Against Occupational Licensing

                                                     Link to the article above

Amid many questionable opinions, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has an excellent take on occupational licensing, as can be seen from the November 24, 2017 editorial linked above. The editorial draws from the report "License to Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing" by the Institute of Justice.

I have been a vocal opponent of occupational licensing for longer than I have been a proponent of negative interest rates as a monetary policy tool (November 5, 2012). In my August 12, 2012 post "When the Government Says "You May Not Have a Job" I write

... sometimes, the rich and the middle class both gang up on the poor. This is nowhere more in evidence than in the area of occupational licensing. ...

Once an occupational licensing regime is set up, one factor making the system hard to change is that those who “paid their dues” to get the license resent the idea that others could do what they do without a license. But even before an occupational licensing regime is set up, an important impetus is often those within a field who resent the idea that others who do lower quality work should be allowed to tarnish the reputation of a field. There is a problem here. It is often a low level of skills that puts someone in the position of being poor. Therefore, to say that no one should be allowed to put up a shingle to do cheap, low-quality work is often to say that a poor person should not be allowed to work. But somehow, the poor who look so sympathetic in other contexts start looking like “riffraff” when they are the competition. ...

... if political forces are insistent that something must be done by government, there is all the difference in the world between government regulation of labels and government regulation of substance. ...

To the extent that even the urge toward substantive occupational licensing cannot be resisted because of at least superficially plausible arguments about health and safety, it might be possible to get a better balance by imposing some kind of global budget constraint on licensing requirements that forces regulation to focus on those requirements that have the least specious justifications. 

The kind of global budget constraint I have in mind in that last sentence is the one I proposed in my July 22, 2012 post "Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School": 

What I want to do is to restrain the tendency to go overboard on occupational licensing while allowing genuinely necessary competencies to be transmitted by requiring states to ensure that their schools high school tracks that would make it reasonably possible to be meet the legal qualifications for any of at least 60% of all licensed occupations, with each student able to be qualified with his or her high school diploma for at least 10% of all licensed occupations. Then the graduates might actually be able to get a job. This requirement for getting the Federal education grant could be met by any combination of reducing licensing requirements and increasing effective training that each state chose. I am sure that states would game the rule, so that the overall effect would be less than what this sounds on the surface, but it would be better than the way things are now, where students graduating from high school are kept out of many of the more desirable occupations by occupational licensing restrictions. 

For those who want to fight occupational licensing as I do, the editorial linked above, "Licenses to Kill Opportunity" is itself a rich resource, hinting at the richness of the Institute of Justice report "License to Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing." Below let me first give some quotations from the Wall Street Journal about the facts, then about the interpretation of the motivation for licensing and the costs of licensing:

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Facts:

• California’s door repairmen, carpenters and landscapers must first rack up 1,460 days of supervised on-the-job experience, then pay more than $500 for the license, before they can work as a contractor.
• Until recently, the New Hampshire Board of Barbering, Cosmetology & Esthetics could levy fines on salons that have a barber’s pole—or even a pole painted red, white and blue that resembles one—but no licensed barber.
• Only three states and the District of Columbia require a license for interior designers. But in all four, aspirants must clock six years of education or experience, pass an exam, and pay between $1,120 and $1,485 for the license. That’s far more training than is required for a dental assistant (Washington, D.C.), optician (Florida), midwife (Louisiana) or pharmacy technician (Nevada).
• In February an Arizona board targeted a cosmetology student who dared to give free haircuts to the homeless. He risked being barred from the profession until Gov. Doug Ducey interceded.

The Motivation for Licensing:

• The cost and time to obtain a license is no accident, as professional guild members sit on state licensing boards and reinforce the racket. They want to limit competition to keep prices high.
• Licensing proponents claim they’re merely protecting public health. But the Institute for Justice found that on average tree trimmers undergo 16 times more training than an emergency medical technician, and cosmetologists more than 11 times.
• ... heavy-handed licensing doesn’t follow party lines, which means the rules are rooted in political muscle more than ideology.

The Costs of Licensing:

• Stiff licensing requirements are often prohibitive for America’s working poor, keeping them trapped in low-wage, low-skill jobs.
• Many states also bar people with a criminal record from working in a licensed profession. Society pays the price. Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Economic Liberty found that in states with burdensome licensing requirements, recidivism rates increased by more than 9% over a 10-year span. In states where it was easier to get a license, the rates went down.
• Nationwide, licensing drives up prices by as much as $203 billion annually. The requirements also hurt consumers by restricting access to goods and services.

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Because it is a genuinely bipartisan good government initiative, the fight against the overgrowth of occupational licensing is a fight that can be won. (It isn't just the Wall Street Journal and Institute of Justice trying to restrain occupational licensing. The Obama administrations Treasury Department also weighed in against excessive occupational licensing.) Because it is a fight at the state level, it is a good effort for politically inclined high school and college students as well as their elders to get involved in. 

Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt →

In addition to the link above, for more contrarian discussion of nutrition, obesity and chronic diseases, don't miss:

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid
• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
• Sugar as a Slow Poison
• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
• Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt
• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So
• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy
• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
• On Fighting Obesity
• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
• Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities

Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life."

John Locke Off Base with His Assumption That There Was Plenty of Land at the Time of Acquisition

                                         "Range's End" by Edward Hopper (or is it "Ranges End"?)

In "John Locke's Song of Praise for Work," treating section 32 of John Locke's 2d Treatise on Government,  I discuss John Quiggin's post "John Locke Against Freedom." John Quiggin argues that John Locke wrote his 2d Treatise in order to justify English freedom on the one hand, enslavement of Africans and expropriation of Native American lands on the other. I am not willing to follow John Locke in disregarding the claims of Native Americans. (See "John Locke on Diminishing Marginal Utility as a Limit to Legitimately Claiming Works of Nature as Property" where I argue against the expropriation of native lands as follows:

To justify, theoretically, taking that land from the Native Americans, one would have to add the principle that when technology changes so that people need less land to support themselves, then previous land claims need to be reevaluated. In general, such a principle is a recipe for a big mess. Better to, at a minimum, require rich outsiders to purchase land as European Americans did from Native Americans in a few cases, and as the European New Zealanders did to a much greater degree from the Maori. If technology has really improved dramatically, they should be able to do so.

But even if one blithely and callously disregards the claims of Native Americans to the lands they occupied before the Europeans arrived, John Lockes' argument in section 33 that there is so much land that no one should object to someone claiming the amount that individual can cultivate runs afoul of actual history after the time John Locke wrote. When farmers claimed land in the American West, and put up barbed wire to mark their claim, the cowboys who had been used to driving cattle through were mightily aggrieved. Keep that vivid bit of history in mind when reading the text of section 33:

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his inclosure for himself: for he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst: and the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

Of course, tortured logic is exactly what one should expect when someone is twisting his arguments to get a complex set of politically desired argumentative results that don't really hang together. 

If John Locke's theory of land ownership is marred, where then can one turn for a theory of land ownership? Here is my view so far:

1. As John Quiggin quotes David Hume, but limited to land only: “there is no property in ... lands ... when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.” (The original of the quotation from David Hume mentions houses as well, but I don't agree with David Hume about houses, since someone might have built their own house or built a house and voluntarily conveyed it to someone else.) 
2. As with national borders, to avoid endless conflict, there must be a statute of limitations on land claims. 
3. There should be a heavy Henry George tax on land, to reduce the injustice from the current distribution of land based on the first two points. (I won't call it a single tax, because unfortunately, it would be hard to raise enough revenue from this alone to do all of the things the government is currently doing.) Zera has a nice post on the "Economic Theories" blog about John Stuart Mill's approach to such a land tax. 

What seems to me even more precious than land is sovereignty: the right to construct one's own government, which in our world—both now and historically—often goes along with certain pieces of land. John Locke, although he deserves to be reprobated for his support of slavery and the expropriation of Native American lands, does deserve credit for helping to at least some degree separate the justification of sovereignty from the possession of particular pieces of land. 

Don't miss other John Locke posts. Links at "John Locke's State of Nature and State of War."

Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli and Tommaso Sonno: There Is a Cultural Channel Causing People to Vote for Populism, But Not a Cultural Cause. The Cause Is Still Economic Insecurity

Link to the article shown above

Note: This post is closely related to "Brian Flaxman: Yes! Economics Did Sway Obama Voters to Trump."

Bonnie Kavoussi pointed me to this interesting VoxEU article. The gist is given by these excerpts:

Economic insecurity is our key determinant of the demand for populism. Because we consider turnout, we can establish a mechanism for the effect of economic insecurity on populism. It acts on two margins: it discourages participation, and increases the chance of voting for a populist party among those who decide to exert their voting right.

An individual who goes from no economic insecurity to economic insecurity is more likely to vote for a populist party. The probability increases by 14.5% of the unconditional sample mean. The individual is also 21 percentage points less likely to vote, equivalent to 27% of the sample mean. These are substantial effects.

Voting, and voting for a populist party, are affected also by two cultural variables:

• Trust in political parties ...

• Adverse attitudes towards immigrants ...

So, there is a cultural channel causing people to vote, and vote for populism but not a cultural cause. The cause is still economic insecurity. Trust and attitudes towards immigrants are proximate causes of the populist vote, not deep drivers.

I want to point out that the current sense of economic insecurity in turn has identifiable causes. Technological trends—in particular manufacturing going the way of agriculture—and trade deficits have played an important role. But flawed monetary policy has also played a big role. If there had been full economic recovery by 2010, politics in the US, the UK and the euro zone would have evolved in a dramatically different way. And such an outcome was quite possible, given a different monetary policy, as I argue in "America's Big Monetary Policy Mistake: How Negative Interest Rates Could Have Stopped the Great Recession in Its Tracks." The details of how to successfully implement deep negative rates can be found in "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide."

Also, dramatically higher capital requirements could have made the Financial Crisis of 2008 no worse than the popping of the dotcom bubble in 2000. On that, see my post "Martin Wolf: Why Bankers are Intellectually Naked."

Finally, note that high capital requirements and a readiness to use deep negative rates when called for are complementary policies that work better in combination than separately, as I lay out in "Why Financial Stability Concerns Are Not a Reason to Shy Away from a Robust Negative Interest Rate Policy." 

Monetary policy matters for politics and the broad sweep of history, not just for immediate economic outcomes. The storified tweets in "The Historical Effects of Monetary Policy Mistakes" point to some obvious examples from the past. 

