You fat bastard? [update 2]

There was a time back there in history when the biggest problem was malnutrition. Now, if you believe the headlines, it's obesity.

Latest headline you're supposed to believe says "Hefty price as kiwis get too fat," and continues by 'reporting' that New Zealand is the "third fattest nation" in the developed world.

The report puts New Zealand's obesity rate at 26.5 per cent in 2007, Mexico was at 30 per cent in 2006 and the United States led with 34.3 per cent of its population classed as obese in 2006. The latest figure for Australia was 21.7 per cent in 1999."

Now there's many things to be said about this "report," perhaps the first of which is to point out the different dates at which these things were measured -- that's some 1999 apples with 2007 pears thank -- and then to notice that the last time New Zealand's "obesity rate" was "measured" was back in 2003, when the OCED claimed it to to be just 20.6 percent of the population [PDF]. Quite some jump, don't you think. Around a thirty-percent increase in fat bastards in just four years.

You really think we've eaten all those pies in four years? I don't know about you, but it smells a lot like bullshit to me. So given that the ban-it merchants over at the Green Party are already calling for the government to ban tasty foods and spend more money on Green party activism, and the wowsers at the taxpayer-funded Obesity Action Coalition want to have fat taxes, vegetable subsidies and to ban everything Sue Kedgeley doesn't, it's worth taking a closer look at where these bullshit figures come from. Says the report:

Estimates relate to the adult population (normally the population aged 15+ unless otherwise stated) and are based on national health interview surveys for most countries (self-reported data), except for Australia, the Czech Republic (since 2005), Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic (since 2004), the United Kingdom and the United States where estimates are based on the actual measurement of weight and height. This difference in survey methodologies limits data comparability, as estimates arising from the actual measurement of weight and height are significantly higher than those based on self-report.

Note those words: "This difference in survey methodologies limits data comparability." Which means there are limits to how seriously one can take headlines like "NZ third fattest country in developed world ," and to how much political capital one should try to make from them.

But it gets worse for the scaremongers and headline writers. The so called "obesity rate" is given by "The Body Mass Index (BMI," says the report, "a single number that evaluates an individual's weight status in relation to height (weight/height2) with weight in kilograms and height in meters."

- Overweight is defined as a BMI between 25 and 30 kg/m² (25≤ BMI <30>

So much so straighforward, right? Wrong. First of all, even by the report's authors' own description the "obesity rate" includes both overweight and obese. This is a rather convenient way to, ahem, overload your figures. But there's a more significant concerdn, and that's with the bullshit index itself.

As Keith Devlin at NPR explains [hat tip Dr Shaun Holt] "this Body Mass Index fails on ten grounds." I'll summarise, but I suggest you head to the full explanation to realise just how serious is the failure -- perhaps the most fundamental being that "a high BMI does not mean an individual is even overweight, let alone obese. It could mean the person is fit and healthy, with very little fat." Here's the top ten objections:

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.
2. It is scientifically nonsensical.
3. It is physiologically wrong.
4. It gets the logic wrong.
5. It's bad statistics.
6. It is lying by scientific authority.
7. It suggests there are distinct categories of underweight, ideal, overweight and obese, with sharp boundaries that hinge on a decimal place.
8. It makes the more cynical members of society suspect that the medical insurance industry lobbies for the continued use of the BMI to keep their profits high [or that professional lobbyists ensure their continued use to support nonsense like this].
9. Continued reliance on the BMI means doctors don't feel the need to use one of the more scientifically sound methods that are available to measure obesity levels.
10. It embarrasses [wealthy countries like] the U.S.

Basically, there was a time back there in history when the biggest problem was malnutrition. Now, the more scientifically, technologically and medicinally advanced you are as a country, then chances are the further you are from being malnourished. Which means that "studies" like this are less about real science (since it's it's very far from that) than they are a way to bash countries that are rich and well-fed. As always, when you add politics to science, the result is going to be bullshit.

And chances are, too, that the more self-responsible you are then the leaner, healthier and fitter you are (which, ironically, can actually raise your BMI).

