ABSTRACT
Contemporary global capitalism is marked by burgeoning obesity levels, along with myriad health and broader socio-economic harms arising from this trend. As a means to both comprehend the drivers of this phenomenon and offer useful policy remedies, behavioral economics has regularly been exalted as transcending the limitations of neoclassical health economics. Through incorporating psychological insights within economic analysis, behavioralism is held to engender a uniquely interdisciplinary and realistic representation of the psycho-social foundations of obesity. Conversely, this chapter makes the case that the tradition offers only limited benefits for a political-economic account of this issue. Short of fundamentally rupturing with neoclassical models of obesity, behavioralism is demonstrated to selectively incorporate psychological acumen primarily to refashion its problematic conceptual and normative core – particularly its account of individual decision-making as axiomatically hyper-rational. In turn, it reproduces – albeit, in novel forms – many of the inadequacies of neoclassicism, while also engendering pertinent new conceptual and political shortcomings, which function to reduce the complex social determinants of obesity to a narrow economic problem of ‘irrational’ individual choice. Accordingly, the chapter concludes that fashioning a capacious critical political economy of obesity necessitates looking beyond both the neoclassical and behavioral traditions.
