Fatter ministers, more corrupt countries: coincidence?

If you want to know how much a government is stealing, maybe you don't need to audit its accounts. It might be enough to look at the group photo of the cabinet.

It sounds like a bar joke. But it is the conclusion of a study published in an academic economics journal, which also won the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize.

What they measured

Pavlo Blavatskyy, an economist at the Montpellier Business School, collected 299 frontal photos of ministers in office in 2017 across 15 post-Soviet republics. A computer vision algorithm estimated the body mass index of each one based on their face.

The result: the median BMI of each cabinet was strongly correlated with classic corruption indices, such as those from Transparency International and the World Bank. Estonia had the thinnest ministers and the best anti-corruption score. In Uzbekistan, more than half of the ministers appeared with estimated severe obesity.

There is one detail that I think is the best part of the study. In countries with more obese ministers, the population tended to weigh less. Fat rulers, thin voters.

In a second paper, focusing only on Ukraine between 2000 and 2020, the ministers' BMI rose and fell in sync with corruption. Its correlation with the World Bank indicator was -0.42. That is stronger than the number of "missing" luxury Swiss watches, which was -0.36. Yes, someone measured that too.

Why would power make you fat?

The study says nothing about this here. What follows is known physiology applied to the situation, not a finding by Blavatskyy.

A position with access to resources without oversight usually comes with long lunches, alcohol, an official car, and a sedentary schedule. Add chronic stress and lack of sleep. Sustained cortisol encourages fat to accumulate in the abdomen, around the organs. Sleeping little raises ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and lowers leptin, the satiety hormone.

You don't need to be corrupt to gain weight like this. The lifestyle that usually accompanies power is enough.

Warnings (and they are important)

This is a correlation between 15 countries, not a cause-and-effect relationship. Other economists criticized that this group of countries seemed tailor-made to find the pattern.

BMI is estimated from a photo of the face. It is an approximation, not a scale.

The most serious criticism comes from a subsequent re-analysis, according to which a large part of the relationship is explained by age. Older ministers weigh more, and more corrupt governments had older ministers. The minister's waistline is, to a large extent, the curve of aging.

The takeaway

What is interesting for you is not the ministers. It is that age and lifestyle show up on the waistline before the scale.

BMI does not distinguish muscle from fat, nor does it tell you where the fat is. Your waistline does. The practical reference is that your waist circumference should be less than half your height. If you are 1.80 m tall, it should be below 90 cm.

Measure yourself with a tape measure at the navel, without sucking in your gut, and write down the number. Repeat it once a month. Data rules.

Your 1% improvement for today. Compound interest that adds up.

After your largest meal of the day, walk for 10 minutes, with no special pace. Moving muscle captures glucose from the blood and reduces the spike left by the meal. It is exactly the opposite of the post-meal sitting in an official office.
 

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