes, is if it changes the dynamic of food portions. One area where I do agree with the major is that everything is out of whack, as far as that goes. Larger portions are more profitable and so there is the incentive to offer much more for a little more price. Nowhere is this more evident with soft drinks, the syrup for which is dirt cheap and that are good profit items, but it applies to other things as well due to the high fixed costs and lower marginal ones. And so if this leads the vanguard towards tilting portions back to sanity, and thus there is some sort of measurable impact, then I will revise my opinion.
But soda alone won’t do it. And I do want to know what’s next.
A couple things I couldn’t quite fit in there:
1) I ultimately come down against uniform smoking bans, despite the benefit to the public health (and the fact that, more often than not, I am glad they are there on a selfish level). some might argue that the whole thing was Freedom vs. Freedom since it was as much as anything about non-smokers being able to go to places without having to breathe smoke. I believe this could have been addressed without a city-wide ban in ways that would have made it easier to avoid second-hand smoke on sidewalks. I still owe everybody a post on that.
2) The Redstone school district has determined that obesity is a problem in Redstone schools. It is, though no worse than I have seen elsewhere (which, considering Redstone’s SES, is actually impressive). Anyway, what is their response to this? Taking soft drink machines out of the teacher’s lounges. ???? This isn’t a salient political point, but it did come to mind with this whole brouhaha.
Will-
Interesting post. I have several issues with the ban.
1.) Bloomberg is drunk with power. This is the guy who pushed to extend term limits so he could run a third time and, after having successfully done so and winning, insisted that his situation should be an exception as no one should really serve for more than two terms.
2.) I don’t think analogizing this to the smoking ban is really fair. The externalities of smoking are far greater and more directly felt than those of drinking soda. You smoking in my bar can have a direct and measurable impact on my health. You drinking a giant vat of soda MIGHT impact me financially IF you develop health issues AND receive more expensive care than you would otherwise need under a publicly financed plan. The smoking ban was largely intended to protect non-smokers from smokers. The soda ban is largely intended to protect soda drinkers from themselves.
3.) Nothing stops folks from ordering two sodas. Or walking to the 7-11 and buying a two-liter.
4.) Diet soda has zero calories and sugar. Can you get a giant one of those?
5.) For many folks, the larger soda was a more economical option. Buy a 12-ounce for each kid at $1.50/each or a 24-ounce to share at $1.80.
6.) If the government wants to be serious about cutting obesity, there are far more effective steps they could take. End corn subsidies, which push shitty corn byproducts into so much of our food cheaply. Put nutritionists in schools, so that children can independently make healthy choices and actually understand the relationship between food and health. Make school lunches healthier; stop trying to pass pizza off as a vegetable and offer something other than chicken nuggets and french fries.*
7.) Oh yea… that whole freedom thing.
Some of these reasons are much better than others. But I haven’t really heard a compelling argument in favor of it that doesn’t involve shaming fatties.
* I realize that most/all of these are not necessarily something Bloomberg can control from where he sits, but the steps he takes in NYC are often replicated elsewhere. He could take more meaningful steps that would lead to widespread difference. Or he could grandstand.
On #2, I think the difference is overstated. See my reply to James. We didn’t just set the limits that would protect non-smokers from smokers. We went after smokers in a very particular way, arguably in some ways that force smokers and non-smokers to collide.
On #4, yes you can. It applies only to those drinks that actually have sugar. There are questions about diet soda, though, and whether it actually has a remarkably bad effect on obesity by screwing with our satiety.
I hadn’t thought of #5. We’re depriving youngsters lessons in sharing!! 🙂 You’re right about the economics of it.
Duly noted on #4. Will respond to #2 below. Thanks!
Some disconnected thoughts.
1. This is different than the smoking ban because smoking bans are justified by negative externalities (second-hand smoke). I’m not sure second-hand sugars are a factor, so one of the crucial factors justifying smoking bans isn’t present here. That is, this is less about protection of innocent bystanders and more direct explicit paternalism.
2. There is research showing that large portion sizes cause people to eat/drink more. So 64 ouncers probably do cause people to drink more soda…irrationally. I just hate saying that, but it seems to be true. Protecting people from their own rational choices that might harm them is, I think, very clearly unjustified. Protecting them from irrational choices that might harm them? Egad I’d hate to start down that slippery slope, but I suppose it provides some purchase on a justification.
There is less to #1 than meets the eye, in my estimation. Which is to say, the (non-voluntary) externalities could have been addressed with something different than what was tried (additionally: the result, at least in most places, is simply pushing smokers outside of establishments and putting them onto sidewalks that are actually harder to avoid). It’s also worth pointing out that those who wanted to ban them didn’t hang their hat on the dangers of second-hand smoke, which does apply uniquely to cigarettes. Almost every other argument applies to obesity.
(Disclosure: Putting everything else aside, I believe that animosity towards smokers and smoking has been a major driver in smoking bans. Not the driver, but the thing that has made any and all objections by smokers moot. There are cultural issues at play here, just as there are with obesity. I mention it not to convince you that it’s true, but simply to state that it informs my thinking on the topic.)
Larger portion sizes absolutely do cause people to eat more. I’m not denying that one bit. What I am saying, however, is that simply cutting portion sizes in one particular area is not going to make a difference. You know what’s easier than cutting calorie consumption? Calorie-substitution. When I was in Deseret, I worked at a place that had a free soda machine. That was terrible! I drank soooooo much! Then I moved to Estacado and there was no soda machine. I had to buy soft drinks either 12 or 20 ounces at a time. I left Estacado weighing more than I did going in, though. I’m not saying that cutting down on the soft drinks caused me to gain the wait, but it should have helped and didn’t. In Cascadia, I had all the free soft drinks I wanted. I lost 50 pounds in Cascadia. I might chalk all of this up to oddity if it weren’t for something I discovered in my many adventures in dieting: When I cut soft drinks out of my diet, I eat more. If there is a difference in calorie consumption, it’s negligible. That’s not to say that soft drinks are good for me – I know they’re not – but my consumption of soft drinks and consumption of other things do not occur in a vacuum.
It makes sense, on some level, to think “Hey, we consume soft drinks without even thinking about it in places where we wouldn’t consume other foods. We’re not going to replace a soft drink on the way home from work with a burrito. So it’s a gain (or calorie loss) when you get rid of the soft drink. My long experience (as well as a lot of research that McArdle has done) suggests that I may not replace the soft drink with a burrito, but there’s a good chance I will replace it with a snack later on.
That’s why I don’t think there will be any measurable effect. If I’m wrong on that? Great! This will be a win, as far as I’m concerned. Much more likely, I think, we will look around and all of these fat people around us and ask ourselves what else we need to take away. Because I don’t think there will be any fewer of them.
The animosity might not be unrelated to the negative externalities – like not being able to go to a bar and come home without a scratchy throat and clothes smelling like smoke.
Ever sit next to a fat guy on a plane?
The animosity is very related to the negative externalities, but it does go beyond them. We could set up a regime that allows non-smokers over here at this bar and smokers over here at this other bar. We chose not to do that. We would rather smokers be pushed onto the sidewalks where we have to walk by them than give them their own personal haven. Screw the smokers.