So if the nett effect of banning stupidity is to fill the world with fools and fat bastards, (to paraphrase a famous saying just slightly), why not just stop the bans and try self-responsibility instead.

UPDATE 1:The Onion saw all this coming in August 2000: Hershey's Ordered to Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion.

"This is a vindication for myself and all chocolate victims," said Beaumont, TX, resident Earl Hoffler, holding a picture of his wife Emily, who in 1998 succumbed to obesity after nearly 40 years of chocoholism.

And my fellow NOT PC columnist Bernard Darnton wrote about it a year earlier in "Achtung Fatso!" But when he wrote it as satire, he didn't realise that Sue Kedgeley was taking notes:

All New Zealand residents will be required to register with the Body Mass Index Safety Authority. Those at risk will be encouraged to attend programmes carefully designed to train clients to adopt a less damaging lifestyle. Advertising of products with a high caloric content is a significant factor in inducing young people to consume harmful foods. This advertising will be banned. Government funding, through the EatSmart brand, will be available to compensate for any losses this may cause. To assist in offsetting the high cost of treatment of fat-related disease, a calorie tax will be introduced. To assist in offsetting the high cost of collecting the calorie tax, a salt tax will also be introduced.
All persons involved in the cooking or preparation of food will be required to submit samples to the Food Quality & Composition Commission. This will ensure that every meal adequately meets the prescribed conditions. To assist in the identification of suitable foods, a useful diagram has been developed & will be distributed to every household in the country. The Healthy Eating Swastika has four branches illustrating the four acceptable types of food. For example, an excellent meal may consist of muesli, broccoli, prunes & mung beans. . .

Read on here.

UPDATE 2: Cactus Kate has spotted the problem: It's not how we're eating at all, it's who is eating.

If you are Pacific Islander you are three times as likely to be obese as a European and Maori are twice as likely.
So I'm calling fat on this one. Until Maori and Pacific Islanders can "improve" their statistics in excelling at being fat, I propose a 20% health levy on all pre-tax income derived by Maori tribes such as Tainui and Ngai Tahu, to be tagged for their healthcare. Levying Pacific Islanders is a tad harder as they didn't receive government handouts because of their race, so lets slap a dedicated 20% health levy on all welfare payments and grants made to their communities to be paid into the health fund.
If it's good enough in America for the supposed "wealthy" to be paying more tax to fund obese bludgers (and we know Obama is an idiot), it's good enough in New Zealand for the source of the problems to start paying differentiated tax rates and levies based on their propensity to use services if they can't be made to pay for their own treatment thanks to the overly-generous New Zealand public health system. . .
Government cannot be expected to interfere in the lives of people and tell them they cannot eat foods, and these "5 plus a day" huggy campaigns just do not seem to work for the right people so lets look at it the other way - like insurance companies do. Passing responsibility on based on risk.

NOT PJ: Frankfurters, My Dear? I Don’t Give a Damn

This week Bernard Darnton raises a sausage to freedom.

There’s nothing as quintessentially American as a hot dog eating competition. While the saying goes, “as American as apple pie,” there are lots of places that enjoy apple pie, apple cake, strudel, and countless other pommelicious treats. “As American as sixty-eight hot dogs in ten minutes,” however – that has the ring of truth to it.

Independence Day is a day when freedom lovers in the United States and around the world celebrate the founding of a nation based on the principle of individual rights. John Adams predicted that the day would be celebrated with “pomp and parade, … sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations.” He never predicted the hot dog eating competition but it’s become an institution anyway.

ESPN – yes, this is a nationally televised “sporting” event – reports that this year Joey Chestnut logged his third consecutive win in the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, defeating his archrival Takeru Kobayashi by scoffing down sixty-eight frankfurters and buns in ten minutes. He improved decisively on last year’s effort, when the competition was decided in “a dramatic five hot dog eat-off.”

Some might moan that this is a trivialisation of an important anniversary. Others (usually not known for their desire to celebrate the principle of individual rights) think it’s an illustration of typical American gluttony. They decry other culinary abominations – like the Domino’s meat pie and French fry pizza in a cheesy puff-pastry box – as obesity-causing examples of American cultural imperialism.

