Board 8 > Five myths about healthy eating

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From: foolm0ron | #097
Also food deserts don't exist when you can order food off ****ing Amazon

Pretty sure that low-income urban families are not buying crates of produce from Amazon.

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You're a bit confused. It was the rationalist school that got displaced by the behavioral school. Neoclassical economics is more macro- and market-based, i.e. Keynesian economics; it doesn't really concern itself with individual behavior.

I was under the impression that neoclassical economics used the perfectly utility maximizing, information gathering and selfish agent as an assumption. I also thought that Keynesian economics was mutually exclusive from neoclassical economics, although I may be confusing the chicago school with neoclassical. I don't know much about the history of economics.

More money would go a long way to fix that, as well as provide a nice bonus for the brave souls that have stuck around this long.

Do most teachers cite lack of money as a reason for the high turnover rate? Just in your description it seems more like the poor working conditions accounts for the high turnover rate. Wouldn't that mean it'd be better for money to be spent on, let's say class prep labor saving devices (Dunno, a full time TA who helps grade, a nationally approved curriculum/syllabus that could be modified for individual classes or something like that) instead of teacher salaries?

pay/incentives/etc for teachers is ALREADY based way too much on how long youre there, which is, well, stupid and nonsensical. pay the teachers who are the best at what they do, like, you know, every other career

How do you know this is true? I know several airline companies which base pay almost exclusively on rank, and that Enron based it on merit. This isn't a conclusive sample but it does tell me that: 1) Basing pay off of merits could lead to perverse incentives which lead to the fall of enron and 2) at least some long time companies base pay off of rank and have not failed yet. Whether it's a major factor is unknown.

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It's simple. It's a lack of demand. Supermarkets go where the money is. The urban poor can't afford expensive produce, and thus won't buy it, so why do the markets have any incentive to build there?

The free market is the cause of food deserts.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioNFdlOzoWA

The free market is the cause of food deserts.

Except the leftists in this topic (and in the white house) allege that there IS demand, just no supply. They claim that IF healthy food was available, people would be buying it.

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From: SmartMuffin | #105
Except the leftists in this topic (and in the white house) allege that there IS demand, just no supply. They claim that IF healthy food was available, people would be buying it.

They would, but only if the price was right. The reason supermarkets aren't moving in is because they aren't willing to lower prices to the point where the poor can afford them.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioNFdlOzoWA

I think what they're saying is that there is demand, but the demand isn't backed with enough money to make it worth building there.

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Thanks for the article, SM. Should come in handy.

The reason supermarkets aren't moving in is because they aren't willing to lower prices to the point where the poor can afford them.

Except that, as the article showed, healthy food is not more expensive than unhealthy food.

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Well, in my experience supermarkets try to have more than just basic foods in them. It might be more profitable to open up a location that will earn sales on the less essential things than it is to have guaranteed sales of the lowest price items.

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From: SubDeity | #108
Except that, as the article showed, healthy food is not more expensive than unhealthy food.

Doesn't matter. Supermarkets make their money on premium items. If they can't sell that, there's no incentive.

Whether food is healthy or not is irrelevant in the free market.

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Justified and Ancient
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Doesn't matter. Supermarkets make their money on premium items. If they can't sell that, there's no incentive.

Then why do so many supermarkets sell cheap store brands?

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SubDeity wants to vote for Calvin Coolidge. [Evil Republican]
Play Der Langrisser.

You are alleging that there are areas where there is large demand for a relatively common good, and yet, for some bizarre unexplained reason, nobody is willing to provide the good.

Food desert just means that there's no fresh food in the area. It has nothing to do with the reason why.

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SmartMuffin posted...
The free market is the cause of food deserts.

Except the leftists in this topic (and in the white house) allege that there IS demand, just no supply. They claim that IF healthy food was available, people would be buying it.

I'm a leftist and I'm agreeing with you. Food deserts are not a problem, because they don't really exist.

And while I do say that, you also have to admit that the quality of the healthy (fresh) food that is available to lower-income families are gonna be lower quality, and might also contribute to the problem. They can afford healthy food, but it might not be good.

What does that MEAN exactly? That it won't come with the fancy sticker that says "ORGANIC" and the $3 markup?

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Well, in my experience supermarkets try to have more than just basic foods in them. It might be more profitable to open up a location that will earn sales on the less essential things than it is to have guaranteed sales of the lowest price items.

