It would also be impossible to make happen. Getting two-thirds of Congress to agree to dilute their power to less than 1/200th what it is today seems highly unlikely, and the other way to do it—getting two-thirds of the states to hold a constitutional convention on the issue—seems equally implausible.
Transparency
I started this book with transparency: the idea that governments, corporations, news organizations, and all of our information suppliers start opening up. Transparency is a necessary requirement for the reality-based community. To go on a healthy diet, we need cheap, healthy food options. The critical supply ingredient to a healthy information diet is transparency.
After spending a couple years working on transparency in government, I keep coming back to food. Not only do the changes in agriculture have significant parallels to our information production, but they also teach us a lot about transparency’s effectiveness. Data-wise, food is very transparent.
In 1990, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by then-president George Bush. The act gave birth to the modern version of what we see on the back of nearly every food item we buy in the grocery store today: the FDA’s Nutritional Label.
It’s a very sophisticated label. On it, you’ll find the caloric content of the food, the vitamins and minerals it contains, and even its ingredients. One can, should one choose to do so, make very effective choices about one’s health armed with basic nutritional knowledge and the transparency-focused nutritional labels on food packaging.
But with the labels came the other adjectives. While the nutritional labels are standard on the back of our boxes, the front of our boxes started filling up with meaningless, but great sounding words and phrases, too—words like “all-natural” and “farm raised” and “part of your complete breakfast.” The words on the front of the box are so much better than the words on the back. They’re brighter, flashier, and much more wholesome sounding than those on the back. Who wants to read about Acesulfame Potassium when you can read about “Real CocaCola Taste and Zero Calories?”
No one would argue that these nutritional labels aren’t a good thing and a positive direction for the food industry, but they certainly haven’t prevented an obesity crisis. The labeling only affected those with the will to read it and the people willing to understand and constantly study what the words and the numbers actually mean.
In 2008, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to require calorie labeling of food sold by restaurants with more than 15 locations. Since the law was passed, a lot of research has been done to determine whether the labeling is having the desired outcome: consumers making more conscious decisions.
Two scientific papers provide a good overview of what’s happened. The first, released six months after the law went into effect, measured the choices of lower-income residential neighborhoods and their purchase patterns before and after, at Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.[89] They then compared the purchase patterns of New York City to those of Newark, NJ, where there are no labeling laws, but the social and economic status of the neighborhood residents are comparable.
The results: more than half of the respondents in New York City said that they saw the calorie counts next to menu items in New York City, and 27.7% of the respondents who saw the calorie counts said that the labels influenced their choices, and more than 10% of respondents reported purchasing fewer calories.
But what did the actual behavior say? People in the locations sampled purchased an average of 825 calories before the nutritional labeling law was passed, and purchased an average of 846 calories after the law was introduced. The difference is statistically insignificant and well within the margin of error. The labels didn’t change anything.
Another study shows a different result. This time, instead of targeting low-income families and common brands, researchers from Stanford chose high-income groups shopping at a luxury brand: Starbucks. The researchers, with the cooperation of Starbucks, examined every transaction in 2008 from New York City and Seattle, where the calorie count laws went into effect, and compared them to Boston and Philadelphia, where there were no calorie count laws.
They found that the laws did have an effect. Where the calorie counts were posted, there was a decrease of 6% in calories purchased: from 247 calories to 232. While it’s a smaller number than the fast food example, it represents more than twice the percentage difference of that in the fast food study, and is thus more statistically significant. Food calories dropped by 14%, and beverage calories remained unaffected. Further, they found that customers consuming more than 250 calories per trip to Starbucks had even more significant changes in their habits: they consumed fewer calories by upwards of 26 percent. Finally, the researchers found that the effect of the calorie postings was greater in higher income and higher education neighborhoods.[90]
With these two pieces of research, you can draw some interesting conclusions. The first is that people may be willing to make marginal changes. Shaving 15 calories off of your Starbucks purchase may be a more palpable change than shaving 50 calories off of your McDonald’s purchase.
The second, and more substantial, conclusion is that maybe this form of transparency only affects wealthier and more educated people who are already trying to be healthy. You can certainly see this in the mostly affluent characteristics of the open government and transparency community.
Even amongst the wealthy, transparency alone won’t solve the problem. While it’s an improvement, the calorie consumption differences are still negligible in terms of fighting what they’re intended to fight: obesity. Even if you shave 15 calories a day, or 5,475 calories a year, off of your diet, you’re only talking about losing a little over a pound a year. If managing to reduce your entire 2,000-calorie-a-day diet by 6%, you’re still only talking about losing a little over a half-pound per month. While it’d help in the obesity crisis, that alone won’t solve any problems.
Yet in the face of the deluge of information and the changing standards of economics, we cling to transparency as a model for increasing our integrity. Writer David Weinberger once claimed, “Transparency is the new objectivity.” It’s convenient and easy: if our information sources are just transparent about their relative biases, then we’ll all be better informed subjects.
Clinging to transparency as a replacement for integrity is a bad idea. The choice between transparency and objectivity is a false choice; what we want is for our journalists, our politicians, and even our athletes to be honest. While both transparency and objectivity are useful tools to draw out that attribute, they’re no guarantee that any system or human being will be honest and act ethically.
Let’s be glad the folks running our water sanitation facilities didn’t listen to Louis Brandeis when he said, “Sunlight is the best of disinfectants,” and just leave our water out in the sunlight before recycling it for our use. While he was speaking metaphorically, sunlight is a relatively poor disinfectant or remedy for disease. Ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, bleach—heck, even most of the stuff behind the bartender at your favorite watering hole—all tend to be better disinfectants than sunlight.