What matters going forward is to reduce economic insecurity in the future:

• Central banks need to be prepared to use deep negative interest rates in the next crisis.
• Capital requirements, and in particular, the capital conservation buffer should be pushed to a much higher level, despite those in the pay of—cognitively captured by banks—who want to keep capital requirements relatively low. 
• US Trade deficits should be reduced by the method that will actually work: by raising our saving rate and insisting that foreign-government-generated capital flows be negotiated. See "How Increasing Retirement Saving Could Give America More Balanced Trade" and "Alexander Trentin Interviews Miles Kimball about Establishing an International Capital Flow Framework." (This, too, is a policy that is complementary with central banks around the world having robust negative interest rate tools.)
• Economists and other scholars need to search for answers to the long-run problems that I discuss in "Restoring American Growth: The Video." (For the short version, see "Bonnie Kavoussi's Tweetstorm on 'Restoring American Growth.'")

Those who care about the direction of politics need to also care about technical economic remedies that can make things better. It isn't just about winning elections by talking about things that sound good. It is also about delivering the goods to people when your faction is in charge, as I write in "Economics Is Unemotional—And That's Why It Could Help Bridge America's Partisan Divide":

Subtler dimensions of economic policies may not work in stump speeches—but they can be the kind of good governance that gets politicians reelected.

... the party that gets to stay in power the longest will be the one that does a good job handling economic policy when it gets its turn in the driver’s seat.

Why I Am Not a Neoliberal

Link to the article above

Without looking at the details, I would have thought that I was a Neoliberal. Indeed, I have a Storify story "The Time Miles was Called a "Neoliberal Sellout" by Matt Yglesias and was Glad for the Compliment in the End." But digging deeper, I am now not at all sure I am a Neoliberal. Let me consider point by point where I agree with Neoliberalism and where I disagree.

Whole books have been written on Neoliberalism, but I haven't read them. So let me take Mike Konczal's take on Neoliberalism in his excellent Vox essay "'Neoliberalism' isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas" as a rough-and-ready definition of Neoliberalism. My discussion of whether I am a Neoliberal or not will only be relative to Mike Konczal's description of Neoliberalism there. If Neoliberalism moves in the direction of Supply-Side Liberalism as laid out in all of the posts in this blog, so much the better. But historically, Neoliberalism seems to have many differences from my version of Supply-Side Liberalism. 

Early on in his essay, Mike Konczal cautions:

The difficulty of the term ["Neoliberalism"] is that it’s used to described three overlapping but very distinct intellectual developments.

                                                      Moving to the Political Center

The first of these three intellectual developments was political:

In political circles, ["Neoliberalism" is] most commonly used to refer to a successful attempt to move the Democratic Party to the center in the aftermath of conservative victories in the 1980s. [One] can look to Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s influential 1989 The Politics of Evasion, in which the authors argued that Democratic “programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate, and they cannot by themselves remedy the electorate's broader antipathy to contemporary liberalism.”

To me, this is just democracy in action—when political entrepreneurs don't get blinded by their own personal ideology. Ignoring the views of close to half the electorate can be politically dangerous. You can see some of my views about the partisan divide abroad and in the US in

• Nationalists vs. Cosmopolitans: Social Scientists Need to Learn from Their Brexit Blunder

• Economics Is Unemotional—And That's Why It Could Help Bridge America's Partisan Divide

• Nonpartisan Redistricting

Personally, I have a great deal of sympathy for many (but by no means all) "Conservative" arguments. 

                                                         The Washington Consensus

Mike Konczal continues: 

In economic circles, however, “neoliberalism” is most identified with an elite response to the economic crises of the 1970s: stagflation, the energy crisis, the near bankruptcy of New York. The response to these crises was conservative in nature, pushing back against the economic management of the midcentury period. It is sometimes known as the “Washington Consensus,” a set of 10 policies that became the new economic common sense.

It is this “Washington Consensus” that I most want to put under the microscope. John Williamson's 1990 Peterson Institute of International Economics paper "What Washington Means by Policy Reform" is the touchstone Mike Konczal refers to for the "Washington Consensus." Looking at this document, one can see that, to this day, when policy folks talk about "structural reform," they are often talking about reform in line with the  "Washington Consensus." 

1. Fiscal Discipline

Fiscal discipline is the first tenet of the Washington Consensus. (All of this about the Washington consensus is "according to John Williamson in 1990.") I am a fiscal hawk in the sense that I worry quite a bit about the national debt. You can see this in my early post "Avoiding Fiscal Armageddon." Yichuan Wang and I interpreted the data as providing no support for the idea that national debt lowers GDP growth in "After Crunching Reinhart and Rogoff's Data, We Found No Evidence High Debt Slows Growth," but there we write:

We don’t want anyone to take away the message that high levels of national debt are a matter of no concern. As discussed in "Why Austerity Budgets Won't Save Your Economy," the big problem with debt is that the only ways to avoid paying it back or paying interest on it forever are national bankruptcy or hyper-inflation. And unless the borrowed money is spent in ways that foster economic growth in a big way, paying it back or paying interest on it forever will mean future pain in the form of higher taxes or lower spending.

What I said in "Why Austerity Budgets Won't Save Your Economy" is: 

To understand the other costs of debt, think of an individual going into debt. There are many appropriate reasons to take on debt, despite the burden of paying off the debt:

• To deal with an emergency—such as unexpected medical expenses—when it was impossible to be prepared by saving in advance.

• To invest in an education or tools needed for a better job.

• To buy an affordable house or car that will provide benefits for many years.

There is one more logically coherent reason to take on debt—logically coherent but seldom seen in the real world:

• To be able to say with contentment and satisfaction in one’s impoverished old age, “What fun I had when I was young!”

In theory, this could happen if when young, one had a unique opportunity for a wonderful experience—an opportunity that is very rare, worth sacrificing for later on. Another way it could happen is if one simply cared more in general about what happened in one’s youth than about what happened in one’s old age.

Tax increases and government spending cuts are painful. Running up the national debt concentrates and intensifies that pain in the future. Since our budget deficits are not giving us a uniquely wonderful experience now, to justify running up debt, that debt should be either (i) necessary to avoid great pain now, or (ii) necessary to make the future better in a big enough way to make up for the extra debt burden. 

My worries about the national debt are also an important impetus behind my arguing for a public contribution program, as introduced in "No Tax Increase Without Recompense" and developed in other posts linked in my bibliographic post "How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide."  

But what about fiscal stimulus? I am firmly of the view that, other than automatic stabilizers (such as taxes that go up with income and benefits that increase with low income), monetary policy should take on the primary stabilization role. One of my signature efforts has been to figure out the most practical and acceptable possible ways to eliminate the zero lower bound. My organized bibliography for that effort is "How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide." Once a central bank's target interest rate can go as low as necessary, aggregate demand is no longer scarce. So there is no excuse for a government to then run deficits beyond those induced by automatic stabilizers to stimulate the economy.

There are three exceptions to this generalization. First, as part of the monetary policy transmission mechanism, the fiscal arm of the government should spend most of the windfall from reduced interest expenses when interest rates go down and cut back spending to compensate for higher interest expenses when interest rates go up. (See "Negative Rates and the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level.") Most governments will do this without extra prompting. Ideally, the government should also do some intertemporal substitution in spending that responds to high or low interest rates in the way that would be optimal for a private corporation. Governments have been surprisingly slow to do this.

Second, in a monetary union such as the euro zone, where countries in disparate economic situations share monetary policy, an individual nation might need to use some sort of fiscal stimulus. For that I recommend the kind of credit policy I discuss in my paper "Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy," which is introduced in my blog post of the same name. The abstract for the paper clarifies the key issue for fiscal hawks who see the need for some stimulus:

In ranking fiscal stimulus programs, it is useful to focus on the ratio of extra aggregate demand to extra national debt that results. This note argues that (because of repayment after the end of a recession) “national lines of credit”--that is, government-issued credit cards with countercyclical credit limits and favorable interest rates—would generate a higher ratio of extra aggregate demand to extra national debt than tax rebates. Because it involves government loans that are anticipated in advance to involve some losses and therefore involve a fiscal cost even after efforts to minimize losses, such a policy lies between traditional monetary policy and traditional fiscal policy.

Third, because monetary policy has a lag of 9 months or so in its effects, the same kind of credit policies can be of some value in the first few quarters after an unexpected shock.

Other than these exceptions, I come down decisively in favoring monetary policy over fiscal policy for economic stabilization. See for example:

• Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy: Expansionary Monetary Policy Does Not Raise the Budget Deficit

• How and Why to Avoid Mixing Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy

• Helicopter Drops of Money Are Not the Answer

On the other hand, I do not always look like a fiscal hawk. In "What Should the Historical Pattern of Slow Recoveries after Financial Crises Mean for Our Judgment of Barack Obama's Economic Stewardship?" I strongly criticize Barack Obama for not politically prioritizing and pushing through a larger fiscal expansion in 2009. At that time, the fact that interest rates could go as far negative as needed with easy-to-implement policies was not well understood, so Barack Obama should have done at least three times the amount of fiscal stimulus that he did historically. Because he didn't, a big part of the harm of the Great Recession in the US was his fault. The political prioritization necessary to get a bigger fiscal stimulus package through could easily have meant not getting the Obamacare legislation in anything close to the actual "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" through. But to me, avoiding a significant part of the harm of the Great Recession at the cost of being forced to proceed with health care reform on a more bipartisan basis seems the better choice.  

On a more technical issue, I believe strongly that there should be a separate capital budget for national governments. Noah Smith and I argue this in "One of the Biggest Threats to America's Future Has the Easiest Fix" and I have thought hard about technical details of how to make a capital budget work well by keeping incentives to game the system mostly in check: see my powerpoint file "The Applied Theory of Capital Budgeting," which I presented at the Congressional Budget Office in May 2014. My post and the associated Powerpoint file "Discounting Government Projects" addresses another technical issue in capital budgeting. 

2. The Composition of Public Expenditures

The second tenet of the Washington Consensus is that health, education and infrastructure spending are especially good types of public expenditure and that indiscriminate subsidies are especially bad types of public expenditure. Here I am in total agreement. 

3. Tax Reform

For the most part, I don't want to talk about the current Republican tax reform plans being hatched in the House and Senate today. Those plans are a mix of very bad measures with some good technocratic measures. But I am sympathetic to widely agreed-upon principles of tax reform. John Williamson writes:

.. there is a very wide consensus about the most desirable method of raising whatever level of tax revenue is judged to be needed. The principle is that the tax base should be broad and marginal tax rates should be moderate.

I favor the more transparent approach of taxing the rich people who (for the most part) own corporations rather than the opaque approach of taxing the corporations themselves. And I favor consumption taxation, as you can see in "Scrooge and the Ethical Case for Consumption Taxation" and "VAT: Help the Poor and Strengthen the Economy by Changing the Way the US Collects Tax." 

I do not depart from the Washington Consensus here. 