Tough. It’s called Freedom. And the thing about freedom is you can’t tell people what to do with it. If that’s how people want to celebrate their independence, who am I to argue?

America was explicitly founded on the idea of freedom. For two hundred years people have flocked to America and used that freedom to create the most economically productive, technologically advanced, militarily powerful nation on earth. And some of them have used that freedom to stuff their faces with processed meat. So what? They’re still ahead on points.

And to the charge of gluttony? When four percent of the world’s population produces twenty-six percent of the world’s stuff there’s room for some excess.

Freedom is the state most conducive to human flourishing. OK, some people will die early because their arteries are blocked with stringy cheese that came out of an aerosol can, but they’ll probably have enjoyed themselves en route. And no one’s saying that you have to eat that crap. Most people will use their freedom wisely – and flourish.

Humanity comes equipped with a vast range of virtues and vices, and a free society gives latitude to both. But most of the vices are trivial and many of the virtues are grand.

Whether you’re looking for wieners or winners – freedom provides more than you can imagine of both.

* * Read Bernard Darnton's column every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

NOT PJ: Avian Swine Flew

This week Bernard Darnton has a headache and feels nauseous. . .

Load up the Land Rover with the 12-gauge and three months worth of baked beans. Bird flu is here. No – mad pig disease. Wait – the Y2K09 bug.

One thing there has been a serious outbreak of is word games. The U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is upset that this week’s fashionable worry has been called “swine flu” because of the possible effect on pork sales. Israeli Deputy Health Minister has suggested “Mexican flu” because he finds the reference to pigs offensive. The Mexican ambassador to Israeli got all huffy because he found the reference to Mexicans offensive. If this really is a serious health threat it’s good to see that world’s governments are suitably focused.

Here in New Zealand, all those people who’ve toiled away for years on pandemic preparedness plans are suddenly feeling important and putting on reflective jackets and hanging out in command centres with giant plasma screens, presumably watching CNN on the big plasmas to find out what happens next.

The death toll in Mexico, the “epicenter” of the “pandemic” is claimed to be 160. The population of Mexico City is 28 million. If a disease of the same virulence swept through a city the size of Christchurch the death toll would be two. Surely sad for the families of those two but I wouldn’t go as far as crossing live to a rain-soaked reporter for an exclusive update.

I’m no virologist, or biologist, or anything-else-ologist for that matter. I don’t even have a beard. I’ll leave it to the lab-coated ones to work out what’s actually going on. But my biggest worry isn’t that some previously unknown disease is coming to wipe us out; it’s that a previously well-known parasite will grow and spread because of this.

In its most virulent form this parasite strikes millions of people dead in short periods. In its modern form in the first world it suffocates and strangles. And there’s nothing it likes more than a crisis.

In his thriller State of Fear author Michael Crichton suggested that it wasn’t the emergence of a military-industrial complex that we should worry about but the emergence of a media-political complex.

His story was far-fetched but the point is valid. At no time in history have we been richer or healthier than we are now but we still worry just as much. We worry about aircraft – noise from aircraft, exhaust gases from aircraft, people with stubble and olive skin on aircraft, people sneezing on aircraft – and there’s a whole lot of other stuff starting the letters B through Z to worry about as well.

The media dishes out fear because it captivates audiences. Those audiences then demand that the government “does something” to address the fear.

The government has sweeping emergency powers that might not be out of place during a Black Death outbreak. The real problem is that the law is so vaguely worded that those same powers could be used during an outbreak of obesity, or anything else that some Sue Kedgley-type dreams up as a health risk.

I don’t feel the need to run out and buy a face mask but if anyone has the antidote to big government I’ll take it. If governments around the world don’t take advantage of avian/swine flu to increase their powers, pigs will fly.

* * Bernard Darnton writes every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

PS: Bernard Darnton, otherwise known as NOT PJ, will be in Auckland tonight seeing the guy who really is PJ, i.e., PJ O’Rourke’s gig at Sky City. If you’d like to catch up with us, Bernard and I and Annie Fox will be in the London Bar beforehand from about 5:30 on – and before that in the garden at The Castle. Maybe we’ll catch up with you?

PPS: And thanks to Crusader Rabbit for the cartoon.

