I recently attended an interesting presentation on the obesity epidemic, which used to be an American issue but is more and more becoming a global one. In Japan, for example, companies are required to measure their employees’ waistlines and companies face penalties if their workforce remains over the Japanese national guidelines (of 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women). This led me to wonder whether Japanese firms would try to fire (or decline to hire) people over those ...