The Economist: Improvements in Productivity Need to Be Accommodated by Monetary Policy

I was delighted see that the Economist noticed my paper with Susanto Basu and John Fernald: "Are Technology Improvements Contractionary?" This is the paper for which the first sentence in the abstract is simply "Yes." Even better, the Economist interpreted it correctly: the historical pattern of technology improvements being contractionary is an indictment of the historical monetary policy response to technology shocks. 

Standard optimal monetary policy theory suggests that monetary policy should come close to stabilizing the price level around a steady trend. The failure of monetary policy to do this in response to technology shocks can be seen in these estimated impulse responses:

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The failure to have sufficiently stimulative monetary policy after technology improvements results in the dysfunctional impulse responses shown below, in which employment and investment fall in response to an improvement in technology!

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One of the underappreciated aspects of these results is what strong evidence they provide against real business cycle models. Nothing that comes anywhere close to a social planner's problem would result in a reduction in investment in response to an immediate permanent technology improvement that we estimate. And if the technology improvement was predicted in advance, a negative response of investment to the actual arrival of the technology improvement would be even harder to generate.  

It isn't that the real business cycle model couldn't be approximately true in the future: better monetary policy would make the economy behave a lot like a real business cycle model would say it should. The "Divine Coincidence" of monetary policy is that keeping prices on a steady track is exactly what is needed to keep output, employment, investment, the real interest rate and so on at the natural level that a real business model would deliver. There may be modest departures from the Divine Coincidence, but if a central bank were doing monetary policy as it should, it would be quite difficult to statistically distinguish the behavior of the economy from what a real business cycle model would lead to. 

Monetary policy does not act instantaneously. Even with excellent monetary policy, the economy may be away from the natural level for 9 to 15 months after an unexpected shock, simply do to the lags in the effects of monetary policy. But there is forewarning for many shocks, and shocks that act through the financial system are likely to have the same lags in their effects as monetary policy, so vigorous enough monetary countermeasures should be able to limit damage to a few month's time after a financial shock that does not diminish the long-run capacity of the economy. A key point though, is that "vigorous enough" may mean using negative interest rates for a brief period of time until the economy is put to rights and positive interest rates can be restored. On this, see my post "On the Great Recession."  

Here is the paragraph in which the Economist refers to our paper, after positing a new high-skilled-labor-saving medical technology:

Indeed, in a paper published in 2006, Susantu Basu, John Fernald and Miles Kimball concluded that advances in technology are usually contractionary, tending to nudge economies towards slump conditions. They estimated that technological improvements tend to depress the use of capital and labour (think, in this example, stethoscopes and doctors) and business investment (new clinics) for up to two years. To those living through such periods, this depressing effect would show up in lower inflation and wage rises. That, in turn, suggests that an alert central bank with an inflation target ought to swing into action to provide more monetary stimulus and keep price and wage growth on track. That stimulus should spur more investment in growing parts of the economy, helping them to absorb quickly the resources freed up by the new, doctor-displacing technology and thus averting a slump.

The Economist then proceeds to diagnose why central banks might do this:

Two obstacles usually get in the way of such a benign outcome. First, these steps unfold with a lag. The slowdown in price and wage growth will be gradual, as displaced workers tighten their belts and compete with other jobseekers for new employment. Central banks might then wait to see whether low inflation reflects a genuine economic trend or is merely a statistical blip. Even after they act, their tools take time to have an effect.

To the extent the Economist is right in its diagnosis, I have these several things to say to central bankers caught in this kind of thinking. First, a track of prices that is too low is something that should be corrected just as quickly as a track of prices that is too high. If you don't think so, you probably have too high a long-run inflation target, as I discuss in "The Costs and Benefits of Repealing the Zero Lower Bound...and Then Lowering the Long-Run Inflation Target." With a zero inflation target, the idea that prices going off track in the downward direction is just as serious as prices going off track in the upward direction is easier to feel at a gut level. Second, central banks should act quickly on whatever information they have, knowing that they can reverse course quickly if further information points in the opposite direction. Third, as I have emphasized at many central banks in my visits to central banks around the world, central banks should begin a major international cooperative effort to monitor early signs of technological change. 

I discuss these monetary policy issues and more in my paper "Next Generation Monetary Policy."

 

Thanks to Ori Heffetz for alerting me to this article in the Economist

 

Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review

Besides frozen cherries with half and half and homemade nutbars, one of my healthy treats is a few squares of intense dark chocolate each day that I am eating anything. (On the benefits of fasting, see my posts "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" and "Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts.") Although the sugar in most chocolate is a problem, I think of the cocoa in chocolate as being good for my health. In this, I am not alone. As Richard Shiffman writes in his interesting Valentine's Day Wall Street Journal article "Is Chocolate a Healthy Choice for Valentine’s Day? That Depends on Which Kind":

U.S. sales of chocolate went from $14.2 billion in 2007 to $18.9 billion in 2017, a period during which overall sales for candy declined, largely because of growing health concerns over sugar.

How did chocolate manage to buck the bear market in candy? One reason is the widespread perception that chocolate, unlike other sweet treats, is not just delicious but good for you. 