Stop! Nanny's anti-obesity red light's on.

Nanny's anti-obesity campaigners have unveiled a new way to get in our face: forcing food producers to put "traffic lights" on their food packaging. In a topical TV appearance, Harry Binswanger from the Ayn Rand Institute makes a fundamental point that needs to be tattoed upon the shrivelled souls of every one of nanny's groupies. Says Harry:

It's not the responsibility of the state to pass laws to fix people's personal problems...

And that's the whole argument right there, isn't it. Debating a woman championing government regulation of business advertising to "help fight child obesity" (a woman who's a US version of Sue Kedgley), Binswanger makes another obvious point:

Parents should show … some backbone, and not give in to whiny kids, and not expect the government to send the police force into the advertising studios to substitute for their own lack of will power...

Advertisers have a right to broadcast whatever message they choose, as long as it isn’t fraudulent…It’s up to parents to decide what their children can watch and what they can eat.

He's right, isn't he. Police in the advertising studios. Police in the packaging plants. It's time to just say "Sod off!" If we're going to see traffic lights applied anywhere, then it should be a red light to nannying busybodies.

See: FTC Subpoenas - Harry Binswanger on CNBC.

UPDATE: But the 'traffic light' system proposed is "voluntary," you say? Nanny's camp follower Jordan Carter makes plain just how "voluntary" all such schemes are:

The health of New Zealanders is more important than ... ideological hatred of regulation. If companies won't cooperate voluntarily with making our food safer, then they must be forced to do so.

Jawohl, Herr Carter!!

Bradford & McCarten: Errors apparent

A few comments this morning on Eye to Eye clarified something for me.

SUE BRADFORD ARGUED that the death of Mrs Muliaga is "an indictment" of Max Bradford's "market reforms" of the electricity industry, "an indictment" of the cold-heartedness of capitalism, and a signal that all electrical producers should be taken back into the arms of the caring state and peremptorily renationalised.

Yet neither Mercury Energy nor Mighty River Power are private companies. Nor did Bradford's reforms take these power producers away from the arms of the state: These are both state organisations. Any resemblance to anything outside North Korea is entirely accidental.

SUE BRADFORD ARGUED that access to electrical power is a right.

At the same time her colleagues in the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to make the production of power more and more difficult; everything they can to raise costs by having extensive restrictions and carbon taxes and the like placed on existing power plants; they're enthusiastic supporters of Kyoto, which guarantees to make power more expensive, and the RMA, which makes it all but impossible to reliably transport power to NZ's largest city; and they're doing everything they possibly can to stop the production of new power plants, cheering loudly every time their protests and the RMA between them sink new plans for more power (Think how they cheered when Project Aqua, Marsden B, and Genesis' Whanganui River hydro schemes were canned).

In the face of opposition such as that from her colleagues and supporters, how are the power companies supposed to keep producing cheap power and keep making it widely available, as she insists they must? How are they supposed to deliver this "right" that she talks about?

How? Somehow.

MATT MCCARTEN ARGUED that the person who switched off the power to the Muliaga's home should have known what would happen to poor Mrs Muliaga when he did that.

Yet he also argued that there was nothing wrong in the family (four sons in all, ranging from a seven-year-old to a twenty-one-year-old) sitting down for two hours with their dying mother to sing hymns, since they didn't know that she was dying... How, we have to wonder, was the poor contractor supposed to know what the family themselves apparently weren't aware of?

How? Somehow.

BRADFORD ARGUED THAT people shouldn't leap to judgement by "playing politics," and McCarten argued that people shouldn't be condemning this family before the facts are known.

Yet even before the facts are known (and in complete disregard of the facts that are known) these two between them have leapt to make political capital out of this tragedy.

There's an error here in both of them that is far more than just one of logic.

UPDATE: What did Mrs Muliaga die from? On that, as Whale Oil suggests,

the quote of the week comes from Lindsay Perigo on Eye to Eye just after one of the socialists say her death should be blamed on poverty. Quote:Well she didn't die of starvation.

As I've said here before, poverty in South Auckland is generally not a shortage of money. It's an excess of poor choices. Today's Herald highlights the result for Mrs Muliaga of some of those choices.

Mrs Muliaga was fatally ill when she left hospital last month and not expected to live much longer. The obesity-related heart and lung disease which was killing Mrs Muliaga was being kept at bay by a cocktail of powerful medication - not the oxygen machine. Mrs Muliaga had previously turned her back on using the drugs to seek traditional Samoan health care...

Mrs Muliaga was suffering from cardiomyopathy - a weakness in the muscle of the heart brought on by a lack of oxygen being carried to the organ. The illness, lung disease and associated breathing difficulties were related to her obesity. She had been admitted to Middlemore Hospital in April and was discharged on May 11...

It was not the first time she had been hospitalised since the illness was diagnosed about five years ago. On previous hospital stays for the same problem, Muliaga had been told her lifestyle had to change or her health would not improve. This time, like previous times, she was stabilised and released with medication that would help relieve the symptoms. She was also given the oxygen machine, which is intended to assist her breathing - not to breathe for her.

When doctors who had treated her heard she had died after the power cut, they were astonished. On release, she was not so ill that the machine was critical to survival...

"No one should ever die because they can't pay a power bill," [said Mighty River Power chairwoman Carole Durbin].

And in this case, no one did. Shame on those who use tragedies like this to make political capital.

Envy is making houses unaffordable

Sprawl is good. Sprawl is choice. The opponents of sprawl are not just against sprawl, they're against choice -- the proof of this is that if people wanted to live in the way the enemies of choice wanted, they wouldn't need to be forced into it, they'd be doing it anyway.

The enemies of sprawl are the enemies of choice -- they simply use the power of government and the powers that the Resource Management Act gives local government to force people to live in the way that they prefer, rather than the way the people themselves wish to live. They're just another brand of interfering busybody who want to force their own predilections upon others.

The result in New Zealand is severe restrictions on building and development, and the result of that is some of the most unaffordable housing in the world.

The enmity of the anti-sprawlers is expressed in restrictions on building and development -- on where and how and how many houses, shops, offices, studios and workshops people can build on their own land -- and is is expressed in severe restrictions on the growth and expansion of New Zealand's cities -- including ring-fencing cities and prohibiting urban development beyond an artificially imposed 'urban fence.'

The result of all the planners' restrictions has been a severe dampening of housing supply at the very time that demand for those houses is going through the roof, so much so that New Zealand's cities now rank amongst the most unaffordable cities in the world in which to buy a home: as you might have heard, in a recent report released by Wendell Cox's Demographia and Hugh Pavletich [blogged here many times], Auckland was shown as the twenty-first most unaffordable city in the world in which to buy a home (as measured by the income of people in those cities) with NZ's other cities not far behind.

There are dickheads about who either don't think that it's restrictions on sprawl that raises costs, or they simply ignore the evidence; dickheads like Colin James for example who, writing in Tuesday's Herald, suggests the reason for the unaffordability of housing is due solely to lending policies.

But this just ignores the reality. The evidence is clear enough that where lending policies are equal -- across the continental US for example -- that the most unaffordable cities are those that have applied the so-called 'sustainable' solutions to growth; and it is the cities that have applied most restrictions on people's choices that are the most unaffordable in which to live. (The chart at left shows the western world's most unaffordable cities; the chart at right shows the cities following the anti-sprawlers' nostrums; this post discusses the correlation) It's no surprise that cities ranking highly in one chart generally rank rather highly in the other chart as well.

The difference between affordable cities and unaffordable cities is not in lending policies, which are the same across whole countries, it is in the level of restrictions placed on building new houses, which differ from city to city. This should not be rocket science. Restrict supply, and you increase prices. Thinking you can do otherwise is trying to refute a basic law of economics -- and even dictators can't do that, however much they like to try.

Notes a recent article in the Washington Post: sprawl, suburban living, and the cars that make the sprawling suburbs possible have been demonised in all sorts of ways.

They don't rate up there with cancer and al-Qaeda -- at least not yet -- but suburban sprawl and automobiles are rapidly acquiring a reputation as scourges of modern American society. Sprawl, goes the typical indictment, devours open space, exacerbates global warming and causes pollution, social alienation and even obesity. And cars are the evil co-conspirator -- the driving force, so to speak, behind sprawl.

