This awesome study by some Dutch researchers has shown that obese people and smokers actually cost healthcare agencies less money than healthy people… because they die sooner. The authors argue that anti-obesity and anti-smoking programs promoted with appeals to fiscal solvency are going to need to re-think their marketing campaigns.
This is just one example of some kind of faulty thinking. I am currently calling it the Fallacy of Everything Being Convenient1. Other examples of this logical error may conceivably include carbon credits, pyramid schemes and the Adkins diet.
A different way to state this fallacy could be: Important problems can always be fixed with little psychological discomfort and virtually no economic cost. For every bad thing in the world, there’s a way to make it better by doing pretty much what we would have done anyway.
Don’t get me wrong; there are many solutions that smart humans have implemented without significant cost to ourselves in the short run: profit-making recycling companies, micro-loans to people in developing nations, cheap farm labor for Americans (as long as nobody looks too closely). But it doesn’t always happen.
Maybe we’ve got too many smart, resourceful people out there, steadily coming up with clever solutions to thorny problems. This leaves us, the peon public, with a vague certainty that there’s no problem so difficult that it could possibly require difficult decisions or real sacrifice.
- I’m sure someone else has a better name [↩]