4. Real Interest Rates Market-Determined and Positive

According to John Williamson, a fourth tenet of the Washington Consensus is that real interest rates should be market-determined, positive and moderate. Distinguishing between the short-run, medium-run and long-run as I do in "The Medium-Run Natural Interest Rate and the Short-Run Natural Interest Rate," in the medium-run and long-run, I certainly agree that interest rates should be market-determined. But a market-determined medium-run or long-run rate may or may not be positive. As John Williamson himself wrote in 1990:

The question obviously arises as to whether these two principles are mutually consistent. Under noncrisis conditions, I see little reason to anticipate a contradiction.

With policy heavy-weights such as Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard talking about secular stagnation, I think the Washington Consensus may be moving toward realizing that situations where real interest rates need to be negative in the long-run are quite possible. 

I fully agree that there are many bad market interventions that push some interest rates down. A good example is the low interest rates given by state-owned banks to state-owned enterprises in current Chinese policy. These divert funds away from the non-state sector, raising the rates in the non-state sector, thereby making it harder for households and private businesses to borrow. 

In the short-run, the idea that interest rates should be market-determined and positive is not helpful. First, I see it as inevitable that some sort of monetary policy be central to interest-rate determination. There is no neutral "free-market" monetary policy. The gold standard is not a neutral monetary policy. The closest it is possible to come to a free-market monetary policy is for the central bank to do its best to get the economy quickly back to the natural level of output, the natural level of unemployment and the natural interest rate. I advocate that strongly, as you can see in my paper "Next Generation Monetary Policy." 

Second, I believe negative rates—both real and nominal—are crucial for cutting short recessions and enabling a lower inflation target. See "How Subordinating Paper Currency to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation."

5. Free Capital Flows

Here I think the "Washington Consensus" shifted between when John Williamson was writing and now. I feel there has been more and more emphasis not just on competitive exchange rates, but also free capital flows. Here I favor a more managed version of international capital flows than the current consensus. See "Alexander Trentin Interviews Miles Kimball about Establishing an International Capital Flow Framework." 

6. Free Trade

I am in favor of free trade. Here I am in agreement with the Washington Consensus. But, in something the Washington Consensus did not push, I think the benefits are much greater for freer immigration than from freer trade. See ""The Hunger Games" Is Hardly Our Future--It's Already Here." But as I mentioned above, I think international capital flows should be better managed in order to get more balanced trade:

• How Increasing Retirement Saving Could Give America More Balanced Trade

• Alexander Trentin Interviews Miles Kimball about Establishing an International Capital Flow Framework.

7. Foreign Direct Investment

I agree that encouraging foreign direct investment is a good thing. For many countries it is a very good thing. Looking at things from the standpoint of countries doing foreign direct investment, one of my favorite essays is "Nicholas Kristof: "Where Sweatshops are a Dream." 

8. Privatization

I agree that many enterprises are better run privately than by the government. But privatization of core government functions such as prisons has often led to very poor quality. For a country like the US, if further privatization took place, my guess is that it would be more likely to move in the wrong direction than in the right direction. 

Part of the problem with privatization of core government functions is the great danger of corruption in government contracting. Suppose I define: 

• core government function = something where if it isn't done by the government itself, the government needs to contract with a private firm for the service.

Then one needs to consider whether any inefficiency of having the government do the job itself is outweighed by the likely corruption in the contracting relationship. 

In what might seem, but isn't, a view antithetical to a pro-privatization view,  I think the US government should take a much bigger role in bringing down the risk premium with a sovereign wealth fund, which would involve it owning, at least indirectly, a large amount of stock. See:

• Why the US Needs Its Own Sovereign Wealth Fund

• How to Stabilize the Financial System and Make Money for US Taxpayers

• Roger Farmer and Miles Kimball on the Value of Sovereign Wealth Funds for Economic Stabilization

• Japan's Move Toward a Sovereign Wealth Fund Policy

The reason a sovereign wealth fund wouldn't violate the principle of avoiding undue government meddling is that it would be required to hold only ETFs that had no voting rights. 

9. Deregulaton

Regulation is one of the areas where I most strongly disagree with the Washington Consensus. I think capital requirements/leverage limits are much too loose. I have said this strongly many times.  "Martin Wolf: Why Bankers are Intellectually Naked" is a good post to start with. I have also cheered on the efforts of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Richard Cordray. I give the philosophical justification for the type of regulation done by the CFPB in "On the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau." I also think there are many types of wealth that are ill-gotten, even though they are legal. See "Odious Wealth: The Outrage is Not So Much Over Inequality but All the Dubious Ways the Rich Got Richer."

On the other hand, at the state and local level, regulation is often used as a tool to keep the poor from living next door or competing with middle-class jobs. That is, state and local regulation is often effectively a tool of oppression. I write about the common impulse behind immigration restrictions at the national level and land-use and occupational licensing restrictions at the state and local level in "Keep the Riffraff Out!"

Affordable housing in desirable cities for all the people who want it requires an adequate total amount of housing. That in turn requires allowing needed construction. In "Building Up With Grace," I call for every substantial city to have some district with no height limits that has excellent bus service to the rest of the city. This is for the sake of those of modest means who want to live and work in the city. (Genuine earthquake dangers might lead to some height limits, but these should not be used as an excuse beyond genuine safety needs.)

In relation to regulatory restrictions on construction, I find myself in sympathy with the great bulk of posts on the excellent Facebook group "Market Urbanism." I highly recommend it. 

I should note that allowing more construction has financial stability benefits as well as benefitting social justice. See "With a Regulatory Regime That Freely Accomodates Housing Construction, Lower Interest Rates Drive Down Rents Instead of Driving Up the Price of Homes." 

Occupational licensing requirements often keep those at the bottom of the heap out of jobs, as I discuss in my post “When the Government Says “You May Not Have a Job.” The extent to which this is done in practice is unconscionable. Fortunately, occupational licensing reform efforts are afoot. But these efforts could easily stall out. This is an important area to focus on. 

For those who haven't thought much about occupational licensing, there are two key related points to take away. First, occupational certification and occupational licensing are not the same thing. In "John Stuart Mill: Certification, Not Licensing" I write:

As for licensing itself, although they are often spoken of in the same breath, there is a world of difference between certification and licensing. Certification requirements say that you have to inform customers of your level of qualifications or lack of qualifications in unmistakable ways, according to a well-defined terminology established by the government. They are based on the principle of telling the truth and not deceiving, but do entail some details to make sure no one misunderstands. 

By contrast, licensing requirements say you can be fined or thrown in jail for getting paid for something that someone with an absolutely crystal clear idea of your lack of qualifications is perfectly happy to pay you to do. For example, I would run afoul of the law in Michigan if I cut someone else’s hair for pay–a law ultimately backed up by the threat of throwing me in jail, even if the initial penalty is only a fine. The real reason for that stipulation is that barbers want that barrier to entry in place (I think at least a year and a half of training), not any danger that I will seriously harm someone with a basic haircut. I express some of how wrong I think the overgrowth of licensing requirements is in my post “When the Government Says “You May Not Have a Job'."

I have no problem with certification—it simply makes things clear. But I do have a problem with licensing, which says to people "You may not have a job" unless they devote time and money to training they may not be able to afford.

(Update: See also my December 5, 2017 post "Against Occupational Licensing.")

For practical reform efforts, the second key point to make about occupational licensing is that establishing a low-hurdle licensing category in each general type of job has many of the good effects of having a certification regime instead of a licensing regime. It isn't too harmful to require that "barbers" have a year and a half of training if there is also an occupational licensing category of "haircutter" that requires only a week of training, and haircutters are legally allowed to do everything that barbers are allowed to do. In that case "barber" would indicate someone highly trained, which is useful, but barbers and haircutters would still compete. 

My post "Against Anticompetitive Regulation" discusses other regulatory issues as well. The title of that post indicates the very first question you should ask about any regulation: "Is the regulation about keeping everyone honest, or is it about keeping down the competition?"

Crucially, "keeping everyone honest" doesn't mean "ensuring high quality." If someone honestly signals that what they are selling is low-quality but inexpensive, they should be allowed to sell their honestly low-quality goods and services.

Overall, more regulation is needed of the financial industry; less regulation is needed for service jobs and housing construction. And it is important to watch out for firms running to the government to get the government to put an obstacle in the way of a potential competitor. Finally, regulations that make corporate deception illegal are almost always a good thing. After all, the key welfare theorems suggesting that a free market will do a good job all rely on people knowing and understanding the truth! (General anti-fraud principles in the legal code are helpful, but often don't do enough.)

10. Property Rights

There are many virtues to property rights as they exist in the United States. But I think we have gone much too far with intellectual property rights. See:

• Copyright

• The Wonderful, Now Suppressed, Republican Study Committee Brief on Copyright Law

• Matt Ridley: Patent Reform is More Important for Technological Progress than Government Funding of Basic Science

• Odious Wealth: The Outrage is Not So Much Over Inequality but All the Dubious Ways the Rich Got Richer

One of the bad aspects of trade negotiations in the last few years has been the emphasis by the United States on imposing its dysfunctional intellectual property system on the rest of the world. (See Dani Rodrik on one aspect of that here.) The United States should get its own house in order on intellectual property, and only then recommend its intellectual property system to other nations. 

On property rights more generally, I think if, by a high standard of proof, an action can be shown to be a bad action that should have been prohibited in the past, then taxing away the wealth resulting from that action is appropriate. If done right, this has good incentives: companies and people will try to avoid doing things that people in the future will realize were wrong. However, there may need to be some statute of limitations on this.

And where uncertainty about future legal treatment stands in the way of important investments, the government may need to provide better guarantees of future legal treatment. I am thinking here of the development of self-driving cars, that could be seriously hindered if there were too much legal uncertainty. Fortunately, that seems to have been avoided. 

                                            Markets Defining More and More of Our Lives

Leaving the Washington Consensus, the last of the three meanings of "Neoliberalism" Mike Konczal writes of is markets defining more and more of our lives:

The third meaning of “neoliberalism,” most often used in academic circles, encompasses market supremacy — or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets.

Another insight is that market exchanges can create an ethos that ends up shaping more and more human behavior; we can increasingly view ourselves as little more than human capital maximizing our market values.

Here let me break out as a distinct problem the idea that companies should only be concerned about maximizing shareholder value. Even if "obeying the law" is added as a constraint on that goal, it still leads to serious problems, as corporations look for every possible loophole to maximize shareholder value even at the expense of social welfare. Although it isn't perfect, a much better goal for big companies, quite consistent with economic theory, would be to maximize the overall welfare of those people who hold index funds covering all the public companies in the nation or in the world.  

In his book Finance and the Good Society, Robert Shiller speaks approvingly of legal structures for corporations that stipulate that a given corporation should pursue goals beyond shareholder value maximization. This is likely to be helpful where it is used.

