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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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If studies found that adults were making continually poorer decisions year after year, and that by 2030 half of all adults chronically made poor decisions, and this was ever-increasing, then I would look for non-volitional factors at play. Lead poisoning? Something involving early life? Something involving complex social-environmental reinforcement mechanisms? That’s what I would begin to look at. Do Americans today lack willpower relative to Americans in 1980 or did other things change? You could have bought lots of pastries and sugar and candy as early as the 1920s, when few were obese. Milk was cheap and highly caloric, alcohol plentiful.

Hunger is different from a typical rational decision. When people are very hungry they will resort to cannibalism and murder, which proves this. Alright, so somewhere between “quite famished” and “eating my crewmate” we may have the polyphagia of the obese. I agree with your (1) and (2), my disagreement is: (A) the problem stems from how their body non-willfully reacts to the cues of food, with enhanced hunger and decreased inhibitory control, versus (B) they really ought to want to be skinny more. We already have evidence of (A) in other cases, like certain drug treatments reliably increasing appetite and increasing weight gain despite not affecting their willpower.

If studies found that adults were making continually poorer decisions year after year, and that by 2030 half of all adults chronically made poor decisions, and this was ever-increasing, then I would look for non-volitional factors at play.

Why? Why is it so hard to believe that humans are flawed creatures who, by and large, are not good decision makers? Why is it so unlikely that faced with unlimited temptation, most people will fail to resist?

Food is delicious. Exercise is unpleasant. That's a sufficient explanation.

Do Americans today lack willpower relative to Americans in 1980 or did other things change? You could have bought lots of pastries and sugar and candy as early as the 1920s, when few were obese. Milk was cheap and highly caloric, alcohol plentiful.

Sugary food existed in the 1920s, but not in such abundance and variety, and not as cheaply. It wasn't so easy to pack HFCS and fat into absolutely everything. Fast food was still a luxury. Prepared meals were very much so. And the ratio of sedentary desk jobs was much lower.

Americans eat many more calories today, on average, and burn much fewer. There are probably cultural factors as well, that made eating fast food and sweets as staples more acceptable, and that caused a decrease in activity levels. But you are looking for some explanation for why people are bad at resisting temptation, and the answer is the question.