(Truthfully, as a smoker, it’s a bit of a briar patch. I don’t mind it and I recognize that it will make it easier to quit. But my point is that the animosity goes beyond the externalities.)
Fat people face massive cultural animosity. Far, far more than smokers do as a matter apart from the direct affect they have on those around them. Until quite recently, smoking was regarded as pretty culturally attractive. But we don’t ban fat people anywhere (though we don’t always accommodate so that they can go everywhere everyone else can). The bans are about the externalities.
The externalities of being fat don’t compare to the externalities of smoking, either. Sitting next to a fat guy doesn’t compare to having to breathe in smoky air in order to go out and have a good time. And the fact the cities and states didn’t set up some kind of licensing system for allowing smoking doesn’t demonstrate that bans were driven by cultural animosity toward smokers; it just shows that they wen with a one-size-fits-all solution. I think it’s as reasonable to think they just didn’t want the hassle of implementing that kind of complex solution or that it was just never proposed (or that the anti-ban contingents never offered it up as an acceptable middle ground) as it is to think it clearly demonstrates that active cultural animosity drove the bans (at all) rather than simply an acknowledgement that in the status quo people weren’t able to enjoy a good time without having to breathe in others’ smoke, and that they should be.
The difference is, sitting next to a fat guy doesn’t give you second-hand heart disease. And if say, flight attendants have to continually work in an environment where they’re constantly at risk of catching second-hand heart disease.
Also, as a non-smoker, I’m happy I can choose a bar/restaurant/place of business on the quality of food/service/etcetera, not whether or not other customers choose to pollute the air.
…It could also have just been a strong commitment to the concept of retail businesses having to take reasonable steps to provide a clean environment for their customers. The idea that a person should not have to breathe in other people’s cigarette smoke in order to be able to patronize that business. We regulate businesses to force them to be accessible to everyone, protecting certain interests of “everyone” that are determined by public deliberation in this way all the time.
If you can name a kind of unhealthy environment factor on the level of smoky bars that is generally allowed for businesses where providing a physical space for clients for prolonged periods of time (restaurants, bars, hotels, airports, etc.) – where those factors are allowed by the same jurisdiction that has banned smoking in restaurants and bars – then you’ve given at least prima facie evidence for cultural animosity being a factor in driving those smoking bans.
Michael,
There are places that have figured out how to tackle the externality without going punitive. The Salt Lake City and Denver Airports. Telling smokers “Hey, go over here and get out of the way of the people who don’t want to breathe this stuff” is eminently reasonable. The Denver model in particular is appealing because they found a way to do that while making money. Other airports, though? They’ve gone punitive. It’s not about reducing the externality, but rather accepting externalities (people having to go through security again, people saying “screw it” and smoking where they’re not supposed to) in order to be unaccommodating.
Washington State banned (and still bans, as far as I know) cigarette smoking in cigar lounges*. My home state passed a law that allowed for hookah lounges, but specifically banned cigarette smoking there (fortunately, they reversed that about a year later). E-cigarettes don’t have the externality, but are still often being treated like cigarettes (maybe if they’d made them look like cigars…).
Smokers brought on a lot of this themselves**. And I understand the desire to give non-smokers places they can go where they don’t have to breathe the stuff. I am supportive of this. But no, this is not just about the externalities. This is about a cultural divide where, after years of suffering, have the upper hand and are taking complete advantage of it. To their own detriment, in some cases.
* – The two are usually lumped together. And yeah, due primarily to externalities. But that the fact that they consciously made the distinction here suggests that there are cultural markers at play. It’s hard to make any sort of rational distinction between the two except who is smoking them, but that’s precisely what Washington State did. And my home state. I don’t believe the underlying attitudes are limited to these two states.
** – I say “themselves” because I try like hell to be a conscientious smoker. I put the cigarette butts back in the carton! I try to get as far out of the way as I can. I am actually frustrated not by being told where I can and cannot smoke where it will or will not disturb people, but rather by process of elimination ending up in situations and places where I am disturbing more people than I would if they would simply give smokers a place to go.
Will,
Why would an airport adopt an agenda to punish smokers because of who they are culturally? Airports are massive administrative/commercial enterprises. The less responsive smoking regulations demonstrates large organizations’ propensity to adopt the least-complex, least-expensive solutions to problems that satisfy stakeholders. Broadly, organizations (private and public) that maintain public commercial spaces have recognized a need to provide for a generally clean, safe, smoke-free environments for patrons. This includes airports. Some also have recognized as stakeholders smokers as smokers – perhaps because the culture around smoking is different in those places than elsewhere, and crafted more accommodating restrictions. but this doesn’t show animosity toward smokers. At most it shows indifference to their particular concerns. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some instances, these less responsive policies are actually less efficient. But in large organizations, especially those as generally dysfunctional as airports, lack of efficiency might just as likely be explained by generally poor administration as by specific animus. It’s just easier to slap on a general ban than it is to do the analysis to see how inefficient the policy is for the airport, and then to figure out where the designated areas should be, etc. I’m not saying it’s impossible that animus is present, but this all just isn’t evidence for it when other, more prosaic explanations are possible. Certainly, airports are responding to changing public attitudes toward smoking in public spaces, but that’s *what* I’m saying they’re responding to, while you’re saying they’re motivated specifically by (their own) cultural animus toward smokers.
And I’m not saying that cultural attitudes toward smoking haven’t changed. Obviously, they have. But that doesn’t establish that smoking bans (even unjustifiably unresponsive ones) are motivated by positive animus toward smokers. Rather, what I’d say is that the cultural assumption in favor of smoking, and in particular smoking in public places, has changed, which allowed for people to consider the effects of smoking in public spaces on non-smokers and form and successfully advance policy positions that are motivated by a desire to address these effects. Even if those policies have not turned out to seek to narrowly balance the interests of non-smokers with smokers’, doing just what was needed to protect non-smokers from the effects of smoking in public indoor spaces, this doesn’t show that cultural animus motivated the policies; it just shows that, now that there’s no cultural assumption to protect smoking, people (in some places) don’t see smokers’ interests (in smoking) to be weighty enough to justify either not simply going with the less complex solution, or in erring on the side of less smoking in public indoor spaces.
The cigar lounge example speaks more to the exigencies of interest politics at the local level. Presumably, Washington established a ban on smoking in public establishments, whereupon cigar shops mobilized to try to save their businesses. The result was the narrowest available carve-out, where a case that this distinctive business needed a certain distinctive exception, otherwise the regulation would unduly stress their business. (This is another reason that a differential smoking ban in bars might have been opted against in many places – a fear that a jurisdiction couldn’t manage the playing field between smoking and non-smoking bars well enough, and you’d have loss of valued establishments, or else there would be essentially no price that was too high to pay to gain a smoking license, whereupon it would just become an extremely onerous tax that didn’t accomplish the policy aim in any degree. Or any of another of other unforeseeable outcomes.)