But what is most needed is for business school professors to quit teaching that maximizing shareholder value is the be-all and end-all duty of those who run public corporations—perhaps with obeying the law as an added duty. I am not at all satisfied with the alternatives proposed by most of those who want companies to pursue something other than shareholder value maximization. In the immediate future, I think what I mentioned above—"maximizing the overall welfare of those people who hold index funds covering all the public companies in the nation"—would be a good alternative to shareholder value maximization in business school instruction. With thought, I have no doubt that careful thinkers can come up with an even better alternative that still has some of the hard edge of economic theory but that is even more conducive to social welfare. 

More specifically on the issue of markets defining more and more of our lives, I think economists need to appreciate more all of the non-monetary motives that drive people. I wrote about this in "Scott Adams's Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich." In addition to affecting taxation and being a big part of the argument for the public contribution program I have proposed in order to expand the non-profit sector, non-monetary motives are a key reason why current copyright law is off-track, as discussed in my post "Copyright." 

Religious motives are good examples of non-monetary motives though far from the only non-monetary motives. Personally, I know well how powerful non-monetary motives can be from my forty years as a Mormon. (See "Five Books That Have Changed My Life.") The posts I noted there can help you appreciate how big a difference non-monetary motives can make:

• The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists

• How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America

Also see this Bloomberg View article by Megan McArdle:

• How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

The biggest share of my research time is currently being devoted to collecting and analyzing data in order to write a paper with the working title of "What Do People Want?" with Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper and Ori Heffetz, supported by a brilliant and capable team of research assistants: Becky Royer, Tuan Nguyen, Tushar Kundu, Rosie Li and (early on) Samantha Cunningham, and by heavy-duty coding support from Robbie Strom and Itay Zandbank. That exercise demonstrates well how many things people care about—of which only some can be purchased in the market. I hope to share some of our latest results in a few months. But for now, take a look at the results from an earlier round of data collection that I discuss in "Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness Are Not Enough."

It is a big mistake to think that people only care about things that can be bought and sold. Acting as if people do care only about things that can be bought and sold impoverishes our interactions with one another. 

Markets are useful tools, but they have downsides as well as the many upsides that we teach in economics courses. 

                                                                  Conclusion

There are many areas where I agree with Neoliberalism. But I disagree with Neoliberalism in important areas:

• the need for more financial regulation (particularly the need for stricter capital requirements and leverage limits and more regulation in the domain of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)

• the need for negative interest rates

• the need for international capital flow policies that lead to more balanced trade

• the need for less restrictive intellectual property law

• the perils of corporate decision-makers believing their job is "shareholder value maximization"

• the downsides of excessive marketization—and even more the downsides of having a view of human beings as motivated almost entirely by the things money can buy

• the prevalence of ill-gotten legal wealth in countries like the US

• the virtues of (possibly debt-financed) sovereign wealth funds as a policy tool for countries such as the US, Japan, the UK and many other European countries

These differences seem important enough that I do not consider myself a Neoliberal. Supply-Side Liberalism is not Neoliberalism. It is a different animal. 

image source

Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice →

For more contrarian discussion of nutrition, obesity and chronic diseases, don't miss:

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid
• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
• Sugar as a Slow Poison
• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So
• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy
• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
• Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities
• On Fighting Obesity
• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

Kurt Andersen's New Admiration for Mormons

                                                                                     Link to the article above

In our current political polarization, politics has often trumped people's commitment to truth. It has also often trumped people's commitment to morality and principles such as freedom of religion. A welcome exception is the Mormons. The case of Roy Moore has provided a test. Here is what Kurt Andersen writes in the article linked above:

... while I find their religious beliefs as extreme and strange as I do those of most American Protestants, Mormons seem more consistently virtuous and disciplined in the ways they live their lives.

In the Trump era, compared to the rest of the religious Republican base, they have walked that walk as citizens. Nationally, Trump’s share of the Mormon vote was 20 percent less than he got from white evangelical voters. In Utah, as The New York Times noted, more people voted against Donald Trump than for him in the general election.

Jeff Flake, one of five Republican U.S. senators who are Mormon, represents Arizona, the state with the fifth most Mormons. Right after Roy Moore won the Alabama Senate nomination in September, Flake was “the only Republican lawmaker to criticize Moore” according to The Washington Post—weeks before Flake announced he was leaving the Senate. Later he elaborated on his displeasure, focusing on Islamophobia, saying Moore’s “belief that a Muslim should not be a member of Congress because of his faith … was wrong.”

 In response to the variously grotesque defenses of Moore, Flake tweeted: “Come on, Republicans. Is this who we are? This cannot be who we are.” ...

America’s most famous Mormon Republican, the one who declined to endorse Trump in 2016 because of his “trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny,” and who said in August that Trump’s “apologists strain to explain that he didn’t mean what we heard” concerning Charlottesville, remarks that had “caused racists to rejoice.” Mitt Romney stepped up first thing Friday morning, making superb use of Twitter’s new 280-character limit, advancing the logic of the case by batting away other Republicans’ main line of defense: “Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman. Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.”

... Latter-Day Saints were the brave, virtuous avant garde, and as ridiculous as I find their supernatural beliefs, they are in this instance an outpost of true, real-world righteousness in a party in the grip of a terrible Faustian bargain.

See my own take on Mormonism in my Thanksgiving 2017 post "Five Books That Have Changed My Life." 

Five Books That Have Changed My Life

Link to the Wikipedia article for "Foundation series" by Isaac Asimov

I read a lot of books. (See "Why I Read More Books than Economic Journal Articles.") Many books lead me to feel profound awe and gratitude toward the author. Today, let me acknowledge five books that have changed my life.  

The first is Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Characterization is not Isaac Asimov's strong suit, but what he does do is to paint a grand picture of a future Galactic Empire falling apart, and a band of social scientists working hard to make the dark times to come as short as possible. Though they are called "psychohistorians," the description of psychohistory might as well be a description of macroeconomics: it is hard to predict what individuals will do, but the average behavior of large aggregates of people can be predicted. Even though it is hard to predict the actions of a single individual, I credit Isaac Asimov's foundation series as predisposing me towards a career in economics. The Foundation series may have also predisposed me toward macroeconomics, though it was not the direct catalyst for becoming a macroeconomist. On that, see "Why I am a Macroeconomist: Increasing Returns and Unemployment."

(I also credit high school forensics with predisposing me towards economics— for me debate, extemporaneous speaking and one turn at oratory as my second event at the national tournament. See "A More Personal Bio: My Early Tweets." As for being an academic, I had decided much earlier I wanted to be a professor like my Dad; the question was in what field.)

Update: Simon Wren-Lewis tweets:

A conjecture: that more economists would rank Asimov's Foundation is one of their favourite books than scientists. Here is Paul Krugman writing about it ["Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation novels grounded my economics"]

Link to the Amazon page for Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

The second book that changed my life was Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. I tell that story in "How I Became Optimistic": 

For several years when I was a teenager, I felt that facing reality meant I mustn’t fool myself by being optimistic. Studiously avoiding optimism had the side-effect of making me less cheerful. But then I read the Maxwell Maltz’s book Psycho-Cybernetics. Maxwell made an argument that changed my life. He argues that visualizing positive outcomes is a way to be prepared in case something good happened and a way to instruct one’s subconcious mind to strive for that outcome. In other words, visualizing a desired outcome is a way to tell one’s subconscious mind what its objective function should be.

To me this was like a bolt out of the blue. Visualizing a positive outcome was not a claim that that outcome would happen, it was simply presenting a certain image to one’s mind without any claim to inevitability, in a way meant to increase the probability that the positive image might be realized. Thus, it was possible to carefully maintain objectivity for analytical decision-making and evaluation purposes, while still gaining the psychological benefits of optimism.

In this case, it was not the book as a whole that changed my life; it was this single idea that changed my life. 

Link to the Wikipedia page for The Book of Mormon, authorship contested

The third book that changed my life was the Book of Mormon. As I vividly remember telling my Harvard classmate and friend Anne Harrington (now Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard) when I was leaving Mormonism around the age of 40, the main story of my life until then was not about being an economist but about my spiritual journey within and then out of Mormonism—a journey I was very fortunate to take in reasonable sync with my wife Gail. 

At the end of the Book of Mormon (in Moroni 10:4) it gives this challenge:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

This worked as advertised for me. I read the Book of Mormon, prayed to ask if it was true, then felt a remarkable warm feeling in my heart. I gave the Book of Mormon—and Mormonism in general—enormous credit for having made this true prediction that was confirmed so strongly. Not only that, I also took very seriously the next verse in the Book of Mormon (Moroni 10:5), saying that was a model for asking God any question: 

And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

This was heady stuff, especially when combined with the promise in Mormonism's Doctrine and Covenants 121:46, "The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion" and further tips for the epistemological procedure in Mormonism's Doctrine and Covenants, 7:8,9: 

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong ...

On the strength of such seeming confirmations and personal inspirations, I was a fully believing Mormon until I neared the age of 40. I worked toward converting people to Mormonism for two years in Japan (in the Tokyo area), and after that served in many capacities in the Mormon Church ("home teacher," "Elder's Quorum President," Sunday School teacher, Ward membership clerk, etc.). I was also an enthusiastic apologist for Mormonism and continued to advertise Mormonism. (When she came to visit the University of Colorado Boulder a week ago, Ellen McGrattan spontaneously recalled how I had given Book of Mormon to V. V. Chari as part of my continuing proselyting efforts when I told her I was no longer a Mormon.) Intellectually, Mormonism was a grand adventure that led to my reading the Bible twice and the other Mormon books of holy writ (including the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenents) many times, as well as getting a fascinating take on ancient history from the Mormon apologetics of Hugh Nibley (whom I had the chance to get to know personally while I was earning my Master's degree in Linguistics at Brigham Young University).

In my 30's, I discovered that the epistemological procedure above didn't always work. I had several occasions where things ascertained through this procedure were falsified; that is a part of the story of why I left Mormonism. And a friend pointed out to me that a feeling in my heart didn't logically imply something to be true in the "universe out there." That is a part of the story of my journey out of Mormonism. 

Despite no longer considering myself a Mormon, I am still a Mormon by the Mormon Church's own technical definition (which I know well from my stint as a membership clerk). Indeed, by that technical definition a deacon, priest and elder of the Mormon Church. More importantly, other than Mormonism's occasional anti-intellectualism, more deeply entrenched inequality for women, harsh treatment of gays, and Mormonism's authoritarian streak, I have enormous affection for Mormonism.

