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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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While they're not currently a net positive financially, there's a lot of invisible societal gains even for thin people.

  1. Less fat people in general means a better looking world. You'll see less chubby kids with chubby parents while at the mall or the park or other public spaces and more attractive looking people. You'll have more hot women and men available for dating, no longer having to settle as much on looks for someone with a good personality match.

  2. Less fat people gives gains elsewhere like not ending up sitting next to a fat guy on a plane or being able to do physical activities with your formally fat friend. All sorts of little small annoyances and issues that will be alleviated by a thinner world.

  3. Resources can benefit even more from economy of scale when we can start assuming people are within a certain size range more often. For example clothing stores can offer larger selections in your size and not have to spend as much space on having XLs and XXLs and the like because the market demand for those will be much smaller.

  4. Your family and friends who are fat will be healthier and prettier and that's just a good thing too if you care about your family and friends.

And that's just on top of not currently a net positive financially. We might be able to improve on it more and get to the point where we have a world of thin hot people for cheap.

I would argue that all of these benefits (which I do not dispute) can be captured very well by the QALY/$ picture -- just add a term for quality of life effects on people other than the patient.

From a purely medical system costs picture, they are all externalities.

Still, from any non-terrible POV, GLP-1 drugs will at the latest be worth it at least when the patents run out and they can be sold for what it costs to produce them.