If Benjamin Franklin was writing his famous letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy today, his famous aphorism might read: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and the obesity crisis.” It seems no matter the year or the season, that crisis inexorably continues, with experts now saying 42 percent of Americans will be obese by 2030. And whether you are one of the 42 percent or not, that trend is going to affect you, because it is expected to cost the country roughly half a trillion (yes, trillion) in additional healthcare costs.
And yet, as relentless as the obesity crisis appears to be, it’s expansion doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. That’s because, unlike a naturally occurring epidemic, it’s almost completely human created — a reality which allows for the possibility of a human-directed reversal.
What does such a reversal require in practice? First and foremost, awareness — and thanks to everything from Michelle Obama’s fitness campaign to HBO’s new documentary “The Weight of a Nation,” that prerequisite is finally starting to be met. But then what? As GI Joe said, “knowing is half the battle” — but it’s only half. Once more of us are aware of the emergency at hand, what will be the most reliable way to address the problem?
In an instant gratification culture obsessed with extreme makeovers and get-thin-quick diet schemes, it’s easy to feel confused about a path forward. But a tranche of new science, data and public policy proposals that cut through the fog of misinformation suggests that path is there — if we’re willing to take it. Here are five of the most promising ways forward:
1. Tax Junk Food
Over the last 4 decades, we went from spending $3 billion a year on fast food to now $110 billion a year on fast food. At the same time, there’s been an explosion in the amount of chemically-enhanced, calorie-packed processed foods Americans eat at home, at work and in the school cafeteria. Not surprisingly, in predictable cause-and-effect fashion, this has all happened as obesity became a public health epidemic.
The response from some policymakers has been to champion junk-food taxes — initiatives whose supreme press-release-worthiness can make them seem a bit gimmicky, but whose merits are nonetheless rooted in substance. Indeed, a bevy of new studies show that such levies, when structured properly, can disincentivize junk food consumption on a large scale.
In one University of North Carolina study, ABC News reports that “Patients got significantly less of their calories from soda or pizza when there was a 10 percent increase in the price of either.” In another study of college-age adults, “researchers found that the students generally bought fewer lunchtime calories when sugary, high-fat fare came with a tax of 25 percent or more.” In yet another study, this one from the University of Buffalo, it was much the same result — higher taxes meant more healthy consumer choices.
New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman has noted that while taxes alone won’t solve the obesity crisis, they are an important part of a multifaceted attack on the problem — and they will also raise much-needed public revenues at a time of crushing deficits:
A study by Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, predicted that a penny tax per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes and bring in $1 billion annually. Another study shows that a two-cent tax per ounce in Illinois would reduce obesity in youth by 18 percent, save nearly $350 million and bring in over $800 million taxes annually. Scaled nationally, as it should be, the projected benefits are even more impressive; one study suggests that a national penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would generate at least $13 billion a year in income while cutting consumption by 24 percent…A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption, which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes, saving about $30 billion.
Put it all together, and junk food taxes should be about as close to a no brainer as you’ll find in the public policy arena.
2. Stop Subsidizing Junk Food
There’s no scientific reason junk food should cost less than whole grains, fruits and vegetables. After all, the former are the product of a mechanized process relying on an entire industrial system, while the later can be grown directly out of the ground by almost anyone.
Yet, junk food consistently beats natural foods in the price competition. Why? It’s all about the subsidies.
As a the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s “Apples to Twinkies” report shows, your taxpayer dollars subsidize junk food and artificially deflate the cost of that junk food so that it undersells everything else. “Between 1995 and 2010, $16.9 billion in tax dollars subsidized four common food additives — corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils.” At the same time, PIRG points out that “taxpayers spent only $262 million subsidizing apples, which is the only significant federal subsidy of fresh fruits or vegetables.” To put those numbers into real-world terms, “if these agricultural subsidies went directly to consumers to allow them to purchase food, each of America’s 144 million taxpayers would be given $7.36 to spend on junk food and 11 cents with which to buy apples each year — enough to buy 19 Twinkies but less than a quarter of one Red Delicious apple apiece.”
While studies show that changing this subsidy structure would be no cure-all for obesity, there’s no evidence to suggest that keeping it in place does anything but make the obesity crisis worse – and there is evidence that changing the subsidies would make things better. This isn’t surprising – it’s basic economics.
Think about it: if subsidies for commodity crops that create junk food were redirected into subsidies for natural foods, it would radically change the market incentives for healthful eating. Sans the subsidies, industrial food corporations would no longer be able to price processed foods at artificially lower prices than their natural competitors. Instead, healthful foods would have the price advantage – and, quite likely, bigger market share.