Despite occasional lying in an official Church capacity, in other contexts Mormons are some of the most honest people in the world. Mormonism encompasses what I would describe as an extensive modern oral wisdom tradition that is shared every Sunday over a pulpit occupied by regular Mormons, not just leaders. I have benefitted greatly from having been immersed in that modern oral wisdom tradition for so many years. Sociologically, Mormonism has solved to a remarkable extent many of the problems that bedevil our society. And Mormonism gives its members strong encouragement to go out and save the world, not just religiously, but in material ways as well.   

Given my experience with Mormonism, I feel strongly that Mormons and Mormonism should be treated in a way that is more equal to other Christian denominations. Looked at fairly, Mormon doctrine is no stranger than, say, Catholic doctrine. Mormonism is, indeed, more supernaturalist than the many liberal Christian churches that keep their supernaturalism safely sequestered in the afterlife and in the distant past, but there are other Christian churches and New Age groups that are equally supernaturalist. Mormonism does have a history of polygamy, but that is getting to be a century ago (except for rebels from the Mormon Church), and current trends in parts of American society have been toward greater acceptance of polyamory (though accepting polyamory is a step too far for me). To make a comparison, I think most nonsupernaturalists would find the views of Mormons on most things to be more congenial than the views of Christian Evangelicals. In short, don't look down on Mormons! Almost all churches that haven't distanced themselves from their history have a lot of baggage. Mormon baggage is no worse than the baggage of most other religions. (I consider my own religion of Unitarian-Universalism as a religion that has distanced itself from its history, although it does teach its members about its history. And I think the history of Unitarian-Universalism genuinely has less bad stuff than the history of most religions.)

To appreciate Mormonism better, a good place to start is these posts,

• The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists
• How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America

and this Bloomberg View article by Megan McArdle:

• How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

If you are curious beyond that, follow the links in my posts above or type "Mormon" into the search box that comes up when you click the link "search" at the top of my blog.

Link to the Wikipedia article for Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett

In addition to the experiences that I felt tended to falsify Mormonism's epistemological procedures and my distress at some of the negatives of Mormonism mentioned above, another big part of my journey out of Mormonism was my growing appreciation for the picture of the world that evolutionary theory and modern cosmology provide. (Mormonism's official position, as laid out in a document given to Brigham Young University students in biology classes is that it is OK with evolution. But Mormon doctrine as it stands tends to marginalize evolution.) Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett was the most mind-expanding of all the books I read on evolutionary theory and cosmology. This is the fourth book that changed my life. Though it was a major part of my mind-expansion during my 30's, it is better to put it in the context of other books I read as well. I said this in my Unitarian-Universalist sermon "Godless Religion": 

---

• Imagine in your mind’s eye what the Copernican Revolution putting the Sun at the center rather than the Earth did to the Biblical worldview.
• Think of modern discoveries about the Big Bang and the size of the Universe.
• Think of what modern advances in neuroscience mean about the connection between the material and the spiritual ...
• Think of the discoveries of anthropology about the wide range of often very firm religious beliefs different cultures hold (see for example Pascal Boyer’s wonderful book Religion Explained).
• Think of Darwin’s theory of evolution and modern advances in understanding genes, with the lengthening of the history of the Earth from a few thousand years to billions of years, the idea that human beings could have arisen through evolution, and the idea that genes determine a large fraction of the way we are.

These scientific advances, let alone all the scientific advances now being discovered and yet to come, have shaken old religious interpretations to the core wherever people have taken the implications of that science seriously. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has compared the idea of evolution to a universal acid that changes everything it touches. Among scientific ideas, it is not the only universal acid. 

---

Darwin's Dangerous Idea is, in my view, the 20th century book that best expresses the grandeur Charles Darwin writes of at the end of The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett manages to combine philosophical rigor with accessibility. Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not only mind-expanding, it also provides excellent mind-training because it deals with such hard concepts so clearly. 

I have also admired other books of Daniel Dennett's. In his honor, let me list here all the places where Daniel Dennett appears in this blog (culled by putting "Dennett" into the search box at the search link at the top of this blog):

• Daniel Dennett's Spirituality
• Godless Religion
• Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life
• The Mystery of Consciousness
• John Stuart Mill on the Historical Origins of Liberty
• The Flat Tax, The Head Tax and the Size of Government: A Tax Parable
• The Philosopher’s Self-Help Book (with Daniel Dennett) | Big Think Mentor | Big Think (link post)

 Link to the Amazon page for The Obesity Code by Jason Fung

The fifth book that changed my life is The Obesity Code, by Jason Fung. At 5 foot 7 inches or maybe a bit more, I weighed well into the 180s a year ago. Today I am in the low 150s. I have The Obesity Code and Jason Fung's companion book The Complete Guide to Fasting to thank. (Thanks also to my wife Gail, who searched these books out, read them first and recommended them.) To see how trenchant Jason Fung's take on obesity is, take a look at my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" or go straight to reading the books.

Almost all approaches to weight loss have been proven to have only temporary effects for the vast majority of people. Jason Fung's approach is not in that large category of weight-loss approaches that have been proven not to work in the long run. The difference is that Jason Fung embraces fasting: periods of time with no food, or only very restricted types of food. (In addition to "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon," see "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid."

What most people don't realize is that in terms of one's experience during weight-loss, there is a nonlinearity in amount of food eaten. Calorie restriction—say anywhere from 400 to 1500 calories a day—is a miserable experience. Fasting—no food or almost no food—is remarkably easy. The reason is that when food consumption (and consumption of sweet beverages) is low enough, one's own fat stores start to be turned into blood sugar. By contrast, calorie restriction gives just enough food that for most people it keeps one's own fat locked away in the fat cells; a lack of sustenance from conversion of internal fat to blood sugar combined with the low levels of food consumption then leads to internal cellular starvation. In brief, as long as someone still has adequate fat stores on your body, they will paradoxically feel much better fed eating no food or almost no food than they will with 500 to 1500 calories a day. (But it isn't a deep paradox; what matters is nutrition in the bloodstream, not how much you are eating.)

I have written in "Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities" and in a series of tweets I storified as "On Fighting Obesity" about how excited I have been and am about these insights into obesity, weight-loss and how to avoid the large suite of "diseases of affluence" that typically go along with obesity. I have taken on as part of my mission in life and on this blog fighting obesity. In my talk "Restoring American Growth" last Spring I used a thought experiment to point out how much a solution to our obesity problem would add to social welfare. Paraphrasing:

Suppose we had had exactly the same growth in measured GDP as actually happened, but there had been no rise in obesity. Think how much better off America would be. 

The same can be said for most other nations as well. For example, I have been told that the rise in obesity in Arab countries has been especially severe. For those countries, a simple, and what I believe would be a religiously acceptable modification in Ramadan customs would make a huge difference: in that month of fasting, instead of eating a big meal before sunup and then a big meal after sundown, change to having only the big meal after sundown, and only water, tea and coffee before sunup. The experience of no food for about 20-22 hours every day is likely to be much easier if the big meal leans toward foods low on the insulin index I discuss in "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid."

I write in this blog—only slightly tongue-in-cheek—about "saving the world." I don't know of any more powerful way to save the world than to stop and reverse the worldwide rise in obesity. (For example, this is much bigger than eliminating the zero lower bound, which I have written on extensively.) And the great thing about fighting obesity is that it doesn't require going through policy makers. Leaving aside the minority of individuals who have no problem with being overweight, every individual who gets clearer about what really determines obesity and weight loss—and the attendant diseases of affluence, such as diabetes, heart disease and strokes—is empowered to make his or her life much better than it otherwise would be. 

Thanks to my wife Gail, for the excellent suggestion of marking Thanksgiving by writing about the books that have changed my life. And thanks to all the authors who have made a difference in my life through their writings, even beyond those featured above. 

Don Lincoln: What Good Is Particle Physics?

Link to this video on YouTube

This is a heartwarming 7 minute video about the value of science. Hat tip to Joseph Kimball.

John Locke's Song of Praise for Work

Link to the Wikipedia page for this painting: "The Angelus," by Jean-François Millet

Hat tip to this website

John Locke, in section 32 of 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (in Chapter V "Of Property") writes:

But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest; I think it is plain, that property in that too is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it for the common. Nor will it invalidate his right, to say every body else has an equal title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners, all mankind. God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i. e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

I want to highlight two aspects of this chapter. First, I find John Quiggin's post "John Locke Against Freedom" persuasive. John Quiggin argues as follows:

Given his reputation as a defender of property rights and personal freedom, Locke has been accused of hypocrisy for his role in promoting and benefiting from slavery and the expropriation of indigenous populations, actions that would seem to contradict his philosophical position. This is too charitable. 

The real contradictions are to be found within Locke’s philosophical writings. These are designed to fit his political positions both in England, where he supported resistance to the absolutist pretensions of the Catholic James II, and in America, where he was part of the slave-owning ruling class (albeit from afar). ...

Considered in the American context ... Locke is not offering a theory of original acquisition. Rather, his theory is one of expropriation, designed specifically to justify the “fraud and injustice” to which Hume refers.

Locke’s central idea is that agriculturalists, by mixing their labor with the soil, thereby acquire a title to it. He immediately faces the objection that before the arrival of agriculture, hunters and gatherers worked on the land and gained sustenance from it. So, it would seem, the would-be farmer has arrived too late. The obvious example, to which he refers several times, is that of European colonists arriving in America. Locke’s answer is twofold.

First, he invokes his usual claim that there is plenty of land for everybody, so appropriating some land for agriculture can’t be of any harm to the hunter-gatherers. This is obviously silly. It might conceivably be true for the first agriculturalist ... or the second or the fiftieth, but at some point the land must cease to be sufficient to support the preexisting hunter-gatherer population. ...

Locke’s real defense is that regardless of whether there is a lot or a little, uncultivated land is essentially valueless. All, or nearly all, the value, he says, comes from the efforts of the farmers who improve the land. Since God gave us the land to improve, it rightfully belongs to those who improve it.

In my post "John Locke on Diminishing Marginal Utility as a Limit to Legitimately Claiming Works of Nature as Property" I argue against the expropriation of native lands as follows:

To justify, theoretically, taking that land from the Native Americans, one would have to add the principle that when technology changes so that people need less land to support themselves, then previous land claims need to be reevaluated. In general, such a principle is a recipe for a big mess. Better to, at a minimum, require rich outsiders to purchase land as European Americans did from Native Americans in a few cases, and as the European New Zealanders did to a much greater degree from the Maori. If technology has really improved dramatically, they should be able to do so.

One of the ways that John Locke justifies both the expropriation of native lands and slaveholding is by quoting the Bible. I discuss his Biblical justification of slavery in "John Locke Treats the Bible as an Authority on Slavery." The Bible verses alluded to in section 32 that he uses to justify expropriation are Genesis 2:15, before the Fall, 

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 

and Genesis 3:17-19, after the Fall:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

From the point of view of these verses, hunter-gatherer populations were violating a command of God by not being farmers. John Locke is unfair here in counting the labor of farmers. Hunting and gathering is also labor.

