Socioeconomic Factors and Food Industry Practices Major Influence to Prevalence of Obesity

A video released by Academic Earth (embedded below) focuses on the economic cost of obesity. James Hill, director of the Center of Human Nutrition at Colorado Health Sciences University, believes that socioeconomic class a more accurate predictor for obesity than biological and genetic factors. Policies such as food subsidies, have had a direct role in driving the obesity crisis.

A study by Eric Finkelstein, Ph.D., associate research professor in the Duke Global Health Institute and Deputy Director in the Health Services Research Program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, shows that by 2030, 42% of the U.S. population could be obese by 2030 and would translate to around $550 billion in medical spending over the next twenty years.

Obesity

Obesity is a disorder where a person has too much body fat. It is a medical condition that can lead to a reduction in the quality of life and more serious disorders such as diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. Obesity starts when the regular calorie intake of a person is more than what the body burns. The unused calories are stored as fat by the body.

MIT News: Increased Temperatures May Be A Factor In Damaging Economic Growth

The economic cost of increased temperatures

Even temporary rises in local temperatures significantly damage long-term economic growth in the world’s developing nations, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist.

Looking at weather data over the last half-century, the study finds that every 1-degree-Celsius increase in a poor country, over the course of a given year, reduces its economic growth by about 1.3 percentage points. However, this only applies to the world’s developing nations; wealthier countries do not appear to be affected by the variations in temperature.

“Higher temperatures lead to substantially lower economic growth in poor countries,” says Ben Olken, a professor of economics at MIT, who helped conduct the research. And while it’s relatively straightforward to see how droughts and hot weather might hurt agriculture, the study indicates that hot spells have much wider economic effects.

“What we’re suggesting is that it’s much broader than [agriculture],” Olken adds. “It affects investment, political stability and industrial output.”

Varied effects on economies

The paper, “Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century,” was published this summer in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Along with Olken, the authors are Melissa Dell PhD ’12, of Harvard University, who was a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics when the paper was produced, and Ben Jones PhD ’03, an economist at Northwestern University.

The study first gained public attention as a working paper in 2008. It collects temperature and economic-output data for each country in the world, in every year from 1950 through 2003, and analyzes the relationship between them. “We couldn’t believe no one had done it before, but we weren’t really sure we’d find anything at all,” Olken says.

By looking at economic data by type of activity, not just aggregate output, the researchers concluded there are a variety of “channels” through which weather shocks hurt economic production — by slowing down workers, commerce, and perhaps even capital investment.

Studying The Physics Behind An Investment Bubble

An investment bubble is a situation where goods or services are traded in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values. It could also be described as a trade in products or assets with inflated values.

An investment bubble happens when groups of like minded investors rush to invest in goods or assets with inflated prices. This further inflates the prices until an event triggers a crash, metaphorically, bursting the investment bubble that built up over a period of time.

An investment bubble is hard to explain. There are various factors that cause a bubble and there is no one particular reason to trigger it. This is so because bubbles appear without any certainty, speculation, or rationality. It has also been suggested that bubbles might ultimately be caused by processes of price coordination or emerging social norms.

Because it is often difficult to observe intrinsic values in real-life markets, bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect, when a sudden drop in prices appears. Such a drop is known as a crash or a bubble burst.

Prices in an economic bubble can fluctuate erratically, and become impossible to predict from supply and demand alone.

Inequality and investment bubbles: A clearer link is established

"Money, it's a gas," says the sixties rock group Pink Floyd in their song "Money." Indeed, physics professor Victor Yakovenko is an expert in statistical physics and studies how the flow of money and the distribution of incomes in American society resemble the flow of energy between molecules in a gas. In his lectures delivered on April 19 at New York University and April 20 at the New School for Social Research, Yakovenko brought his physics-of-incomes study up to date, including a report on the correlation between levels of income inequality and the appearance of financial downturns, such as the dot-com bubble of 2000 and the more recent housing bubble of 2008.