Count your IQ, Instead

Mother Jones -- Good news for haters of the nanny state: New York City's new law requiring calorie counts on chain restaurant menu boards doesn't appear to be making any difference. In fact, it might be causing people to eat more.

The results were pretty dismal: only about half the respondents even noticed the calorie counts and only 15% said they influenced their choice. But the receipts told an even more dismal story: overall, people actually purchased more calories after the law went into effect.

The second time I went to NY is the time I really despised it, in no small part due to fast-food calorie counts by every item required by its legislators. I assumed it to be damaging in the long run to smaller businesses that can't afford such requirements, and either way, its subtly-fashioned tyranny at its best. More so, I figured it wouldn't do any good because we already have calorie counts on the back of chip bags and cereal boxes in the super market, and if you haven't noticed lately, chips have their own aisle, as well as soda. Obviously, people don't care about calories as much as the satraps in Washington would like them to.

Anyway, this post killed two birds, in that it relates to my last post about condoms. Though not statistically significant, the results of this study found that consumption actually increased. Who'da thought? Now, because of the absence of statistical significance, I wouldn't go around saying it's a done deal, but just like the condom issue, we cannot a priori assume that what we do, even in totally fiat ways, will get the job done. In fact, we'll often find that government fiat actually encouraged the opposite kinds of behavior!

Now, will the bureaucrats running NY pull the calorie requirement off the table? Ask me if I like public schools, instead. This runs with my theory (which I can't really call it mine because I know other people have written about it [Hayek, but I did pioneer my brain into it before I read Hayek]) that governments have extremely poor feedback mechanisms. Hot issues take center stage often just one time, and no matter what the effects specific legislation actually procured after-the-fact, we are more often than not stuck with it.