Freakonomics » How Much Does Your Name Matter? A Freakonomics Radio Rebroadcast

How Much Does Your Name Matter? A Freakonomics Radio Rebroadcast

This week’s podcast is a rebroadcast of our episode called “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

The gist: a kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?

The episode draws from a Freakonomics chapter called “A Roshanda By Any Other Name” and includes a good bit of new research on the power of names. We talk with NYU sociologist Dalton Conley and his two children, E Harper Nora Jeremijenko-Conley and Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley. Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney talks about Google ads, and how a search for people with distinctively black names was more likely to produce an ad suggesting the person had an arrest record – regardless of whether that person had ever been arrested. We also talk to Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, about his new research that looks at how children’s names are influenced by their parents’ political ideology. Lastly, Steve Levitt and Roland Fryer argue that a first name doesn’t seem to affect a person’s economic life at all.

We hope you enjoy this episode, whatever your name might be.
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Got Your Back | This American Life

#531: Got Your Back
There is a special comfort that comes from knowing someone’s got your back. You can do things that just weren’t possible before. You take huge risks, including some that aren’t necessarily advisable. This week: stories where one person’s powerlessness is transformed when they discover they have backup. And we see what happens when that backup goes away.

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Freakonomics » A Podcast User’s Guide for People Who Don’t Use iTunes or iPhones Podcast Lovers)…

A Podcast User’s Guide for People Who Don’t Use iTunes or iPhones Podcast Lovers) Who Don’t Use an iPhone
We routinely hear from people who’ve heard about our Freakonomics Radio podcast, but feel somewhat shut out from the podcasting world because they don’t use an iPhone or iTunes. So here are some alternative options:

1) For Android Users

We’ve heard great things about Pocket Casts, which, for $3.99, syncs your favorite podcasts and keeps them backed up. You can also stream it to your Chromecast. Pocket Casts also works for Apple devices.

2) Windows Users

You actually don’t need a third-party app to stream, download, or subscribe to podcasts. It’s super simple: here are instructions. If you use a Windows phone, you can download the Podcast Lounge app to subscribe and listen to Freakonomics Radio.

3) Stream from our website or RSS Feed:

If you’re listening from your computer, this is probably the easiest way. Go to the Freakonomics Radio page and click on the “Feed” button on the right-hand side just below the search bar (or access it here). This will take you to a list of all of our podcasts. Find the one you want, and click “Play Now”; an MP3 of the podcast will now begin downloading to your computer. When the download has finished, you can open it with your media player of choice.

Alternately, you can also download a podcast from its individual page on http://ift.tt/1sZazU7. You can click the play button to start streaming or click the “WNYC” link, which will take you to a WNYC page where you’ll see a “download” button under the player.

4) WNYC App

You can download the free WNYC App for iPhone or Android. In the app, go to “shows” in the dropdown menu. Scroll down to find Freakonomics Radio, pick an episode and hit “play” to start streaming. If you want to download an episode, hit “save.” You can adjust the settings — whether you want to bookmark an episode or download it, e.g. — under the “saved audio” tab.

5) Stitcher App and Swell App

You can listen to Freakonomics Radio on Stitcher or use the Stitcher app. On the app, select Freakonomics Radio and add it to your favorites playlist. You can also add specific episodes to your playlist, and again you can use the settings to adjust whether you want to stream or download for offline listening. We’ve also started hearing good things about the Swell app.

Any other suggestions? Please leave any listening tips or workarounds in the comments below — and, as always, thanks for listening.
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Freakonomics » Does Religion Make You Happy? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

Does Religion Make You Happy? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

(Photo: http://www.CGPGrey.com)

This week’s episode is called “Does Religion Make You Happy?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

We undertook this episode in response to a listener question from Joel Rogers, a tax accountant in Birmingham, Ala. Here’s what he wrote:

Being devout Southern Baptists my parents have steadfastly been giving 10% of their income to the church their whole lives. I recently voiced my opinion that I thought that was too [much to] give, and my parents and I got into an argument.

After a little back-and-forth, my parents conceded tithing at 10% may not be the exact amount ‘God’ expects, but my mother said something that stuck with me. She said the 10% they give to the church makes them happier than anything else they spend money on.

I’ve read that people who go to religious institutions consistently are happier than their counterparts. The economist inside me says that money (not given to the church) would make a non-tither happier, all things equal. So, will exchanging 10% of your income for the right to participate in a religious congregation statistically increase or decrease your happiness?

Joel is in effect asking two questions, related but separate. One is whether giving away money – in this case, to a religious institution – makes you happier. The other is whether religion itself makes you happier. Neither question is easy to answer, but we’ll do our best.

In the episode you’ll hear from Laurence Iannaccone, an economist at Chapman University who specializes in the economics of religion. Iannaccone says there is a strong correlation between religious giving and happiness but, as you’ll find out, just because giving and happiness seem to go hand in hand doesn’t mean the giving causes the happiness.

You’ll also hear from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who has done quite a bit of research on these topics. In “Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance” (abstract; PDF), Gruber tried to determine whether giving money to church is a complement to religious attendance or a substitute — and, whether it’s the giving or the going that actually makes people better off. Here’s his suggestion for the Rogers Family:

GRUBER: I would say if it’s really going … to church that matters for them, for their happiness and well-being, then they should maybe even give less and just go more.

And here’s what Gruber found in his paper “Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?” (abstract; PDF):

GRUBER: [The religious are] more likely to have higher incomes, higher education, have more stable marriages, be less likely to be on welfare, essentially be more successful on any economic measure you want to use.

In the podcast, Stephen Dubner also wonders: what if you’ve been giving to your church but find you’re no better off in the long run? As it turns out, some churches, like NewSpring in South Carolina, offer a money-back guarantee.

Finally: a big thanks to the Rogers Family (as well as to WBHM producer Andrew Yeager), who let us go to church with them at Grace Life Baptist Church in McCalla, Alabama.

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Freakonomics » Does Religion Make You Happy? Full Transcript

Does Religion Make You Happy? Full Transcript
[AMBI: Birds chirping]

JOEL: Jesus can’t keep the heat out in there!

WAYNE: Woo man, nice and warm!