Here is some of the evidence for the health benefits of chocolate, according to Richard Shiffman in the same article: 

Leaving aside such historical hype, many modern studies have shown, in fact, an association between the consumption of pure cocoa, which is rich in compounds called flavanols, and moderate reductions in risk for a range of cardiovascular illnesses and even for diabetes. Research done in 2009 on the Kuna people, who live on islands off the coast of Panama, lends some credence to these results. Dr. Norman Hollenberg of Harvard Medical School found that the Kuna, who drink up to 10 cups of gravy-thick homegrown hot cocoa a day, live longer and have lower rates of hypertension, heart disease and stroke than most Western populations, though other factors may also contribute to their outstanding health.

Science has also delved into the impact of cocoa products on various brain functions. A review published last May in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition found evidence that cocoa flavanols may help to focus concentration and improve memory and may even slow the mental decline that often comes with aging.

... ... the Cosmos trial—is administering cocoa flavanol capsules together with placebos to over 21,000 individuals. Harvard’s Dr. JoAnn Manson, a co-director of the study, says that while previous research shows that cocoa can lower blood pressure and increase the elasticity of blood vessels, “the jury is still out on whether this translates as lower risk of heart attack and strokes.” The researchers hope to provide some definitive answers when they publish their findings in 2020.

However, this evidence needs to be taken with a grain of salt:

Dr. Marion Nestle (no relation to the chocolate manufacturer), a professor emerita in the nutrition and food studies department at New York University, points out that most chocolate research has been funded, at least in part, by chocolate companies. “In general, they get overwhelmingly positive results. Whereas studies that are independently funded have mixed results,” Dr. Nestle said. “Bias can creep in with the research question that they ask, or how they interpret the results.” In fact, all of the studies I have cited in this article have received at least some of their funding from chocolate manufacturers or analyze research that did.

As I touch on in "Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance," scientists distort evidence quite a bit just for the academic rewards of getting published in journals. The desire to secure funding can also tilt research.

Still, I think of chocolate as not only delicious but healthy—except for the sugar in most chocolate. So I try to eat chocolate that has such a high percentage of cocoa that I figure there isn't much room left for a lot of sugar.

Let me review several types of chocolate bars with very high percentages of cocoa. I assure you, I don't receive any money from companies that sell chocolate, unless you count my income from the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California, which no doubt sell chocolate in their university bookstores.  

Because it is easy to get at the grocery store, not unreasonably expensive, and delicious, my main go-to chocolate is squares from a panther bar, which advertises itself as 88% cocoa:

I have tried many other types of chocolate with percentages of cocoa at 88% or above. One exception to my general rule of 88% cocoa or more are ChocoPerfection bars, which only 60% cocoa, but are sugarfree:

Link to the Amazon site for ChocoPerfection bars

Link to the Amazon site for ChocoPerfection bars

ChocoPerfection bars are sweetened to chicory root and erythritol. Though my approach differs from keto in important ways—see especially "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid" and "The Keto Food Pyramid"—I take the keto folks as my experts on which nonsugar sweeteners are OK: chicory root and erythritol are some of the few that pass muster by a reasonable consensus among keto folks. Most of the time, ChocoPerfection bars seem too sweet most of the time, but sometimes a jolt of sweetness is nice.

Beyond those two types, I have tried many others that I found by one of two procedures: (1) searching on Amazon for every type of chocolate advertising a percentage of cocoa 88% or above and (2) looking for everything 88% or above in my local Whole Foods store, where I thought I could catch some more exotic brands. I am sure I missed some, and new brands keep getting added. If there is anything I don't mention that is 88% or above—or even 85% or above—that you recommend, let me know and I will try it if I can find it reasonably easily. 

100%

The most interesting subcategory are those chocolate bars that advertise themselves as 100% or cocoa, which I assume means 99.5% or more cocoa. To best tasting of these to me is the very expensive Arete Vietnam Lam Dong 100% Dark Chocolate, listed at $15 a bar:

I am intrigued to try Arete's Guatemala Lachua Micro-lot 100% Dark Chocolate when it is no longer sold out. 

I also enjoyed One Hundred Percent Pure Cacao Ritual Chocolate, listed at $11 a bar:

It is actually a hard decision which I prefer between the Arete Vietnamese 100% Chocolate and the Ritual 100% Chocolate. Each has its own distinctive sophisticated taste. The Ritual 100% Chocolate has a floral aftertaste.

Lastly in this category, Primal Chocolate Midnight Coconut advertises itself as 100% cocoa. It has no sugar and a little coconut. I don't recommend it, but it was better than I expected from a 100% chocolate bar before I tried the Arete and Ritual chocolate bars above.   

Link to Amazon site for MIdnight Coconut

Link to Amazon site for MIdnight Coconut

98%-99%

Within this category, I found the Lindt 99% bars surprisingly accessible. They sometimes have the label "Noir Absolu" or "absolute black" from some version of French: 

Link to the Amazon site for Lindt 99% Noir Absolu Bars

Link to the Amazon site for Lindt 99% Noir Absolu Bars

Of course, the flipside of "accessible" is that some may consider these bars a little bland. But they go down easily and have a pleasing aftertaste. 

