Germany also faced the China shock and Japan. They didn't deindustrialize. Policy choices matter. Leadership matters. And the social factors that lead to devaluing competence and doing things matter.

The US didn't actually deindustrialize. US manufacturing by value added is larger than Germany and Japan put together. What we did do is get rid of a bunch of low value manufacturing. We're finding out the hard way that some of that low value manufacturing is actually useful though when you need a hundred million facemasks or ten million test swabs or whatever.

Taiwan didn't make millions of facemasks before January. Ventilators are also made in the US and are very high value.

Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use. I don't think he means desire in terms of willpower or motivation, but in terms of ambition. I do think the world has lost some of of its ambition over the last 50 years.

I don't think "ambition" is the correct root cause for "not enough surgical masks", either.

Look at someone like Bill Gates. He had the knowledge of how dangerous a pandemic could be, the financial resources to manufacture or stockpile the basic medical items which would be needed, and as much ambition as anyone on this planet.

I hate to single out anyone in particular, as this is certainly not his fault. I don't mean to pick on him. It's just an example of how even cranking AMBition up to 20 wouldn't have prevented our current predicament.

True, in the case of "not enough surgical masks", it's not ambition (and I don't mean it in a financial sense either). It's a combination of ambition, imagination, foresight and desire.

If Bill Gates had manufactured or stockpiled basic medical items, someone would be complaining about why he didn't do it sooner, or accusing him of profiteering, or somesuch. It shouldn't be up to one person to be responsible for the foibles of the human race, even if they have outsized resources. They just become a scapegoat for our own lack of responsibility.

China begs to differ.

Using an example where an outcome (weight gain) is completely driven by an individual’s (in)action (consuming more energy than expending) is probably not the best argument for opposing a “try harder” approach to living.

Yes it’s never been easier to eat like shit and have hobbies that require no movement, but the opposite is also true.

Would you say the same when talking about drug addiction, rather than just weight gain? Would it matter to drug addiction rates, if there were cheap Fast Drug stores all across the country, akin to fast food stores?

I think it's quite clear that here it makes zero sense to just say 'try to resist taking these ubiquitous drugs which give short-term satisfaction' as a policy measure. You'd need to treat it as a public health issue in which human beings not rational robots, but instead pleasure-seekers who would be helped by e.g. a sugar tax, policies that restricted the number of fast food stores to a minimum concentration level, healthy-food subsidies, public health and information campaigns, public cycling infrastructure, rules to enable workers to engage in sports at their workplace blablabla.

Apparently willpower is not enough and there are lots of policy instruments we could employ.

To what end do we put the onus of an individuals poor decisions on “policy measures”. Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games? Should we reinstate prohibition?

It’s dangerous to equate someone choosing to “get fries with that” in the same vein as a chemical addiction to drugs.

> Should we put a tax on minutes playing video games?

Of course, if it was necessary?

80% of US men for example are overweight, obese or extremely obese, all of which have substantial and known effects on health, with about half overweight and the other half (extremely) obese. Further, the trend is worsening. You also have a context in which one of the main reasons for caloric surplus is sugar which is priced in the food industry at 7700 calories per $1, way more expensive than many healthy choices, and is known to be addictive.

Then you have studies which show a gradually implemented sugar tax has beneficial policy outcomes, without destroying industries, saving many lives and reducing healthcare costs by orders of magnitude greater than the revenue losses (for which the food industry could be compensated, if you'd want), and improving the quality of life for many people who'd otherwise be diabetics, unhealthy, unhappy.

Now if you can show me statistics where 80% of your friends, colleagues, parents, teachers etc, have some kind of addiction to a particular niche of games, which have widely studied and known impacts on physical and/or mental health, and where a small gradual tax can be introduced to nudge people to other games, without destroying the gaming industry, and being able to compensate any losers in the market due to this policy change, then yes... absolutely I think we should put a tax on that.

> Should we reinstate prohibition?

No, we should not reinstate prohibition. We have no evidence that works. There's lots of evidence that a sugar tax works. As is there evidence that alcohol taxes work. All to a limit, introduced in balance.

I'll grant you that these are not trivial questions and we should not try to control people's lives. But I also think there are some policy decisions that make complete sense. Alcohol taxes by the way, are already quite widespread. This isn't some new big-government idea. It's science-based, experimental based, balanced policy making, that aims to give people a choice, but also incentivise the right choices. It's not treated as a moral judgement question, I love sugar, I keep consuming it, but it's also a public health problem and I'd really benefit from not being able to get a big coke for $1 with every meal, but rather for $4 every now and then. (That by the way, is a way more extreme example than any policy recommendations, which is typically 15%, e.g. $1 to $1.15, and works)

My point is that arguing that "try harder" is a solution to the American obesity problem is provably ridiculous, because we've been saying that for decades and it obviously hasn't worked.

A single outcome in over a single point in time, you mean. It doesn’t address the structural issues, such as cost and availability of healthy foods, that contribute to the need to lose weight in the first place.

As someone who lost 60lbs eating subway and Taco Bell for 8 months I don’t agree with this whatsoever.

If we are talking about weight loss (which we are) “healthy” foods are not a requirement, a calorie deficit is.

> Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years?

Um no. The people in the 40s didn't have the choice to eat as much as we do today calorie wise. That is really all there is to eat. Food today is cheaper than ever. While that means fewer people go hungry, it means more people overeat. It has nothing to do with city design because cities that existed in the 40s largely in the same form still have greater rates of obesity.