In objecting to sprawl and to the evidence adduced by Pavletich and Cox for the unaffordablility of cities with more restrictions on development, blogger and 'Smart Growth' advocate Tom Beard demonstrates the sneering mixture of envy and myth on which restrictions on turning bare land into new housing are based:

In reality, what actually concerns [Hugh Pavletich] and right-wing American lobby group Demographia is the ability of suburban property developers to make a quick profit from subdivisions while externalising the cost of infrastructure...

The price of a house is only part of the story: how "affordable" will it be to live in his sprawling, car-dependent suburbs when oil prices soar even higher? Meanwhile, the entire city shares the costs of roading, sewerage and water, as well as having to put up with increased pollution, road deaths and having motorways driven through our neighbourhoods.

Pavletich... can't wait to convert the country into a debased landscape of McMansions, megamalls and motorways, pocketing the profit while the rest of us pay for the physical and civic infrastructure required to turn it into some semblance of a city

Beard is representative of many anti-sprawlers; people who want to force others to live by the anti-sprawlers' own envy-ridden sensibilities. But ignoring the envy-ridden barbs, let's boil down his real objections to sprawl, the claim that suburbs are "unsustainable."

• Anti-sprawlers argue that roads, sewage, water and "the physical and civic infrastructure required to turn it into some semblance of a city" are paid for by "the rest of us," so therefore the extension of infrastructure must be restricted. But what is their reaction when someone suggests that roads, sewage, water and "the physical and civic infrastructure required to turn it into some semblance of a city" are provided privately, and the real costs sheeted home to buyers? Apoplexy. Let infrastructure be provided privately, however, with costs sheeted home to users, and this objection dissolves.
  
• And "how affordable will it be to live in his sprawling, car-dependent suburbs when oil prices soar even higher?" Well, isn't the future affordability or unaffordability up to those who choose to live in these sprawling, car-dependent suburbs, and to invest in their own future?
  After all, neither Tom Beard nor Dick Hubbard nor Al Bore nor any planner anywhere in the world has a direct line to the future. Freedom means we're each allowed to plan our own futures, with the full knowledge of our own context, our own lives, and our own hopes and dreams, and -- provided we don't initiate force against anyone else -- we should all be free to do so. In fact, when people have been left free to plan their own lives, and to react freely to price signals that indicate resources and lifestyles are or should be changing, the results have been vastly superior to those achieved in the planned societies and planned economies so beloved of Beard and Hubbard and Bore.

As Joel Schwartz at the American Institute summarises, in a related context:

I suspect these people and others like them must at bottom believe that businesses don't deliver what's best for consumers unless the government forces them to. They hold this belief, or at least fail to examine it, even as businesses continue to supply them with what they actually want, as revealed by their purchase choices, rather than with what they say they want.

Perhaps we need to define a new type of 'market failure.' Market failure occurs when businesses supply what people actually choose to buy, rather than what people claim they want to buy.

As I've suggested, the idea that that sprawl is bad is essentially one of envy; what gets anti-sprawlers apoplectic is the idea that someone, somewhere, is being allowed to live their life in the way that they want too, rather than the way the anti-sprawler wants them to. Economic ignorance allows them to think they can get away with it.

Ted Balaker and Sam Staley discuss five other envy-ridden myths of the anti-sprawlers in that Washington Post article mentioned above, myths they explode in the American context, and which are equally mythical here in NZ.

• Myth #1. Americans are addicted to driving.
  Fact is, Americans are no more addicted to driving than Europeans. Europeans -- who live in the European cities that are so often cited by planners as being our ideal (that's a suburb near Paris on the right, by the way) -- they drive almost as much as we do. As Balaker and Staley point out: "The key factor that affects driving habits isn't population density, public transit availability, gasoline taxes or even different attitudes. It's wealth. Europe and the United States are relatively wealthy, but American incomes are 15 to 40 percent higher than those in Western Europe. And as nations such as China and India become wealthier, the portion of their populations that drive cars will grow."
  