Will-
First, let me say that I am not necessarily wholly a supporter of smoking bans. My point was more that smoking bans and soda bans aren’t really analogous. Selfishly, I love smoking bans, since I’m a non-smoker. However, I do have some real issues with it. I am curious why more bars didn’t voluntarily ban smoking. Yes, you might lose some clientele, but you might also carve out a niche for yourself for folks like me and my friends, none of whom smoke, and all of whom prefer a smoke-free environment. I turned 21 right around when all these bans went into place, so I really don’t know if there were many or any smoke-free bars. I do remember smoke-free restaurants as well as smoking and non-smoking sections. Did there exist bars that were smoke-free? Was it simply a losing business model? I wonder if, with the bans lifted, any places would voluntarily maintain them after seeing the impact.
Secondly, I agree with you that there is a large stigma on smokers, much of it undeserved. I don’t really harbor any disdain for smokers. My dad was/is a smoker, many of my friends growing up were (though few, if any, are now), and I enjoy a cigar or a cigarette here and there. All of this has probably led to me being less bothered by the whole thing. That being said, I don’t enjoy reeking of smoke, especially if it wasn’t me indulging in it. There is a noticeable decline in my running performance the day after I’ve hung out in a smokey place. But that doesn’t mean that smokers deserve my disdain.
The externalities of smoking are real. Much more real and much more serious than the externalities of soda. Does that make banning the former right and the latter wrong? No. But I do think it makes smoking bans righter (or less wrong) than soda bans, though both probably fall on the “wrong” side of the line, albeit in different places.
Michael, my beliefs stem primarily from being a smoker in a largey non-smoking and anti-smoking subculture. From this I have come away with the belief that there is a personal element to it (even if I’m a credit to my people). Additionally, I believe the disconnect between the demographic profile of smokers (disproportionately poor, disproportionately uneducated, disproportionately not-white) and the anti-smoking legion and the politicians that pass these bans to be significant.
But really, whether you agree with that or not isn’t central. My central point is that no, we’ve moved beyond negative externalities. Whether we attribute any of this towards animus towards smokers themselves or all of it towards cultural attitudes towards smoking and smoking in public (even when no externalities are present), there are cultural dynamics at play. Just as there are cultural dynamics involved in the soda ban.
What happened in Washington is that there were no cigar rooms. The state needed some money and someone came up with the idea of allowing them for a very hefty fee. But they decided to disallow cigarette smoking. That’s similar to what happened in my city, except that it was hookah and not cigars. And in the latter case, the city came around on cigarettes. Maybe Washington will, too.
My general stance on smoking bans is that we shouldn’t look at them as smoking bans exactly, but rather smoker separation. Put them over here so they are not over there (or fewer of them are over there, at any rate). I favor this not for the convenience of smokers (as far as I’m concerned, the more inconvenient the better – I want to quit) but to come up with a system of rules that is manageable instead of what we have now, which I believe actually results in more collision than my preferred set of rules would. But the rule of the day – especially when I talk about this to people – is that it’s insufficiently tough on smoking. Because even when you mitigate the externalities, there’s still the smoking.
Kazzy,
I am on board with the need to mitigate the harm done by second-hand smoke. My main contention is that we have moved beyond that. I think the soda ban is actually a reflection of that. Only marginal externalities, but we talk of banning them anyway. Or taxing them. Or doing something. I view the two as similar because there is an interplay between Public Good and culture. For smoking it may be 90% public good and for the soda ban it may be 50%, or the reasoning for one may simply be more valid than the reasoning for the other, but I think it’s a mistake to look at either and say that they aren’t influenced by cultural passions.
On the smoking side, I think the initial push was almost entirely about public good. Something needed to be done. We needed a system shock. I’m not saying we should, but if we lifted the ban tomorrow, I think a large number of these places would stay non-smoking. At the same time, I think a fair number of these establishments would never have gone non-smoking had they not been initially pushed (most restaurants would have, eventually, but I think few bars would have).
I do think that something has happened along the way though. Culturally desirables, educated white collar sorts, started quitting. And dying. And their children started taking it up in much smaller numbers. And so we increasingly associate smoking cigarettes as something the other does.
I had a job a while back at a software-hardware place. When I first started, smoking ran the spectrum among the various people and their various jobs. We had the Vice President of Accounts out there with us! But he quit smoking. Half the developers quit. Soon, I was one of only a couple white collar employees out there. There was a noticeable change in the atmosphere for smokers as it pertained to the tolerance for it. I believe this is happening on a larger scale.
(To repeat what I just said to Michael, though, whether the attitudes towards the smokers themselves is a part of the issue is not central to my argument. You can say I am imagining things, and I’ll shrug it off and stick to the fact that I simply do not buy that the whole thing is about negative externalities. To whatever extent it initially started as being about that, it’s changed.)
Great point about how smoking bans have made things like soda mans more acceptable. I didn’t think of that or gather that from your statements (I’ll confess to not reading every comment in this little subthread here), but it makes perfect sense. In debating the soda ban with my mom, she kept referring back to the smoking ban. The smoking ban shifted the center, so to speak. A soda ban would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. But the smoking ban, which many folks LOVE and even most smokers have accepted or even appreciate in some way, make a soda ban seem downright reasonable.
Well played, sir!
Will,
You started by saying, “I believe that animosity towards smokers and smoking has been a major driver in smoking bans,” and now your claim is just that, “there are cultural dynamics at play.”
I can’t possibly argue against this new position, especially when you admit that your views are more determined by personal experience (and, it seems to me, personal identification) than evidence.
Suffice to say, people can have personal animus toward smokers and still support bans on smoking in public spaces only because of the externalities. If you want to make your prior claim, you need to demonstrate it, because clearly people are entitled to their attitudes about smokers (I’ve never denied they have them), and they’re entitled to pursue restrictions on business practices that harm them as consumers, and they’re entitled to a presumption that the one isn’t a major driver of the other (IMO). Further, organizations not tailoring those restrictions to a narrow determination of what is necessary to mitigate second hand smoke is better explained by the fact that it’s more trouble and expense to determine that fine balance than to just recognize the need to provide a clean, healthy environment in public commercial spaces, and slap a broad-brush policy on the situation. The fact that some institutions have been more responsive than that of late shows that, over time, organizations respond to patron and stakeholder concerns and strike a balance. But it takes time and energy for that to happen, so the fact that it hasn’t everywhere doesn’t show that animus toward smokers is driving the policy particulars wherever you think they are not narrowly tailored to mitigating the externality.
How in the world does a ban on smoking just inside public establishments, which has a direct effect on everyone inside whether they smoke or not, reasonably make a complete ban on a given serving size of soda throughout an entire geographic-political jurisdiction obviously acceptable, if a smoking ban is? The only reason I can think of is that, however much attitudes toward smoking have changed, some people still think of smoking as a more socially acceptable activity than drinking sugary soda if you are overweight (which I think is actually plausible that some people do).
Michael, I don’t see “a major driver” as being remarkably different from cultural factors being at play. I was not intending to say that animosity is the major driver, but it’s one of them. And I think you take away the negative externalities (as they pertain to second-hand smoke) and you still end up… well… the soda ban. More controversial than the smoking ban, but drawing on many of the same things.
