Boy on a Bike on social engineering and the mythical plague of fat kids:
…a press release is issued stating that “30% of kids are overweight”. We are not told how that calculation was made, nor whether the problem is clustered around several socio-economic or ethnic groups. We are simply given a blanket figure. We are not told what the ideal weight is either, and how far kids are from that ideal weight. We simply assume that those 30% are all bulbous balloons the size of hefalumps.
…But the raw numbers tell us nothing useful, and the press releases tell us even less, except that we must engage in a moral panic, recruit some health professionals and throw money at a TV campaign.
Boy on a Bike’s solution? Well, if you must have social engineering, at least do something that works, not another useless public education campaign. Like take away their Foxtel, mandate cooking lessons for mum and blacklist them from the local fast food outlets. “That will never happen, of course,” he adds.
Er, no.
But then, fictional problems don’t actually require solutions.
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And being of a libertarian mindset, I’d never want to see it happen either. You make your bed, and then you lie in it.