Just like every sad, sad song is sung by a cowboy.
Name that tune!
(in case the embed fails: http://youtu.be/gYeZJ9_Hmwg )
OK, so I reversed the lyrics a little bit, so don't feel bad if you didn't get it. And don't feel bad if you weren't born in the 70's and didn't come of age with Poison playing on every radio station when you were a teenager.
So clearly the generalization doesn't work nearly as well in reverse, but it helps make the point I want to make: certain constraints we put on ourselves may keep us from doing beneficial things we want to do, but they may also keep us from doing things that are ultimately more harmful to ourselves. The question is, what is the net benefit? If the net benefit is positive, perhaps it is worth adopting those constraints.
For example, we accept a constraint on taking other people's property. Setting aside morality, there is a practical side of this prohibition: if people are not secure in their property, they will consume every resource as they get access to it, rather than husband it and invest in improving it. Most of the tragically poor countries in the world also have very poorly enforced property rights. People are always insecure in their property, so they make very little effort to invest in improvements to their property for fear that someone (a stronger person or group, or agents of the government) will expropriate their property. It is perfectly rational for people to make no investments in property - whether that is mobile property such as tools, or fixed property like land - if they believe that there is a sufficiently high probability that it will be taken from them. When a society does not invest in capital, that society stagnates at a primitive level of subsistence. Everyone is worse off because there is less specialization and less trade. So from a practical point of view, accepting the property rights of others is a constraint on our behavior that has positive net benefits. Even though in the short run stealing your neighbor's goods would be a very efficient way of improving your own wealth, in the long run your neighbor would likely return the favor when he could, and as a result neither one of your would produce more than what you could immediately consume. We are much better off if we agree to respect each others' property.
So the $3 diet seems to have costs and benefits. The costs are pretty clear: as Kerryn discussed in her post, I can't afford many of the healthy foods she normally wouldn't think twice about prescribing to patients - principally fresh fruit and vegetables. It's even difficult on some days to fit in simple things like frozen fruit or frozen vegetables. Never mind adding in fancy foods like quinoa. Or fresh fish (not that I'm wild about fish, but I do like shrimp). Or even the occasional steak. The $3 constrain makes everything more complicated and forces me to take dramatically more time planning and preparing for healthy eating.
The benefits are quite clear, though, too. My weight has been dropping like a stone (lol). As of this morning (Day 24), I have dropped to 183.1 pounds - a 15.7 pound loss in 24 days. Other than being hungry a lot, I feel good. And I like how my body is returning to its proper, leaner form. I am looking forward to the results of the end of the experiment blood tests to see what has improved chemically. Other benefits include the fact that I have largely eliminated processed foods from my diet. I bake my own breads, and I cook almost everything from scratch. The food I make mostly tastes pretty good. Honestly, I don't miss much of my old diet. Many of the things I had been eating - Little Debbie Snack Cakes for example, or Hostess Fruit Pies - don't really taste very good. Shockingly, I don't miss Diet Coke (that much).
When I lift the constraint on my resources in a week, I wonder which of the gains I will be able to retain. Kerryn and I have discussed how the literature on habit forming indicates that you need about six months to make a new behavior a habit.
When I lift the resource constraint, it will be very tempting to start slipping some of the foods I used to eat all the time back into my diet. And from there it is easy to slip back into overeating.
Commitment devices are another issue we talk about quite a bit in economics. New Years is a traditional time for people to make resolutions to improve themselves. But most of those resolutions have very short lives. People really want to make those improvements, but they are usually hard to do when you look to the horizon and see no relief. Losing weight and keeping it off requires daily dedication and attention, and not a little bit of sacrifice. At the moment when you walk into a convenience store to get a cup of coffee and you walk by the snack cake aisle with its siren call of sugary satisfaction for only pennies, it takes a repeated exertion of will not to pick up one or two.
Most of us can't sustain the effort necessary to stay committed to our resolutions, so in a few days or weeks, we find ourselves munching on cream pies and Diet Coke and feeling bad about the fact that we just can't lose weight.
Joining a gym is usually one way we try to commit to healthier living. We know we have to pay something every month to retain our membership, and so we believe the bad feeling of paying for something will help balance the bad feeling of not getting to eat whatever we want.
Some economists have proposed other means of staying committed. One means is to get a third party involved. For example, you might write a check to a charity you despise (think "Planned Parenthood" if you are a conservative, or "Focus on the Family" if you are a liberal), and give that check to a friend. The friend has instructions to mail the check if you fail to meet your weight loss goal. This actually works better than a gym membership, because we tend to treat the gym membership as a sunk cost, whereas the donation to a charity you despise is there for you to lose.
For me, blogging about this experiment has been a fairly powerful motivator. Everybody I work with knows I'm doing this, many of my students know. They kid me about what I'm eating, and some of them are even reading this blog. So if I were to give up, it would be publicly embarrassing for me. That's a pretty powerful commitment device. But in 7 days, that won't be there anymore.
The $3 constraint has its thorns, but its roses smell pretty good. I know I couldn't have accomplished this improvement in health without this commitment. Now I just wonder if I can do it without the thorns.
