Enemy of the steak: what's wrong with government diet guidelines

As an amateur chef I have become increasingly interested in the government’s guidelines and regulations around food. For something so central to our lives, the advice and rules the government makes to do with what we eat are usually overlooked. Two developments this week suggest that this is a mistake. I have previously argued that government regulation is often bad because, if it turns out to be bad regulation, it imposes a single error across an entire group of people or firms. That view may explain the financial crisis, where banks were required to hold lots of mortgage debt by regulators who thought they were forcing banks to be sensible.

Now, it looks as if it might also apply to diet guidelines. This week a new paper has been published that argues quite convincingly that, not only does modern evidence show that government guidelines to reduce dietary fat intake were a bad idea, they were even against the bulk of the evidence available at the time.

Today, it’s being reported that the US will stop advising people to avoid dietary cholesterol, because of a change in nutritionists’ view of how our diet affects our bodily cholesterol levels.

The Verge says that ‘The DGAC is more concerned about the chronic under-consumption of good nutrients, noting that Vitamin D, Vitamin E, potassium, calcium, and fiber are under-consumed across the entire US population.’ Interestingly, high-cholesterol foods like eggs, offal and seafood are very high in some of those vitamins.

It’s tempting to suggest a connection there – that vitamin deficiencies may be a direct cause of misguided government diet advice. And this may be the case. But, having looked around and spoken to the British Nutrition Foundation, I can’t find any work by either the government or independent academics on how much impact these guidelines have on what we eat, let alone on our health. (The exception is the five-a-day campaign, which has been fairly successful.)

If it turns out that diet guidelines have been wrong on things like fat and cholesterol, and maybe things like salt as well, what are the costs? I see there being two potential downsides to bad advice. The first is that the advice is actually dead wrong and drives people to eat in ways that ends up being worse for their health. Perhaps this is true of the cholesterol advice.

The second, which is more ambiguous, is the welfare cost. We eat not just for sustenance but because it gives us pleasure – a steak done well is much better for me than a well-done steak, because, even though the nutritional content is basically the same, it makes me happier. If government guidelines have been mistakenly putting people off eating foods they enjoy then they have been costly in welfare terms even if the health impact is not significant.

Of course people may need to get advice from somewhere, and I don’t see any reason to believe that government advice is worse than, say, the stuff you get in the Femail section of the Mail Online website. But if government diet regulations are still likely to be mistaken, and they influence people much more than any single bit of diet advice from an independent source, then they may end up holding back a process of private trial and error that would give us better information about what’s good to eat over time.

This picture is illegal in California

Or rather, the action being performed in that picture is illegal in California. It's not that the lettuce is not organic or anything. It's that it is evidence of someone working during their lunch break:

I mentioned earlier that we had struggled to comply with California meal break law. The problem was that my workers needed extra money, and so begged me to be able to work through lunch so they could earn a half-hour more pay each day. They said they would sign a paper saying they had agreed to this. Little did I know that this was a strategy devised by a local attorney who understood meal break litigation better than I. What he knew, but I didn't, was that based on new case law, a company had to get the employee's signature every day, not just once, to avoid the meal break penalties. The attorney advised them they could get the money for working lunch AND they could sue later for more money (which he would get a cut of). Which is exactly what they did, waiting until November to sue so they could get some extra money to pay for Christmas bills. This is why -- believe it or not -- it is now a firing offense at our company to work through lunch in California.

Eventually a system becomes so encrusted by such nonsense that nothing useful can ever be done and all that can be is to chase the paper around in ever decreasing circles. That is arguably what happened to the Ottoman Empire, various incarnations of the various Indian and Chinese empires and so on and on. It's one of the reasons that we here shout so loudly about regulation and the necessity of a bonfire of much of it.

We do not say that there should not be regulation, not at all. But we do say that we need to carefully consider who is doing the regulating. There are times and circumstances when it does need to be the bureaucrat or the politician. But far more often tasks that they take upon themselves will be better regulated through what we might call simple market processes. Markets are, after all, just the interaction of voluntary behaviour and surely we can trust two adults to agree between themselves about whether someone might usefully check a spreadsheet, or not, while munching on a salad?