More challenging to the tastebuds, but quite edible is Dante Confections 98% Extra Dark Chocolate: 

These use stevia as a sweetener instead of sugar. Opinions on stevia as a nonsugar sweetener seem to vary more than opinions on chicory root and erythritol.  

Also challenging, but quite edible, are TCHO Dark Chocolate Critters:

TCHO Dark Chocolate Critters advertise themselves as good for baking and cooking. In that context I think they would be great. 

95%

The only type I found between 92% and 98% was Taza Wicked Dark at 95%:

Amazon sit for Taza Chocolate Wicked Dark

Amazon sit for Taza Chocolate Wicked Dark

To me, Wicked Dark bars tasted awfully, by far the worst of any of the chocolate bars reviewed here. They are suitable only for gustatory masochism, unless your tastes are quite different from mine. 

88%-92%

Jumping from the worst to the best of those I am reviewing, I found the Equal Exchange Chocolates Extreme Dark delicious—better tasting than the panther bars:

Link to the Amazon site for Equal Exchange Chocolates Extreme Dark

Link to the Amazon site for Equal Exchange Chocolates Extreme Dark

I expect to eat many more of them in the future. 

I also very much like LAmourette's Extra Smooth Chocolat Noir 91% cacao bar shown below.

Online it appears to list for $30 a bar! But I bought one for $7.95 at the wonderful Boulder Book Store on Pearl Street.

To my taste, the LAmourette's Extra Smooth Chocolat Noir 91% cacao bar is also a step above the Endangered Species panther bar. 

By contrast, the a 90% chocolate bar that is easy to find in stores but that I find boring is Lindt 90% chocolate. 

A bit bland was a virtue in the 99% Lindt bar, but at 90%, a chocolate bar should be delicious. To me, the Lindt 90% chocolate bar isn't.  

Finally, I tried 4 kinds that weren't terrible, and each was interesting in its own way, but were significantly below panther bars in taste. You might like one of them better than I did. Starting from those with the highest cocoa content, here they are:

Link to the Amazon site for Chocolove Extreme Dark Chocolate

Link to the Amazon site for Chocolove Extreme Dark Chocolate

Intense dark chocolate is a good example of the many food pleasures available to those striving to eat food that is low on the insulin index. The panther bars also illustrate my boundaries for sugar: a few squares of a panther bar a day represents the most sugar that I eat on any regular basis. (I defend my negative view of sugar in "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes" and "The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes." Also see "Sugar as a Slow Poison" and "How Sugar Makes People Hangry.")

In the Greek myths, Prometheus was punished for giving fire to humans. In a Mesoamerican myth, Quetzalcoatl was cast out from among the other gods for sharing chocolate with humans. So by ancient American tradition, chocolate is the food of the gods. Enjoy!

 

Update: Morgan Warstler recommends cold-brewed chocolate made with  these cocoa nibs
and this bag. He also tweets a recommendation for these cocoa extract pills. More recommendations from others are coming in that I will report as I get them clear. 

 

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Other Health Issues

VII. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography. I defend the ability of economists like me to make a contribution to understanding diet and health in “On the Epistemology of Diet and Health: Miles Refuses to `Stay in His Lane’.”

Equality Before Natural Law in the Face of Manifest Differences in Station

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                                                                    image source

Because people are so obviously unequal in so many ways, it is tricky saying what one means by saying everyone is "equal before the law." Putting a high value on freedom makes that easier, because then "equality before the law" means that everyone gets to do whatever they want in as long as they respect other people's right to do whatever they want. I discuss some of the complexities in this in "The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty," but the basic idea has become intuitive in our society, which has a fairly well-defined notion of the boundaries of each person's private sphere.

The issues I discussed in "The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty" were about setting the boundaries between the private spheres of different adults. After laying out how freedom provides a way of thinking about equality under the law in section 54 of his 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (Chapter VI. Of Paternal Power), in sections 55 and 56, John Locke deals with a different complication: limitations on the size of the private sphere of freedom for children. What John Locke emphasizes is that the limitations on children should be temporary ones. 

Though I have said above, Chap. II. That all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality: age or virtue may give men a just precedency: excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level: birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those to whom nature, gratitude, or other respects, may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the equality, which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another; which was the equality I there spoke of, as proper to the business in hand, being that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.

Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them, when they come into the world, and for some time after; but it is but a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they art wrapt up in, and supported by, in the weakness of their infancy: age and reason, as they grow up, loosen them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free disposal.

Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession of their strength and reason, and so was capable, from the first instant of his being, to provide for his own support and preservation, and govern his actions according to the dictates of the law of reason which God had implanted in him. From him the world is peopled with his descendants, who are all born infants, weak and helpless, without knowledge or understanding: but to supply the defects of this imperfect state, till the improvement of growth and age hath removed them, Adam and Eve, and after them all parents were, by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the children they had begotten; not as their own workmanship, but the workmanship of their own maker, the Almighty, to whom they were to be accountable for them.

In American society, we take it for granted than children are no longer subject to their parents after a certain age (typically 18), absent a serious mental disability. But not all societies have allowed children to be automatically emancipated from their parents at a certain age. I suspect that English society already allowed children to be emancipated after a certain age even in John Locke's time, so that John Locke could use that English custom to give a counterargument to the idea that the authority of monarchy could derive from the power of parents over their children. 

