This is more for entertainment than discussion. I heard it on Beck today, it’s hilarious. It’s a new government ad on the radio. Check it out here.
Pathetic!
Food stamps are one of the major causes of obesity. I see these people rolling through my local discount grocery store with three shopping carts heaping full of groceries; wife approximately 400 lbs, husband skinny as a rail but looks like he hasn’t worked a job in the last 5 years, and a teenage daughter who could rival the Goodyear blimp for girth. Copy/paste the same thing a dozen times at every cash register. It’s grotesque.
Clayton -
Food stamps are one of the major causes of obesity.
Do you have any actual evidence for this apart from an anecdote regarding your pre-judgment of people observed at a distance?
@Consumariat: Well, it’s praxeologically the case - when the government subsidizes something (eating food), there will be more of it. The more food that is eaten by the same population, the more obesity there will be in that population. Feel free to point out the flaw in my reasoning. Or shall we “test” the Law of Sines with a compass and straight-edge to see if it “empirically holds”?
Clayton -
In other words you have no idea whether or not these people had a jobs, and you just decided to make a rash judgment based on how they looked. Not that you need to be unemployed to qualify for food stamps, but then you’d know that already right?
Anyway, since entitlement to food stamps is assessed on an individual basis wrt a person’s financial predicament, it is not the case that people just have an endless means to purchase as much food as they like. Food stamps are not a blank cheque, and people on them have budget restraints just like anyone else.
The claim that you ‘know’ for sure the main cause of obesity is food stamps ignores the fact that there are other factors that lead to a society getting fatter. Culture, the cost and accessibility of healthy food, lack of education regarding the calorie content of food, etc. Praxeology is only valid (if it is at all) in a theoretical world where all other factors are held constant.. Reality doesn’t work like that, so yes, you do need empirical evidence.
That is assuming that
- The food consumed is not healthier/more expensive
- Other health related behavior doesn’t change
- The people receiving foodstamps would have been able to afford food anyway…
Don’t lie.
Clayton -
@Neo: I think (3) is the controversial point but I think it’s generally true. Most people on foodstamps would not otherwise be in destitution, they would be in troubel with their parents, grandparents, buddies or whoever it is they would be mooching off if it were not for foodstamps.
Clayton -
Don’t lie about what exactly?
@Consumariat: I highlighted the error. Feel free to re-read my prior posts for comprehension and then fix your mistake.
More food stamps = more fat chicks? This government thing ain’t so bad after all!
If your quibbling about the fact you said ‘one of the major causes’ rather than ‘the major cause’, then it seems you are incapable of noticing that my point still stands. You have no way of determining via first principles what importance at all food stamps have wrt to the obesity problem. So whether it is the major cause, or simply one of them, is irrelevant.
I’m still waiting for your response to the substance of my second post, btw. Or is your tactic here to quibble about minor discrepancies in order that you may avoid having to provide one?
My reaction to this ad:
I will grant that we can’t determine how much food stamps contribute to obesity without doing empirical measurments. After all, “how much?” is an inherently empirical question. So, I guess I should drop the “one of the major” and just say food stamps cause obesity because that is praxeologically true. Are there other causes? Yes. Can we determine how much food stamps contribute to obesity from first principles? No. But it’s still the case that food stamps cause obesity.
The ad itself is a data-point - why did the health & human services department feel the need to tell people that food stamps can help people eat healthy unless there is some kind of “misconception” they are attempting to “correct” ? This kind of PSA is aka propaganda.
Clayton -
I’d be careful phrasing it that way, because it sounds like you are saying that food stamps must cause obesity, unless that is what you mean, but then I would disagree with that statement.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of theoretical constructions which praxeologists employ. The discovery of causality depends on isolating causal factors. When in an ‘experiment’, if there are multiple causal factors at play, no final statement on causality can be made. It would be illogical to conclude in a situation with multiple causal factors on one of them merely by observation.
This is the reason that praxeology was conceived: to create an actual scientific method of economics, to determine causality in the market process. Once the causal factor is discovered through praxeology, it is not lost when the total complexity of the market is reintroduced. It merely serves to interpret (make sense of) the market complexity.
Within the Emprical-inductive framework, one often wrongly concludes upon observation of the data that one change in the figures determines another. But this is the old correlation-causation mistake. One’s conclusions may be correct upon drawing from data tables, but only incidentally or from drawing on the knowledge of causality in the market. For instance the amount of buffalo in the great plains is inversely correlated with the settlement of vacant land. According to an inductive principle we may conclude that to settle vacant land we must only sacrifice more buffalo to develop land. Even in the empirical models, economists tacitly accept the notion of a priori knowledge in squabbling to assert one causal factor over another as a definitive principle of the market.
Here’s some praxeological validation.
FTFY.
Ceteris paribus, yes. The logic is painfully simple.
- Food subsidy → more food consumption
- More food consumption → more calories consumed
- More calories consumed → more obesity
Clayton -
Actually, praxology is valid in every and all cases, as it simply cannot be invalid any more than 1 can not equal 1. Logic is funny that way.