3. Ban Junk Food In Schools
The Obama administration has been trying to reduce the amount of obesogenic foods in school cafeterias, under the theory that stopping obesity-inducing eating habits at an early age might stop the obesity crisis in its tracks. It’s been an uphill fight — according to the Associated Press in February, “Junk food remains plentiful at the nation’s elementary schools,” with “nearly half of public and private schools surveyed sold sweet or salty snack foods in vending machines or other places.”
Nonetheless, new data prove the administration’s efforts, in conjunction with local school districts, is indeed worthwhile. As the New York Times recently reported:
Five years after California started cracking down on junk food in school cafeterias, a new report shows that high school students there consume fewer calories and less fat and sugar at school than students in other states … The study found that California high school students consumed on average nearly 160 calories fewer per day than students in other states, the equivalent of cutting out a small bag of potato chips. That difference came largely from reduced calorie consumption at school, and there was no evidence that students were compensating for their limited access to junk food at school by eating more at home…
To study the effect of this policy, the researchers examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the eating habits of high school students in California, comparing it with data on students from 14 states that did not have nutrition standards for vending machine snacks and other foods sold outside of school lunches and other meal plans … California students had the lowest daily intake of calories, fat and, especially, added sugars.
In light of this, it’s hard to imagine anyone still defending the American school system’s role as glorified junk food machines.
4. Stop Glorifying Unhealthy Eating Habits
In his endorsement of the campaign to legalize gay marriage, Vice President Joe Biden said that “when things really began to change is when the social culture changes … I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anybody’s ever done so far.” It was an acknowledgement that televisual images often play as big a role in our society as ironclad policies — and the same truism relates to the obesity crisis.
Today, our political culture regularly equates unhealthy eating habits to Americanness and authenticity. As evidence, recall that the party nomination fights have become a kind of televised eating contest, with candidates trying to one up their competitors with photo-ops stuffing corn dogs, cheesesteaks and other unhealthy foods.
The committee now has a White House petition calling on the president to stop undermining his wife’s crusade against obesity and end such photo ops. It’s the least the administration can do.
5. Start Broadening Our Understanding of Obesity
Conventional wisdom holds that a calorie is a calorie, and that if Americans simply take in fewer calories and use more via exercise, obesity can be stopped. But journalist Gary Taubes reports that science now suggests that this formula may be fundamentally flawed — that obesity is a product of specific kinds of calories from sucrose and fructose:
There is an alternative theory, one that has also been around for decades but that the establishment has largely ignored. This theory implicates specific foods — refined sugars and grains — because of their effect on the hormone insulin, which regulates fat accumulation. If this hormonal-defect hypothesis is true, not all calories are created equal…
Sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup have a unique chemical composition, a near 50-50 combination of two different carbohydrates: glucose and fructose. And while glucose is metabolized by virtually every cell in the body, the fructose is metabolized mostly by liver cells. From there, the chain of metabolic events has been worked out by biochemists over 50 years: some of the fructose is converted into fat, the fat accumulates in the liver cells, which become resistant to the action of insulin, and so more insulin is secreted to compensate. The end results are elevated levels of insulin, which is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes, and the steady accumulation of fat in our fat tissue—a few tens of calories worth per day, leading to pounds per year, and obesity over the course of a few decades.
He goes on to note that “back in the 1980s, the FDA gave sugar a free pass based on the idea that the evidence wasn’t conclusive” — but that now, the evidence can’t be ignored.
This isn’t to say that the theories about sugar are 100 percent correct — it is only to point out that if we are going to reduce our consumption of junk food in order to stop the obesity epidemic, we need a better understanding of exactly what junk food is. That means broadening our understanding of obesity’s roots and rejecting the reductionism that says simply that “a calorie is a calorie.”
Ever since I first watched my dad drive his chocolate brown Datsun 280 ZX back in the early 1980s, I’ve been inculcated to believe that driving — true driving — can only be performed with a stick shift. From that childhood experience, I came to see the manual transmission as a birthright passed down from my grandfather, to my father, and eventually to me via a series of tense, stall-filled lessons when I turned 16. In my case, after ripping apart the transmission one too many times, my dad went barking drill sergeant on me, eventually teaching me that a stick requires a special kind of focus, and that I needed to ease up more slowly on the clutch in order to get into first gear on those damn inclines. Through the experience, I learned to consider my stick-shifting skill a special talent with transcendent value.