I don’t expect to be able to convince you or anyone else based on my personal experience. That’s non-transferable. I mentioned it as a disclosure and said that I wasn’t trying to convince anybody. It’s something that informs my views as to why I don’t think that the soda ban is just a matter of public health: because I don’t believe its predecessor was (just) that, either.
[Just read your next comment…]
I agree with you that fat people are despised far more than smokers. I’m not sure the actual regulations are as different as you think they are, though. You can still drink as much coke as you want (you can still get 2 liter bottles). As with smoking, it’s just a matter of when/where you can do it.
As for the difference between being in a place where people are smoking and being in a place where they are drinking, well as I said I don’t think the smoking ban was entirely about that. I think how one is being used to justify the other is actually indicative of that. The case for a soda ban is weaker than the case for a smoking ban, but the target is easier.
Ever sit next to a fat guy on a plane?
Yes. It beats the hell out of sitting next to someone who’s smoking.
Agreed. It does. My point was that it’s easy to cite negative externalities. It was poorly applied. I agree that there are significant and unavoidable negative externalities back when smoking was everywhere; I just think there were/are other significant factors and that’s how we got to where we are with soft drinks, despite being in a different league of externality.
I’d rather sit next to the smoker. Airplane seats are too small for comfort as it is, and much less so when you lose half of yours to your neighbor. I once flew in a seat next to a woman who was simply massive. She was well aware of it, and did her best to limit her spillover into my space. And I assume there were physiological reasons for her weight, not that she is in some worthy of condemnation. None of that mitigated the serious discomfort I experienced on that flight.
Unless someone was blowing cigar smoke directly up my nose, a smoker really couldn’t have caused me as much discomfort.
Actually, for me personally, yeah. Not only because of my habit, but because I was raised around it. But when I’m flying, I’m flying with my wife. And a smokey plane is nooooooo good, in that case. And I’d rather our kids not be raised around it, when they come along.
I’d rather sit next to the smoker.
Is that hypothetical, or have you actually done it?
Yes, I have, on Greyhound (back in the ’80s, before smoking on the bus was outlawed).
That doesn’t mean I think smoking on buses and planes should be allowed. There are obviously people a lot more seriously affected by others’ smoking than I am (I’m a bit of an opportunistic smoker–I rarely buy smokes, but I occasionally cadge them), and I think it’s a legitimate regulation. And I don’t think banning obese people from buses and planes would be legitimate. But if I had to choose one or the other, I’d take sitting next to the smoker because it would bother me less.
That said, it didn’t used to bother me to go into bars that were heavy with smoke. I was accustomed to it. Now that I live in a place where smoking in bars has been banned for several years, I find it unpleasant to go into a bar where smoking is allowed. Really unpleasant. I think there ought to be bars where smoking is allowed, or at least we should allow dedicated smoking rooms that are physically separated from the rest of the establishment, including a ventilation system that keeps the smoke out of the other areas, but I would normally avoid going into one.
Honestly, kids these days.
On a bus, you can mix in fresh air by opening a window. Bad idea on a plane. Also the air recirculation systems on airliners were never up to filtering out the smoke. so even the idea of a non-smoking section was a bad joke.
Mike, the Greyhound windows did not open.
Will,
To clarify, I fully agree with you that simple animosity towards smokers drives a lot of the public policy. Most of the rest is driven by the AHA’s and ACA’s concern about heart disease and cancer. But it’s the externalities that legitimate the policies (to whatever extent the various specific policies are in fact legitimate).
And pushing smokers outside is still in many ways better than letting them inside–while they may be somewhat harder to avoid (I hate smokers who cluster just outside the entrances to buildings), because their smoke is dispersed, I suspect the actual amount of second-hand exposure is less.
I assume you have evidence, or at least a reason, to think you should believe this.
What part of my comment does “this” attach to?
Sorry, was going to re-post with that info, then decided it must be obvious from my above ranting. In any case: the first sentence.
My issue is that it seems mighty unfair to presume without evidence that people who are pushing a clearly justified policy (as I believe indoor smoking bans in public establishments/public spaces are) are motivated largely by, basically, personal dislike of the people who will be most affected by the policy. To grant the reasonableness of the policy position but then just to ascribe that position to personal bias rather than said reasons seems nearly as unfair as it would be to be motivated to policy positions by personal bias in the first place.
OK. No, no evidence. Just a hunch. But obviously that’s not what the public justification is, so I can’t object to your skepticism. In general I think most public policy is driven by animosities thinly papered over with handy justifications. In some cases those justifications are indeed legitimating in and of themselves. But the objective public interest theory of public policy has, in my experience, been generally less explanatory than the personal interest (including animosity) theory of public policy. That doesn’t mean animosity’s always the story, just that if you were wagering on randomly chosen cases, you’d win more often by betting on it than by betting on the objective interest approach.
As another example, I don’t really think the transmissibility of HIV was the primary force behind bans on gay bathhouses; it was just a justification that gave a veneer of respectability to anti-gay bias. And I don’t think it was the evidence of actual harm that was the primary motivator in the prohibition era. And I don’t think it’s actual public health concerns that drive the war on drugs.
Sure, smoking could be different. But I’m skeptical.
For what it’s worth, I believe the latter to be an underlying motivation to some extent or another on most issues. So, if it helps, when I brought up cultural markers and non-benign motivations, I was not intended to pick on the anti-smoking lot as being unusually motivated by this. Rather, I was attempting to illustrate the mental connection between A and B and how one can lead to the other even though the ostensible reason for one does not apply to the other. A was about a lot of things, the second-hand health implications being one of them. Maybe the biggest one, but far from the only.
You and I have run into this before (or another manifestation of this). We (or I) need a name for it. And to write my treatise.
James,
Isn’t actual desire not to have to be in smoky air in order to go out drinking as plausible a personal interest motivation for being for smoking ban as is animus toward smokers? Or in any case isn’t the question of objective public interest versus personal interest explanations for policy positions at least silent on which personal interests govern? it seems to me it’s still just a hunch you’re making that personal interest in expressing animus toward smokers has a large(ish) role to play vis-a-vis personal (as opposed to asserted public) interest in there being relatively smoke-free air in bars in animating support/advocacy for smoking bans? It seems to me that the greater explanatory power of the personal interest theory is silent on what role animus toward smokers would play – that it remains just speculation how various personal interests relate to each other among various ones that might drive a person to support smoking bans.
Michael,
You’re right. It’s speculative. But I’ve already said as much. But you’re being fully as speculative about what personal interests drive the policy. I think you’re making some big assumptions about human nature if you’re arguing that people in general have the capacity to not just say, but to mean, “I personally prefer not to have to breathe cigarette smoke, but I bear no ill will toward those who puff in my vicinity.”
I think you are suggesting that the non-animus explanation is more parsimonious because it would sufficiently explain motivation for supporting a smoking ban. But I think it’s less parsimonious than you think because it implicates a theory of human nature that itself requires a demonstration that’s not forthcoming.