JOEL: I’m dumping sweat…

WAYNE: I’ll tell you what!

Stephen J. DUBNER: That’s Joel Rogers and his father Wayne.

JOEL: Yeah! So we’re just about to walk into Grace Life Baptist Churchand worship with my parents, and my brother, also, my sister is about to be here, running a little late as usual.

[AMBI: Roosters crow, gravel crunch]

[MUSIC: Cantinero, “Happy When I’m Down” (from Championship Boxing)]

DUBNER: We’re in McCalla, Alabama, about 20 minutes outside of Birmingham, on a very warm Sunday morning.

WAYNE: It’s uh, I would say, fairly typical evangelical service.

LAURI: It used to be an old gym so the setting is a little different than a traditional church. There are no windows in here, but there is a praise band up on the stage. Sometimes there is a choir, the choir is off right now for summer.

DUBNER: That’s Lauri, Joel’s mom. She has a lot of friends here.

PEOPLE: Hi! Nice to see you! Hey! How’s it going? Good to see you!

LAURI: This is kind of like the fellowship area, it’s fun to see everybody in here and you get to see people who might not come to your service.

JOEL: Most people call it hanging out, at the church they call it fellowship.

LAURI: Exactly! That’s the church word.

Pastor Joel FREDERICK: Glad you’re here, let’s stand together this morning. We want to go to the Lord in prayer today. Father God, we bow our hearts before you, and we are so thankful God to see people coming to know Jesus…

DUBNER: We went to church with Joel Rogers’s family this morning because of an e-mail he sent us. Joel works as a tax accountant in Birmingham. Here’s what he wrote: “Being devout Southern Baptists” – Joel italicized “Southern” – “my parents have steadfastly been giving 10% of their income to the church their whole lives. I recently voiced my opinion that I thought that was too much to give, and my parents and I got into an argument. After a little back-and-forth, my parents conceded that tithing at 10% may not be the exact amount God expects, but my mother said something that stuck with me. She said the 10% they give to the church makes them happier than anything else they spend money on.” Joel goes on here: “I’ve read that people who go to religious institutions consistently are happier than their counterparts. The economist inside me says that money (not given to the church) would make a non-tither happier, all things equal.” So here’s what Joel wants to know:

JOEL: Will forfeiting 10% of your income, for the right to go to a church and experience a church congregation….will that make you happier or less happy, overall?

[MUSIC: The Dibs, “Brompton’s Cocktail”]

DUBNER: That’s the question we’ll try to answer on today’s show. But really Joel is asking two questions – related, but separate. One is whether giving away money – in this case, to a religious institution – makes you happier. The other is whether religion itself makes you happier. Here are Joel’s parents again:

LAURI: I think the world is a better place because of our little bit of tithing.

WAYNE: By tithing I am pleasing God. I am doing something that God would want me to do. That gives me happiness in that way, too.

DUBNER: And even Joel sees how giving money to the church can have a personal upside:

JOEL: I mean if I think back to another thing that I spent 20 dollars on, I don’t know, a t-shirt, like, which one would bring me more prolonged happiness? And I think the answer is probably giving the money away.

DUBNER: But, as we’ll see in this episode, these questions aren’t so simple.

WAYNE: Does it make me happy to tithe? Would I be happier if I had that 10% in my 401(k). Ugh, I don’t know. But you know my 401(k) would look a lot better if I had all the 10% that I had given over the years.

FREDERICK: ….we thank you God for all of this and we pray it in Jesus name and all of God’s people said:

CONGREGATION: Amen!

[THEME]

ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

[MUSIC: The Civil Tones, “Outrageous” (from City Stoopin’)]

DUBNER: Okay, we’re trying to answer Joel Rogers’s question about whether giving money to your church makes you happier in the long run:

Laurence IANNACCONE: When you just look at survey statistics, particularly in the United States, you find a strong and consistent positive association between rates of giving and happiness.

DUBNER: That’s Larry Iannaccone.

IANNACCONE: I’m a professor of economics here at Chapman University. I’m Christian I would classify myself as Evangelical Christian.

DUBNER: Iannaccone has studied the history of religious giving, including tithing:

IANNACCONE: Tithing literally comes from the word a tenth and traditionally meant ten percent of something, usually your income, paid to a church or to religion in general. The term originates as far back as the Bible, and in ancient Israel, the people of Israel were expected to give a tenth of their income, a tenth of their farm produce, to the priesthood, and to also help the poor.

DUBNER: At some points, and places in history, tithing was essentially a government tax. But things have evolved a good bit:

IANNACCONE: In American churches, however, when you hear tithing used today, you’re almost always talking about contributions that are freely given to the church. Often some fixed percent of people’s income, but not necessarily 10 percent. So, in that sense, the term is something of a misnomer and its use has evolved and changed quite a bit over time.

[MUSIC: The Willie August Project, “Lost And Found” (from Surrender to the Wind)]

DUBNER: Iannaccone can tell us which American denominations are most likely to tithe:

IANNACCONE: It varies some, but you hear it more among Protestants and especially conservative Protestants, those who try to emulate or describe their behavior in terms of biblical traditions. So they’re drawing on that ancient term and tradition from the Old Testament. You hear it especially among Mormons, but you also hear it in the Assemblies of God and many theologically conservative Protestant traditions. It’s not unusual to hear Baptists talking about tithing.

DUBNER: Baptists like Wayne Rogers.

WAYNE: I was taught to do it by my grandparents. When I was very very young, my granddad would give me a dollar every Sunday to give to the church. From the time I was three years old I would take an envelope with a dollar in it. So then as I got to be in middle school and high school and started making a little bit of my own money, my grandmother said Wayne, are you tithing off of that money?

[MUSIC: The Mackrosoft, “The Bison” (from Upgrade)]

DUBNER: Larry Iannaccone has some data, from the General Social Surveys, on the rate of giving among different American Christian denominations. At the top are Assemblies of God, Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons.

IANNACCONE: They average closer to 6 or 7% of their income—which is really quite an astonishingly large amount.

DUBNER: Baptists on average give 3 to 5% of their income. Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians give about 1%. So the trend is that the more liberal denominations give less. And then there are the Unitarians.

IANNACCONE: Unitarians, who by many measures are the most liberal of all, give less than 1% of their income to religious causes.