Rules and recipes are different things Mr. Burnham

We tend to think that there must be some special dictionary out there, one hidden from us mere mortals, that allows politicians to say whatever they damn well please and yet not use the words that we all do. Almost as if there's some other foreign language they use to speak to us mere voters. Take this from Andy Burnham for example:

As Burnham correctly said last week: “For change to work in a market context, all players need to be following the same rules.”

This is in the course of The Observer managing to get absolutely everything about obesity, sugar and fatty lardbuckets entirely wrong. We all consume fewer calories than our grandparents did, sugar is not addictive (we consume less of it than in the past) said fatty lardbuckets do not cost the NHS money (dying young saves the NHS money) and so on and so on throughout the entire litany. And, of course, they're entirely wrong in the basic theory of what they are talking about for the role of government is not to tell us how to live our lives but to enable us to live our lives as we would wish.

But specifically what Burnham is talking about there is that manufacturers should be forced, whether by taxation or by regulation, to put less sugar, less salt, in our food. And no doubt to throw some organic lentils in there at some point as well.

Which is where that special dictionary comes in of course. Because that's not "rules" that's "recipes".

Is it too much to hope that one who would rule the country actually speaks the language of it? Sure, Willie the Conq and George I didn't do so well on this basis but aren't we supposed to have moved on?

Modi’s development key: agricultural land rights liberalisation

Narendra Modi has stated that growth, controlling food-price inflation, improving farmers’ incomes and developing infrastructure are top priorities. Agricultural Land currently makes up ~60% of India’s total land area. Liberalising agricultural land usage laws has the immense potential to accomplish these, amongst other things: 1. Liberalising agricultural land usage rights increases both use and trade value for investors, developers etc. – farmers’ and landowners’ wealth will increase.

2. Enables farmers and landowners to develop their land and diversify their income and, since they know what parts of the land are relatively unproductive or infertile, they will be able to diversify their income (tourism, hospitality, factories etc.). At the moment, a lot of land remains uncultivated because agriculture is not financially feasible but undeveloped because of land usage policy.

3. Developing rural and semi-rural transport infrastructure becomes legally possible and, therefore, private entities will be more likely to invest in its development.

4. Further connecting the Indian hinterland via the aforementioned liberalisation of the private development of rural transport infrastructure.

5. Combating food-price inflation. Food-price inflation in India is not due to a shortage of food per se but, rather, the fact that the transport, storage and maintenance infrastructure is so poor or even non-existent in places. This means that close to 1/3 of the food rots or spoils before it even reaches the market. If it becomes legally feasible for interested parties to build and improve roads, storage facilities and so on, then this will efficiently preserve stock and connect the source of produce to the markets; food-price inflation will naturally decline via this supply-side reform.

6. Reducing farmers’ suicides and debt. Since farmers will have alternative sources of income, increased wealth and also increased income from actually being able to transport their food to market, more farmers will be able to service their debt and are less likely to commit suicide.

7. Economic counter-terrorism against Maoists. Maoists are scattered across rural and semi-rural parts of India and are particularly concentrated in areas that are rich in natural resources and where there is high unemployment. The aforementioned points in 3 and 4 will make it easier to combat them and alleviate the economic pressures in that lead to the violent backlashes.

8. Diversified employment opportunities. Opportunities for diversifying land use and earning through alternative sources of income means there is a chance to have jobs that require different skills and education in rural areas.

9. Easing pressure on urban India to accommodate migrant workers. From 7, there will be less incentive for younger migrants of rural origin to travel to cities for jobs (or at least the rate at which migration increases may not increase as much).

10. Increased private incentive to educate. 7 implies that there will be a greater need for certain skills and education to prepare workers for different types of employment.

It's a pity to see Larry Elliott going off the rails

We always thought that Larry Elliott was a little oasis of comparative sanity over at that small part of The Guardian that has actually heard of the basic concepts of economics. So it's something of a pity to see him coming off the rails over the desirability of limited liability:

Finally, there’s the nuclear option: stripping companies of the protection provided by limited liability. The owners, the shareholders and those running companies wield enormous power but don’t bear full responsibility for their actions because their liability is limited to the size of their investment in a company or partnership. But limited liability is a privilege not a right, and in return for granting it society should get something back in return. The argument the Thatcher government used when it said employers could sue unions for damages caused by strikes was that there was no such thing as a something-for-nothing world, and the same argument applies to companies.