Cultivation is not the only way to improve land. Land can also be "improved" by combining it with the knowledge of where to find plants to gather and animals to hunt on that land. But John Locke won't count that. 

The second aspect I want to point to is that after correcting John Locke to include all kinds of labor in improving land, not just cultivation, I do feel sympathetic to the idea that labor is not only honorable, but honorable enough to sometimes by rewarded by a claim to something that was unmade by humans, or to some of the income of things that were unmade by humans. 

One of the arguments these days for a universal basic income is that it frees people from the necessity to work, as if needing to work were an undignified imposition on people. It may be that we have somehow subtracted dignity from many forms of work, but work itself is not inherently undignified!

Some day the robots may be able to do all the work for us. But I see that day as at least 100 years off. In the meantime, much needs to be done, and we need everyone to pitch in! Instead of giving everyone a basic income without needing to work, let's give everyone a basic income as long as they do work, and make sure there is a way to work.

Personally, I like Morgan Warstler's plan for this using wage subsidies for those at the low end of the wage distribution. One way I might emend his plan is to augment the income floor for those who do government help in the form of wage subsidies by adding in some credits that can be used only to buy services from others who are also receiving this kind of government help. By that means, the poor can be encouraged to help one another by providing inexpensive services to one another, in addition to, as now, the poor providing services to the rich and the rich providing often overpriced services to the poor.

Another way it is necessary to add to Morgan Warstler's plan is that services done under the rubric of the wage subsidy system needs to be free of the most onerous limitations of occupational licensing. Streamlined, minimalist occupational licensing requirements for those working under that rubric can be the beginning of streamlined, minimalist occupation licensing requirement for everyone. 

Update: Morgan Warstler replies on Twitter.

Don't miss other John Locke posts. Links at "John Locke's State of Nature and State of War."

Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

To see my latest posts on diet and health, follow @mileskimball on Twitter.

Link to the ungated article above

Direct link to the "Table 2" above. "FII" is the food insulin index for each type of food tested.

In my post "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" I explain why insulin is so central to obesity. In brief, among its many other effects insulin is an instruction to fat cells to take in blood sugar and turn it into stored fat. As a result, knowing the details of what ramps up your body's insulin production is much more helpful for weight loss than counting calories. 

The Problem with Calories In/Calories Out. But isn't it obvious that weight-loss is all about calories in/calories out, given the familiar energy balance identity below?

Weight Gain in Calories = Calories Consumed - Calories Expended

The basic problem with that view is in the title of my storify story "How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy." To understand weight-loss or weight gain from the energy balance identity, you have to understand calories consumed and calories expended. And insulin is the key to understanding calories consumed and calories expended.

As mentioned above, high insulin levels cause sugar to be taken out of the bloodstream and turned into fat in the fat cells. The low blood sugar levels then have two effects: making you hungry, so you want to eat more, and making you feel less energetic, so you burn fewer calories.

(If your body produces too much insulin for too long, it can create enough insulin resistance to cause Type II diabetes. Once you have Type II diabetes, administered insulin or an insulin-promoting drug may play a role in treatment. But dietary modifications may help. Jason Fung is an expert on that, and has a Center for Intensive Dietary Modification that he talks about in his book The Complete Guide to Fasting.)

People often say the way to lose weight is to "Eat less, move more." By itself that is not so stupid, but what is off track is to think that you "Eat less, move more" by trying to "Eat less, move more." Instead, just keep your insulin levels down, and your body will automatically make you want to eat less and move more without you trying at all—other than whatever effort it took to keep your insulin levels down. (Here I am taking a bit of poetic license in counting a rise in basal metabolism as "moving more.")

Some aspects of a low-insulin strategy for weight loss will look very similar to what you might try to do anyway under the naive take on calories in/calories out that surrounds us in our culture: for example, eat lots of greens, avoid anything with added sugar; avoid eating late at night. But many other aspects of a low-insulin strategy are quite different than the conventional wisdom.

What I think is the correct advice—and hope will become conventional wisdom in a better future—is to avoid all foods and beverages that cause the body to produce a lot of insulin and to lean towards foods and beverages that cause the body to produce relatively little insulin. This post looks at the evidence on which foods and beverages cause the body to produce a lot of insulin and which don't in order to give advice about what are healthy and unhealthy foods to eat in relation to weight gain and weight loss and the suite of "Western diseases" such as diabetes, heart disease and strokes that are highly correlated with weight gain and weight loss.   

Multipliers. "Table 2" linked above (from the paper linked above that) reports the results of experiments in which experimental subjects ate a particular food, and then their insulin was measured over a period of time after that. The table focuses on differences between different foods and beverages. But there are also difference across people and across time in insulin production.

Compared to other people, you will produce more insulin in response to any given food or beverage if you are "insulin resistant." Basically, if you have had chronically high insulin levels, some cells in your body are likely to respond less to insulin, and so your body produces more insulin. It is a little like people who have hurt their hearing through many years of loud music; because they can't hear as well, they often turn up the volume of the music even more to make up for the lost hearing. The bottom line is that the more you have acted to raise you insulin levels in the past and the less you have done to lower your insulin levels in the past, the more insulin any given food is likely to cause your body to produce now.  

Compared to other times of day, you will produce more insulin in response to things you eat late in the day. On this there is less evidence than one would like, but here is what Jason Fung says in Chapter 12 of The Complete Guide to Fasting

... is there a difference between eating during the day and eating at night? Well, the studies are few, but perhaps revealing. In a 2013 study, two groups of overweight women were randomly assigned to eat a large breakfast or a large dinner. Both ate 1400 calories per day; only the timing of the largest meal was changed. The breakfast group lost far more weight than the dinner group. Why? Despite following similar diets and eating about the same amount, the dinner group had a much larger overall rise in insulin. An earlier 1992 study showed similar results. In response to the same meal given either early or late in the day, the insulin response was 25 to 50 percent greater in the evening.

Insulin production being high late in the day has a very obvious implication for weight loss: if you can, make your big meal of the day lunch, not dinner. For most people this is possible at least on the weekends. Actually, as far as timing goes, a big breakfast is likely as good, maybe even better, but as I will discuss below, many common breakfast foods are particularly high in their insulin production, so it might need to be a big breakfast that doesn't look like breakfast food to you. So suggesting that lunch be the big meal might lead to less misunderstanding. 

The fact that doing badly in relation to insulin in the past will cause you trouble now has several important implications:

1. Prevention is much, much easier than cure. For most people, if they simply avoid added sugar and avoid eating late at night starting from a young age, they won't get fat. But if you are already overweight, chances are you have some degree of insulin resistance, and you will have to be stricter in your actions to reduce insulin production in order to have the results be reasonable insulin levels despite the high multiplier you have because past actions have led to insulin resistance. (Let me be clear that any past actions that have led to insulin resistance may not be your fault at all. They may well have been out of ignorance caused by the bad dietary advice the government has given us.)

2. Just because someone else can get away with eating something doesn't mean you can. Indeed, you can learn something about your own insulin responses without any elaborate testing equipment: just notice which foods have a rebound effect where they lead to your getting hungry again an hour or two later. (For me personally, the big heap of white rice routinely served in Asian restaurants with almost any meal was an obvious example of this.)

3. Reversing insulin resistance and thereby reducing one's personal multiplier for insulin production can be very valuable. Even apart from the direct health benefits, reversing insulin resistance expands the range of foods one can eat without causing trouble. (For example, reversing insulin resistance can add to the number of different kinds of whole fruit one can eat without trouble. That is valuable because many fruits have benefits that need to be balanced against the relatively high levels of insulin production most of them cause.) The only thing I know powerful enough to do much toward reversing insulin resistance is serious fasting of the sort Jason Fung talks about in The Complete Guide to Fasting

The rest of this post gives a few general rules about good and bad foods and beverages and then divides foods and beverages into groups according to their food insulin index or "insulin index" for short. I title each section according to my own rules of thumb about how to think of each insulin index range. This may give you some sense of what the numbers mean: 

• 70 or above insulin index: "never" foods

• Insulin index from 50 to 69: wicked treats: very bad, but not quite as bad as some other things

• Insulin index from 30 to 49: except on special occasions (such as a meal at a good restaurant) portion sizes should be kept small

• Insulin index from 20 to 29: go-to staples for a low-insulin approach

• Insulin index from 10 to 19: especially good foods

• Insulin index below 10: suitable for eating and drinking even on an extended "modified fast."

Also, for comparison, straight sugar (glucose) has an insulin index of 100. 

For simplicity, I will report only the point estimate of the insulin index for a food or beverage. Table 2 at the link reports standard errors. You should double those to get an idea of a reasonable range of what could be true. In particular, if you think one of the insulin index ratings doesn't make any sense, it is fair to look up the standard errors in the table, then add double the standard error and subtract double the standard error to get a reasonable range of what the true insulin index might be for that food. It is especially valuable to be suspicious of the point estimate of an insulin index and pay close attention the confidence interval obtained by looking at plus or minus 2 standard errors when the insulin indexes for similar foods seem very different than the insulin index for the food you are looking at. I do a bit of that below. 

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Now the general principles:

General Principle #1: Avoid "Lowfat" Foods

The first general principle is to avoid all lowfat foods. The highfat versions both taste better and have a lower insulin index. So as economists would say, all lowfat foods are dominated: worse on taste and worse in terms of making you fat. Always choose the high fat version of everything. Let me give here some of the comparisons from the table between lowfat and highfat versions of things:

• vanilla ice cream: 65

• lowfat vanilla ice cream: 69

• milk: 24

• 1% milk: 34

• skim milk: 60

• reduced-fat cottage cheese: 40

• lowfat cottage cheese: 52

• tuna canned in oil: 16

• tuna canned in water: 26

• Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookie: 33

• Chips Ahoy reduced-fat chocolate chip cookie: 49

• potato chips: 45

• 40% reduced-fat potato chips: 51

From here on, I will list only the highest-fat versions of things in the table since eating lowfat versions of things makes no sense unless you want to fool yourself that you are eating more healthily than you are. 

General Principle #2: Avoid Cold Cereal

Many, many different kinds of cold cereal have been tested. They all have fairly high insulin indexes. I won't list them all. Below are the worst and the best, but aside from all-bran original, even the best is pretty bad:

• grapenuts: 110

• rice krispies: 94

• original shredded wheat: 91

• special K (US version—Australian version much better): 86

• Kellogg's cornflakes (US version—Australian version much better): 82

• wheaties: 78

• frosted flakes: 72

• ...