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts: 

Math Learning for Kids Who Have a Tough Time

 

This is an interesting panel discussion. In addition to useful background explanation, the discussion had three specific bits I found revealing. Let me transcribe those parts. Then I will expand on what Michele Mazzocco says. 

Lindsey Jones: ... there is a beautiful study by Aaron Maloney and Sian Beilock showing that when parents have math anxiety and they do homework with their children, then their children end up being even more math anxious and performing even worse in school. 

Lindsey Jones:  But there are things we can do as well. So there is research showing that suggests that for example if you engage students in what is called "expressive writing" exercises, before they take, for example, a high-stakes math exam—they simply write down how they feel about the upcoming test, how they feel about the upcoming exam—and if you do that, you lessen the effects of the anxiety on the subsequent test performance. 

Michele Mazzocco:  In our longitudinal study, we looked back at kindergarten, first, second graders' descriptions of math and reading. And, again, looking at the different groups of children,  those who had consistently shown difficulties with math throughout the study, we looked back at how they had defined math and reading in first and second grade. They were significantly more likely to use negative language in describing math compared to reading, more likely to describe it as difficult compared to their typically-achieving peers.

And this gets back to the chicken-or-egg problem that Daniel was talking about: Is it that they disliked math and therefore they avoided it and therefore didn't get better at math? Or is it that they disliked math because it was difficult and math would have continued to be problematic for them, regardless of their disposition towards math?

And I think that this speaks to the broader issue of math disposition. Math anxiety is a very real phenomenon; it's something that we should not ignore. But there's also the part of the math disposition that reflects how children feel about the importance of math—it's usefulness—and the sentiment that "Hey, you know this might be one of those things that's hard. It might be something where I need a recipe guide or I need some help. I need some scaffolds.  But that's OK, because we all need some scaffolding for different kinds of tasks, and putting forth effort actually leads to some success." So if we have this healthy disposition towards math and recognize that effort is required, that effort doesn't mean necessarily that I'm bad at it—it just means that I need to work harder. 

After Noah Smith's and my column "There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't" went viral (and was translated into Spanish here), many people shared their own personal stories of ultimate success at learning math even when they went through a period of thinking they were bad at math. Many other people shared wonderful ideas for how to help people learn math. I tried to distil those ideas and some of my own into the advice in "How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person'" One of the key ideas is that it is OK to learn math slowly:

A second related idea is that for children, math needs to be made as fun, relevant and unthreatening as possible:

In "How to Turn Every Child into a 'Math Person'," I pointed to leading a math club for children as a wonderful choice for those willing to volunteer to help kids. 

I have also been interested in how to teach math effectively in more formal settings:

More recently, I have run across discussions of stereotypes for particular demographic groups that can get in the way of learning math:

For those who need a little extra confidence boost to counteract a tendency to underestimate themselves, I also discuss "Travis Bradberry: Ten Guaranteed Ways To Appear Smarter Than You Are." 

At a high level, the confidence that one can learn math, as well as the idea of "slow math" is important in the advice Noah and I give in "The Complete Guide to Getting into an Economics PhD Program."

By the way, I dug out these links simply by typing "math" into my blog search box. There are more, especially guest posts people telling personal stories of overcoming the belief that they were bad at math.  

The most important principle is the key not only to learning math but to succeeding at almost anything: knowing that you can get smarter by working hard at getting smarter. Here is that message, generalized:

 

A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research

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                                                                   Boulder Creek (image source here)

In addition to the Economics Department here at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I am a professor, I have been hanging out at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, which is on the other end of campus, a beautiful hike past the football stadium and then along the Boulder Creek Path. 

One of the impressive people I have met at the Institute for Behavior Genetics is David Brazel, currently a Predoctoral Trainee of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology. 

                          David Brazel

                          David Brazel

Though he now focuses on drug addiction, in order to get into his joint program, David had to do a research proposal comparable in detail to a grant proposal, which was directed at research on obesity. So David read a lot of the previous research in this area. I had a chance to talk to David last Wednesday and David graciously gave his permission for me to share with you what I learned from that conversation and the hypotheses about obesity that I ran by David. I should say that what I learned, or thought I learned, may not exactly match what David said or what he thinks. What I have below represents what I ended up thinking after talking to him. 

Leptin and Ghrelin. Following Jason Fung in the way I lay out in "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon, I have emphasized the role of insulin and its opponent hormone glucagon. David said that research has also pointed to leptin and ghrelin as extremely important. For example, the genes for leptin and ghrelin seem important in predicting obesity. This is something I need to look into more. 

Beige Fat. One of the intriguing things David mentioned was that some of the most important genes for obesity have to do with whether fat cells are trying to generate heat or not. Mice have such a high surface-area to volume ratio, they would get cold if they didn't have something called "brown fat," which generates a lot of heat. Humans don't have brown fat in the same sense as rodents, but they do often have fat cells with an enhanced number of mitochondria and enhanced heat generation that are called "beige fat." 

One way to make your fat cells more beige so that they burn more energy is to live in a cold climate. It may be that taking cold showers could make a difference, too. A lot of research remains to be done on this. 

