Holy Nudge, Cool Table!
4th May 2010
If you count and think, you know that the Cool Table is on a Nudge bender seeking small effects to make big changes in that nuanced way of Cool Table Intellectuals. They think they are making a three-rail, four-ball combination to drop the nine ball in the corner pocket when all they produce is a bad break, but in all the noise and confusion, no one remembers the original aim of the nine ball in the corner pocket, so All’s Well That Ends Well and yet another way that Shakespeare is a smart persuasion commentator. But I digress in my faux Cool Table way, mixing Shakespeare with billiards to illuminate the Other Guy’s folly . . . back to the opera!
Small is once again beautiful, particularly in health and safety. Small salt. Small sugar. Small warning labels. Small climate change. Small financial reform. All leading to Big Change (Nudge, baby, Nudge). I need to burnish my credential here as a Small Guy, so let me make a Small Nudge for Big Health.
Let’s regulate church attendance.
The research on this is painfully Cool. Read this nice observational study for your first sting of truth. More church attendance produces longer and healthier lives. And, the effect size is right in the power alley of Nudgers: Small. Taken as a simple main effect (just the correlation between church attendance and health at age 70), the Windowpane is about a 40/60, a smallish size. If you add new variables, you can reduce the effect to zero, but no one in public policy would ever try to do that – in fact they usually have to add new variables to make their Nudge appear merely statistically significant, much less practically useful. So, the research evidence for church attendance all by itself is a much better Nudge for Health than:
Calorie Counts on Menus
Lower Salt in Processed Foods
Tax on Sugared Sodas
Health Care Reform for Mortality
Stated more plainly, church attendance has a more clear effect on health and longevity than these other Nudges. Thus, you don’t have play the statistics guitar like a maestro to make music. Best of all, the effect isn’t Large, but is Small. Which we know is beautiful for the Cool Table.
Thus, if the Obama Administration was to regulate church attendance to increase consumption of this activity (rather than decrease consumption as is more often the case), Americans would live longer and healthier lives. But just a little.
Consider various advantages of this Nudge.
1. It is a regulation to Increase rather than Decrease activity. Most Obama Nudges take that sour School Marm orientation where what is Bad is Good for you! Less sugar. Less salt. Less trans fat. Less! Less! Less! With church attendance, we can play to human nature. More! More! More! the Cool Table can cry to us because the observational research proves that More Attendance is More Healthy! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that wants you to do More?
2. This does not establish Religion, so is Constitutional. Nothing in the research says that anyone believes anything while sitting in church. It only measures how often you show up at a shul, mosque, cathedral, or VFW basement. Church attendance does not require: 1) a particular kind of building, 2) belief or acceptance of anything said in the building, 3) behavioral consistency with anything said in the church. All the research demonstrates is that the behavior of regularly going to a particular place where a particular activity occurs produces better health outcomes. Thus, atheists can attend any Church of any faith, not believe a Word they hear, do nothing suggested by the Word they hear, or attend a different Church every time. So, too, that Christians of the most nominal theology could attend Jewish or Muslim buildings, not believe the Word they hear or do anything consistent with that Word, and still obtain the positive health outcome. We’ve got no Constitutional problem here, folks.
[FauxItAll Sidebar: Interestingly, behavior is a better predictor of health than cognition. If you ask people to rate themselves on how religious they are, then track their health into the future, you find a virtual zero relationship between religiosity and mortality. You might have heard of the startling distinction between the Visible and the Invisible Church. The Visible Church is the one filled with all the people while the Invisible Church, known only to God, is the one filled with only the genuine believers among all the people in the building. Well, according to the research, it doesn't matter whether you are part of the Visible or Invisible Church (faith), but whether you are in Church (behavior). End of Sidebar!]
3. Church attendance has been falling in the US over the past 50 years, but the infrastructure is still there. Thus, we can have a surge of new attendance and we’ve got plenty of capacity to handle it. This isn’t like the interesting problem we’re facing with health care reform where an additional 30 million customers are going to be crowding into the already jammed waiting rooms demanding more services from a reduced corps of health care professionals. We’ve got the ways and means already!
Hey, if this doesn’t put your knickers in a twist, you don’t think before you shout.
Or Nudge.
Amen.