The deal should be that companies get the protection limited liability provides in return for looking after all their stakeholders: the workers they employ, the customers they serve, the companies that form their supply chains, the taxpayers who pay for the transport infrastructure and the education system that businesses require. The deal should not be limited liability in return for boardroom greed, running rings round the taxman and breaking the law.

As Prem Sikka said in this series, any change to limited liability would be fiercely resisted. But even the suggestion of change would concentrate minds. Imagine, for example, that a future government set up a royal commission to look into the issue. Would this lead to companies treating their staff better and paying more tax? You bet it would.

Limited liability has been called the third great invention, after agriculture and the scientific method. That might be rather overegging the argument but we do face Chesterston's Fence here. We shouldn't be thinking about removing something until we've worked out why it was introduced in the first place. And the reason we have limited liability isn't particularly because it's a necessary feature of capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism or any other -ism that might currently be unfashionable. It's because it's a necessary precondition of having any large scale economic activity.

Some economic projects require the mobilisation of the assets of tens of thousands to tens of millions of people. Or some reasonable fraction of those individual assets. And it doesn't matter, for our argument here, whether that's done through the State, a workers' coop, a capitalist style corporation or any other method. If all those thousands to millions are to be held jointly and severally liable for all of the risks of however many projects their assets support then that mobilisation simply will not happen. Limited liability is simply a precondition of being able to have large scale projects undertaken.

So Prem Sikka is howling at the Moon here but then we knew about the Professor's tendency to do that already. what's disappointing is Elliott's support for the argument. For Elliott is missing something we've mentioned around here a number of times. The value to us of an organisation that produces things is not in the tax they pay, the wages they cough up, the manner in which they treat their suppliers. The value to us of a producing organisation is in what they produce. And, as above, limited liability allows large scale producing organisations to exist. And that's the benefit that we the wider society get from it.

Nothing else is necessary.

It’s time the government let adults - even the smokers - grow up

While the under-12s and orchestras hit the jackpot in yesterday's Autumn Statement, tobacco companies were subtly thrown under the bus, as the Chancellor quietly committed to a consultation to determine how much more money tobacco companies should be contributing to public services; a pledge Labour has already signed on to as well. Specifically, the consultation will look at the “introduction of a levy on tobacco manufactures and importers,” which could raise taxes on tobacco companies by millions of pounds a year.

From the Independent:

The tobacco industry should pay for the costs it imposes on British society, the Chancellor has said, signalling that the Government will back a levy on tobacco manufacturers and importers.

In a low-key Autumn Statement announcement, George Osborne committed the Government to a consultation on how tobacco companies could make bigger contributions to the public purse.

Specifically he said:

Smoking imposes costs on society, and the Government believes it is therefore fair to ask the tobacco industry to make a greater contribution.

The Government will shortly launch a consultation on introducing a levy on tobacco manufacturers and importers.

My colleague Ben has just recently addressed these ‘costs on society’ the Chancellor references, and debunked a fair few of them. He also pointed out the known, positive effects of nicotine, and reminded us that, despite all the lies perpetuated around smoking and NHS spending, smokers, on average, take up less health expenditure over their lifetime than non-smokers do.

My two-cents goes something like this: What cost on society? Sure, there’s a cost on the smoker, who will deal with the consequences that come from inhaling all sorts of questionable stuff – but adults get to make those personal decisions and take those risks. All choices have a cost, but in the case of cigarettes, the individual bears the brunt of the consequences; not the public at large.

But more powerful than the adults trying to make decisions about their personal lifestyles is the government, which is treating cigarettes the same way children tend to treat stuffed animals – labelling them with human-characteristics; acting as if objects are inherently bound to be good or bad.