Obesity research is still at an early stage in many areas. One general theme from my conversaition with David was this: while the views I have taken about obesity on this blog might be wrong, they are consistent with the existing research on obesity. This is saying much less than you might think: the results of existing research admit of many, many interpretations, and much is simply unknown. 

Is It Healthy for Humans to Eat What Is Healthy for Rats and Mice? One simple example is my suspicion of using rodent data to give advice about what humans should eat. (Thinking about rodent brown fat might steer you in the right direction, but thinking about which foods are fattening to rodents may steer you in the wrong one.) Several people I have talked to who are involved in genetics research have been sympathetic to this argument that I made in "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes":

I am inclined to agree with Stephan that rodent data do not support the idea that sugar is more harmful than fat (though it does seem to support the idea that fat plus sugar is worse than fat alone). But I am struck by the possibility that rodents might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans are. This may even allow them to eat sugar with less harm than humans. Am I wrong in thinking that for many, many generations rodents outside laboratories have tended to eat highcarb diets? The "many, many generations" is important. Even if rodents had only been eating highcarb diets for the same number of years as humans, the larger number of generations per century would have allowed rodents that hang around humans to be naturally selected to tolerate highcarb diets more than long-generationed humans.

Every discipline tends to develop conventions that the best research that is feasible for the typical researcher should be treated with respect. But if the best experimental research that is feasible is studies on rodents that might be much better adapted to highcarb diets than humans and small-sample-size human studies, it shouldn't make it any more persuasive to those of us who are not acculturated diet scientists for them to say "This is the state of the art."

Both Stephan Guyenet, as I discuss in "The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes" and Seth Yoder, as I discuss in "The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes," are insufficiently cautious in applying rodent data to recommendations about what humans should eat. This leads me to believe that it might be common for nutritionists to rely too heavily and too uncritically on results from rodent data. 

Almost everyone would agree that the adequacy of mice and rats as a model for human nutrition is a crucial scientific question. The specific research I would love to have someone point me to, and would love to see someone pursue if it hasn't been done already is to look closely at the coevolution of mice and rats with humans, and the evolutionary response of mice and rats to the human agricultural transition. I know there has been a lot of interesting work on the coevolution of humans and dogs, so this is a type of research that can be done. There may even be mouse remains partially preserved in ancient middens that would provide some ancient mouse DNA before, during and after the human agricultural transition. 

Belly Fat. It is known that belly fat is correlated with insulin resistance. But research has not fully established why. I threw out a possibility that extends the logic of this passage from "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon": 

People often talk as if obesity itself caused many chronic diseases. But other than joint problems, and the social stigma of obesity, almost all of the diseases associated with obesity could be due to the common cause of elevated insulin levels. That is,

  • chronically elevated insulin levels usually cause obesity, and

  • chronically elevated insulin levels have many dangerous side effects. 

There is an interesting theoretical case in which chronically high insulin levels would be de-linked from obesity. Suppose the fat cells of someone caught in a carb rebound cycle became resistant to insulin, but his or her muscle cells retained their normal sensitivity to insulin. Because the fat cells would not respond much to the insulin signal telling them to take in glucose from the bloodstream and convert it into triglycerides and then fat, he or she would not gain much weight. But to keep blood glucose levels in line, insulin levels would have to go up even further to get the job done just from the muscle cell response to insulin. If high insulin levels cause most of the chronic diseases we associate with obesity, then while still normal in weight, he or she would be at risk for all of these chronic diseases. This is someone others might envy for being able to eat anything without gaining weight—right up until he or she died of a heart attack. ...

If, on the other hand, muscle cells become more resistant to insulin than fat cells, then the higher insulin levels that result from insulin resistance will lead to weight gain. Moreover, the fact that even a little food can still elevate insulin levels quite a bit will make weight loss very difficult. In saying this, I have in mind this model relating insulin levels to fat accumulation and decumulation

  • high insulin level —> accumulation of body fat

  • medium insulin levels over a substantial range —> body fat steady

  • low insulin level —> fat burning

If you have insulin resistance for muscle cells but not fat cells, even small amounts of food will prevent reaching an insulin level low enough to lead to fat burning. The only way to get insulin levels low enough to lead to fat burning may be to have a substantial period of time with no food at all—fasting.  

One logical possibility for why belly fat is an especially good indicator of insulin resistance is that belly fat cells are one of the last type of fat cells to become insulin resistance. So they still respond strongly to the "take in blood sugar and turn it into fat" message of elevated insulin even when high levels of insulin shouting that message go less and less heeded by other fat cells. This is speculative, but what is known is that there are several distinct types of fat cells in the body. So it is not impossible that belly fat cells get insulin resistant at a slower rate on average than other types of fat cells. 

The Net Body Fat Accumulation Response to Insulin Curve. Talking to David, I waved my hands in the air trying to describe something like the graph below giving the picture I have in my mind of how the permanent weight gain or weight loss of fat accumulation or fat burning is related to insulin levels. Here, as in response to the other ideas I put forward, he said the basic idea was possible; the research hasn't been done to confirm or refute this idea. He also emphasized that the set of mechanisms would no doubt be more complex than this. 

