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Category: Policy

Published February 15, 2012

An All-Too-Little-Known Fact About Quitting Smoking

Last Thursday was an important day for me, for personal reasons: it was the third anniversary of my quitting smoking.

After about 15 years of heavy smoking — a little over one, but sometimes up to two packs a day — I finally managed to quit in February 2009.

That last attempt at quitting smoking was my sixth or seventh attempt at quitting smoking. The first time I tried to quit smoking, when I was 19, I lasted a few hours. The penultimate time, I did not smoke for about six months.

This leads me to the following little-known fact about quitting smoking:

“Most people who quit smoking for good only do so at their fifth or sixth quitting attempt.”

I had no idea until I walked in my colleague Don Taylor‘s office one day after yet another failed attempt at quitting and said: “Screw it, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to quit smoking.” Don, who is a health policy scholar and who blogs over at the Incidental Economist, responded by quoting the stylized fact above, which is apparently well-known among health policy scholars.

It might be well-known among health policy scholars, but I feel like it deserves to be publicized widely. Every failed attempt at quitting smoking is very disheartening, as it brings a real sense of failure. How many people might have given up on the idea of quitting because of that sense of failure? How many people would have kept going had they been told that most people who quit smoking for good only do so at their fifth or sixth attempt?

If you know anyone who smokes and wants to quit smoking — and what smoker does not want to quit smoking? — the best thing you can do for them is to tell them about the stylized fact above, and not to give up. There is definitely a learning process. And if they want an actual source, they can check out the 1990 report of the surgeon general on smoking cessation.

 

Published February 2, 2012

US Food Aid Does Have an Impact in Developing Countries, Just Not the One You Think It Has (Updated)

A new working paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian:

This paper examines the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in US wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country’s tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Our estimates show that an increase in US food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.

This is bound to make waves among food policy scholars and in Washington, DC, where the Farm Bill, part of which sets guidelines for the provision of food aid, is due to be renewed this year.

I have not yet had a chance to read the paper (I’m teaching two classes this semester, so most of my reading time goes to those; I’ve been on the same “pleasure”-reading book since before Christmas), so please take the following with a grain of salt since it’s off the top of my head, but I wonder whether it might have made for cleaner identification to use weather shocks (specifically, extreme weather events and natural disasters) as a source of exogenous variation instead of fluctuations in US wheat production.

In other words, it could perhaps be the case that US wheat production affects conflict through means other than US food aid, so using unpredictable shocks to the supply of US food aid might make for more solid identification. But as I said, I have not yet had a chance to read the paper, and Nunn and Qian are both careful empiricists, so they probably address my concern somewhere in the paper.

UPDATE: Jon Prettyman, a Masters of Public Policy student advisee of mine, just emailed with this: “I saw the Nunn and Qian paper on several blogs today and I’m reading through it now, primarily because it sounds an awful lot like my thesis, and came across the answer to the question from your post.  They did use weather in an earlier draft of the paper, but found that wheat production yields similar estimates and is easier to interpret.”

Published January 5, 2012

Coordination Failure, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, and Rising Food Prices

Fiorenzo Conte, in a post on the London School of Economics’ Development Studies Institute’s student blog, makes a crucially underappreciated point when it comes to food prices:

The price spike was ignited by a series of decisions which made a lot of sense from the perspective of every individual actors who took them. Each of this “rational” choice was dictated by the goal of achieving the food security in each country in face of a growing fear that the world was running out of rice. More precisely the fear that there might have been a shortage because the shortage never materialized in reality. Rational choices compounded by fear determined the very irrational outcome of a price spike.

The first culprit was the government of India which made “food for all” its flagship. (…) To do so it banned the export of rice out of the country. (…)

The next thing was that rice prices soared by 20% overnight. Governments all over Asia rushed to buy as much rice they could and hoard it in the expectation of a future scarcity of rice signaled by the price jump. (…) What government officials in the Philippines did was to tell their people to eat less rice so that the government could have bought less rice (and this was probably the least reasonable of the reactions). In response to this Filipinos rushed to buy as much rice as they could because they understandably interpreted the message from the government as “we are running out of rice.”

In a recent American Journal of Agricultural Economics article (ungated version here), Will Martin and Kym Anderson estimate that almost half of the increase in rice prices between 2006 and 2008 was due to country-level policies such as the ones described above.

This is a classic case of coordination failure (and, in the case of the Philippines, of a self-fulfilling prophecy). Unfortunately, global policy makers have very little say as to what goes on within countries. Even if they did, international organizations react way too slowly to be effective during food crises — this is especially true of the United Nations (the “colossus with feet of clay” analogy is particularly apt here), a little less so of the World Bank and the IMF.