• 7 whole grain puffs: 59

• great grains: 57

• Kellogg's cornflakes (Australian version—US version much worse): 55

• sustain: 52

• honeysmacks: 49

• cracklin' oat bran: 48

• special K (Australian version—US version much worse): 48

• Quaker 100% natural granola oats, honey and raisins: 41

• Kellogg's all-bran original: 23

General Principle #3: Avoid Sweet Beverages, Including Fruit Juice

The trouble with sweet beverages is that the sugar in them is too easily and quickly digested, and so causes and insulin spike. That includes fruit juices. The fiber in fruit is needed to slow down digestion and moderate the insulin spike. Making fruit into juice stops the fiber from doing its work.

Even beverages with artificial sweeteners can cause an insulin spike simply from a mental anticipation effect: it is easy for your body to start looking forward to some real food if you taste something sweet. Some artificial sweeteners have other effects on insulin, but for those that operate through a mental anticipation ("cephalic") channel, my view is that they are more OK when sprinkled on real food than when drunk as part of a "zero calorie beverage" which makes the body expect nourishment that won't actually be there. 

If you want to know about the effects of a particular non-sugar sweetener on insulin, try googling "insulin [name of non-sugar sweetener]" and you might find articles like this on the effects of stevia and aspartame on insulin.

General Principle #4: Avoid Things with Added Sugar

This one is pretty obvious. One more lenient rule of thumb is to avoid anything with any form of sugar listed among the top three ingredients. 

General Principle #5: Avoid Starchy Foods

The body can turn starch into sugar so fast that starches cause insulin spikes similar to sugar itself. But in case it is not so obvious what is a starchy food, I list them all in the category for the appropriate insulin index range. 

General Principle #6: If You Drink Alcohol, Lean Towards White Wine Instead of Red Wine or Beer

For other health reasons, I am not going to recommend drinking alcohol. (The idea that alcohol is good for health doesn't replicate well, empirically.) But it is worth knowing that while beer has an OK insulin index of 20, white wine has an insulin index of only 3. (Gin has an even lower insulin index of 1, but such high levels of alcohol have other negative side effects for health that have nothing to do with insulin.) Because grapes have a relatively high insulin index, I suspect that red wine, which leaves more of the grape in has quite a bit higher insulin index than white wine. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the insulin index for red wine is in the same ballpark as for beer. Given this principle, of alcoholic beverages I will only list white wine below.

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On to the groupings. Note that many foods and beverages haven't been tested, so one has to guess based on the things that have been tested. One good example is what I said about cold cereal above. I'll bet cold cereals that haven't been tested have quite a high insulin index, too! (Below I will leave cold cereals out, since I dealt with them all I need to above.) Remember to choose the highest-fat version of everything available. Lowfat versions of things will have a higher insulin index than what I list below!

Insulin Index above 70: Foods and Beverages to Avoid Completely—Or If You Must, Only the Tiniest Bite

• jellybeans: 117

• pancake and waffle mix: 110

• honeydew melon: 93 (95% confidence interval from 63 to 123)

• Mars bar: 89

• potatoes: 88

• baked beans (with added sugar): 88

• strawberry lowfat yogurt: 84

• fruit punch: 76

• 97% fat-free pretzels: 74

• sherbet: 76

• white bread: 73

• whole-wheat bread: 70

Insulin Index from 50 to 69: Wicked Treats—Very Bad, But Not Quite as Bad as the Things Listed Above

• fat-free blueberry muffin: 69

• blueberry struesel muffin: 69

• sweetened iced tea: 69

• peaches canned in syrup: 65

• vanilla ice cream: 65

• peach-mango frozen yogurt: 64

• water crackers: 64

Image from the Wikipedia article for "Water biscuit," a.k.a. water cracker

• chocolate cake brownie with chocolate frosting: 60

• black grapes: 60

• bananas: 59

• Panjacks: 58

Website for buying Panjacks—but don't buy any!

• white rice: 58

• croissants: 58

• chocolate chip cookies: 57

• McDonald's french fries: 57

• orange juice: 55

• Australian french fries: 54

• peaches canned in juice: 54

• fat-free oatmeal raisin cookie: 54

• doughnuts with cinnamon sugar: 54

• battered fish fillets: 54

• supermoist yellow cake with chocolate frosting: 53

Insulin Index from 30 to 49: Portion Sizes Should Be Kept Small Except on Special Occasions

In addition to keeping portion sizes small, make sure to combine things in this category with other things that have a lower insulin index. Try not to eat them all by themselves.

• apple juice: 47

• apple pie: 47

• pizza: 47

• brown rice: 45

• Australian Jatz crackers: 45

• potato chips: 45

• corn chips: 45

• coca cola: 44

• oranges: 44

• apples (red delicious): 43

• white fish: 43

• cinnamon swirl pastry: 42

• lentils: 42

• carrot juice: 41

• Australian grain bread: 41

• frozen corn: 39

• popcorn: 39

• honey-raisin bran muffin: 37

• snickers bar: 37

• beef steak: 37

• white corn tortillas: 36

• chocolate milk: 34

• muesli bar: 34

• beef lasagna: 34

• Chips Ahoy full-fat chocolate chip cookie: 33 (95% confidence interval from 27 to 39)

• raisins: 31 (95% confidence interval from 21 to 41)

Insulin Index from 20 to 29: Go-To Staples for a Low-Insulin Approach

• porridge (I assume this means unsweetened, non-instant oatmeal—the Wikipedia entry for "porridge" says, "Porridge made from rolled oats or ground oatmeal is common in the UK, Ireland, Australia ... It is known as simply 'porridge'"): 29

• Australian brown pasta (I assume with no sugar added): 29

• Australian white pasta (I assume with no sugar added): 29

• tuna canned in water: 26

• milk: 24

• taco: 24

• eggs: 23

• navy beans: 23

• prawns: 21

• tofu: 21

• 7% fat cheddar cheese: 20

Insulin index from 10 to 19: Especially Good Foods

• chicken fried in olive oil with skin: 19 (95% confidence interval from 11 to 27)

• cream cheese: 18

• roast chicken without skin: 17 (95% confidence interval from 9 to 25)

• tuna canned in oil: 16

• Australian hot dog (I assume with no sugar added): 16

• peanuts: 15

• Australian bologna (I assume with no sugar added): 11

• Australian peanut butter (I assume with no sugar added): 11

Insulin index below 10: Suitable for Eating and Drinking Even on an Extended "Modified Fast."

Jason Fung argues for the benefits of extended fasts (periods of time without eating) in The Complete Guide to Fasting. And many people find not eating for even a week surprisingly easy. Anyone interested in this should read the book before trying it and heed Jason's warning:

If you are on any medication, you need to talk to your doctor before trying an extended fast, because appropriate dosages are often affected by how much you are eating. If you are diabetic and don't have your doctor adjust your diabetes medicine for the fact that you are eating less for a period of time, you could die. 

Here, what I want to suggest is that for those who don't tolerate extended fasts (lasting more than a day) very well, it might work well to have a week, say, in which you only eat very-low-insulin-index foods. To my mind, that is too little variety to be a satisfying diet all the time, but if you think of it as a modified fast, a week of very restricted food choices wouldn't be that bad if you then go back to eating a wide variety of things. Here, I will list the things there is data on, then I will give my best guess about a wider range of things I suspect would have an insulin index below 10.

Let me note this: I assume the bacon in the list just below is bacon with no sugar added. Unfortunately, in the US, most bacon does have sugar added. You have to work hard to find bacon without sugar added and then pay extra. Bacon with sugar added likely has an insulin index quite a bit higher than 9. You may not always feel it is worth the extra money for bacon with no sugar added, but I would make a point of getting bacon with no sugar added for your modified fast, if you are going to eat bacon during your modified fast.

• full-fat bacon (with no added sugar): 9

• walnuts: 5

• avocado: 4

• olive oil: 3

• white wine: 3

• butter: 2

Based on this data and my guesses about the insulin index of things that weren't tested in time for this table, I would allow any of the following foods during a "modified fast":

• full-fat bacon

• any type of nuts (except maybe peanuts)

• any type of nut butter that doesn't have any added sugar

• avocados

• oil of any kind

• vinegar

• salad dressing that has less 1 gram or less of carbs

• hummus (see my discussion in the Conclusion)

• butter

• cream

• coffee (but don't use a sweetener)

• any kind of tea (but don't use a sweetener)

• white wine (if you drink alcohol)

• kale

This list means that you can have a very nice kale salad with bacon, avocado, olive oil, low-carb dressing and pine nuts, with a side of other nuts. And you can have "bulletproof coffee" which is butter melted into coffee, or stick with just cream in your coffee or tea. That doesn't sound so bad if it is only for a week.

It should go without saying that if you like these foods, it is great to eat them all the time—don't limit them to modified fasts. Part of my own practice is to make sure to eat a gigantic salad every day. That daily salad has a few other things in it, for example a tomato, mushrooms and half a cucumber, two eggs instead of bacon, and usually lettuce and spinach instead of kale, but it includes many things in this "insulin index so low it is suitable for a modified fast" category, including a whole avocado every day, pine nuts and all three of hummus, oil (olive oil or MCT oil) and full-fat 1-gram-carb ranch dressing. Preparing food causes an anticipatory rise in insulin, which makes me hungry, so I eat handfuls of roasted cashews and almonds and raw brazil nuts and salted raw macadamia nuts while I am preparing my salad. 

Even with a modified fast, be alert to any warning signs that you should increase the range of food you are eating. If you need to, you can always raise the upper limit on the insulin index for your modified fast above 9, or discontinue your modified fast entirely. Nausea or an irregular or unusually fast or slow heart rate are warning signs you should heed. Also, worry about a level of dizziness or weakness that seems scary to you. But I am hopeful that eating to satiation from the list of very-low-insulin-index foods will keep such symptoms at bay. Since, in a modified fast, you are eating until you feel full at least once a day from the list of very-low-insulin-index foods, it is also unlikely that you would feel the extreme hunger that is also a warning sign. This sensation is called "true hunger" in this "All About Fasting" blog post that I googled: 

True hunger is a sensation in the mouth and throat, similar to thirst, and not a gnawing pain in the stomach. The way it will get your attention is that [it] comes after many days of experiencing no hunger. Seemingly out of the blue, you'll have an intense desire for food. ...

Having once experienced this "true hunger", you will no longer confuse it with the emotional desire or physical discomfort we usually associate with hunger. Such physical "hunger pains" felt either in the stomach, or as "hunger headaches", are said to actually be withdrawal and detox symptoms from rich foods, chemicals, and stimulants.