Name that tune!
(in case the embed fails: http://youtu.be/gYeZJ9_Hmwg )
OK, so I reversed the lyrics a little bit, so don't feel bad if you didn't get it. And don't feel bad if you weren't born in the 70's and didn't come of age with Poison playing on every radio station when you were a teenager.
So clearly the generalization doesn't work nearly as well in reverse, but it helps make the point I want to make: certain constraints we put on ourselves may keep us from doing beneficial things we want to do, but they may also keep us from doing things that are ultimately more harmful to ourselves. The question is, what is the net benefit? If the net benefit is positive, perhaps it is worth adopting those constraints.
For example, we accept a constraint on taking other people's property. Setting aside morality, there is a practical side of this prohibition: if people are not secure in their property, they will consume every resource as they get access to it, rather than husband it and invest in improving it. Most of the tragically poor countries in the world also have very poorly enforced property rights. People are always insecure in their property, so they make very little effort to invest in improvements to their property for fear that someone (a stronger person or group, or agents of the government) will expropriate their property. It is perfectly rational for people to make no investments in property - whether that is mobile property such as tools, or fixed property like land - if they believe that there is a sufficiently high probability that it will be taken from them. When a society does not invest in capital, that society stagnates at a primitive level of subsistence. Everyone is worse off because there is less specialization and less trade. So from a practical point of view, accepting the property rights of others is a constraint on our behavior that has positive net benefits. Even though in the short run stealing your neighbor's goods would be a very efficient way of improving your own wealth, in the long run your neighbor would likely return the favor when he could, and as a result neither one of your would produce more than what you could immediately consume. We are much better off if we agree to respect each others' property.
So the $3 diet seems to have costs and benefits. The costs are pretty clear: as Kerryn discussed in her post, I can't afford many of the healthy foods she normally wouldn't think twice about prescribing to patients - principally fresh fruit and vegetables. It's even difficult on some days to fit in simple things like frozen fruit or frozen vegetables. Never mind adding in fancy foods like quinoa. Or fresh fish (not that I'm wild about fish, but I do like shrimp). Or even the occasional steak. The $3 constrain makes everything more complicated and forces me to take dramatically more time planning and preparing for healthy eating.
The benefits are quite clear, though, too. My weight has been dropping like a stone (lol). As of this morning (Day 24), I have dropped to 183.1 pounds - a 15.7 pound loss in 24 days. Other than being hungry a lot, I feel good. And I like how my body is returning to its proper, leaner form. I am looking forward to the results of the end of the experiment blood tests to see what has improved chemically. Other benefits include the fact that I have largely eliminated processed foods from my diet. I bake my own breads, and I cook almost everything from scratch. The food I make mostly tastes pretty good. Honestly, I don't miss much of my old diet. Many of the things I had been eating - Little Debbie Snack Cakes for example, or Hostess Fruit Pies - don't really taste very good. Shockingly, I don't miss Diet Coke (that much).
When I lift the constraint on my resources in a week, I wonder which of the gains I will be able to retain. Kerryn and I have discussed how the literature on habit forming indicates that you need about six months to make a new behavior a habit.
When I lift the resource constraint, it will be very tempting to start slipping some of the foods I used to eat all the time back into my diet. And from there it is easy to slip back into overeating.
Commitment devices are another issue we talk about quite a bit in economics. New Years is a traditional time for people to make resolutions to improve themselves. But most of those resolutions have very short lives. People really want to make those improvements, but they are usually hard to do when you look to the horizon and see no relief. Losing weight and keeping it off requires daily dedication and attention, and not a little bit of sacrifice. At the moment when you walk into a convenience store to get a cup of coffee and you walk by the snack cake aisle with its siren call of sugary satisfaction for only pennies, it takes a repeated exertion of will not to pick up one or two.
Most of us can't sustain the effort necessary to stay committed to our resolutions, so in a few days or weeks, we find ourselves munching on cream pies and Diet Coke and feeling bad about the fact that we just can't lose weight.
Joining a gym is usually one way we try to commit to healthier living. We know we have to pay something every month to retain our membership, and so we believe the bad feeling of paying for something will help balance the bad feeling of not getting to eat whatever we want.
Some economists have proposed other means of staying committed. One means is to get a third party involved. For example, you might write a check to a charity you despise (think "Planned Parenthood" if you are a conservative, or "Focus on the Family" if you are a liberal), and give that check to a friend. The friend has instructions to mail the check if you fail to meet your weight loss goal. This actually works better than a gym membership, because we tend to treat the gym membership as a sunk cost, whereas the donation to a charity you despise is there for you to lose.
For me, blogging about this experiment has been a fairly powerful motivator. Everybody I work with knows I'm doing this, many of my students know. They kid me about what I'm eating, and some of them are even reading this blog. So if I were to give up, it would be publicly embarrassing for me. That's a pretty powerful commitment device. But in 7 days, that won't be there anymore.
The $3 constraint has its thorns, but its roses smell pretty good. I know I couldn't have accomplished this improvement in health without this commitment. Now I just wonder if I can do it without the thorns.
No comments:
Post a Comment