I think there is a bit of optical illusion in the graph below: the horizontal axis really is flat, but a trick of the eye makes it look downward-sloping. The insulin level—really a stand-in for a linear combination of several hormones—is on the horizontal axis. Also on the horizontal axis is the equation giving where the insulin level comes from in this simplified model: the product of calories, average insulin index of the food one eats and one's level of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance increases the insulin response for any type of food. So the more insulin resistant you are, the more you need to shift to lower insulin-index foods and the more you need to fast if you want to achieve a low enough insulin level to lose weight. (See "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid" on the foods to avoid and the foods to move toward to lower the average insulin index of the food you eat.) 

A key feature of the net body fat accumulation response to insulin curve that I have drawn is that it has a flat part. There is a range of insulin levels that lead to no weight gain and no weight loss. But a high enough insulin level, while it lasts, leads to weight gain; conversely, a low enough insulin level, while it lasts, leads to weight loss. A simple way to get a response curve of this shape is to have one signaling mechanism for weight gain that has a high insulin level threshold and another signaling mechanism for weight loss that has a low insulin level threshold. The main reason to think the shape might be something like this is that people are as close to steady in their weight as they are. Without a flat part to the response curve, that would be harder to get.  

It might seem that lowering calorie intake would be a good way to lower your insulin index. But calorie intake also matters for making sure your cells have enough nourishment and energy. The balance between pain and weight loss is dramatically different depending on what part of the response curve you are in:

  • At a low enough insulin level, fat is released from your fat cells and your cells will have plenty of nourishment.
  • At the right end of the flat part of the curve, your cells will also have plenty of nourishment.
  • At the left end of the flat part of the curve, you aren't eating very many calories and your body isn't burning any fat, so there is not enough nourishment for your cells. This is sometimes called cellular starvation, and it isn't pleasant. 
  • At a high enough insulin level, sugar will be taken out of your blood stream and stored as fat so fast that you are likely to feel quite hungry. It isn't exactly cellular starvation, but it is genuine hunger. 

Technically, in this simple model, the amount of nourishment available to cells is shown by which line you are on parallel to the purple line. The purple line itself can be seen as a dividing line between adequate and inadequate nourishment. What give this model its interesting results is that nourishment is linear in calories and net body fat accumulation, but net body fat accumulation is nonlinear in insulin levels. 

The bottom line is that you will feel hungry even shortly after eating a lot if you are eating a lot of high insulin index foods, but as long as you have plenty of fat to burn, you won't feel all that hungry if you are not eating anything at all. That is the revolutionary idea that I learned from reading Jason Fung's books The Obesity Code and The Complete Guide to Fasting—and an idea that matches my own experience and the experience a few other people who have shared their experiences as self-appointed guinea pigs with me. 

Don't miss these other posts on fighting obesity:

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

 

On Rob Porter

Image source. Rob Porter is holding the documentLink to the Wikipedia article on Rob Porter

Image source. Rob Porter is holding the document

Link to the Wikipedia article on Rob Porter

Note: This is not about the well-known economist named Rob Porter but the former White House staffer

The sharp edge of the Rob Porter story came home to me when I realized my personal connection. Other than the victims and those close to the victims, some of those whose hearts are hurt most deeply by someone's misbehavior are the parents of the bad actor. I know Rob Porter's father Roger Porter well. 

My connection comes through the small world of Mormons at the highest levels of academia. Roger Porter was my bishop when I was in the student congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1977-1979 before I served a Mormon mission in Japan. Moreover, in a Mormon congregation, even the bishop and his family has a "home teacher" (see "Inside Mormonism: The Home Teachers Come Over"), and although I was less than 19 years old during this period, I was assigned as the home teacher for Roger Porter and his family. (Since Rob was born in 1977, that means I was the home teacher for Rob Porter during his first two years of life.)

Roger Porter is a truly delightful person. His his wife Ann was also truly delightful. Ann died last year and so was spared the latest reminder of Rob's bad behavior. I don't see any angle whereby Rob could make any progress at blaming his parents for his bad actions. 

Tangentially, as a young White House Fellow, Roger Porter took on a role in the Ford Administration similar to role that Rob took in the Trump administration: being an effective manager of the paper flow. 

Good parents want their children to be good and to do good as well as to be happy. By all accounts, Rob was doing some good within the Trump Administration; but he did bad things in his marriages.

I am moved by the progress that the #MeToo era represents. It is a huge step forward for humanity to the extent that it is now harder for men to get away with treating women badly.

The question I have, though, is what the path for repentance is for men who have treated women badly. One thing I think is a minimum standard for us as a public to treat men in the public sphere as having repented is this: men who have done serious harm to women should come forward and admit their crimes and near-crimes without waiting to be accused by others. If someone proactively says they have acted badly and shows real evidence of having turned over a new leaf, there should be some length of time after which we as a public should treat them more or less the same as those who were never bad in the first place. (In the private sphere, more caution is likely to be appropriate for women.) 

The Mormon Church, in particular, should encourage men who have treated women badly to talk about what they did wrong and their efforts to do better. This sends an important to other men about intolerable behavior. The Mormon Church is an institution that could dramatically improve the record of its men in their treatment of its women by having men who are truly remorseful talk about how they mistreated women and how terrible a thing that is. (Other institutions need this just as much, but have less of the institutional capability to make it happen.)

