 Pour some sugar on me In 2018, Britain introduced a sugar tax. The plan was to reduce obesity, especially in children. But Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, points out something awkward: After its introduction, child obesity, as defined by the U.K. government, actually increased. It’s not that the sugar tax caused the rise. But Snowdon argued that the tax had all-but-zero chance of ever working. Advocates for the policy say it reduced the amount of sugar in soft drinks — which it may have, slightly. But soft drinks account for about 2% of the nation’s calories, and consumption had been falling for 20 years anyway, as had sugar content. Proponents also say that obesity would have been even higher without a sugar tax. But that only makes sense, according to their own figures, if the tax had started having an effect two years before it was introduced. “To date,” an unimpressed Snowdon wrote, “the sugar tax has cost consumers well over a billion pounds.” Mind the gap What causes the gender pay gap? The academic Saloni Dattani, in a roundup of recent science that interests her, looked at a new study that tries to answer the question. Is it that men and women do different jobs, or is it that even when they do the same work, women get paid less? The answer (inevitably) is both, but there are subtleties: “Differences within the same job accounted for around half of the overall gender pay gap,” says Dattani, “but this varied a lot between countries; it accounted for around 35% of the gap in Israel and 96% of the gap in Hungary!” The good news is that the gap is declining in almost all of the 15 countries studied, albeit only slowly. Behind the mysticism Carl Jung is an influential figure in the history of psychology. A contemporary and friend of Sigmund Freud, several of his ideas have become mainstream in psychology. But he was also explicitly mystical and anti-scientific. He believed in extrasensory perception and astrology, thought dreams could tell the future, and insisted that his theories could not be tested by scientific methods. The psychology blogger Superb Owl tries to distill what it is about Jung that makes him interesting and useful, and separate out the “nonsense.” Jung’s model of the unconscious — that we have a face we present to the world, and parts we suppress and project onto others — is powerful, they say. “But Jung took his own ideas too literally,” treating them as something real rather than a useful model. His ideas can be “rewarding … just don’t take him too seriously.” |