DUBNER: According to one evangelical Christian polling firm, 5 percent of Americans give at least 10 percent of their income to a religious or other non-profit institution. Among born-again Christians, that 5 percent rate jumps to 12 percent. If you look at the share of religious giving in the whole charitable picture, you find that roughly two-thirds of Americans’ individual contributions go to religious institutions.We could talk at great length about what those institutions do with all that money, and maybe someday we will. But today, we’re trying to answer Joel Rogers’s question, which is: what does all that giving do for the giver? Larry Iannaccone again:

IANNACCONE: The data that we have suggest a pretty strong positive association between various measures of happiness and wellbeing on the one hand, and other measures of religious involvement, including giving, on the other.

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “Medicine Spoon” (from It’s About Time)]

DUBNER: Okay, that sounds fairly persuasive – that giving and happiness go hand in hand. But, as Iannaccone is careful to point out, there are a number of caveats here. Just because giving and happiness go together doesn’t mean that the giving causes the happiness. It could be that happier people are more likely to give money. It could be that having more money makes you happier, and therefore more able to give. Or that being happy makes you likely to make more money, which makes you more able to give. In other words: it’s not so easy to establish firm causal proof – as our listener Joel Rogers is looking for – as to whether giving money to your church makes you happier.

Jonathan GRUBER: The answer is complicated and the answer actually speaks to two different elements of research I’ve done on religion.

DUBNER: That’s Jon Gruber.

GRUBER: I’m a professor of economics at MIT. Um I grew up in a Jewish household with a very religious mother and a fairly not-very religious father. You know, mom sort of ran things. We were reform but pretty serious about it.

DUBNER: So are you a religious person yourself?

GRUBER: No I’m not.

DUBNER: Gruber is, however, very much interested in the questions we’re asking today. But, with causality in this realm being elusive, Gruber had to get a little creative.

GRUBER: This was my first paper on religion. It’s called, it’s my favorite title of a paper I’ve ever written, it’s called “Pay or Pray.” And it was actually a bit inspired by an episode from my childhood, which is my father, he’s a finance professor, and so he was sort of induced to become treasurer of our temple. And he said, “Oh, now I’m treasurer of our temple, oh good, that means I can go less.” Now that wasn’t about giving and going. That was about time and going, but nonetheless it sort of implied that trade-off.

DUBNER: The question Gruber was asking in this paper is a subtle one: does giving money to a religious institution complement going to religious services, or act as a substitute?

GRUBER: Giving to charity is very tax-price sensitive. This is well known in economics that when you give a bigger tax break to charitable giving, people give more. But then no one had ever looked, well what did it do to their attendance? And I found that if you give a bigger tax break to charitable giving, people give more and go less. That is: they are substitutes.

DUBNER: Gruber’s father, in other words, was more norm than exception. Gruber found that every 1 percent rise in charitable giving led to a 1.1% decline in religious attendance. But what about someone like Joel Rogers’s parents? They give their 10 percent to the church, and feel really good about it. Is it the giving that feels good, or is it the going to church that feels good?

GRUBER: I would say if it’s really going that matters, if it’s going to church that matters for them, for their happiness and wellbeing, then they should maybe even give less and just go more.

[MUSIC: Phil Symonds, “Rusty Tear”]

DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: does attending religious services make people better off?

GRUBER: What I find is an incredibly strong correlation, that basically these people are more likely to have higher incomes, have higher education, have more stable marriages, be less likely to be on welfare, essentially be more successful on any sort of economic measure you want to use.

DUBNER: One more thing: if you do not already subscribe to Freakonomics Radio — we believe you should. Just sign up, for free, at iTunes, and you’ll get the next episode in your sleep.

[UNDERWRITING]

ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

[MUSIC: The Civil Tones, “Slinky” City Stoopin’)]

DUBNER: Today we’re in church, in McCalla, Alabama…

FREDERICK: Let’s pray: Lord thank you. Thank you for your love for us that never gives up…

DUBNER: … with Joel Rogers and his family. Joel’s parents give 10 percent of their income to their church. Here’s what Joel wanted to know:

JOEL: Will forfeiting 10% of your income, for the right to go to a church and experience a church congregation, will that make you happier or less happy overall?

DUBNER: We’ve already established that the connection between donating to a church and happiness can be hard to prove. But what about the connection between happiness and religion itself?

GRUBER: So, I came up with what I thought was a fairly convincing idea for this.

DUBNER: That’s Jon Gruber again, he’s an MIT economist who has tried to measure whether religion makes people better off.

GRUBER: As your listeners know, developing a causal case means finding some factor that changes religiosity, but doesn’t change happiness. You know, the fact there’s this correlation that religious people are happier could be that religious people have higher incomes, religious people live in parts of the country that are happier, whatever.

DUBNER: Or it could be that happier people tend to be more likely to participate in religious services, yeah.

GRUBER: Or more worrisome, what we call reverse causality, that the happier people could be more likely to participate.

[MUSIC: Spencer Garn, “Solar Gazer”]

DUBNER: Gruber began by looking into the research conducted by sociologists, like Rodney Stark:

GRUBER: One of the findings in this field is that people are more religious if they’re in an area that’s more densely composed of their religion. So basically if you are a Catholic in Boston, you are more religious than a Catholic in Minneapolis. And if you’re a Lutheran in Minneapolis, you’re more religious than a Lutheran in Boston.

DUBNER: Now, why was that religious clustering important for trying to measure the impact of religiosity?

GRUBER: That’s a fact that was given to me. That was well documented in the literature. And so what I said is, well, if you look at who lives where, that’s largely a function of sort of what waves of immigrants came over at what time. And certain ethnic backgrounds have certain religions associated with them.

DUBNER: Alright, so let me say this. I believe you because you sound believable and you have good credentials, you have great credentials. But as a layperson, and in this case I speak not only for myself, but I probably represent most of our listeners, that methodology as a means to extricate the causal relationship of attending religion changing your life, it’s a little, I don’t know how to say it.

GRUBER: Distant.

DUBNER: Yeah, distant is a great word. So, before we get into the findings, just persuade me a little bit more, and in as plain English as you can, why this variable and why this methodology is worthwhile and believable to you.