Doesn't matter. Supermarkets make their money on premium items. If they can't sell that, there's no incentive.

Want to comment on both of these things. And by "comment" i mean "give you all a remedial education in basic economics."

When a certain product is scarce in a certain area, demand for that product increases. As a result, people are willing to pay more for things that are increasingly rare. Profits can be made by purchasing a product, and selling it for more than you purchased it for. Now, it's true that the most profit is made in economies of scale, such as Wal-Mart, or other large corporations.

HOWEVER, even one individual can make profits by doing such a thing. Hasn't anyone in this topic ever lived in Southern California and driven by some Mexicans selling flowers by the side of the road? Or strawberries? Or oranges? What is that, if not a very much scaled-down version of a supermarket?

Given that these "food deserts" supposedly exist in urban areas, I find it impossible to believe that no entrepreneur would do something similar. Urban areas are typically full of lower class immigrants who are CONSTANTLY engaging in similar entrepreneurship, whether through driving a taxi, or starting a food-cart, or other such things. If it was true that in their local community, people really wanted apples, but there were no apples around, SOMEBODY would be driving out to the nearest Wal-Mart, buying a bunch of apples, bringing them back, and selling them with a bit of a markup.

I thought we all learned this in our freshman year of high school playing Drug Lord on our TI-83, but apparently not.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized
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I guess maybe there are barriers to entry to the market.

Or maybe that the utility of "health foods" are undervalued

Or people don't know what healthy food are.

But you aren't paying attention so whatever.

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Oh I'l certainly admit I know nothing on the subject, I just like debating things. But that sort of thing doesn't always work, I know that a game shop opened in my town and I never learned about it until it was closing. Your average entrepreneur is going to find it difficult to become well known enough for it to be worth buying and selling food in the scales needed to break the desert.

Also, I spent my time programming my own games into my TI-83. Fun stuff.

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SmartMuffin posted...
What does that MEAN exactly? That it won't come with the fancy sticker that says "ORGANIC" and the $3 markup?

Haha, not even remotely. Grocery stores in lower income areas are going to have lesser quality foods, because the stores don't have the money to pay for the higher quality foods, and because the people won't have enough money to pay for the higher quality foods. I'm not talking about Organic, or those stereotypical labels that mark food up, but just higher quality. Food there is not going to be as ripe, or simply as good. You go to the grocery store, and when you're looking through produce, you aren't gonna just grab the first apple you see, you look through and find the good ones, and when you're in a lower income area, the good ones are few and far between.

There are a lot of groceries in my area, and there's one that's much cheaper than the others, and that's because the food there isn't as high quality. A lot of it is off-brand, which isn't as big a deal as it sounds, but the produce and other fresh items simply aren't as good. The one that's more expensive, the co-op, has higher quality foods, but comes at a price. It's simple free market. Better food costs more, so the places that make more money and have more customers who are willing to spend more money are going to get the better food, while the places with customers who don't have as much money are going to get what's left.

Yoshi: Can you answer that question I had earlier?

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meisnewbie posted...
Why is privatizing schools bad? I've heard some data about voucher based schools working out but I don't know the details of the argument.

give more money all around for teacher salaries,

Finland has a lower per student spending than we do and yet has a better educational system than we do too. Now, I don't know if they spend less on teachers than we do, but what do we know about the impact of increased salaries on teacher performance?

Also, how do you know those are the most scaleable solutions given money, instead of let's say, time, tech or labor?

The four have to be used in tandem. You aren't going to get anywhere just spending time on it without changing something else, tech naturally increases effectiveness over time, and gets cheap enough to be massively used in school systems (though not fast enough, based on some of the computers I had to use when I was in high school), and labor goes into each of them as well.

From: KingButz | #101
Pretty sure that low-income urban families are not buying crates of produce from Amazon.

Pretty sure there's a really easy solution to that -- start buying jumbo packs of peanut butter from amazon

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Healthy isn't always more expensive, but it often seems to be. Fresh produce in the market is going to be more expensive than canned. All there is to it, it's a fact. Canned vegetables and fruit are probably more healthy than some things, but being canned they often are submerged in a brine or syrup of some sort that virtually makes them unhealthy (baked beans are a great example of that).

Fresh is almost always more expensive, and fresh is better. I don't buy the "lentils and beans" example because what else is there but that. Not much. You can substitute hotdogs with a ton of cheap unhealthy crap that you can easily purchase for a fraction of the cost of healthy alternatives.