Yes, of course, in the intervening years I’ve had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra — a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.
No doubt, for stick shift enthusiasts, these factors have all conspired to create an alluring mystique around the manual transmission — one that, according to new data, is on the rise.
Last week, USA Today reported that while “the percentage of new vehicles with stick-shift gearboxes remains a small slice of the new vehicle market,” the “the first quarter this year manuals were in 6.5 percent of new vehicles sold, and that’s getting close to double each of the past five years.” The stick shift is back in a big way — but is that really such a good thing?
Upon hearing the news, my initial thought — for aforementioned reasons — was that, yes, of course it’s a good thing. In an ocean of bad drivers and wasteful vehicles, the news seemed like a distant island of hope. I thought that perhaps more motorists are being converted to the automobile religion (cult?) I first was exposed to in Dad’s Datsun 280 ZX. And maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign that American drivers are wising up, both stylistically and efficiency-wise.
Then I did a bit more investigation, and realized the news might not be so good, and that my quasi-religious fervor for the gearbox may have blinded me to my catechism’s new downsides.
In the past, the stick shift was an all-but-guaranteed fuel saver. But not anymore. As AOL Autos notes, computer technology has advanced to the point where “automatics have become so efficient that most of the time their fuel economy is on par with manuals — and in some cases even better.” USA Today notes that such a trend may eventually erase the long-term price differential between manual and automatic transmissions, meaning the manual will lose its frugal-chic appeal. Meanwhile, according to AOL, new technology also boosts automatics’ overall performance (read: speed), meaning many driving aficionados have come to prefer the automatic over the manual.
Thanks to all this, on the days I don’t bike to work and instead fire up my 11-year-old Saturn and shift it into first gear, I no longer feel so righteous or populist. I feel like part of the problem — not just because I’m driving a fossil fuel-dependent vehicle, but also because the manual transmission seems like a silly relic. Likewise, word that manual transmissions may be coming back no longer seems like such great news; it seems like more proof that when it comes to transportation, we’re still prone to making shortsighted decisions.
And yet, I can’t let go of my love for the stick — or maybe “can’t” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “don’t want to” is more appropriate. If the automobile is still one of the key chronological markers in a typical American’s life (and, unfortunately, it still is), the stick shift is a special symbol of our general heritage, and my specific family traditions.
That’s why I was happy to see that there remains one significant reason to still love the manual transmission — a reason that’s substantive, rather than just aesthetic or experiential. In the age of distracted driving, many believe the stick shift might encourage kids to stay focused on operating their vehicles, rather than operating their smartphones. The idea is that because a manual transmission requires special attention to operate, it doesn’t allow for as much multitasking as an automatic.
While there’s no science (yet) to prove the manual-transmission-as-deterrent-to-distracted-driving hypothesis, the memory of those first harrowing stick-shift lessons — with my dad imploring me to “really focus, goddammit!” — suggests to me that there’s something to the theory.
At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself to justify my stick-shift fetish — that is, until the automatic fully surpasses the manual in every other way.
With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. “I want us to sell stuff,” said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.
That nebulous word “stuff” is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we’re shipping overseas. In this coldblooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that’s as far as any conversation should go.
At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we’re building.
The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that “the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons.” Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the “stuff” theory of exports to ignore the objections.
This is part of a larger pattern since President Obama took office. During Obama’s first year in the White House, he began to gut the Pentagon’s approval process for arms exports, weakening controls on what could and could not be sold. Later, diplomatic cables uncovered by WikiLeaks showed, as Fortune magazine put it, “American officials act(ing) as de facto pitchmen for U.S.-made weapons.”
The result is that America has become the true “Lord of War,” as the arms dealer motto goes. We are the leading arms supplier to the developing world and we are responsible for the majority of all weapons sales across the globe. Yes, we are so committed to selling instruments of death to the rest of the planet that military industries have almost tripled their share of the U.S. economy in just a decade.
The second bit of news came from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, whose new study shows that America is exporting our obesity crisis to Mexico. Coupling health statistics with U.S. export data since the North American Free Trade Agreement tore down Mexico’s agriculture trade barriers, researchers found that the Mexican market was flooded by American agribusinesses’ taxpayer subsidized commodities (corn, soybeans) and their processed derivatives. According to the report, that quickly wiped out Mexico’s local food economy, leaving its food system exactly “like the industrialized food system of the United States — characterized by the overabundance of obesogenic foods.” Not surprisingly, Mexican obesity rates have consequently skyrocketed.