I said at one point that the bans are about the externalities, so on that statement, fair enough.* But my main intent, and the majority of what I’ve been arguing the whole time, and what I’d insist on, has been to deny that Will has presented evidence to support speculation that it does play a large role, and that because it is speculation about a thing that would reflect (in my view quite) poorly about the people doing it if true, therefore to say that it isn’t justified to speculate (to the point of asserting) that it’s the case without such evidence. If we could agree that we don’t know what part it plays in the personal interest calculation, that the bans have a solid public interest justification, that we don’t have evidence that personal animus motivates a large part of the pro-ban sentiment, that it’s saying something at least somewhat disparaging about a person to say that that is their motivation if they say it isn’t and it in fact isn’t, and that therefore we shouldn’t engage in such speculation to the point of making assertions about it (asking, Is a large part of the motivation anti-smoker animus? is also speculation, but it’s perfectly fair speculation) without evidence, I’d be perfectly happy to leave it there. (In retrospect, I’d much prefer to be able to say I was only making that anti-speculation argument the whole time, but I had to go and throw that bald assertion of my own in there for effect. I’m happy to take it back.)
* However, I’d argue that there is some evidence that the smoking bans were about the externalities (though not enough to get it past the more-than-speculation bar) – in the form of the myriad other personal attributed that there is public animosity about, which for a long time while smoking bans proliferated, had no ban attempts associated with them. Why did smoking bans so significantly predate attempts to partially ban(! – I still marvel at that – well, I guess it’s really just a regulation when you think about it – same with most smoking “bans,” for that matter) or tax soda? Because they were about the externalities – people got sick of having to come home smelling like they did, and the cultural assumptions holding back those preferences and public calculations (not to mention the number of smokers) disintegrated enough to make those preferences politically viable. That’s not animus toward smokers, that’s a broad change in attitudes about the cultural status of smoking (people stopped just assuming it was part of life, in the workplace, in public leisure spaces, etc.) that previously protected it from public-interest scrutiny of its effects, and opening up the possibility that people could successfully pursue their personal interest in ensuring through law that they wouldn’t have to breath smoky air not just at work but in bars and restaurants, etc.
Michael, this was my original statement, by and large:
(Disclosure: Putting everything else aside, I believe that animosity towards smokers and smoking has been a major driver in smoking bans. Not the driver, but the thing that has made any and all objections by smokers moot. There are cultural issues at play here, just as there are with obesity. I mention it not to convince you that it’s true, but simply to state that it informs my thinking on the topic.)
This was, as much as anything, background information about where I am coming from on this issue. A rather weak statement and arguably something of a disclaimer: Here are my biases. I’m not sure what more I could have said to convey “You can take this seriously, or think I’m nuts, but here ya go…” At the very least, if you thought the preceding paragraph was nuts, I gave you an indication as to why I am nuts. I do not view that as an altogether bad thing.
It might be different if I was trying to make these assertions on the way to trying to convince someone not to trust anti-smokers, but that wasn’t really my aim. Nor was it to suggest that anti-smoking people are particularly nefarious (I was probably unclear on that, and I apologize). Rather, I have a way that I view the world and the way that people tick. The above is the view most consistent with those beliefs. Think about it, ignore it, call me crazy for thinking it… your call.
I should have said… most consistent with those beliefs and with what I have observed over the years. It’s not based solely on my preconceived notions.
Will – acknowledged, and I meant to acknowledge it before, but got caught up in writing everything else I wrote.
However, you did go on to argue your view rather than to back off and just say, hey this is my bias, I’m not claiming a basis you should accept for it (even though you initially said that). In particular @ 8:54 pm: “The animosity is very related to the negative externalities, but it does go beyond them. We could set up a regime that allows non-smokers over here at this bar and smokers over here at this other bar. We chose not to do that. We would rather smokers be pushed onto the sidewalks where we have to walk by them than give them their own personal haven. Screw the smokers.” From there it could only a debate about what assertions can be backed up with evidence, or are fair to make without it – after all, the stuff after the first sentence there is precisely you offering what you take to be evidence for your belief.
I realize you weren’t intending to have that debate, but in order not to you’d have had to back away from it and just say ‘I may not be justified in having this belief, and I’m not going to give any reasons for it. I’m not going to debate, but I’m going to continue to believe it” (Which is rarely something anyone wants to say). Because I was perfectly willing to debate the justification for this belief of yours to whatever extent you wanted to say there is in fact reason to believe it (whether for you or anyone else), whether or not you were saying that you thought other people should believe it. After all, if there’s reason to believe it, there’s reason to believe it. I was happy to get into that, and, in the event, so were you.
I’ve never been good at dropping out of a conversation. I primarily wanted to explain where I was coming from, not realizing that it was taking on an obligation to justify my views to you rather than simply explain them (or try to).
[EDIT: Just caught myself before getting back into it with “one more thing” that, of course, wouldn’t have been…]
I’ve never been good at dropping out of a conversation. I also wanted to explain where I was coming from, not realizing that it was taking on an obligation to justify my views to you rather than simply explain them (or try to).
I do want to add one thing: whether or not I presented evidence depends on what counts. I gave you a number of examples of things that I believe to be indicative of something. You do not believe they are indicative of something. That’s not the same thing as having not produced anything. Also, my original comment was “smokers and smoking.” We disagree as to how separable these things are. I think disdain for the thing invariably spills over to the person doing the thing. Especially when it’s an amorphous other that you associate together only by the thing that they do that you hate.
Look, I am willing to discuss this further and I am willing to let this go. I don’t want the former being seen as me wanting to push my views on the subject. I don’t want the latter being seen as declining to explain myself.
Will,
On not being good at dropping things, you and me both. I think we’ve done ourselves proud here; we needn’t go further on my account. I’m going to address a couple things you’ve just said because there continue to be misunderstandings not just disagreements, and then I’m going to try to leave it there.
You never had any obligation at any point to justify yourself. However, choosing to explain yourself opens your views up for scrutiny. Regardless of whether you are seeking to have me accept your explanation as justifying the view you have, I might be independently inclined to say
that the explanation you’ve offered doesn’t amount to a justification. And that’s what was going on: you just ran into me wanting to make those points on this given day. Even if you had more explicitly and more frequently said that you don’t think your explanations justified your views, I might (maybe, maybe not) have simply been at pains to continue to emphasize how your views weren’t justifiable, or in any case, that you hadn’t justified them and therefore shouldn’t have them (because I think they are unfair to people who have legitimate grievances), so long as you continued to say you held them. It wasn’t that you at some point created an obligation to justify them; it’s that I wanted to challenge their justification, and when you began to offer your explanation, I was independently inclined to judge them as justificatory or not, because I think you ought to have justification for these views if you’re going to hold them – or certainly, express them (even as a “disclosure.”) I don’t accept that you can just have these views, bring them to our attention, and not be questioned about them. (That was longer than I expected it to be.)
On evidence, indeed the issue is whether you produced information that is evidence for your view. You certainly produced something. I deny that it is evidence for your views – i.e. I deny that anything you mentioned even suggests what you think is the case is the case more than it suggests something else is the case.