And when it comes to cigarettes, the government has deemed them inherently evil. And it’s the tobacco companies, of course, that are proliferating them (remember, public demand matters very little to paternalists), so naturally, they must be taxed to the death.

But you know who’s really going to suffer when push comes to shove and levies are imposed? Low earners – who probably will, but can't afford to, see cigarette prices rise when the levy comes into play. Because, at the end of the day, these levies aren't coming in to save public health; they're there to save vulnerable public budgets. It's time the government came clean on that—childish, indeed.

Bad Signals from DCMS

Yesterday was the final day of a rushed, three week long Government consultation into the elimination of the ‘partial mobile not-spots’ — areas where there’s 2G coverage from some, but not all, of the 4 mobile operators — which cover a fifth of the UK. The Government now considers such gaps unacceptable, and Sajid Javid has warned that he is prepared to legislate a solution should mobile network operators fail to come up with a satisfactory 'voluntary' response.

One of the options the consultation considers is the introduction of national roaming. Via government dictat, mobile operators would be required to enable customers to roam onto a competitor’s network if their home signal were not available.

As the ASI has warned in a submission to the consultation, national roaming would be a terrible idea.

Partial not-spots occur where mobile infrastructure is lacking. To address them we need things like more masts, more powerful equipment and more infrastructure sharing agreements. National roaming does nothing to achieve this, and on the contrary could harm investment and the quality of mobile networks across the board.

A system of national roaming rewards those who’ve invested least in their infrastructure at the expense of those who’ve invested the most. Were it to be introduced, networks could free-ride off the infrastructure of others where their own signal is weak or non-existent, and still 'provide' coverage for their customers. Roaming also creates a strong disincentive for any one operator to invest in infrastructure where there’s complete not spots or signal from all 4 operators is weak, as well as reducing the incentive to spend on general repair and upkeep.

Since mobile networks compete predominantly on coverage and the quality of their service, roaming reduces networks’ ability to differentiate themselves. With consumers less able (or less concerned) to judge the quality of an individual network, the return on investment further lessens.

Roaming could also have potentially disastrous consequences for network’s resilience. Were one network to experience an outage, customers would move en mass to alternate networks. This surge in traffic could overwhelm another operator’s infrastructure, leading to a domino effect of failures. This very real risk to critical infrastructure has long been acknowledged as a key argument against a permanent, ‘any to any’ system of national roaming.

For something that wouldn’t actually improve mobile infrastructure and could actually actively threaten it, national roaming wouldn’t come cheap, either. The government’s back-of-the-fag-packet figures put the cost of mandating roaming as between from £276-400m, compared with projected benefits of only £54-249m.

Creating a robust system of national roaming would be a lengthy, expensive, and complex procedure. There’s a very real risk that forcing mobile operators to divert resources towards roaming would result in the slowdown or scaling back of other projects, such as the rollout of 4G. To add insult to injury, consumers would also have to pay for the cost of establishing and operating roaming, even if it makes their service worse than it otherwise would have been.

For all of these problems, national roaming isn’t even an effective solution to partial not-spots. Roaming would be ‘non-seamless’, meaning that calls would be dropped when a phone switches from one network to another. This means that roaming would do very little to help those travelling by motorway or train and going through patchy areas at speed. Calls made where there’s weak signal also risk being dropped when they would have previously stayed connected, and in some areas connection could ‘bounce’ between operators as the phone tries to lock onto the strongest signal.

Roaming would also impact other, surprising elements of consumer's mobile experience. Roaming on another’s network means that you lose access not only to things like voicemail, but all data services. The practicalities of roaming mean that a phone will probably ‘lock on’ to a network for a few minutes before searching again for a home signal, which means that consumers could be left without internet and other services for a prolonged period of time, despite only experiencing a temporary loss in signal. In addition, a phone which constantly scans for signals and changes networks will deplete its battery far quicker than one locked onto the same operator.

To ask consumers to lose core mobile services and accept diminished handset performance in the name of tackling partial not-spots is frankly absurd. Whilst it may be possible to disable roaming on some devices until needed, the fact that it’s a good idea to do so simply highlights what an enormous waste of time and resources national roaming would be.