Taken together, these export booms represent what could be called America’s new Guns and Butter economy. We are so desperate to export any “stuff” we can, we are now fattening up the world and arming it for permanent bloodshed.
Seeking to short-circuit any objections to this trend, President Obama has said simply that “we’re at a moment where necessity has tempered the old debates” over exports and economic policy. In terms of history, he’s not wrong — during the previous century, America witnessed fevered fights over what constitutes a moral farm policy, and in the 1930s the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee held almost 100 hearings into “greedy munitions interests” that were unduly influencing public policy. Sadly, Obama is correct – those debates have been silenced.
But should they be? Should we simply say that any exports — no matter their moral, ethical, environmental or health implications — are inherently good? Does “necessity” really mean that “stuff” for stuff’s sake must be the basis of our export economy?
Washington and profit-at-all-cost industries certainly say yes — but that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer.
This week, Gallup’s poll showed that half of all Americans now support legalizing same sex marriage. This same week, President Obama had his spokesperson reiterate his opposition to such a move. That’s right, in the face of near-majority public support for equality, the official position of the Democratic administration is that its “feelings about this are constantly evolving” — a direct quote from the president in 2010.
In light of Obama’s past support for gay marriage as a state legislator and his recent refusal to sign an order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, it would be logical to assume that — sans a full-scale reversal (which may be in the works tonight) — the president’s position has been “evolving” toward more entrenched opposition to equality.
Yet, somehow, many liberal pundits nonetheless defended the president’s restated opposition to gay marriage this week.
Two articles in the Daily Beast sum up the bizarre arguments from the left. The first, by Jesse Singal, insists that Obama actually “supports [gay marriage], but he doesn’t think he can afford to make this support public.” The second, by Michael Tomasky, argues “that Obama should not endorse gay marriage before the election, for various political reasons, mostly because the majority that supports same-sex marriage seems a little fragile.”
Both rationales, not surprisingly, were echoed by liberals across talk radio and television throughout the week, raising a pair of disturbing questions: 1) How could any liberal defend Obama’s current opposition to gay marriage? and 2) What’s so fundamentally immoral about such a defense?
The answer to the first question is related to the fact that in red-versus-blue America, many liberals are first and foremost Democrats, leading them to defend any position taken by a Democrat, no matter how illiberal.
We’ve been reminded of this constantly during Obama’s term, as the American Left is now dominated by those who will angrily chastise a Republican politician for advocating atrocious tax, trade, war and civil liberties policies and then cheerily praise a Democratic president for advocating the exact same policies, or worse. Essentially, many liberals are desperate to see liberalism in their president, even if it’s not there. And so on an issue such as gay marriage, Obama deftly plays to that vanity with terms like “evolve” — promising-but-meaningless words that prompt his base to insist that he has a stealth scheme to make gay marriage legal — and that any pressure to force his hand somehow undermines the overall cause.
That gets to the second question about morality. However pathetic it is for liberals to manufacture Nixon-esque “secret plan” sophistry to defend a president, it’s far worse for anyone to cite political considerations as reason to endorse Obama’s current opposition to equality.
To understand why it’s worse, simply exchange “African American rights” with “gay marriage” in Tomasky’s aforementioned sentence and then re-read it. Yes, your gut reaction is correct — in that context, the sentence suddenly seems not like measured advice from a pragmatic liberal, but like a totally unacceptable bigot-appeasing screed from a Jim Crow apologist trying to stop civil rights legislation a half century ago.
Ignored as it is, the forgotten triumph over such prejudice in the 1960s is instructive in today’s battle for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. Though many Democratic partisans and Obama apparatchiks today may not want to admit it, civil rights laws didn’t originally pass because the American Left kept applauding politicians who said their positions were still “evolving.” They passed, in part, because activists set aside their partisan affinities and declared that such condescending propaganda was an intolerable excuse for inaction.
If history is any guide, the cause of equality today demands that same commitment to principle over party — even if it means making a Democratic president uncomfortable. Indeed, if Obama reverses course and endorses equality in his ABC News interview tonight, it will be because he was made sufficiently uncomfortable by civil rights activists, not because party-first sycophants praised his continued intransigence.
The grand unifying theory of the American consumer has been that we are, first and foremost, low price fetishists. There’s ample evidence supporting this view: From Wal-Mart’s prominence to the fast food industry’s ongoing success, vast swaths of the economy are indeed built on the premise that buyers will prioritize discounts and quantity over premium prices and quality.
