Marco Springmann is in the pages of the
Guardian again calling for a meat tax so here's what I wrote about him and his ideas the first time around.
First published by Spectator Health in November 2018
Once you accept that the modern ‘public health’ movement is
just the latest incarnation of the puritanism that waxes and wanes
throughout history, it is easy to predict its next target. If you
further assume – and who can now deny it? – that nanny state campaigners
follow a blueprint laid down by the anti-smoking lobby, it becomes easy
to guess not only their future targets but also their methods.
And so, when I suggested
in an interview a few years ago
that the next vices to fall under the cross-hairs of ‘public health’
would be caffeine, gambling and red meat, it was not because I had
psychic powers, nor because there were rumblings in the medical journals
about these issues (there wasn’t). It was because they have been for
centuries the classic targets of scolds and ascetics once they tire of
fighting the demon drink and tobacco.
Coffee is too popular with the upper-middle classes to be done away with yet, but
this year saw the start of a minor crusade against energy drinks. The imminent downfall of
fixed-odds betting terminals
represents the first real scalp for the anti-gamblers in decades, with
gambling advertising lined up as the next dragon to slay.
Meat has had an easier ride. Until now. A study published today in
PLoS One
looks very much like the start of a concerted effort to clamp down on
processed and red meat. The crusade is beginning, as such crusades
usually do, with a push for a sin tax.
Like most of the influential policy-based evidence in ‘public health’
of recent years, the study rests on opaque computer modelling. It
produces estimates of how many people are dying from the
over-consumption of meat, how much this costs society and what size of
tax is needed to balance out the costs. It then estimates how many lives
will be extended by processed meat consumption falling in an era of
higher prices.
The published paper does not provide enough information for the model
to be meaningfully assessed by the reader, but one thing is clear: the
numbers are unfeasibly large. The authors reckon that the global death
toll from processed and red meat is
2,390,000 people a year. The link between
processed meat and bowel cancer
is reasonably robust by the debased standards of nutritional
epidemiology and there may be an association between meat-eating and
coronary heart disease and stroke. Even so, a figure of 2.4 million
defies belief. The authors admit that the
Lancet’s Global
Burden of Disease reports estimated the true figure to be 900,000 in
2010 and 700,000 in 2013. That is enough of a discrepancy, but they do
not mention the
most recent edition of the report
which put the figure at just 140,000. The estimate published today is
therefore seventeen times larger than an estimate of the same risk
factor published barely a year ago. How can anyone have confidence in
this field of academia?
Their estimates for the UK are equally outlandish. They claim that
processed and red meat causes 70,000 deaths a year in Britain. That’s
one in nine! 70,000 deaths is far more than is said to be caused by
obesity and ten times more than is caused by
alcohol. If today’s estimate is correct – and let’s face it, it’s not – only
smoking can rival it.
If you can swallow the idea that 2.4 million people are struck down
by bacon butties and surf-and-turf every year, you might be inclined to
believe the authors’ estimate that processed and red meat incurs a cost
of $285 billion to the world’s healthcare systems each year. Taking this
figure and adding in some unspecified assumptions about the cost to the
environment of cattle emitting greenhouse gases, they decide that the
price of processed meat should rise in rich countries by an average of
111 per cent to offset its negative effects.
Calculations of this sort are not unusual in economics. The standard
way of dealing with negative externalities is to implement a
Pigovian tax,
thereby passing the external costs of consumption back to the user. To
do that, you must first work out what the net external costs are. This
is where people in ‘public health’ invariably go wrong,
counting internal costs (such as lost productivity) as external costs and
failing to subtract savings.
People who live to a ripe old age tend to cost a lot of money, but a
classic mistake in ‘public health’ studies of this kind is assuming that
someone who avoids a diet-related disease will avoid every other
disease and never trouble the health service again.
Today’s study is not detailed enough for us to tell whether the
authors have made all of these mistakes but the sheer size of their
estimates suggest they have. They reckon that the UK alone needs to tax
meat-eaters to the tune of £2.9 billion a year. This, they say, will
reduce consumption of processed meat by ten grams a day and save 6,100
lives. That is nearly half a million pounds for every hypothetical life.
Leaving aside the garbage-in, garbage-out methodology at the root of
these numbers, it seems unlikely that a British government – even one
that bans plastic straws and taxes fizzy drinks – will introduce a 78
per cent tax on processed meat any time soon, although that is what the
authors recommend. It is even less likely that everybody in the world
will go vegan, although that is what the lead author, Marco Springmann,
told delegates needed to happen at the
End of Meat conference last year.
And yet every nanny state policy sounds absurd until the public have
been battered with soundbites, dodgy statistics and empty promises for a
few years. Nobody who has witnessed the unstoppable rise of the ‘public
health’ movement over the last two decades can dismiss the possibility
of a meat tax being introduced in the foreseeable future, probably
followed by an advertising ban and graphic warnings.
The odds shorten when you consider that it is not just the ‘public
health’ lobby that wants it. There is now an unholy alliance between
health campaigners, vegans, vegetarians and environmentalists on this
issue. This is the next battleground of lifestyle regulation and only a
fool would bet against the people who always win.