GRUBER: Okay, so first of all this is an unbelievably hard problem because there’s lots of things that correlate with both outcomes and religion, and because people who are say richer or happier may choose to be more or less religious. So it’s clearly a typical, difficult, Freakonomics-style problem. So, basically, why do I believe my solution? Well, essentially the starting point for my solution is saying, look, Polish people in Boston are much more religious than Polish people in Minneapolis. Likewise, Swedish people in Boston who are otherwise pretty similar are less religious than Swedish people in Minneapolis. Now, there’s no great reason for that other than the fact that they’re not around people of their ethnicity and thus their religion. Moreover you might say, well, maybe Polish people in Boston are just different in some way. But then let me go one step further. You might say okay well look Jon, that’s all well and good, but Poles and Swedes aren’t identical. Maybe Poles in Boston are different than Poles in Minneapolis. Maybe they’re different along some other dimension. The way I can test that is I can look at participation in other activities. So if you’re really worried that gee Poles in Boston are just different they should be more likely to be in other clubs, or other civic activities or other similar things, and they’re not. So except for being more religious, Poles and Swedes in Boston are no different. Now look, is this a bullet proof argument? No. I mean, let’s be honest about this paper this is how economics works. This paper was not accepted at a top economics journal. The top economics journals had enough concerns that this was not real, that you know, this paper was published in a second tier journal. So is this the cleanest paper that I’ve ever written, not by a long shot. But I’m pretty convinced.

DUBNER: Right, okay, so you find that the clustering of national identity has something to do with religious participation.

GRUBER: Exactly.

DUBNER: Therefore…

GRUBER: Therefore, I look and I ask does the clustering of ethnic identity also correlate with economic outcome. And what I find is an incredibly strong correlation, that basically these people who are clustered with others of their ethnicity are more likely to have higher incomes, have higher education, have more stable marriages, be less likely to be on welfare, essentially be more successful on any sort of economic measure you want to use.

DUBNER: And just persuade me that it’s the religious participation that you feel is the causal driver in that as opposed to let’s say the ethnic clustering itself. In other words, I could imagine that when there are a lot of Poles in Boston, there are network effects that might aid education, health, income/outcomes the way that potentially religious observation does.

GRUBER: Right and the way I want to convince you of that that is two things. One is I want to say what I do is I can look at what happens to Poles when there are a lot of Italians in Boston. So essentially because they share the same religion but not much else. So I can actually ask what happens not just to Poles where there are Poles in Boston, I can control for that, I can essentially say let me get rid of your own ethnic density and ask what happens to Poles when there are a lot of other groups that happen to be Catholic in Boston? And so that way it’s not just asking look if there’s other people of your ethnicity, it’s asking are there other people of other ethnicities that share your religion. And then I also have the fact that you’re not more likely to participate in anything else, so it looks like it’s operating to the religion margin.

DUBNER: Excellent, okay good. So I have to say, that was one of our…I love these…This show is meant to be primarily entertainment, but we love to teach when we can. And to me that was a great teaching sequence there. I think anybody will hear that and really understand the way that someone like you tries to approach a question like that. So that was awesome.

GRUBER: Yeah, and look, I think, you know, its important for your listeners to understand that you know, life’s not black and white, and sometimes there’s cleaner answers than others, and sometimes we have a randomized trial and sometimes we don’t. And in life you’ve got to decide is the question important enough that you want to answer it even if there’s not as clean an answer as you’d like.

[MUSIC: Nasimiyu, “Time is a Train” (from Rules Aren’t Real)]

DUBNER: So let’s say I accept that finding that religious participation doesn’t just correlate to better outcomes in life but actually helps produce them: higher levels of education and income like you said lower levels of welfare receipt, disability and divorce. What, if you have any idea, are the mechanisms by which you think religious participation leads to these outcomes?

GRUBER: So there’s essentially several possibilities. The sort of least exciting possibility is through educational routes, which is maybe when there’s a lot of Catholics there’s more Catholic schools. Now, I don’t think that’s it. But that is one possible route. I think another route and the route that I probably find most likely is the church is essentially a social network, that essentially provides kind of insurance against bad things happening to you, and that it provides a place where you can go and network if you lose a job, you can have people who can help you out if times get tough, loan you money or whatever.

DUBNER: Or even if times aren’t tough, if you’re a successful business person theoretically you expand even more if you’re successful within your community.

GRUBER: Exactly. Basically churches are the source of social capital in society, are the main source of social capital in society. And therefore if you’re around more people like you, that’s a bigger community, that’s what we call in economics a thicker market. There’s more people around who can help you out as you’re growing, help you out if you’re hurting, it’s really sort of a social insurance notion of a church. And then finally and most speculatively, faith itself may produce better outcomes. I know a number of people who are very religious. It gives them a calmness and a certainty that allows them to be successful in other areas of their life.

DUBNER: I’m curious if along the way of doing this research if your research persuaded you to either get involved, or want to get involved more in something resembling religious participation since it seems to be pretty good for you, or were you convinced that you’re already doing well enough and didn’t need it?

GRUBER: You know, what it changed in me is it gave me, I probably had the typical secular, rich, liberal skeptic’s view of religion.

DUBNER: Which is what?

GRUBER: Which is that religion is sort of an opiate to the masses. You know, kind of, the religious right is kind of ruining America. Religion is a source of wars in the Middle East. Religion is basically bad. And I think it really changed my view on that, that I really gained appreciation for the role religion can play in people’s lives, appreciation for my friends who are more religious, and a respect for the role religion plays in their lives. But it didn’t really affect my religiosity. I think it’s something that just has to come to you or not. I was kind of forced to go to temple as a kid, I kind of burned out on it, and it’s just not, I kind of tried, and I just didn’t feel it. So I decided I wasn’t going to kind of fake it to make it. So it didn’t really affect my life. But for example, my wife is, she’s Unitarian. We raised the kids Jewish, although she never converted, and now she’s going to become a Unitarian minister. And I think that’s something I probably wouldn’t have been supportive of before I did this research. And now I’m very supportive of her. I think it’s great for her. She’s getting faith and doing that.

[MUSIC: Blindfold Sound, “Guitar Ambient 1”]

DUBNER: Okay, so does religion itself make people better off? As best as Jon Gruber can tell the answer is… quite possibly. If that’s the case, you can see why some people are willing to donate a considerable chunk of their income to their religious institution. Which, if you follow this line of questioning through to its natural conclusion, might lead you to think – well, okay, if I’m tithing money to my church and I’m not better off in the long run, maybe I should get my money back? It turns out that some churches do offer that money-back guarantee.

Pastor Perry NOBLE: We are challenging you to take our 90-Day Tithe Challenge. And in 90 days if you don’t feel like God has blessed you, if you don’t feel like God has done what his Word has said, if you believe God is a liar, here’s what we’ll do, we’ll refund every dime that you gave during that 90 day period. No questions asked.

DUBNER: Perry Noble is the senior pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina.

NOBLE: I think the thing about the 90-Day Tithe Challenge is it just tells people, hey, we’re smoking what we are selling here. I believe we’ve had over 4,000 people total sign up for the challenge since we’ve started and between 15 and 20 people total since we started it a couple of years ago have ever asked for their money back.

[MUSIC: Teddy Presberg, “Timebomb” (from Outcries From A Sea of Red)]

DUBNER: I asked Jon Gruber, the economist, what he thought of this offer:

GRUBER: Well, I think it’s, I guess quite frankly I think it’s terribly misleading. I think that you know, if we go with the theory that religious participation is good for you because it builds faith and security, the last thing you want to do is have people keeping track and saying God didn’t really score me anything in the last three months, I want my money back. That sort of, that seems to promote a transactional view of religion which is damaging. And I don’t find that helpful at all.

DUBNER: We also ran the tithing refund idea past the Rogers family. They didn’t like it any more than Jon Gruber:

WAYNE: I think that’s completely nuts! I mean it’s not Sears. It’s very different when you give to the church. Once I give the money away I expect them to do something good with it and I dont want the money back.

LAURI: God says, “Give a tithe. Test me and see if I will pour out blessings.” It doesn’t say what type of blessing and I don’t think the blessings have to necessarily be in any way that we can measure it. So I don’t see how a church could say they could have a money back guarantee. Seems like a very selfish reason to give if the only reason you give is to get back, so I think it takes away from the whole heart of it.

JOEL: You do get an itemized tax deduction, though, for giving to the church, a good 30 percent.

[MUSIC: Carson Henley, “Give It Up” (from 100 Hours)]
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Mind Your Own Business | This American Life

#530: Mind Your Own Business
Stories of meddling, snooping, and just getting way, way up in other people’s business. A cellphone hidden in a bag of chips starts a messy turf war between the FBI and a local sheriff; and a surprising handbook lets us peek into the secret world of professional cheerleading. Plus: Studs Terkel.

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Freakonomics » Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

(Photo: Nana B Agyei)

This week’s episode is called “Why You Should Bribe Your Kids.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

Let’s say you’re trying to get a bunch of kids to eat more nutritious food. What’s the best way to do this — education, moral urging, or plain old bribery? That’s one of the questions that a pair of economists set out to answer in a recent field experiment in Chicago. In this podcast, you’ll hear from both of them: John List, a University of Chicago professor (and co-author of The Why Axis who’s familiar to readers of this blog); and Anya Samek, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

They tried several methods to see what would make kids choose fruit over a cookie. One trick, Samek tells us, easily beat the rest:

SAMEK: It actually works every time. So we come in five times and every time we have these really high rates of selection of the fruit.

The conversation then broadens, addressing the fact that so many people — kids and adults — have a hard time making good short-term decisions that will have a long-term benefit. As List puts it:

LIST: The general point here about all of this is that you have many problems where what you do now affects what happens later, and usually we choose the easier decision or the easier action now. You think about savings for retirement, you think about getting doctor check-ups, you think about going to school, you think about engaging in risky behaviors, you think about adopting green technologies for our houses. In all of these cases we usually choose the bad action. And that action is to do what’s best for us now to the detriment of the future, to the detriment of our future self. And nutritional choices right now are just one of these elements that we face in society where we need kids to recognize the choice that you make now will critically affect your outcome in the future.

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Freakonomics » Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: Full Transcript

Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: Full Transcript
[MUSIC: Pearl Django, “La Rive Gauche” (from Under Paris Skies)]

Stephen J. DUBNER: Hello, John List?

John LIST: Stephen Dubner, how are you doing, man?

DUBNER: I’m great! How are you doing?

LIST: Great! Great!

DUBNER: John List is an economist at the University of Chicago. And he’s a family man – five kids.

DUBNER: Now… do you… do you ever have to bribe any of your kids? I’m just curious, John.

LIST: Every now and then I have to incentivize them. I don’t call it bribing. I call it incentivizing them. My kids refuse to eat seafood. So this comes directly from my wife who claims to have gotten a bad piece of fish when she was a third grader, but I’m a big seafood lover, and we were in the Bahamas about six months ago and I thought of an incentive scheme for my kids that included a large sum of money if they would eat fish for seven consecutive days.

DUBNER: And how’d that work out?

LIST: Three of the five kids it worked for. They collected the money. And I was hoping then that they would acquire a taste for seafood, that they would say, “You know, Dad, that whitefish is actually pretty good.” Or, “You know, one time we had crab legs”. But no, zero of five for the long run the minute we touched ground back here in the states….The kids have not touched fish since, even the three of five who were eating the fish down in the Bahamas.

DUBNER: How much did they get from you?

LIST: I better talk about that off air. Put it this way, a lot of money.

DUBNER: So three of them at least played you pretty well, though.

LIST: Well, I don’t know about played me. They responded to the incentives, they ate the fish.

DUBNER: But your incentive in giving them that big cash bounty was not just to get them to eat it for the week, presumably.

LIST: Absolutely. I wanted to modify their long-term behavior. And it’s hard to… it’s just a lesson that it’s really hard to change habits.

[THEME]

ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

[MUSIC: Teddy Presberg, “Thanks Maw” (from Outcries From A Sea Of Red)]

DUBNER: So is it possible to bribe kids to eat the food you want them to eat? And even if it’s possible, is it desirable? That’s what we’re talking about on today’s show — but not just about bribing and eating; we’ll talk about how bribing incentives may work with all kinds of behaviors. Now, you just heard John List describe his failure to bribe – excuse me – to incentivize his kids to eat something they didn’t want to eat. That was his experience as a parent. So you might think that, as an economist, John List also doesn’t believe that incentives can change the way kids eat. But you’d be wrong. List recently ran a field experiment in Chicago, along with another economist, Anya Samek.

Anya SAMEK: Okay, so what we’re trying to do is understand what kinds of small behavioral nudges or education we can use to actually improve children’s food choices.

DUBNER: That’s Samek. She’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

SAMEK: And we’re using this after-school program called the Kids Café. And there are 24 of these in the city of Chicago and surrounding area. Kids come there, they receive some help on their homework, and then they’re given free food. And what we do is we randomize these different Kids Cafés. And when I say randomize I mean we randomly put different Kids Cafes into different treatments. We have one treatment where we tell the Kids Café just carry on as you are, but at the end of the food-choice we’re going to give kids a second choice, it’s going to be which dessert to have. And they can either have the healthy dessert or the less healthy one.

DUBNER: And what are the two desserts you’re offering, the healthy and the less healthy?

SAMEK: So the healthier dessert — this is actually a good question — we thought about this for a long time, and the healthy dessert is a cookie…I’m sorry.

DUBNER: Wishful thinking.

SAMEK: Yeah, yeah, yeah the unhealthy dessert is a cookie…

DUBNER: What kind of cookie?

SAMEK: We really were quite careful and we chose a low-sugar, whole-wheat cookie. And the reason we did that…

DUBNER: Oh, come on, and that’s the good one?

SAMEK: We didn’t feel comfortable going in and giving 1,500 kids who were at risk for obesity a really high-sugar, delicious cookie.

DUBNER: Okay. Alright.

SAMEK: The healthy dessert then, we again ran into a problem, so we really wanted to use fresh fruit. And unfortunately because of the logistics of how this food is delivered, which is actually another big problem with the way that we deliver food to kids in these school lunchroom settings is that we couldn’t get fresh fruit there so we had to use dried fruit.

DUBNER: Which has sugar concentration problems of its own that fresh fruit doesn’t have, yeah?

SAMEK: Yes, exactly. So one thing that we can’t do is say that for this particular 1,500 kids we really improved their nutrition because all we did was we observed their choices. And all we needed to do was believe that most kids were going to choose the cookie and that’s the less healthy option, and that’s exactly what happened.

DUBNER: Okay so all else equal, you’ve got 1,500 kids roughly. They have their meal and then they do homework and maybe hang out and play a little bit. And then at the end they’re having this snack, this dessert with a choice, yes?

SAMEK: Yeah.

DUBNER: Okay, and just describe to me how this is, how the experiment itself is set up. How is the choice set constructed?

SAMEK: So we announce to kids that they get a choice of this dessert. And we tell them they can only choose one item and they have to eat it there in the cafeteria. And then we come around and we have these trays in which we have a large number of cookies and a large number of fruit and then we just have kids choose one. All of these kids, we know all of their names, we record exactly what they’ve selected, and that’s our control group.

DUBNER: Okay, and you’re doing this for a few days, a few weeks to establish a baseline, how does that work?

SAMEK: We come in twice and then we have kids make this choice, and what we find is that less than 20 percent of kids are choosing healthy. And then we come in for a period of five more days in which we now have these treatment schools actually receive incentives or education. And what we find there, we come in, we read all this information about the food pyramid, so we tell kids that look you really should choose the fruit, fruit’s really good for you, we have this campaign, it’s called Eat Strong, so we tell them you should eat strong. You’re going to be strong on the playground, you’re going to learn more at school, it’s going to be very good for you, this is really good for your health, the USDA recommends that you eat more fruit. And we show on the food pyramid. We have all these posters, and we walk around and show these posters with the food pyramid. And kids don’t improve their food choice at all.

DUBNER: Okay, so teaching them doesn’t improve their choices, or it doesn’t change their choices. Now before we declare that a dead end, do we know that this mode of education was a good one, or maybe…Like when you’re telling me that, if you tell me that if I eat this little cup of raisins and dried apricots that I’m going to be a stud on the playground and a superstar in the classroom, I’m just going to say, ‘Anya, you seem nice, but I don’t believe you. That doesn’t sound compelling to me.’ Do we know if the education is actually considered legitimate by them?

SAMEK: Well, it’s the education that you would administer if you went on the USDA website and pulled off their informational materials.

DUBNER: Right, I know that, but what I’m saying maybe the USDA isn’t so good at this. I realize I’m throwing a stupid thing in the middle of your smart thing. But that’s the way I think.

SAMEK: No, so obviously we could be using the wrong education, that’s true. So we can’t say much about whether it’s the right education or not. But what we can say is that we give them this education, we tell them about how healthy fruit is and 8 out of 10 kids still choose the cookie.

DUBNER: Okay, alright, so that’s not working so well. What else do you have up your sleeve?

SAMEK: So we come in and we have these incentives that we thought, we didn’t even know what to do with these incentives because they were a little bit lame, so we just had these pens, we had these rubber bracelets and then we have these tiny plastic trophies that just said “I ate strong.” And we told kids if you choose the fruit and you eat it, you get to pick out one of these prizes. And now we have 8 out of 10 kids who are choosing the fruit.

DUBNER: Oh my god, for plastic trophies, and pens and rubber bracelets.

SAMEK: That’s right. So these things are very popular. They’re very cheap so they cost us less than a dime each. And kids are choosing healthy and they don’t have any education about why they should be choosing healthy, at least from us. But now we’ve really improved food choice.

DUBNER: Now, how do we know this is not just a novelty, that it’s the first time that they get offered the incentives, or does it not even matter? Is it just a matter of kind of switching the habit or the preference?

SAMEK: Well it actually works every time. So we come in five times and every time we have these really high rates of selection of the fruit.

DUBNER: And do they actually eat the fruit then? Or do they just –

SAMEK: They have to eat it to get the toy. They have to eat it.

DUBNER: And did you check their cheeks and so on like in prison to make sure they swallowed or they’re sticking it under the table, or it doesn’t go that far?

SAMEK: We were actually pretty careful. So this study took a lot of undergraduates from the University of Chicago who were walking around and monitoring these kids.

[MUSIC: Phil Symonds, “Caravan Cookoo”]

DUBNER: Okay, so what did the researchers take away from this experiment?

SAMEK: Overall all of these studies really show, first of all, that you can make a small change in a school setting, in a food setting, for kids and have it have a big impact on choices. It shows that education is not enough. We actually do find when we combine education with incentives, that that has the strongest long-term effect, which I didn’t address earlier, but that’s an important point, that in addition to education we need to really give kids a moment where they can make a choice. And that’s the moment where we can provide a nudge, where incentives can act as a great nudge for that.

DUBNER: If I’m a restaurant, I want to sell a lot of food, I want to make the money that I’m able to make. If I’m the government, I think especially as I’m paying more and more for people’s health care long-term as the government, I want to keep people healthier and therefore I have an interest in getting people to eat more nutritiously. So I can put some pressure on restaurants to either serve more nutritious food, serve less food, or help them somehow come up with a scheme to at least educate people or make them a little bit more likely to eat more nutritious food. So I can have calorie counts, or maybe even subsidize healthier food choices. That seems to be fairly viable. Yeah? Do you see evidence of that kind of thing going on and working well?

SAMEK: One project we have that is very effective, it’s a small nonprofit grocery store on the south side of Chicago called Louie’s Groceries. And we’ve gone in and we’ve been running studies in which we give adults incentives for choosing at least five fresh fruits and vegetables in their cart. And we’re actually giving them a dollar for every five servings of fresh fruits and vegetables they buy in a shopping trip. And we’re comparing that to another treatment in which adults are just receiving some educational information about why it’s important to eat fruits and vegetables. And there we see almost the same results that we’re seeing with these kids. So in a real environment where adults are making decisions about purchasing, incentives really work.

DUBNER: So the takeaways here seem to be that fruit must be subsidized whether dried or fresh, yes?

SAMEK: Right.

DUBNER: And that kids can be bribed successfully.

SAMEK: Yeah, well adults can be bribed successfully, too.

[MUSIC: The Jaguars, “The Swagger” (from The Jaguars)]

DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: so we can incentivize choices that benefit society, at least in some cases – but why should we have to?

LIST: You know, I think that this is one of the most important issues that humanity faces, is making this tradeoff between doing something costly now that will benefit me or humanity in the future. Things like staying in school, things like saving for retirement, things like adopting green technologies.

DUBNER: Also: if you are not a subscriber to this podcast – well, please become one. It’s free. It’s easy. You can sign up at iTunes – and then you’ll get the next episode in your sleep.

[UNDERWRITING]

ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

[MUSIC: Seks Bomba, “Cal Tjader” (from Thanks and Goodnight)]

DUBNER: We heard Anya Samek describe the field experiment she worked on with John List.

LIST: I’m John List, and I’m a professor at the University of Chicago’s economics department.

DUBNER: What, exactly, does John List do?

LIST: And what I do is I go out into the real world and try to change it for the better using field experiments.

DUBNER: That sounds pretty simple. Can you give me an example?

LIST: Very simple. So let’s talk about the simple example that we’re talking about today. What we’re after is we’re trying to explain or describe first of all the consumption choices of the underprivileged children in America. And once we see the types of foods that they’re consuming, which is not a great thing. You know, if they have a choice between a cookie and a bowl of fruit, they choose the cookie. So our idea is to go out…

DUBNER: Now, John, can I just interrupt you for once second there? Is it fair to say that this is the kind of poor choice, relatively poor choice that an underprivileged kid makes or is that the same choice do you know that a mediocre-ly-privileged adult would make as well. In other words is this a function of childhood or…

LIST: Absolutely.

DUBNER: I’m just curious to know what you know about food choice in children versus adults generally?

LIST: Yeah, so I think that this is a general problem, but you have the problem in an even stronger way amongst the underprivileged who have less resources to use to purchase and consume healthier foods. So when I say underprivileged, I think this is our experimental testing ground, but nevertheless you do have the same problem throughout society. You have kids, you know, running an obesity rate of about one in five across America. And in urban settings the obesity rate is a little bit higher than that. But the general point here about all of this is that you have many problems where what you do now affects what happens later, and usually we choose the easier decision or the easier action now. You think about savings for retirement, you think about getting doctor check-ups, you think about going to school, you think about engaging in risky behaviors, you think about adopting green technologies for our houses. In all of these cases, we usually choose the bad action. And that action is to do what’s best for us now to the detriment of the future, to the detriment of our future self. And nutritional choices right now are just one of these elements that we face in society where we need kids to recognize the choice that you make now will critically affect your outcome in the future.

[MUSIC: The Diplomats of Solid Sound, “Shadow Of Your Soul” (from Let’s Cool One)]

DUBNER: There’s an idea, quite prevalent in our society, that if we can only teach people that they are making poor decisions now that will adversely affect them later – well, they’ll make better decisions now. But the experiment that John List and Anya Samek did in Chicago, trying to get kids to eat healthier snacks, showed that an educational message didn’t work at all, at least not in that setting. So… maybe it’s reasonable to think that educational messaging isn’t as potent as we think.

LIST: Right, I think at just about every walk of life we have messages like get out the vote, it’s your duty to vote. We had messaging in the States on smoking for decades. And now with a combination of changing the prices of smoking, and what I mean by that is increasing the tax rates on purchases of cigarettes, along with messaging, those together formed a very important duo to curb smoking in the United States. But when you look at other countries, just go to Europe, you can see that smoking is alive and well in Europe. And they surely have the same information that we have on the detrimental effects of smoking. But I think in every walk of life you have people saying stay in school, don’t do drugs, you know, messaging has a really hard time working, and I think by and large because they recipients of those messages is not a demander of that information. And if you’re not a demander you will have very little use for that information. You know, people say we should be green, we’re ruining the planet because of carbon emissions, global warming. But again, that’s a problem where if we curb our consumption of carbon now, that hurts us, that hurts our economic growth, and we’re not going to see the advantages for 50, 100, 150 or 200 years. People don’t want to make that tradeoff between now and then.

DUBNER: Do you think that policymakers and other, you know, incentive creators are starting to get the message that educational messaging especially when its got a sort of moral tone to it is not very effective, or do you see people in the academic and research realms where you live who understand this quite fully just look out at those policymakers and say, ‘Oh boy, they really don’t get it yet’?

LIST: Right, I sort of see, I sort of see both. On the one side you have policymakers who don’t get it. On the other side, you have policymakers who really do get it, but that’s really the only tool at their disposal. You see, using messages is cheap. You have government agencies… right now I’m working with the U.K. government to try to convince people to pay their taxes. You have many people who have not paid their income taxes in the U.K. And the U.K. government sends out letters to them every year telling them please pay your taxes. So they ask us, ‘Can you run some field experiments with us to help convince people to pay their taxes’? And we propose all kinds of different incentive schemes — you know, fines, jail time, all these fun things that economists dream about, and the policymakers say we can’t do that. We can’t change law. But what we can do is we can add those two cool sentences that you used back in your 1998 study, and we can use those sentences, which are on moral suasion to try to get people to pay their taxes. So, you see, they’re smart enough to know this might not be a great tool…

DUBNER: It’s the best they have.

LIST: Yeah, and it’s not very costly, and that’s important to them.

DUBNER: So, John, is the takeaway message of your study that it’s better to bribe kids to eat healthy food than to just teach at them?

LIST: I think the message would be you want to do both. I think you do not want to use messaging alone. If you do use messaging you should combine it with an incentive, because that will allow you to convince kids to make better choices, but it will also yield better consumption choices. I think we need to understand that this is a two-part problem, not only the choice but the consumption. And what we find is that messaging along with incentives give you that outcome, or that set of outcomes that you want.

[MUSIC: Teddy Presberg, “Bella’s Boogaloo” (from Outcries From A Sea Of Red)]

DUBNER: Now take what you learned from this study, which is that incentives work in terms of food consumption, and generalize it for me as much as you can not only out of the experimental realm, but out of the childhood realm.

LIST: Right absolutely. You know, I think that this is one of the most important issues that humanity faces, is making this tradeoff between doing something costly now that will benefit me or humanity in the future. Things like staying in school, things like saving for retirement, things like adopting green technologies. We have to convince people right now to make the right choice for, in many case themselves, and also society, and I believe that strong dosage of incentives combined with tasteful messaging will allow us to get to that point, where we have people making the right choices now that will yield the right outcomes in the future. So when you think about all of our major problems, it’s a tradeoff through time. And you have kids who would rather skip school and go have fun when they’re 16 years old than stay in a boring algebra class. It’s a very simple point of calculus for them. They don’t see that the future labor market returns are 12 percent for every year that they stay in school. When you’re 16 years old you don’t even think about what’s going to happen when you’re 25 much less when you’re 18. And we need to combine the correct basket of incentives to align the kids’ choices with what society wants them to choose.

DUBNER: Okay, so that’s all well and good to say, and even if one believes it, and I personally tend to pretty much believe what you’re saying, what do you do? What is that basket of incentives for a 16-year-old who’s teetering on the edge of dropping out or not going to school?

LIST: Yeah, I think it is both. It depends on what realm we’re in. If we want to talk about education I think the solution is changing the prices to education. What I mean by that is taking some of the future rewards that we as a society reap from the kids staying in school and not committing crime and going to jail, taking some of those rewards and giving them to the kids now, or giving them to the parents now to incentivize the parent to make sure that the child stays in school, takes school seriously and goes on and gets the right education to help society and the future. That might be different than our food choices, for example, because we’re not talking about 16-year-olds now in our food experiment, we’re talking about six, seven, and eight-year-olds. Incenting a six, seven and eight-year-old with dollars doesn’t make any sense, you know, you have to choose, again, the right incentives. We chose toys, things like rubber ducks really turn a seven-year-old on. So I think in each case there is not a silver bullet, but nevertheless in each case in the long run we need education because, like I said, habits are what keep you going. And I think the education and information change beliefs but only over generations. I think now you have my kids who are coming home and telling me, ‘Papa, you better not smoke that cigar because it’s really bad to smoke.’ When I went home and saw my mom smoking I never thought it was a problem, smoking. But now our kids they’re actually programmed to think that smoking is a really bad thing. That has taken place over generations, and that’s were I think information and education works over the long run when we change habits. But you need initial incentives to change the motivations of our kids now. We just don’t want two generations of lost children because we couldn’t change their habits, we need to change the motivations now, and I think incentives will do that.

[MUSIC: Pearl Django, “Zingarelli” (from Under Paris Skies)]
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A Little Bit of Knowledge | This American Life

#293: A Little Bit of Knowledge
Stories about the pitfalls of knowing just a little bit too little.

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Freakonomics » Here’s One Way to Fight the Obesity Epidemic: Free Stomach Surgery

Here’s One Way to Fight the Obesity Epidemic: Free Stomach Surgery
From the (U.K.) Times:

Up to a million obese people will be offered weight-loss surgery on the NHS, under controversial new guidelines.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has ruled that all obese people who have been given a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes in the past decade should be considered for stomach bands and bypasses. …

Patient groups questioned how the health service would cope with the up-front cost, potentially running into billions of pounds, at a time when waiting lists for treatment have topped three million, the highest for six years. …

Weight-loss operations cost about £5,000 each, but Nice said that this had to be set against the 10 per cent of the £110 billion health budget being spent on treating diabetes and its complications, which can include blindness and amputations. …

However, Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said: “There is a mismatch between what Nice says based on the clinical evidence and the fact that all of this has to be paid for in an NHS which is already in the red . . . It’s the next patient who desperately needs an operation that really feels it when the doctor says, ‘We’ve just spent our last pound’. Somebody is going to suffer somewhere.”In draft guidance to be published today, Nice said it would be cost-effective to consider weight-loss surgery to all obese people who have been given a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes within the past decade. The fattest patients should be automatically offered an assessment for surgery, while doctors must at least consider it for the rest, Nice says.

Simon O’Neill of Diabetes UK agreed that surgery could lead to “dramatic weight loss” but warned that it should not be seen as a cure or an easy option, urging patients to persist with eating better and exercising more.

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