In any case, be careful. Different people have different experiences, and because a lot of nutritional research has been barking up the wrong tree, research on fasting in general and on individual differences in responses to fasting or modified fasting is sorely lacking. It makes sense to do some experimentation to learn about your own reactions to dietary changes and fasting, but be cautious in the risks you take. 

The Conundrum of Fruit

As I alluded to above, one issue with a low-insulin diet is that many fruits have a high insulin index. And many fruits weren't tested in time for this list. Although there are many important differences, the glycemic index does have a positive correlation with the insulin index. Given the lack of direct data on the insulin index for many fruits, let me report some glycemic indexes for various fruits (mostly from this website). Unlike above, in my list below I put fruits with the lowest glycemic indexes first. Where there is insulin index data, I put that alongside for comparison.

Glycemic Index

• tomatoes: 15

• cherries: 20

• grapefruit: 25

• dried apricots: 32

• pears: 38

• apples: 39 (insulin index 43)

• oranges: 40 (insulin index 44)

• plums: 40

• blueberries: 40

• strawberries: 41

• fresh peaches: 42 (insulin index 54 for peaches canned in juice)

• bananas: 51 (insulin index 59)

• grapes: 53 (insulin index 60)

Based on this data, for fruits with no direct insulin index data, I would guess the insulin index by multiplying the glycemic index by 1.1. Based on what I know, I have made cream and frozen cherries (or sometimes cherries and half and half) one of my healthy treats. I also love grapefruit. Apricots look like a good way to go as well. I view Pears and apples as fruits that should be eaten only in moderation. 

Given the other benefits of fruits, weighed down by the high sugar content, and therefore high glycemic index of most fruits, the other choice I have made for myself is use this fruit powder:

Link to the website for this product

I don't have any commercial relationship with this product. Indeed, no one pays me anything for my blog. (I do get paid by Quartz for columns I write there.) But also, all I know about this product is what the advertisements for it say. I figure that taking many kinds of fruit and turning them into a powder that I mix with milk destroys some of the value of the antioxidants, phytochemicals, and other micronutrients, but for me the fact that the sugar has been subtracted in making the powder more than makes up for that. Overall, I feel I am getting an improved ratio of the good aspects of fruit relative to the bad aspects. I do eat some whole fruit (cherries and cream :), but I feel the variety of different fruits that are used to make this powder is valuable because it might give me a wider range of different antioxidants, phytochemicals and other micronutrients. 

In any case, I wanted to get across the message that, contrary to what you have been taught "fruits and vegetables" are not automatically healthy. Some vegetables—such as carrots, peas, and corn—are relatively starchy, and most fruits have a lot of sugar that weighs down the benefit from their other good aspects. Be just as careful with fruits and vegetables in your efforts to avoid too much fattening insulin production as with other things you eat. 

Conclusion

If everyone kept handy a table of insulin indexes and treated foods and beverages with high insulin indexes as fattening, and treated foods and beverages with low insulin indexes as good for keeping weight low, it could make a huge difference to health in the US and other countries around the world. This is an area where accurate information alone can do a lot to raise welfare. So spread the word!  

I hope that soon, many more foods and beverages will be tested for their effects on insulin production by the body, so that an insulin index table will soon be as complete as the calorie tables that I am warning you away from relying on.

Let me illustrate how I cope with the current state of the data on the insulin index. I wanted to guess the insulin index for basic hummus (with no added sugar). I first think about the insulin index for related foods like beans and lentils, but that still leaves me confused. Also I wondered whether being mashed up would affect the insulin index (anything that makes digesting something easier, including chopping something or mashing it can raise the insulin index), so I googled "hummus glycemic index" and found that it was 6. Multiplying by 1.1 or a bit more makes me hope insulin index for hummus is about 7, which would mean it was a very good food, suitable even for modified fasts. That is how I would then treat hummus until I found genuine insulin index data for hummus or for the chickpeas hummus is made from. An easier case is cucumbers. Without direct data on the insulin index for any of these, I start out expecting cucumbers to have a bit higher insulin index than lettuce or spinach. To confirm, I googled the glycemic index for cucumbers as 15 (giving me a guess of 17 for the insulin index for cucumbers), but find on the same webpage that spinach and lettuce have the same glycemic index of 15, somewhat higher than I expected. Googling kale glycemic index gets me an estimate of 4 or below for the glycemic index, which further makes me guess an insulin index of 5, which is behind my inclusion of kale in the "suitable for modified fasts" category above. Finally, curious about another ingredient in my daily salad, I googled a glycemic index of 15 for mushrooms. 

I learned a lot from studying this table of the insulin index for various foods and beverages. I hope you have learned something from my take on that table.

Finally, let me emphasize again: please read "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" if you haven't already. That is where I explain why insulin is so important for anyone who cares about their weight or the many deadly diseases that are highly correlated with weight. 

Update: I think you will find the discussion about this post on my Facebook page interesting. And here is an organized version of the discussion on Twitter. Also, let me copy out here a highly relevant Q&A with the same commenter in the comments for my post "On Fighting Obesity" and "'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets":

Matt: So i don't totally get the fascination with focusing on insulin vs calories in / calories out.

If you were to eat a ton of fatty meat, nuts, guacamole etc and low sugar you would still gain weight. I don't think many nutrionists / healthcare professionals would disagree. Would you?

What usually happens, however, is that carbs / sugar are insanely cheap and tasteful and ubiquitous now such that way more calories in vs calories out means weight has gone. As well as insulin issues and overconsumption of sugar. I just don't see why you disagree so much with saying yeah it is an calories in vs calories out thing, but primarily caused due to the massive increase in sugar / fast digesting carbs.

I think you partially agree to this by saying the problem with calories in / calories out is wrong due to the fact that calories in isn't totally exogenous.

In short, I think you are on to something with the importance of sugar, and fast digesting carbs, and the resulting insulin effects, I just think that you miss a good bit by not integrating that with the relatively accepted and common sense calories in / calories out framework.

Miles: I totally disagree. If you eat only high-fat food, you just can't get much down. You will be too full.

By contrast, people can eat a huge amount of sugary things. Sugar gives you a keen appetite.

How many calories you want to eat is governed in a big way by how much insulin is produced. Sugar produces a lot of insulin and makes you read to eat more an hour or two later. Fat by itself makes you not want to eat more.

Calories in/calories out talks as if calories in and calories out are exogenous. They aren't. They are governed in a big way by insulin.

Matt: The bloomin onion has 1,950 calories, of which 72 are due to sugar, and over 1300 are due to fat... you are telling me that is not fattening and that the fat in tht will be satieting? Or that a wedge salad that has 500 calories, and then the clam chowder that has 400 calories which is mainly fat is filling and won't make you fat? That's crazy....None have substantial refined carbs or "starchy", they all have huge, huge amounts of fat and added fat / frying / oil.

Sugar is bad, which seems obvious, and I totally agree. the insulin side you and taube talk about is just way exaggerated.

(btw, love your blog, and love your unique economic insights. It probably almost seems like I am trolling you since this is about my fourth comment on this topic, but I have lost and kept off 90 lbs over 4 years ( statistics shows <10 percent of people do this) with primarily a calorie counting philosiphy, and this was emphasized when i did nutrition research before recently going to outback (not a big govt rule guy at all, but them mandating calorie information for larger chains certainly has changed my habits, despite many studies I think showing smaller broad scale change). Just thought I would make what anecdotally and logically seems obvious about added fat (oil / butter / fried etc).

Miles: Just avoiding sugar and flour (which is highly correlated with avoiding processed foods) will do an enormous amount of good. So if you are getting that right, I am not surprised you are having a lot of success.

Yes, I do think that it is better to focus on the effects of food and drink on insulin than on calories, which implies that avoiding avoiding dietary fat is not helpful (unless you are substituting food with an even lower insulin index or are fasting—no food).

Think of it this way: many American adults gain about 1 pound a year. One pound of body fat corresponds to about 3500 calories. That means 1 pound a year is slightly less than 10 calories a day. So someone gaining 1 pound a year is keeping the calories in/calories out balance on average within 10 calories per day out of, say, 2000 calories a day overall. That is a remarkably close match! It is clear that people are not doing this consciously. So there must be unconscious regulatory mechanisms that are keeping calories in and calories out in very close balance. If those regulatory mechanisms get off by even 10 calories a day, it leads to being overweight in a now typical way. If those regulatory mechanisms get off by 30 calories a day, it can lead to serious obesity. So it is the regulatory mechanism you should pay attention to, and keeping it on track. The regulatory mechanism will handle the calories in/calories out for you. And insulin is central to the regulatory mechanism.

Let me also say that many things people think are fattening really are fattening, but are fattening for a different reason than people think:

• Bread and butter: It is the bread you need to worry about, not the butter.

• Pizza: It is the dough and the sugar in the toppings you need to worry about, not the cheese.

• Hamburger: It is the bun you need to worry about, not the meat.

• Ice Cream: It is the sugar (or nonsugar sweeteners) and corn syrup you need to worry about, not the cream.

Note: If you find the title of this post puzzling, take a look at the Wikipedia article for "It's the economy, stupid."

Update: Bonnie Kavoussi pointed me to the graphic below, which does a good job at showing how to avoid the types of food that are the very highest on the insulin index. But here are my notes on this graphic, from my post "The Keto Food Pyramid":

1. The Keto Food Pyramid doesn't do a good job at distinguishing between types of food that are medium on the insulin index and those that are low on the insulin index. Avoiding high is most important, but leaning toward low in the choice between low and medium also matters. In particular, any fruit (including berries), as well as most types of meat, poultry and fish need to be eaten in moderation,

2. While skim milk is high on the insulin index, whole milk is not.

3. While some types of beans are high on the insulin index, other types of beans are reasonably low on the insulin index.

4. While I suspect typical American spaghetti is indeed quite bad, existing evidence on the insulin index suggests (surprisingly) that there may be some types of pasta that are not so bad. More research is needed on this.

5. It is only raw carrots that are OK. Cooked carrots have a higher glycemic index, suggesting a high insulin index.

6. Potatoes should be on the banned list.

Link to the source for the graphic above

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

• Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide

For example, here is what the first section looks like:

I. The Basics

• 3 Achievable Resolutions for Weight Loss

• Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts

• 4 Propositions on Weight Loss

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon

• Maintaining Weight Loss

• Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

• What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet

• The Problem with Processed Food

• On Exercise and Weight Loss

• David Ludwig: It Takes Time to Adapt to a Lowcarb, Highfat Diet

• Competition from Generic Insulin Would Do a Lot to Reduce Medical Costs; But Reducing the Incidence of Type II Diabetes by Changes in the American Diet Would Do Much More

• Jonathan Shaw: Could Inflammation Be the Cause of Myriad Chronic Diseases?