  
• Myth #2. Public transit can reduce traffic congestion.
  Public transportation still has an important role, concede the authors, but they say, "We have to be realistic about what transit can accomplish."

  Suppose we could not only reverse transit's long slide but also triple the size of the nation's transit system and fill it with riders. Transportation guru Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution notes that this enormous feat would be "extremely costly" and, even if it could be done, would not "notably reduce" rush-hour congestion, primarily because transit would continue to account for only a small percentage of commuting trips.

  In any case, public transportation use itself is generally declining, but like auto use, suburbanisation itself is driven not by use or non-use of public transportation, but by wealth. "Workers once left the fields to find better lives in the cities. Today more and more have decided that they can do so in the suburbs."
  
  
• Myth #3. We can cut air pollution only if we stop driving.
  "Although driving is increasing by 1 to 3 percent each year, average vehicle emissions are dropping about 10 percent annually. Pollution will wane even more as motorists continue to replace older, dirtier cars with newer, cleaner models." Cleaner cars and better roads -- so those cars aren't sitting around in traffic jams all day -- between them, that's going to do more for pollution and greenhouse gas emissions than raising the price of houses by restricting growth.
  
  
• Myth #4. We're paving over America.
  "How much of the United States is developed? Twenty-five percent? Fifty? Seventy-five? How about 5.4 percent? That's the Census Bureau's figure... In truth, housing in this country takes up less space than most people realize. If the nation were divided into four-person households and each household had an acre, everyone would fit in an area half the size of Texas."
  The same sort of figures apply here in New Zealand, except even less so. According to the Landcover Database of Terralink, urban areas and urban open space in New Zealand account for less than 1 percent of total area, one quarter of that in the Auckland region. If all of NZ's 1,471,476 existing households were to be rebuilt on an acre of land (which was the sort of thing proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his Broadacre project, right), we'd all fit in an area less than one-quarter the size of the Waikato -- and think how easy it'd be to thumb a lift out to Raglan!
  
  
• Myth #5. We can't deal with global warming unless we stop driving.
  Really? Does the myth-making of the anti-sprawlists depend solely on the myth-making of the warmists? Seems so.
  But as Dr Vincent Gray notes, even the alarmists on the IPCC only suggest it is "very likely" that between 0.3ºC and 0.5ºC of the last century's warming is due to us humans, and only one-tenth of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions are due to "household transport." In fact, and if you believe the threats are real, then you will know that livestock are a greater 'threat' to the planet than our cars. Are we going to 'save the planet' by ploughing under our livestock and paving all the farms? Or by bulldozing all our existing housing just so we can pack ourselves all in within walking distance of each other?
  And even if you take seriously the alarmism of the warmists, that's not going to stop everyone driving, particularly not the drivers in China and India who are just going to go right on getting rich and driving more -- the only thing to do is ensure that price signals here reflect the true realities, and leave people free to choose.
  

Such is the quality of the reasoning by which our houses are becoming unaffordable.

What the anti-sprawlists are doing with their restrictions on development is making housing unaffordable for every first-home buyer, and pushing up rent and mortage payments for everyone else.

And what they're also doing, ironically enough, by artificially ring-fencing our cities with restrictive zoning, is offering a great boon to the bigger developers they claim to despise -- the mega-developers who are the only ones to have the capacity and the political connections to buy up the ready-to-be-rezoned land that sits outside the ring-fence, encourage its rezoning, and then release it on to the market once the ring-fence is relaxed.

But that's another story ... one we'll talk about here very, very soon.

UPDATE: Tom Beard has responded here, to which I've responded briefly here.

LINK: Five myths about suburbia and our car-happy culture - Washington Post
Sustainable cities are unaffordable cities - (Peter Cresswell) Not PC

RELATED: Urban Design, Politics-NZ, Housing

It's all about choice!

You've probably seen me mention a few times Tibor Machan's view on the basic errors made in the 'ongoing' nature/nurture debate (here for instance). As he's just blogged on how this error affects the 'obesity debate,' allow me to quote:

So once again we see the age old battle between two kinds of determinism, inherited versus environmental factors. But there is another option that needs to be added. This is personal responsibility.