Marriage—Not for the Faint of Heart

Miles and Gail in 1984 (engagement photo)

Miles and Gail in 1984 (engagement photo)

I am proud to share with you the first guest post on supplysideliberal.com by my wife Gail. It is also the 2d post on her blog resilienceconspiracy.com. 

This is a Valentine's Day themed post. In case you are interested, I have two Valentine's Day themed posts of my own: "Marriage 101" and "Marriage 102."

Update: Gail also has a later guest post: 

When I was 22 years old, I met Miles Kimball.  Two months later we were married. We were young, attracted to one another, and had an uninformed confidence born of youth and optimism that we could make a successful marriage. 

When I looked into Miles’s eyes, I thought about all the wonderful things in our future: kids, jobs, and building a life together that would be fulfilling and joyful.  I imagined the love I felt for him would naturally grow, with no thought of the real work a successful marriage requires.

I’ve sometimes wondered if I could have seen the challenges ahead, would I have entered into this partnership?  If I could have seen the grief, heartache, and work it would take to find common ground . . . would I have gazed into this man’s eyes and agreed to spend my life with him?

Miles and I have been married 33½ years.  We’ve had the tragic misfortune of burying three children—each separate loss taking a tremendous toll on our family.  We’ve regrouped many times, struggling to find the language to explain our separate experiences in order to move on together. 

Romantic love is fun and mostly easy.  This Valentine’s Day I’d like to pay tribute to the troopers, the couples who manage to sort through all the challenges, upheavals, job losses, grief, health challenges and more . . . and still manage to connect, eye-to-eye with the person they long-ago promised to spend their life with.

Love is complicated . . . and sometimes very simple.  I remember the first time I saw Miles walking toward me to pick me up for our first date.  I felt a surge of hope and wonder.  Now when Miles walks toward me I feel the validation of someone who sees me, has comforted me, and has shouldered our shared burdens with grace and humor.  After all we’ve been through, he continues to approach life with a happiness and optimism I’ve come to rely on. 

Today, Miles and I still want to be in the same room with one another and face whatever is coming together.  Who could ask for more?

The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness

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                                                  Link to the article above

                                                  Link to the article above

Obesity has many other negative consequences in our culture beyond its negative health consequences. The introduction to Shoshana Grossbard and Sankar Mukhopadhyay's article flagged above lists many:

Obesity is a major problem in the industrialized world, including the US. Its health and health cost consequences have been well documented, e.g., in Strum (2002) and Cawley and Meyerhoefer (2012). In addition, higher body weight may have negative social and economic consequences. Several studies (Register and Williams 1990; Averett and Korenman 1996; Pagan and Davila 1997; Cawley 2004; Atella et al. 2008; Johar and Katayama 2012; Cawley and Meyerhoefer 2012; Sabia and Rees 2012; Larose et al. 2016 among others) have found an inverse relationship between women’s earnings and their body weight. There is a related but smaller literature that explores the effects of BMI on employment status. Lindeboom et al. (2010) do not find any significant effect of obesity on employment in the UK. Morris (2007) on the other hand finds that obese women are less likely to participate in the labor market in the UK. Two experimental studies, Rooth (2009) and Reichert (2015), find a negative effect of BMI on employment. Caliendo and Gehrsitz (2016) provide semiparametric estimates for the relationship between BMI and employment and find evidence of non-linearity.

Furthermore, body weight has negative consequences for a number of outcomes related to couple formation. It reduces (1) women’s dating and matching opportunities (Lemennicier 1988, Hitsch et al. 2010, Vaillant and Wolff 2011; Chiappori 1992), (2) their likelihood of cohabitation and marriage (Mukhopadhyay 2008) but not in a linear way (Malcolm and Kaya 2016), and (3) a wife’s relative influence on how the couple’s resources are internally distributed (Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque 2012). Singles with higher BMI may expect less from marriage. For instance, Vaillant and Wolff (2011) show that French obese women are less likely to expect men to be tall and charming and are more willing to accept a violent mate. Obese women are also less likely to be married to men with higher income and education (Oreffice and Quintana-Domeque 2010).

The research behind their article identifies another, as described in the abstract:

Is BMI related to hours of work through marriage market mechanisms? We empirically explore this issue using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 and a number of estimation strategies (including OLS, IV, and sibling FE). Our IV estimates (with same-sex sibling’s BMI as an instrument and a large set of controls including wage) suggest that a one-unit increase in BMI leads to an almost 2% increase in White married women’s hours of work. However, BMI is not associated with hours of work of married men. We also find that a one-unit increase in BMI leads to a 1.4% increase in White single women’s hours of work, suggesting that single women may expect future in-marriage transfers that vary by body weight. We show that the positive association between BMI and hours of work of White single women increases with self-assessed probability of future marriage and varies with expected cumulative spousal income. Comparisons between the association between BMI and hours of work for White and Black married women suggest a possible racial gap in intra-marriage transfers from husbands to wives.