And on explanation, I think your view of explanation is something rather closer to justification. I.e., even if you don’t expect your justification to convince me your view is justified, you want me to understand why you think it is justified. Otherwise, I don’t think I understand what you mean by explanation as distinct from justification. You explained what your view was clearly early enough in the thread. From there, it seems to me you were giving me your reasons – your justifications for your belief. If that’s what you wanted to explain, fair enough, but in this case I was inclined to tell you that I still thought your views were not justified. At some point, then, you’ve got to conclude you’ve explained your self-justification fully and act out your stated acknowledgement that you don’t expect others to think these actually justify your view. (Which you did do eventually, but basically after the entire exchange was over.) While we were at it, it did not seem to me that you were interacting in such a way to indicate that you knew your views aren’t actually justified. And that makes sense, because if you think your views are justified, it’s hard to act like you don’t think they are. But if they’re justified, and you’ve fully explained your reasons, then other rational people ought to acknowledge that they are justified: that’s just what it means for views to be justified. And it seemed to me that’s exactly the discussion we were in effect having.
Or in other words, I think what happened was that, because you had said you weren’t out to convince people, that whenever I persisted in saying, ‘But that doesn’t justify your view,’ you thought I must just not be understanding what you were describing as your own private reasons. But in reality I was just reiterating that none of it in fact justifies your view, just because I wanted to and I could. Again, I don’t think your language through the “debate” we had suggested you were not trying to do a degree of public justification, beyond just an explanation of what you acknowledged were reasons that didn’t justify your view. But I acknowledge that throughout, in your mind, you were not trying to convince me or readers that we should think your reasons justified your view. But whatever you were or weren’t saying about what outside force you thought your reasons had or didn’t, I was independently choosing to say that the reasons, evidence, etc. that you were offering in fact did not justify the view you’d expressed. Because I wanted to put that statement on the record in response to each of the reasons you gave (so long as I continued to find that they didn’t justify your views), regardless of whether or not you were saying they ought to justify your views to anyone other than you.
Basically, I was just doing what I was doing – it wasn’t because I thought you were saying we all should think your reasons justified your view. (Though in the middle of it, I think your language kind of suggested that that’s how you were operating, or at least didn’t suggest you were looking to maintain clarity that you weren’t claiming to offer a publicly valid justification.)
Pushing them outside is better than having them inside everywhere (as they used to be), but I think better still is having them inside their own place where the smoke goes out a vent into the sky. Yeah, it’ll be smokier inside, but as long as the people inside are smokers, it’s a chosen hazard (Seriously, though, a good vent system works wonders. It still smells bad, but you can make it not like the smoky bars of old.).
This. I forget which airport I was at where I saw interior enclosed smoking rooms. Either Salt Lake or Las Vegas, iirc.
However if you want to avoid animosity, never smoke in SLC near the temple.
San Francisco used to have them, though I haven”t seen one recently. It had glass walls, was so smoky that you could barely see the people inside, and made me think “gas chamber”.
Mike,
The last time I went through SFO was before those, but, yeah, that’s pretty much the image. I suppose a more effective ventilation system could minimize the gas chamber effect, but perhaps the lack of better ventilation is a purposeful choice (to deter smoking that is, not to give Jewish people the creeps).
“There is research showing that large portion sizes cause people to eat/drink more.”
http://news.yahoo.com/japan-diet-glasses-fool-wearers-eating-less-114410996.html
Video glasses reproject pictures of food to make it look smaller or larger. Test subjects respond by eating more when the food items look small, and eating less when the food items look big.
Things like this make me wonder if Bloomberg isn’t a Tea Partier slyly trying to discredit liberalism by introducing a nanny-state measure designed to make the entire liberal project look absurd.
But it is useful as a real life example of where the reductio ad absurdem argument is bounded. It seems to me that whatever public health benefits are gained, the costs associated with the intrusion and heavy-handedness of the government action aren’t worth it.
Within the assumption that the state has such a role, things that conceivably harm everyone at once are on a different level as intrusion than things where the collective complaint amounts to “years down the line he might have an ailment that a piece of MY money is helping treat!”. The former is the environment (though I’d argue rather that the problem of pollution is more because state & business collusion pretty much pretends the commons doesn’t exist, but this isn’t the time or place), the latter is nitpicking to which a response of “if it offends you that damn much then fine, don’t pay for them” makes tons of sense.
Contrary to the belief among more openly nanny-state types, collective-via-state health care automatically leading to sacrifice of others’ lifestyles in favor of a certain overwhelmingly upper-class cultural bubble is not Hey We’re All In This Together, it’s just the “progressive” wing of old-fashioned sneering at the peons. That the thought of what right-wingers might come up with to micromanage lives with such a grant of power doesn’t scare those people away from the concept shows either they don’t think people different from them will ever make the rules, or worse, they assume the rules will never apply to them anyway so they don’t care.
If the Bloomberg attitude towards how individuals choose to live is compatible with “liberalism”, then liberalism is dead.
When i came back from a bike trip in Europe a month ago i was stunned at how big all the people on the flight from Seattle to anchorage were. sure everybody on the bike trip was fit, that is to be expected. but i really couldn’t tell if the all the super sized people on the flight was just an aberration or if i hadn’t noticed it. had i forgotten or not noticed how large Americans were and had become used to skinnier euros??? it was weird. hearing the large person in the row in front of me snoring loud enough i could hear him over the jet engines was…interesting.
I’ve seen mixed data on whether this will work. Even if it works i think this goes a bit to far in controlling what people can buy. I’d prefer to see more education and making physical activity more accessible. While sugared sodas are a pretty darn obvious source of high calories that many people are likely unaware of there are many loopholes that will make this law less powerful. In any case unless people learn why sugared sodas are bad i can’t see it making a huge change.
fwiw i’m a major diet soda drinker. i love me a bucket full of the stuff, but calories aren’t an issue. the bottom less soda that most restaurants have now is interesting. i love it, since i can drink and drink and drink. I imagine this trend has started since the only way restaurants can get people to choke down 18oo calories of meat and fries and cheese and bacon and etc is to offer a constant supply of liquid. that is not a healthy combo of course.
From what I understand, Europe is following the same trajectory we did, just a few decades behind. I hope it’s not true.
One big reason for bottomless drinks is actually that it allows them to charge more. The marginal costs are very minimal compared to the fixed costs of running an establishment. So you look for any and every way you can justify charging more. Charge a little more money for a lot more food, you end up significantly ahead. Hence, huge portion sizes.
And I totally get that this is a problem. But it’s a holistic problem. Getting people to consume less coke does not necessarily result in them consuming less calories.
There are far more examples where true “Health Freedom” comes into play than there are examples when “Health” is pitted against “Freedom.” We will do well to keep our eye on the ball and look up to the big perspective rather than to get lost in the relative minutia of big drinks in the Big Apple. Places to defend our health freedom are:
– The attack on the rights of people to choose their alternative therapist (states have shut down colon hydrotherapists, nutrition advisors, and more in the past few weeks)
– The attack on potent nutritional supplements
– The increasing requirement of food, even raw food co-ops and organic food products, to be irradiated and pasteurized either by heat or chemicals
– The shuttering of raw foods businesses
– The attack on labeling GMO (genetically modified organisms) in food, when the right to know what we eat is a basic right
– The attack on the right to collect roof water rather than drink chloraminated and fluoridated tap water
– The mandatory vaccine issues currently pressuring people in various kinds of educational and occupational settings to get vaccinated against their preference
– The influence of pharma corporations and pharma-lobbied FDA in health care, resulting in the lack of healthy alternatives presented to patients proven to prevent, heal, and reverse depression, diabetes, heart conditions, and more naturally.
Health and freedom are teammates far more often than they are opponents. That is so true because man’s essential nature is health and free.
If Super-sized sodas, energy drinks and candies are such health risk and some of the leading causes of obesity that ineitably place even more financial strains on our tenuous healthcare system- why not a sin tax on big gulps, candy etc.
This isn’t a sin tax, Jerry. This is a ban.
More broadly, I find the “Your personal choices cost the system money” a very problematic argument. It essentially says that government-funded health care makes our choices the government’s business. That criticisms that our freedom is at stake when it comes to the socialization of health care is actually quite valid.
I mean, we can argue that it’s dumb to equate government-funded health care as anti-freedom. Or we can use the fact that government-funds health care allows the government to involve itself in our choices. We can’t argue both.
THIS SECOND-HAND FAT IS KILLING ME!
This is the same Mayor who today says he supports not having police enforce laws on marijuana. I guess they need more time to issue tickets for a 32 ounce soft drink.
You wanna know how to lose the support of a lot of people who support legal marijuana? Put joints in a box that says Marlboro on it.
??? Can you exlain this?
If pot ever became legal-legal, guess who would make it? One of the most reviled industries in the country. That’s who.
I support legal-legal regardless, but the thought does amuse me.
Have you heard what Gov Cuomo of NY has proposed? Making possession of small amounts of the debil weed in public a violation only worthy of fine and not a misdemenor. Only a small improvement, even if passes, but something on the right way.
Yes! Very awesome! I doubt pot will ever be legal-legal (in part because of the Marlboro thing, actually, or more precisely a preference from keeping high-volume marketing and distribution networks from forming.)
What I feel like is lost whenever a freedom vs. health issue comes up is who ultimately has to pay for it. While almost every form of government aid asks you to give something up in return (for example the unemployed have to prove they are looking for jobs [and in some states get tested for illegal drug use]) medicare only requires that you be of age. The upshot of this, as almost all adults in the US will be on medicare at some point, is that this “it is my body!!” nonsense doesn’t hold water. The younger generation, myself included, has to foot the bill when you need to get hooked up to oxygen and pumped full of steroids when you smoke yourself into COPD. We have to pay for your high blood pressure medication, heart surgeries, canes, fatguy scooters, post-stroke physical therapy, etc etc when you eat yourself into a quasi-human simulacrum more blob than man. Fine, it’s your choice, but only after you permanently opt out of government entitlements. Until then, we all have an interest in forcing people to be healthy.
It sounds like government subsidization of health care is a serious threat to our freedom.
I mean, risky sexual behavior causes all sorts consequences that the system has to pay for. In fact, everything we do can make us less healthy or more healthy. And since we’re all going to be on Medicare one day and a lot of us will be on Medicaid, they have domain over just about everything…
That seems like the slippery slope fallacy.
Health related problems due to obesity and smoking account for the vast majority of Medicaid outlays. I wish that those who want to be unhealthy in this mundane and easy-to-moderate ways are forced to change their behavior or permanently and unchangeably opt out of government health aid of all kinds.
The biggest threat to my freedom is the future collapse of the US economy if we don’t start shutting off aid to bloated boomers before they sink the whole ship.
Not slippery slope. I’m simply saying that if you’re saying we don’t have the right to do with our bodies as we seem fit, this has implications beyond smoking and diet and other things that Lazlo Panaflex disapproves of.
If it makes you feel any better, there are indications that smokers end up saving the government money in the long run because they die sooner and often of an untreatable illness (so millions aren’t spent trying to treat it). Tod (who knows about such things) has made references to that.
It has implications that are that limited by practicality – for example, you can easily assay tobacco use and diet, but not sexual behavior or general risk taking. The cost/benefit analysis for testing some given behavior vs. its actuarial impact on health costs would not be particularly expansive. There should be limits placed on the freedom of people who participate in Medicare, just like there are limits placed on people who take an FHA loan, collect unemployment, collect social security disability payments, use a federal student loan, etc.
People should be free to opt out for good if they find it is too onerous to maintain a health body weight, and be ineligible for life once they have. As an upside, they should also be exempt from paying into the system.
I do disapprove of the fact the majority of federal outlays are for treating illnesses people brought on themselves. Why am I expected to pay a dime for someone who couldn’t stop gorging themselves on cheeseburgers? If you big gulp yourself into type two diabetes, you shouldn’t get taxpayers to foot the bill.
So your only issue with regulating sex lives is logistical?
I respect the ability to opt out and be exempt from the system. The problem is that (a) we have trouble saying “tough luck” to a sick elderly person (which is why Medicare was instituted in the first place, and one of the reasons why it’s so expensive) and (b) the uninsured take a toll on the system (which is one of the reasons why we PPACA has a mandate attached to it). It’s an ideologically sound idea, but has some practical problems.
If we could perfect camera technology, we would finally be able to overcome this logistical problem of figuring out who is doing what, tax various acts, and use the footage to create new revenue streams.
Jaybird, GPS systems have given us a head start, right?
use the footage to create new revenue streams
After all, they owe it to us. (A sentiment I disapprove of only because of who said it, not because it’s vile or anything.)
Yet nanny bloomberg supports “doughnut day.” Apparently doughnuts in moderation won’t hurt unlike soda.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bloomberg-defends-supporting-donut-day-banning-sugary-drinks-article-1.1088261
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but here goes anyway.
When I started working, smoking was considered as normal as drinking coffee. If you shared an office with a chain-smoker, you put up with it or you were considered a whiner. (Yes, if you made a fuss, you could probably find someone to switch with you, but the onus was on you.) Over the next few years, things started to change: An effort was made have smokers share offices with other smokers. The company bought ashtrays with little fans in them. Smoking was banned in the cafeteria. Finally, smoking was forbidden except in designated areas outside, which is where we are today.
This is a huge improvement. There is no reason to have to spend a third of your life in a smoke-filled room because of someone else’s habit.
Sure. I don’t want to go back to yesteryear. But having reservations about where we are does not mean support for that. Not that you’re saying it does. I just want to be clear on that point. It doesn’t have to be either-or and where we are now is actually counterproductive in some respects (to the non-smokers themselves) and unnecessary in others (we can backtrack in some places without having to backtrack 20 years). As I said above, smokers have earned a lot of the animosity poked in their direction.
(With the exception of people in certain segments of the service industry, I support all indoor workplace bans.)
We got where we are by demonizing smoking (which, unfortunately, demonizes smokers as a side effect.) When I was in high school, all the cool kids smoked. Nowadays, almost none do, because it’s considered low status. That perception did a lot more than the health scares ever did.
That is, while I understand what you’re saying, and don;t in principle disagree, I think there are two points of stability:
1. Smoking is accepted, so it’s everywhere.
2. Smoking is disparaged, so it’s ghettoized.
Even with its faults, I prefer 2.
The “low status” factor is one of the most understated aspects of smoking and smoking bans. I don’t know if that was ever the goal of anti-smoking campaigns, but it made a lot of what has happened over the years possible.
I consider the ghettoization of smoking to actually be unstable, though. The lack of acceptable places to smoke actually make the following of the rules – or not following of the rules – more arbitrary and inconsistent.
At a rest stop, say, the ghettoization of it is “You cannot smoke within 25 feet of the restroom. Out there it’s windy and maybe rainy and the piercing sun is out, but we don’t care.”
The end result is that if it is windy or rainy, people are simply going to smoke within 25 feet of the restroom.
On the other hand, if you put up a little canopy and some transparent or translucent wind-blocking walls (I live in windy country), you’ve created the stability of these people over here and those people 200 feet over there.
I think one of my fears of where this is all is headed is that while smoking will never be banned and cigarettes made illegal, the rules will be such that they are difficult enough to follow that nobody will.
We can say, well they’re not following the law now, but in my view that only kind of reinforces things… I mean, some people are scofflaws, but as often as not, we’re actually just looking for a place to go. Among other things, smokers are pack animals who will go where the other smokers are. Right now that’s right outside the doorway, as often as not, since it’s the consistent place out of the sun/win/rain (we’re also creatures of habit… obviously).
On the other hand, if you put up a little canopy and some transparent or translucent wind-blocking walls (I live in windy country), you’ve created the stability of these people over here and those people 200 feet over there.
That makes a lot of sense. It’s still ghettoization, of course. Literally.
64 comments on a sub-blog post before I even get a chance to read the OP? Wow.
One thing I wanted to touch base on that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere is that the justification for this policy seems to stem largely from the research Mr. Hanley refers to above regarding larger sizes causing people to consume more than they otherwise would.
My problem with this is that research does not have any meaningful nexus to the policy Bloomberg is pushing here. That research dictates that people should have the ability to order smaller portion sizes; it does not dictate that they should be prevented from obtaining larger portion sizes. In other words, to the extent one wishes to solve the problem identified by that research, the appropriate solution is to require that restaurants/stores offer an 8 or 12 ounce option, not to prohibit the 32 ounce option. As long as smaller options are available and are the standard option (and what restaurant or store ONLY offers a 32 ounce option or offers it as the default option?), the decision to drink an ungodly amount of soda is made consciously at the time the consumer places their order. The research on which this policy is apparently based, however, deals only with the subconscious effects of larger sizes AFTER the individual receives the food/drink.
I just have two tangentially related comments to make about this post (which id first rate, btw). The first is that if there is anyone outside of Bloomburg’s office, on the right or left, that does not mock this bill I have yet to see them.
The second is that this ban seems the negative image of the ban on smoking. One effects the the health of one person and the other many; one drives up the cast of healthcare for society and the other drives it down.
I’ve actually seen a pretty good number of people defending it. To my knowledge, though, few of these people would be accurately characterized as being of the “right” or the “left,” but rather of the “center”; David Frum is a pretty good example. The most notable exception is probably Michael Tomasky.
I’d be interesting is seeing a federal bill that stipulates greater taxes for places that sell or serve certain kinds of foods to fund HCR. It makes no sense to me that we tax tobacco companies for selling something that reduces healthcare costs, but not companies that increase them.
I’m not a terribly big fan of sin taxes, and particularly not of taxes that are justified on the basis of what I’ve called, not entirely accurately, the “negative externality of increased negative externalities” (https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2010/03/26/sin-taxes-and-the-welfare-state/). That said, it would be a far less intrusive way of addressing the issue than a ban.
I’m not a big fan of them either, for a variety of reasons. (For one thing, they almost immediately cease to be about curbing behavior and instead become simply a budgeted income stream. In Oregon one of the [many] budget problems we have now is that much of our education budget funding comes from cigarette tax, and smoking numbers are plummeting – which creates a hole that needs to be filled.)
And yet I do have a problem with companies like McDonalds and Coke being allowed to advertise and promote their products as part of a healthy lifestyle a jillion times a day in ever medium with the costs of healthcare continually rising. It may be there is no real solution for this, and that if you have a free society one of the caveats is that you have to allow people to undermine it in various ways. This is why even though I find the NY drink ban laughable, I was actually a big supporter of the controversial demand that nutritional info had to be available to customers.
I’m actually quite ok with requirements to make nutritional information available.
Ditto. I don’t care if there were no measurable effects with the nutrition-availability requirement because, in my view, it added on the freedom side of the ledger more than it detracted.
(Easy for me to say, I guess, since I’m not the one who had to supply the numbers.)
Whenever you’re asking yourself “Is there anybody actually supporting this proposed legislation on food?” look up Marion Nestle and see what she has to say. I call her my nemesis ever since she (a) said that a 20oz Coke had 800 calories* and (b) suggested that some meat irradiation technology was actually bad because it meant more people would eat meat who might not have been due to fear of getting ecoli.
If I ever needed a food-hawk villain in my writing, I’d use Nestle as my blueprint. I’d have to make some changes, though, as if Nestle weren’t real, she wouldn’t seem realistic.
* – To be fair, she corrected herself. What happened was that she saw a photoshopped image and thought it was real. Okay, we all get fooled. But seriously, if you’re a nutrition person, 800 calories for a 20oz soda shouldn’t even pass the sniff test.
2 1/2 cups of HFCS would be about 2200 calories, so if it’s 40% HFCS, 60% water… 🙂
Testing this out.
Another test comment.
I like James Lileks’s comment on this: “Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.”
It does seem like this is more about “Eff You, Fatty” than anything else. As with worrying about overpopulation, it’s a way for enlightened progressives to pretend that their emotional responses are actually the result of rational thought. It’s not that we think fat people are disgusting; we’re just worried about the obesity epidemic and its implications for healthcare costs. It’s not that we’re scared by nonwhites in large groups jabbering a foreign language; we’re just worried about overpopulation and its implications for the global food supply.
(And yes, that was ripped off from O’Rourke.)
“I could never date a fat person because I can’t be with someone that doesn’t have respect for their health and body.”
Yeah. That’s exactly why you won’t date a fat person.
(Okay, sometimes it is actually true. Let’s just say it’s a claim that I have become enormously skeptical of, especially when I have limited information about them.)
This has nothing to do with anything, but In my experice the more likely someone is to tell someone they will not date an overweight person the more likely they are to not be in, shall we say, “optimum shape.”
No one expects the thin guy to date a fat girl. No explanation is necessary. The thickly-built fellow? He has to explain. so he explains that it’s about health.
I know that “fat” is being used hee to mean “hopelessly unattractive.” I’m just reflecting that nowadays Marilyn Monroe would be considered fat.