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You aren't going to get anywhere just spending time on it without changing something else, tech naturally increases effectiveness over time, and gets cheap enough to be massively used in school systems (though not fast enough, based on some of the computers I had to use when I was in high school), and labor goes into each of them as well.

Yes, but how do you know that specific batch of interventions would work?

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meisnewbie posted...
Yes, but how do you know that specific batch of interventions would work?

Because it's the opposite of what we have now. NCLB rewards schools that succeed at standardized tests like the SAT, or more blatantly, ITEDs or the local equivalent of that, by giving them more funding, and removing them from the list of "Schools in need of assistance", which is a list of schools that actually need help, and forces them to shape up, or ship out, without offering any real assistance. It also encourages, and in schools that aren't necessarily the best schools, practically requires teaching for the test, instead of teaching in ways that kids will respond to. There's so much wrong with NCLB, and I think getting rid of it entirely and replacing it with, honestly, anything else, would right the ship. Test scores might be going up, but morale is going down, and real intelligence and knowledge along with it.

Because it's the opposite of what we have now.

The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence. Just because 1+1 does not equal 5.7 doesn't not mean that negative 5.7 is the answer. Out of an infinite number of options, only "2" would be the correct option (and before you intimidating math giants start balling all over me, I mean paeno arithmetic I think) If the stupidest man in the world said the sun was shining, you should strive to go outside and check for yourself, because he's not necessarily wrong.

Now, do you have any concrete reason, for example, other school systems which already work, research on incentive structures in jobs or test cases which you know of?

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meisnewbie posted...
Because it's the opposite of what we have now.

The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence. Just because 1+1 does not equal 5.7 doesn't not mean that negative 5.7 is the answer. Out of an infinite number of options, only "2" would be the correct option (and before you intimidating math giants start balling all over me, I mean paeno arithmetic I think) If the stupidest man in the world said the sun was shining, you should strive to go outside and check for yourself, because he's not necessarily wrong.

Now, do you have any concrete reason, for example, other school systems which already work, research on incentive structures in jobs or test cases which you know of?

Concrete reasons? No. But this isn't math. There's more than one answer to "What do we do here?", and there isn't when you ask "What is 1+1?". It would bring us closer to the education system we had in the 1960s and '70s, which is when we were not embarrassing when it comes to education. If we stop doing what's been driving us down, and start doing what kept us up, it stands to reason that we're gonna at least begin to get back to where we were.

Concrete reasons? No. But this isn't math.

This isn't sim city either. Whatever plan you propose, IF IMPLEMENTED ON A LARGE SCALE, should have some grounds for its success. Your proposal will have real effects on real people, and I don't think you should be gambling on your igorance.

which is when we were not embarrassing when it comes to education. I

What do you mean by "not embarrassing when it comes to education" Do you mean more people went to the current equivalent of college? That more of our economy was based off of better educated citizens? That we did well compared to the rest of the world? It's entirely possible that the only reason we did so well back then was that we didn't have competitors such as China and India back then, so it's important to analyze WHY we weren't failures back then.

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Compared to the world, and your point would be salient if we were only losing out to India and China. I mean, according to this list (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html), in our best subject (reading), we are, in our upper rank students, 12th in the world, and that is our absolute best subject. At our worst, in math, even our best students are only 25th in the world. Part of that is a sign that the world is catching up to us, but that wouldn't explain such a massive drop.

This debate actually led me to start reading a very interesting book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and the author (a well renown education historian) makes the point that the way we're headed, toward privatization and school choice, is not helping us at all. It makes the argument in a much clearer way that I ever could, as well. I know it seems like I'm taking an easy way out, but it really encapsulates my point very well.

I'll look into it.

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I read an interesting quote by Diane Ravitch (one of her articles was posted earlier) that we don't so much have a education problem in America as we have a poverty problem. If you look at public schools with low rates of poverty in their students, they do just as well as schools overseas. It's not so much that a country like Japan is better at teaching poor inner-city kids, they just simply have less poor inner-city kids to teach. Of course we're not going to do as well. It's probably pretty remarkable that some of these kids do as well as they do.*

*Last two sentences are my thoughts.

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Also our society glorifies stupidity and denigrates achievement, but yeah.

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wanna keep this around for a few more days

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