Everything so far suggests that introducing national roaming would be a mistake. But when you look at the scale of the problem of partial not-spots, you start to wonder why DCMS even launched this consultation at all.

DCMS point out that 21% of the UK’s land mass is covered by partial not-spots; but they also admit that mobile networks are already working to bring this down. Project Beacon, an infrastructure sharing project between Vodafone and O2 is expected, once completed, to bring this down to 13%, leaving just 2% of premises affected by partial not-spots.

It’s not even clear why the government is so concerned with land mass coverage statistics, anyway. When you look at the percentage of the population with 2G coverage, you see that every operator hits 99%. In addition, spectrum licence obligations mean that 99% of the population will have 4G coverage by 2017 (and developments like voice over WiFI may prove an effective way of  extending coverage and call quality). It’s somewhat misleading, then, to portray a lack of signal as a problem for a significant chunk of the population. Whilst losing signal in rural areas and when travelling can be annoying, it's millions of miles from clear that it justifies such extensive intervention from the government.

At best, national roaming would bring marginal benefits at great cost. At worst, it would be an expensive, time consuming and potentially destructive disaster. It runs the risk of reducing competition and investment, and sucks for both mobile operators and consumers. Hopefully the consultation will convince DCMS that national roaming is a terrible solution to a problem blown way out of proportion. Certainly, the department would be best to focus on projects that would actually improve mobile infrastructure, such as reform of the inaccessible and outdated Electronic Communications Code. National Roaming is one call that it would be good to drop.

Err, yes Mr. Naughton, this is entirely the point

John Naughton, over in The Observer, is very worried about, err, capitalists being capitalists. Something of a pity really for someone, let alone a journalist, of his richness in maturity should by now have realised that this is the damn point of it all:

The real lesson of the Uber exposé, though, is that it’s time to discard the rose-tinted spectacles with which we have hitherto viewed these Silicon Valley outfits. For too long, they have been allowed to trade fraudulently on the afterglow of the hippie libertarianism that supposedly infected the early days of the personal computer industry. The billionaire geeks who currently run the giant internet companies may look and talk like a new species of entrepreneur but it would be more prudent to view them as John D Rockefellers in hoodies.

And the economic philosophy that’s embedded in this new digital capitalism is neoliberalism red in tooth and claw, which is why they minimise the number of “ordinary” (ie non-geek) workers on their payrolls, outsource everything they can, despise trade unions, view regulators as barriers to “innovation” and are outraged by the temerity of European institutions that seek to curb their freedoms of action.

Yes, exactly. Companies operate to the benefit of their shareholders. They're also pretty red in tooth and claw when they do so. And if that were all the economy were about then agreed, we consumers might not enjoy the experience all that much. Which is why we do our darndest to make sure that that's not all there is in the economy. The other magic ingredient we look for is competition. This means that we've any number of red in tooth and claw capitalist institutions trying to do the best for their owners and for their owners only. But they can only do this by offering us something that we think is worth it. Their proposition must offer us value: both in the simple sense that no one buys anything at all that they don't think is worth more than they are paying for it and also in the more detailed sense that competition means that the offering must be better than that of those others.

It's competition in the market that tempers that profit lust. Just as it's competition that tempers the inherent inefficiencies and producer capture of formerly monopolistic and non-profit making state services.

On that capitalist side of it this is the very point of the entire system. We want them to be sharp elbowed, nothing but profit seeking, neoliberals. Because only by producing something that we both desire and are willing to pay for can they become those billionaires (geeks or not).

Releasing data could help Britain's entrepreneurs scale-up

The celebrated entrepreneur, investor and adviser Sherry Coutu CBE has just released a detailed report on scale-up businesses. Scale-ups are defined as enterprises with average annualised growth in employees or turnover greater than 20 per cent per annum over a three-year period, and with more than 10 employees at the beginning of the observation period. The Scale-Up Report explains how “a boost of just one per cent to our scale-up population should drive an additional 238,000 jobs and £38 billion to GVA within three years”...“[I]n the medium-term, assuming we address the skills-gap, we stand to benefit by £96 billion per annum and in the long-run, if we close the scale-up gap, then we stand to gain 150,000 net jobs and £225 billion additional GVA by 2034.”