Moreover, beyond all the negative consequences listed above, I am struck by what a great share of the consciousness of many people is filled by thoughts about their own unsuccessful weight-loss efforts. That is, these negative consequences of obesity and being overweight are on top of the costs people incur to try to weigh less. I emphasize the expenditure of consciousness itself, but of course there is a great deal of time and money spent in weight-loss efforts as well. It is a bit like crime: we suffer from crime and we are hurt by all of the costs we incur to try to reduce crime.  

Having emphasized all the costs on top of the health cost, how big is the health cost itself? Here is a way to get an idea of the right order of magnitude. A little googling turns up the 2013 PLOS One article "Life Years Lost Associated with Obesity-Related Diseases for U.S. Non-Smoking Adults" by Su-Hsin Chang , Lisa M. Pollack, Graham A. Colditz which cites these CDC figures in the introduction:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that approximately 112,000 deaths are associated with obesity each year in the United States [6], [7].

When combined with a $9 million valuation of a statistical life, which is not an unreasonable number (see the Wikipedia article "Value of Life"), that comes to slightly over $1 trillion worth of obesity-related deaths each year. 

The total cost of obesity, including all of the above, motivates me to keep writing about how to fight it. Here are the main posts I have written so far on fighting obesity:

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

John Locke: Thinking of Mothers and Fathers On a Par Undercuts a Misleading Autocratic Metaphor

Large-scale matriarchies appear often in fiction, but are hard to point to in real life. Some of these fictions project matriarchy into prehistory. But I suspect the status of women relative to men is better now than at any other time since the…

Large-scale matriarchies appear often in fiction, but are hard to point to in real life. Some of these fictions project matriarchy into prehistory. But I suspect the status of women relative to men is better now than at any other time since the emergence of Homo Sapiens. For better than now, we need to look to the future, not the past.

The word "patriarchy" points to a very real correlation between autocratic hierarchy and sexism. There are, and there have been female dictators and semi-dictators. But it is hard to come up with an example of an autocratic government that has as high a percentage of women in the top echelons of power (say in a list of the top 100 most politically powerful people in a nation) as many democracies do. (Communist governments officially proclaimed the equality of men and women. But they did not and do not have a large percentage of women in the top echelons of power.)

In sections 52 and 53 of John Locke's 2d Treatise on Government: “Of Civil Government” (Chapter VI. Of Paternal Power), John Locke points to an interesting reason that gender equality is a bad fit for autocracy: it put two people at the head of each family, instead of one, and thereby undercuts the notion that one person needs to be at the top of society:

It may perhaps be censured as an impertinent criticism, in a discourse of this nature, to find fault with words and names, that have obtained in the world: and yet possibly it may not be amiss to offer new ones, when the old are apt to lead men into mistakes, as this of paternal power probably has done, which seems so to place the power of parents over their children wholly in the father, as if the mother had no share in it; whereas, if we consult reason or revelation, we shall find, she hath an equal title. This may give one reason to ask, whether this might not be more properly called parental power? for whatever obligation nature and the right of generation lays on children, it must certainly bind them equal to both the concurrent causes of it. And accordingly we see the positive law of God every where joins them together, without distinction, when it commands the obedience of children, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” Exod. xx. 12. “Whosoever curseth his father or his mother,” Lev. xx. 9. “Ye shall fear every man his mother and his father,” Lev. xix. 3. “Children, obey your parents,” &c. Eph. vi. 1. is the style of the Old and New Testament.  1

 Had but this one thing been well considered, without looking any deeper into the matter, it might perhaps have kept men from running into those gross mistakes, they have made, about this power of parents; which, however it might, without any great harshness, bear the name of absolute dominion, and regal authority, when under the title of paternal power it seemed appropriated to the father, would yet have sounded but oddly, and in the very name shewn the absurdity, if this supposed absolute power over children had been called parental; and thereby have discovered, that it belonged to the mother too: for it will but very ill serve the turn of those men, who contend so much for the absolute power and authority of the fatherhood, as they call it, that the mother should have any share in it; and it would have but ill supported the monarchy they contend for, when by the very name it appeared, that that fundamental authority, from whence they would derive their government of a single person only, was not placed in one, but two persons jointly. But to let this of names pass.

The image of mothers and fathers being equal leaders of a family is not even a good fit as an image for oligarchic rule: most mother-father pairs leading families jointly have dispositions that differ more than the three individuals in a triumvirate, for example. So the image of mothers and fathers leading families jointly tends to suggest the idea that it is possible for people who are different to be involved in ruling. That is at least partway toward the idea of democracy. 

I have become enamored of the idea that involving people with different dispositions and different views in making a decision is likely to result in a better decision. Believing this forces me into the awkward position of being open to the possibility that I might be wrong even in situations where I am convinced that I am right. It also leads me to hope that my words persuade when I am right and don't persuade when (unbeknownst to me) I am wrong. 

I have enough confidence in my own views that if somehow, I were magically in the position of being a benevolent dictator in a society that would tolerate a departure from democracy, it would be hard to lay down that power entirely. But one of the first things I would do would be to gather around me a set of councillors I respected and trusted who would not hesitate to tell me when they thought I was wrong. Then I would irrevocably cede constitutional authority to the council that I had appointed—and mandate a transition to democracy by the time most of those councillors would become unable to serve due to death or advanced age. 

 

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts: