economistsandcolumnists

Let's talk, seriously.

Ignoring the evidence on fiscal policy.

Plugging, extended.

Repeating ancient mistakes.

Blinders in Brussels.

Go to Firedoglake.

Why contemporary rather than classical?

The London Whale was bigger than we knew.

But we won't.

And yes, I mean that in the singular.

Big organisations should test out their new policies whenever they can

An awkward moment recently: I ordered an espresso from Starbucks and the barista, a young fellow with fashionably chaotic blond hair, asked my name. I’d heard that this is the new policy at Starbucks but, not being a regular, I’d forgotten. None of your business, I thought, and fumbling for something to say instead of my name, I said, “I suppose you’re getting annoyed having to ask people their names.”

The young man’s face darkened perceptibly. “A lot of things annoy me,” he said, “but if you don’t want to tell me your name, that’s fine.” His colleague proceeded to pull me a deeply uninspiring espresso, which I felt that I rather deserved.

I took the coffee and sat awkwardly in the corner, avoiding eye contact with the staff and vowing to steer clear of Starbucks in future. One bad espresso just isn’t worth the social discomfort.

If my Starbucks experience is typical, the policy of requesting names is going to prove very ill-judged. But perhaps my Starbucks experience isn’t typical; I’m not a regular customer, after all. Perhaps the regulars love it. Who can say? But it’s worth asking: where does this kind of idea come from in a large organisation? How is it tested? Under what circumstances might it be reversed?

The question of the U-turn is a particularly vexed one. Politicians find it especially painful, perhaps because lazy journalists find U-turns easy to criticise: either the old policy was wrong or the new one is wrong, and either way, the politician can be blamed with no need for further investigation. Just think of the plight of Theresa May, the Home Secretary: she demanded tight border controls, but lacked the personnel to carry out the new regime efficiently. She has painted herself quite methodically into a policy corner.

Any high-profile policy runs a similar risk: if it doesn’t work, it is hard to perform an elegant about-face. This is why I think Starbucks should have conducted a randomised trial to test the question: pick 100 branches, then randomly select half of them to receive instructions and training videos, and see whether there was any effect on staff morale, customer satisfaction or sales.

It wouldn’t have been a perfect double-blind trial, but it would have been revealing. I can confidently assert that if we were talking about Amazon, it would be inconceivable that the company would change how it interacted with a customer without testing the idea with such a trial.

As it happens, Starbucks wasn’t quite as clueless about this as I might have guessed. (I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that these people know something about selling coffee.) I am told the idea emerged after listening to customers in focus groups, who pointed out that they liked the fact that in their local branch, the staff knew who they were. (I think the Starbucks press officer telling me about the focus groups was about to say that the customers didn’t mention the coffee as a reason to go to Starbucks, but thought better of it. Perhaps I imagined that.)

Next came informal testing: staff at some Starbucks branches – for instance, in Cambridge and in the new Westfield shopping centre in east London – had already been doing this for a few months. An internal “training” video shows these staff enthusing about the idea and entertains no possibility of awkwardness.

Perhaps my cynicism is misplaced. Starbucks is trying to keep regular customers happy; there is no reason to expect sceptics to like it any more than we should expect atheists to be impressed by a religious sermon. Intuition can be misleading in such matters – all the more reason why big organisations should test out their new policies whenever they can.

Also published at ft.com.

‘The UK needs to impose a “fat tax” of at least 20 per cent on unhealthy foods to have any significant impact on rising levels of obesity.’

Financial Times, May 15

I thought it was supposed to  be  a  10  per  cent  fat  tax?

That was the British Journal of Nutrition in December. This is the British Medical Journal, this week. Do try to keep up.

Either way, would it work?

It all depends on what you mean by “work”. Inasmuch as anything can be said to be certain in social science, a tax on some foods would certainly reduce the consumption of those foods, just as surely as cigarette taxes have reduced the consumption of cigarettes. Whether that reduction is desirable is another question.

You’re saying obesity is a good thing?

No, but ice cream is a good thing and obesity is a potential unwanted side-effect of ice cream. If you tax ice cream, people will be less obese, which is good, but they will also be enjoying less ice cream, which is bad.

Which is sophistry.

Not at all. Ice cream versus obesity is the key imponderable about the whole policy. I find there’s a striking contrast with the idea of a congestion-based road tax, as advanced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies this week. The case for the congestion tax is pretty unanswerable: every driver who joins rush-hour traffic is making it worse for every other driver. If we could all get together and agree to drive a bit less, we’d all be better off because when we did drive, our journeys would be quicker and less uncertain. But we can’t enforce that kind of agreement, hence the need for the tax.

It’s all the same: obesity is bad and traffic is bad. I’m not sure why you’re trying to make a distinction.

It’s not the same at all. Each driver causes a problem for others and she can’t be expected to take that into account. But an ice cream lover is causing a problem only for himself. It remains to be demonstrated that he would find an ice cream tax helpful.

What about the cost to the National Health Service?

That is certainly a consideration, although don’t be too quick to assume there is a net cost. It’s fairly clear that smoking should, on this logic, be subsidised because it tends to kill people, often quite quickly, just as they have finished paying their taxes but before they start to draw their pensions. Perhaps obese people are more costly, but this is a double-edged argument. The Department of Health has published estimates suggesting that obesity and related conditions cost the NHS an extra £2.2bn, a figure that is rising rapidly. What the impact on pension costs might be is not clear.

Why do we tax cigarettes, then?

Partly because they’re a good revenue source, partly because of passive smoking. But I think a key reason is that because nicotine is so addictive, many smokers ardently want to be non-smokers but find it hard to quit. And surely this is the basic idea behind a “fat tax” as well: it is to help weak-willed people do the right thing. The economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Jonathan Gruber put their finger on the key issue about 10 years ago with a clever research paper titled: “Do cigarette taxes make smokers happier?” Which seems to be an important question.

And the answer?

It seems that cigarette taxes do indeed make smokers happier. More specifically, it seems that the reported happiness of people with a propensity to smoke rises in parallel with increasing state cigarette taxes in the US, but not with increases in other taxes. You need to jump through a lot of statistical hoops to reach this conclusion but the research makes a pretty good case. Presumably this is because smokers often do have self-control problems and the fact that the tax helps some of them to quit outweighs the fact that the tax also makes the non-quitters poorer.

And that’s the case for the fat tax in a nutshell, isn’t it?

It might be, if the research paper had instead been called: “Do fat taxes make fat people happier?” I hope and trust that someone has examined that question but I am not aware of any attempts to do so.

George Osborne is taxing pasties – perhaps he’s ahead of the curve.

I am sure he eagerly awaits his plaudits from the BMJ.

Also published at ft.com.

And a virtuosic performance on the magazine.

Way too much.

For your listening pleasure.

These are the rewards for good behavior?

Republicans create private-sector jobs, right?

My invisible head talking.

Irrational voters or insufferable elites?

Bank losses? Who cares?