The report identifies key issues for helping these companies grow:

• Finding employees to hire who have the skills they need
• Building their leadership capability
• Accessing customers in other markets / home market
• Accessing the right combination of finance
• Navigating infrastructure

Twelve recommendations are put forward, but the first (arguably) offers the biggest bang for its buck:

Recommendation 1. National data sets should be made available so that local public and private sector organisations can identify, target and evaluate their support to scale-up companies, and evaluate their impact on UK economic growth.

The specific data required includes:

• Company registration number
• Revenue (UK and export)
• Location of headquarters and plant
• R&D tax credit (recipients and amount)
• Employment data (number of pay slips issued in a given month)

It is suggested that data “should be made available on a real-time basis openly or to a cross-departmental scale-up support unit within government. This would allow both public and private sector organisations to target scale-ups accurately to make sure support is offered at right time to the right leaders.”

Releasing this data wouldn’t add to the bureaucracy faced by entrepreneurs. As the report explains, companies are already required to submit turnover data annually to Companies House, report on PAYE in real-time, file quarterly VAT returns, and report on the amount the spend on R&D (if claim R&D Tax Credits). However, as the report acknowledges, releasing this data raises questions around data privacy. To counter this criticism, the report uses the example of the Cambridge Cluster Map, where this sort of data is already collated, and 59 companies have asked to be included in it since its initial launch.

Also, following a YouGov survey, the report reveals: “83% of scale-ups were in favour of the government sharing information on their company growth with other government departments or agencies, and 72% were in favour of government sharing this externally.”

But this leaves a minority of companies unwilling to open up their data willy nilly. The report doesn’t offer any guidance on how to deal with these concerns but there should be a way for companies to opt out. If, as the report reasonably suggests, these companies are then better targeted for support, those that have opted out will surely be all too ready to release their data too.

Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.

Hey, sometimes the lefty lot are actually correct

Galling though it may be to have to admit it there are times when those over on the left side of the political aisle are correct. Take, for example, the case of supermarkets. They've been telling us for the past couple of decades that they're wrong,. That they rip the heart out of the High Street and that something must be done to stop them. And it even looks like they might have been right:

Supermarkets in Britain could start to close as the grocery industry struggles to cope with an unprecedented slide in sales and profits, the head of Waitrose has warned.

Mark Price, the managing director of the upmarket grocer, said it was “incredibly hard to call” whether all of Britain’s food retailers would survive tumultuous shifts in shopping habits.

The “Big Four” supermarket groups have been forced to dramatically rein in plans to open new stores in UK in order to save cash to shore up their balance sheet. In recent weeks Tesco has scrapped two supermarket openings despite actually building the stores.

However, Mr Price warned that food retailers could be forced to go a step further and close existing stores, just as non-food retailers have done in Britain since the onset of recession.

He was speaking in the week that rival J Sainsbury slumped to a £290m pre-tax loss, scrapped plans to open new stores, and warned that sales in supermarkets will be falling “for the next few years”.

However, let's not go overboard in our appreciation of their perspicacity here. For all those years they were complaining they were in fact wrong. For we, the consumers, by the very fact that we went shopping at the supermarkets, showed that we liked shopping at supermarkets. Further, said supermarkets aren't about to be replaced by the High Street of old. Instead they're being outcompeted by online shopping and the budget retailers. Meaning that we value convenience and low prices even more than we all thought we did.

And the other point that we really must make about this is that, of course, nothing at all "needed to be done". Whether we think this is as a result of changing consumer tastes, or merely as a revelation of extant tastes now that we can sample these alternatives, no one at all has had to intervene in the shopping market in order to overturn those supermarkets. The market itself has done all of that for us: the aggregate effect of us spending our own pounds in our own manner has led to the results that obviously we all, in aggregate, prefer.

So those lefties, those campaigners, might well have been right, correct, in their insistence that there was something better than supermarkets. But they were obviously entirely wrong in whether anyone needed to do anything about it for one thing that markets really are very good indeed at is reflecting consumer preferences.