But ever so quietly, we are starting to see the rise and success of a competing vision, one that turns the old assumption on its head. In the technology arena, for instance, Apple is successfully challenging the PC world with a business model that convinces consumers to pay higher prices in exchange for better reliability, durability, efficiency and customer service. Likewise in the transportation world, more and more consumers are willing to pay higher prices upfront for hybrid and electric vehicles in exchange for the promise of lower long-term energy costs. This has encouraged companies like Philips to introduce more expensive light bulbs, in hopes that consumers will pay more for illumination that promises to use less electricity and last 20 years.
Nowhere, though, is the battle between the low-price/quantity business model and the higher-price/quality business model more clear than in the world of beer. In the fevered battle between the macrobrew behemoths and the craftbrew insurgents, both sides are digging in for an epic confrontation.
The history of the face-off is illustrative. For decades, the big brewers (Anheuser Busch, MillerCoors, etc.) have marketed their products less on the basis of taste or quality than on identity branding. What you drank subsequently became a statement not necessarily of what your taste buds enjoyed, but of your self-image. The Miller versus Budweiser wars and Old Milwaukee ads, for instance, were so often a pitch to guys looking for working-class street cred. Meanwhile, Pabst Blue Ribbon lately has been pitched as a retro-themed statement of hipster style.
This kind of marketing made a certain sense, because while macrobrew brands are certainly appealing, the actual beers in question are basically terrible. Produced through the macrobrews’ low-price, high-volume process, they don’t contain high-quality ingredients, they don’t contain much alcohol and, thus, they simply don’t taste good. Knowing this, the macrobrews have logically designed their marketing campaigns to focus on everything (the can, the type of people who drink it, the logo, etc.) but the actual product. Indeed, if there’s one ubiquitous reference that macrobrewing companies make to the beer itself, it’s usually one telling you how cold the beer is or should be — a temperature that, quite deliberately, helps hide just how bad the beer actually is.
The obvious assumption in this business model is that Americans generally reward low price over everything else, and specifically preference beer that is cost-effective to drink in mass quantities, rather than beer that delivers more alcohol or taste in less volume of liquid. In other words, the model assumes consumers see beer as a homogenized, undifferentiated commodity and that therefore less can never be more. In this view, more is always more, and since cheaper means more, cheaper is inherently better.
This is not a silly assumption, of course, in a country whose college binge-drinking culture teaches kids to prefer quantity at an early age. However, it ignored a potentially profitable market of beer drinkers with a different set of priorities. That’s where the craft brew industry came in.
In the last few years, small brewers have filled the vacuum left by macrobrewers, specifically marketing higher-priced products based on premium quality and taste. It’s been a wildly successful endeavor. 2011’s sales results tell that story: In a year that saw an overall decline in the beer market, the craft brewing industry increased its year-to-year sales by 15 percent and substantially grew its share of the total market. And here’s the key stat: according to the Brewer’s Association, “craft brewing sales share in 2011 was 5.7 percent (of the total beer market) by volume and 9.1 percent by dollars.”
That gap between share of total volume and share of total dollars generated is the high-price/high-quality/low-volume business model at work. Basically, craft brewers are generating a much larger share of beer revenue than they are contributing to the overall volume of beer in America — meaning that, contrary to previous trends, a growing share of consumers are willing to pay more for less, as long as the product is the comparatively higher-quality product that craft brewers provide.
Will this trend continue? Will the craft brew industry follow in, say, Apple’s footsteps and become the next high-quality David vanquishing the quantity-over-quality Goliath? It’s hard to say, but unlike in most other industries, the battle doesn’t look like it will be muddled by compromise — which makes it a hugely important test case.
Recall that in other major industries, the establishment’s low-price titans have typically tried to crush the high-price/high-quality upstarts by partially mimicking them — think Microsoft copying Apple or Wal-Mart partially pantomiming Whole Foods. In the beer industry, by contrast, it’s the opposite. Save for a few mini-brands like Coors’ Blue Moon line, which pretend to be a craft brew product, the macrobrew moguls are largely doubling down on their old low-price/low-quality/high-volume formula.
So, for example, Coors Light isn’t changing its watered-down product; it’s simply going with color-changing cans. Pabst is thinking about introducing not any higher-quality lines, but instead trying to brand its products to the military. And most blatantly, Miller has just launched this television campaign promoting a new can that allows the beer to be consumed as quickly as possible.
