Bad Habits, Hard Choices by Fell David;

Author:Fell, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
Published: 2016-03-08T11:24:24+00:00

Chapter 6

How we make new commitments

I fought the law, and the law won

— Sonny Curtis

If we follow Schelling’s lead and think about the ways in which societies impose commitment devices upon their future selves, we find the same three types of ‘policy instrument’ I mentioned in chapter 2.

•Regulatory: we can pass laws to ban certain foods, or certain ingredients, or certain food-preparation practices, for example.

•Persuasion: we can try to encourage businesses to work together to change the amount of salt or sugar they put into their food; and we can try to encourage people to make different choices, with information campaigns and behaviour-change strategies and so on.

•Fiscal: we can use money, by increasing or decreasing the price of things, or fining or incentivizing people and businesses.

If we think about the way in which smoking has been tackled over the past forty or fifty years, we can see how it has comprised a commitment strategy using all three of these types of device. The price of cigarettes has been increased in fits and starts by Chancellors of the Exchequer imposing special taxes called ‘duties’; there have been innumerable campaigns to highlight the negative health consequences of smoking, ranging from mass media advertising to the display of graphic images on cigarette packets to highly tailored behaviour-change campaigns aimed at particular (and stubborn) target groups; and, as we saw earlier, legislation has been used to ban smoking in public places.

In the case of smoking, the science supporting the assertion that it was bad for you built slowly, and was – let us not forget – resisted powerfully by the tobacco lobby.36 It is worth noting, too, that although there is some variety in the ways it is possible to consume tobacco, it is a relatively well-defined and identifiable activity.

Food, by contrast, is a very different case. The scientific evidence in support of the assertion that, say, ‘eating too much sugar is bad for you’ 37 is as incontrovertible as similar assertions about tobacco, but the number of ways of ingesting too much sugar is enormous. The type and power and mix of commitment devices we might need will necessarily be different compared with tobacco.

Using legislative instruments to reduce sugar intake (to continue the example) would appear doomed from the start. There are too many variables, too many complications, too many obvious difficulties. We are not going to be able to ban our way to health.

Using the tools of persuasion would appear to be more appealing; and this is indeed where such efforts have focused so far. There has certainly been progress with salt,38 for example: UK and European governments have worked with major food producers and suppliers (through what are called ‘Voluntary Agreements’) to progressively reduce the amount of salt in a wide range of foods. And on the consumer side, too, programmes such as ‘Change for Life’ 39 have demonstrated some success.

Voluntary Agreements – soft commitment devices in which a group of businesses and one or more government agencies work together towards mutually agreed goals – are nevertheless highly limited.

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