We are all saddled with aspects of ourselves that we had nothing to do with, and we all face elements in our environment we cannot control. But there are also choices we can make, given who and what we are and the world in which we live. The very idea that we should look more to environmental factors than to our hard wiring suggest that we have a choice. This also suggests that no one has to eat fast foods, or clear his or her plate, or go on various binges. Some of us may find it more difficult to resist temptations than others, but so what? Tall people have different challenges from short ones but both need to meet those challenges they face.

As a teacher of ethics, I find it disturbing that so many educated people opt for removing individual responsibility from the picture as they try to understand human affairs.

Me too. I just don't know how they do that. Are they wilfully blind?

On this'debate' for example, don't you find it disturbing that fatties and pollies alike find common cause in removing personal responsibility from their respective equations.

If you're a fat bastard and you don't want to be, how about you stop blaming vending machines, your school, your parents, your genes and just try the 'don't-eat-so-frigging-much' diet. (Do you see many fat starving Africans in famine photos hiding at the back going, "Oh, I've just got big bones"? No? Is that a clue? Sheesh!)

And if you're a politician, how's about you trying an 'I-won't-poke-my-nose-into-your-business' week, and just leave us and our eating habits alone.

You see, it's not about victims, it's all about choice -- something you educated people want to remove from our understanding of human affairs. Why would you choose to do that?

LINK: Obesity -- Nature vs. Nurture (again) - Machan's Inputs
Nature v nurture: character is all - Not PC (Peter Cresswell)

RELATED: Ethics, Health, Politics

Who ate all the biscuits?

One present fashionable concern is obesity. For most of history the very real concern was malnutrition. Lift your eyes occasionally and see things in a historical context, and you realise some fashionable concerns actually incorporate something to celebrate.

As a reminder of just how recent were these concerns, here's an actual New York Times ad from June 27, 1906 [hat tip Craig Depken at Division of Labour]:TAGS: Health, History

Happy Meal meddlers backtrack?

Sue Kedgley and National's Jackie Blue appear to be backtracking from their earlier calls to ban -- or at least "give serious consideration" to banning -- McDonalds toys and McDonalds Happy Meals, and even Helen Clark felt the need to observe that "getting rid of kids' fast food deals such as McDonald's Happy Meals is not the way to fight child obesity."

Several email correspondents lambasted both Blue and Kedgley for their busy-bodying, to which Kedgley replied (punctuated just as she sent it; as one wag said she seems to want to ban the use of apostrophes as well):

Please dont believe everything you read in the papers. I said to a reporter it was something the inquiry into obesity might look at ..end of story. I cant ban anything, we live in a democracy and we need a majority of MPs to vote for an ything.

So 'majority rules' is apparently okay with Sue, then. In another response she told a correspondent:

Well you shouldn't fall for a media beat up. All I said was that these were the sort of issues the select committee would be looking at. And he managed to twist it into me calling for a ban.

To be fair, most of Kedgley's headlines come from "calling for a ban," so when a reporter is presented with fat, food, Sue Kedgely and "something the inquiry into obesity might look at" the word "ban" would naturally spring to mind.

Meanwhile, Jackie Blue responded on behalf of the Nats:

Thank you for your feedback. In the article. [sic] I was quoted as being 'open minded' about this issue and hoped that the committee could make recommendations that would turn our obesity epidemic around (whatever they might be). What wasn't reported in the article was that I said that National's position would have to be discussed at caucus and I understand that Tony Ryall has made a statement to a TV station today that National does not support banning of happy meals and toys etc. I hope that reassures you.

It doesn't. "Whatever they might be." sounds ominous, doesn't it, and Blue sounds so open-minded that anything could walk in -- and maybe already has. And has anyone actually seen Ryall's reported attempt to rescue Blue? I haven't seen anything from Vile Ryall since last Sunday, and certainly nothing on this subject. Methinks she's wriggling.

LINKS: Fat-fight MP plans Happy Meal ban - Sunday Star Times
Happy Meal ban unlikely to succeed - Newstalk ZB

TAGS: Politics-NZ, Health, Politics-Greens, Politics-National