Though thinly veiled as a mechanism for better drinkability, the new “punch-top” can is obviously developed as the first specifically engineered to shotgun beer — that is, specifically designed to drink beer in a way that makes sure you don’t actually taste the beer. The unique selling proposition of the campaign is incredibly blatant in its embrace of the low-price/high-volume model: It is screaming at you to buy the cheap product exclusively because everything about it — the beer and even the can — is aimed at helping you pour it into your body without even having to taste or savor it. In this “punch top” innovation, Miller is effectively acknowledging that its customer base is those who drink only for volume — and it’s trying to thus convince more beer enthusiasts that speed drinking is a virtue.
The craft brewing industry, by contrast, is going in the opposite direction, trying to direct the beer-drinking population away from volume for volume’s sake. Visit a liquor store with a wide selection of microbrews and you’ll find an ever-more diverse selection of specialized offerings, from double IPAs to sour beers to barley wines. Notably, many of these products are sold in smaller sizes — four-packs or single pint-size bombers — making their price-per-ounce of beer far higher than the typical macrobrew. Additionally, what innovations the industry has made to beer technology tend to be fundamentally different from those of the macrobrew companies: They tend to be aimed at making the beer itself actually taste better (best example: Left Hand’s breakthrough creation of a bottled, widget-free milk stout on nitro).
In the competition for the future of drinking, both sides are obviously trying to exploit their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. The massive macrobrewing corporations are trying to take advantage of their size and corresponding ability to produce volume — all while playing down the fact that their beers have little local character or quality. The craft brewing industry, composed mostly of independent small and medium-size businesses, know they can’t compete in a volume game, and so they are trying to promote quality and diversity. It’s a straightforward fight — one that may seem only interesting to drinkers, but one that truly transcends the inebriation industry. It underscores both consumer shifts and questions about what kind of economy we want in the future.
Will we be a country of high volume and low quality? Or can we become an economy of quality and price premium? Whether it’s drinking, buying computers or choosing what industrial policy to support, we are in the process of answering those questions.
A Macrobrew Economy — a high-volume, low-price model — asks us to compete with other such economies throughout the world, and the problem is that countries like China will always have lower-priced labor, more lax environmental regulations and lower production standards to win a battle that rewards more and cheaper for more’s and cheaper’s sake. By contrast, a Craft Brew Economy — a high-quality, lower-volume model — is a different proposition. It follows the German model, which, as Time magazine notes, is all about being “committed to making the sort of high-quality, high-performance, innovative products for which the world will pay extra.”
The choice is ours — and it starts with the beer in your fridge.
When you hear the phrase “property rights,” you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer – and asking, how much of you is really yours? It’s not a navel-gazing rumination from a college Intro to Existentialism class – it’s an increasingly pressing question in the brave new world of social networking and cloud computing.
Last week’s big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.
When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely “enable us to give you the services you want – so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can.”
As reassuring as that seems, though, it’s not that simple when considered in a larger context.
In the last few years, major technology companies have become integral to interpersonal communication and information management. At the same time, many of these firms have tweaked user agreements in exactly the way Google has, helping the industry legally position itself for a mass intellectual property grab. That means whether you are using a photo-sharing site or a Web-based email account, you may have signed off on letting one of these corporations do whatever it wants with your data. As evidence of that reality, Facebook in 2009 let advertisers employ users’ uploaded photos to market products without users’ explicit approval.
Such a use unto itself may not offend you, but remember – that’s only what you can see. Indeed, nobody has any comprehensive idea of how tech companies are using these provisions in their secret business-to-business dealings. If they are already using your photos, what else are they doing behind their firewall? Are they selling your data? Are they mining your cloud files looking to preemptively appropriate the next great innovations? Nobody knows … well, except the tech companies themselves.
It’s easy to ignore such concerns by believing that the scope of a mass data mining operation is prohibitively large. But that’s not true. With the government already mining data from millions of Americans’ phone records in the name of fighting terrorism, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that multibillion-dollar corporations can do the same.
Of course, companies providing these services assert that intellectual property is a substitute currency for cash. As the logic goes, even though online services cost money to create and maintain, you the user don’t have to pay actual cash for them because you are already paying in information about yourself, which technology companies then monetize.
That may seem at first like a good deal. But amid companies’ ever-intensifying pursuit of profit, the monetization process opens up the possibility for serious shenanigans. And here’s the worst part: If a company ultimately pilfers inventions or trade secrets or anything else from users, it will already be too late. Because we so quickly hit “agree” when we originally opened our accounts, we will have signed away any claim to what we believed to be ours and ours alone.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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