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Ezra Klein is skeptical:
A few weeks ago, Tom Laskawy took issue with my contention that we don't really know how to convince people to eat better. "Junk food--and that includes any processed food that crosses the line from nutritious to purely caloric--has to get more expensive," he wrote. "Period."
The theory behind this is simple, and, on an abstract level, unassailable. If calories cost more, people will consume fewer of them. If the government slaps a $10 tax on every bag of chips, Lays would probably go out of business. But that isn't likely to happen. The question, rather, is whether relatively modest taxes on calories are effective. Are people extremely price sensitive when it comes to food? Or not?
The evidence appears to point toward "not." A recent study conducted by researchers at the RAND Corp. used evidence from the Health and Retirement Study -- which is generally considered to provide very high-quality data -- to estimate the impact of a 10 percent reduction in the cost of all calories (they use a reduction because, well, food prices have been going down, so that's where we can find real-world data on how people respond to price changes in food). The data isn't very encouraging.
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