Battle of the Bulges: Obesity, Financial Illiteracy and the Role of Behavior

I’ve recently been thinking about the similarities between our national epidemics of obesity and financial illiteracy. Both are socio-cultural phenomena created through generations of misinformation, misunderstanding and perverse incentives. Factors like (but not limited to) easy credit and encouraged consumerism without proper consumer disclosure and easy access to abundant, cheap astonishingly unhealthy foods has created a culture of overindulgence on so many levels. Both problems tend to fall disproportionately on poor, low and even some moderate-income households, which lack easy access to alternative options (like banks red-lining disadvantaged neighborhoods; public school cafeterias serving french fries most everyday yet not offering physical education classes). And both are believed to have huge social and economic costs that are now reaching epic proportions. If similar forces are causing and/or driving these problems, then shouldn’t efforts to tackle both childhood obesity and financial illiteracy also be similar? Only recently has this become apparent to those fighting the battle of such rhetorical bulges.

At the high-level International Conference on Financial Education host this month by the US Department of Treasury and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, INSEAD Professor Klaus Wertenbroch presented his research on psychological biases in financial decision-making. He told a story of how explaining to a high school aged girl how much money she could save (and earn through compound interest on savings and investments) if she did not buy that one Coke each day out of the vending machine at school. He explained this as “a message that clicked” with the student that she can make good financial decisions just by changing her attitude toward money. But the message about the coke in the vending machine everyday “clicked” with me in another way – it’s the same sort of message those in the fight again obesity make as well. Overall, the messages are similar – yes, knowledge is important, but healthy habits (behavior) stem also from attitudes. We seemed to reach this consensus at the OECD/Treasury Conference but failed to come up with any agreement on concrete solutions to the financial literacy glut in the United States. The problem is, creative messaging to change attitudes will only go so far if access to more “healthy” options (access to financial services; physical education classes and salads in schools) are not – and have not traditionally been – readily available.

However, one buzzword that had stemmed from new insights of behavioral economics might offer an innovative approach – Nudge, as recently made popular by the new book by Thaler and Sunstein. The power of the “nudging” (some wonks like to call it libertarian or soft paternalism) people in the right direction and the idea seems to be catching on in both health and financial education circles. As Dr. Wertenbroch put it “we need to create choice environments to coax people in the right direction.” And while he referred explicitly to financial decision-making, this could obviously be applied to healthy eating and living habits as well. For instance, why don’t we do more to default people into the more “healthy” options (healthy school lunches offered; auto-defaults into retirement accounts or other financial products such as savings accounts)? Why not use new media more actively to “nudge” people toward physical and financial fitness? Marcin Polak presented on the Polish government’s investment in “edutainment,” which used popular mass media and internet to launch an effective campaign against financial illiteracy, is actually quite amazing. I don’t see why we couldn’t emulate something similar in the United States.

It seems like experts and policymakers alike are finally realizing that in order to win the fight to effectively change unhealthy behaviors – and the perverse environments our society has created that enable and indeed encourage such behaviors – some creative and active “nudging” back in the right direction is going to be necessary.