I do think you, if anything, understate what proportion of the harm is done by that top 1%, it's really the vast majority. That 1% also tends to be poor and dysfunctional, which is why alcohol taxes are so good. Specifically, we want a tax *per unit* of alcohol, to discourage the very heavy drinkers.
This concentration of damages in the most dysfunctional members of society also, therefore, overstates how much social influence anyone reading this piece is likely to have. The local drunks in the park do not give a damn about my values or my example, because I'm not in their reference set.
This is importantly different than the example of meat, where
1) Each incremental meat purchase is clearly harmful
2) There are meat eaters in my social circle who are influenced by my example
3) The vast majority of meat eaters eat meat from factory farms (so are in the 'problematic' category that only a small minority of drinkers are in).
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that; your cultural impact isn’t quite as straightforward and direct as you seem to be imagining.
The idea isn’t that drunks in the park are going to see you happily sober and put down the can, but that over years and decades, fewer and fewer people drinking will lead to fewer and fewer people drinking, and 50 years from now there will be significantly fewer drunks in the park in the first place (this is also a vast oversimplification, but adds back in enough detail to illustrate a more plausible mechanism).
I don’t think we will ever get alcohol less socially acceptable than something like heroin, and there are still plenty of heroin addicts. Even over fifty years I don’t think there’s a path from my behavior to affecting the worst 1% of users. But I also don’t necessarily think it’s true that the worst 1% of users cause the vast majority of the harm, especially if you put more weight on the harm drinkers cause to others than what they cause to themselves. There are too many drunk drivers and partner abusers for them all to come from the one percent. And the behavior of normal people probably can affect those users.
The thing is, I'm not sure an alcohol tax puts off the heaviest drinkers, because they are chemical addicts. They are not following the same decision-making processes over personal spending as the rest of us, because the chemical has hijacked their brain to make getting their next hit the only thing they care about. The evidence I've seen is that minimum unit pricing largely serves to impoverish alcoholics rather than making them cut back.
I think you’re ignoring or dismissive of the benefits of alcohol, which may be quite large.
In personal relationships, alcohol does a great deal to relax people and lower boundaries. This is often very positive, leading to friendship, romance, and generally having a good time. You could argue that we should be able to get by without that liquid encouragement, but it is baked into our culture and there is no ready replacement.
At work, drinking similarly lowers inhibitions and allows coworkers and bosses to open up in a way that they simply would not otherwise. Again, ideally we would not need this, but in practice the best way to get the real scoop on what people at your company think is to share a few drinks and spill some tea together.
I do agree that raising the taxes on alcohol substantially would probably be a good idea. The first two drinks have a lot of utility that the next six probably don’t.
The social benefits typically occur out of the house. You could get a lot of mileage out of taxing liquor stores at a far higher rate than bars to discourage day drinking and drinking on your own I suspect. That could move us toward a happier medium.
Also a very good point. Although, a lot of alcohol bought at liquor stores is consumed in good company too. I'm certainly down for focusing higher alcohol taxes on liquor stores - maybe you could get some mileage out taxing the bottom shelf stuff the most, on top of that. Probably don't need to make a $50 bottle of scotch more expensive, but that $15 handle of "brandy" is probably not societally good.
Scotland, for one example, imposes a minimum per unit price, so the nicer and more expensive stuff is unaffected because it’s already over that price. It just raises the price of things that were previously the most price-efficient ways to get drunk.
Its introduction was a bit of an apocalypse for me and my friends as students at the time, but it is a simpler way of achieving the effect of your ‘tax the bottom shelf’ idea, with fewer logistical difficulties.
I think a flat per unit tax is an easy to administer solution to this. As the bottle gets more expensive, the tax becomes a smaller proportion of the overall cost. Your hypothetical 750ml bottle of Brandy has 16.6 shots in it with 1 unit of alcohol per shot, if we tax at $0.30 per unit we add $5 to both the high end bottle and the low end one. Higher proof liquor gets a higher tax, and it’s easy to apply to other forms of liquor, too, just figure out how many units of alcohol are in each container.
This is a great article but its so hard to calculate the nonlinear positive effects. I love the article but alcohol is how I met my wife and maybe my kids don’t exist if I follow this? Or something just as fine happens and one shouldn’t over think it when you laid out the known harm so well. I genuinely don’t know.
Have you read Ed Slingerland's Drunk by any chance? I'm not sure what to think about the subject but he seems to be the most serious proponent of alcohol out there
This is the biggest problem with not tallying up the benefits in the other side of the ledger. There are literally tens of millions of marriages that exist bc of alcohol, because it lowered initial approach anxiety and out people in a more open and friendly mood when meeting. I'd warrant hundreds of millions of babies exist that would not, if their parents hadn't had liquid courage when they met. The number of friendships created and cemented bc of alcohol is so vast I can't imagine how you'd quantify it. Then there are the reduced conflicts and frictions with families, the business deals that get sealed, etc. There's a reason that per-country alcohol consumption is so strongly correlated with GDP...alcohol is a social lubricant that helps relationships happen and solidify.
I say this as someone who cannot have more than one drink per day bc if I do I get a raging headache. And who had one previous relationship completely blow up because of severe alcoholism and an individual who sadly ruined their life. But that's one person, compared to the dozens and dozens of friendships, business contacts, and romantic relationships I've had in my life that have been facilitated by alcohol to get over initial awkwardness and create a warmer and more open psychological state for bonding. It's not a fair analysis without a full accounting on both sides of the ledger.
I take this objection super seriously. I guess I just don't see many issues coming up in cultures that don't drink as much. I'm curious about how much of alcohol's social lubricant effects would just be replaced by other social practices.
Which cultures? You mean like Afghanistan?? 😉 I think MOST cultures with no drinking at all are actually quite terrible and awful. I give an exception to the Mormons, but teetotalers are usually harsher people with extreme social hierarchy. That's actually another plus in alcohol's favor...it gives the underdogs the courage to rebel a bit against those above them. The first thing most tyrants want to do is ban alcohol, because of this. Interestestingly, our current president has famously never had a single drink.
I mean 3 out of 4 of our last Presidents were teetotalers! Obama was the only President who drank in the 21st century. I'd be interested in actual stats on this, again very open to being wrong here. I'm not sure how much of this pattern is only because people enjoy drinking and the only places that outright ban it right now are otherwise hyper authoritarian and religious.
I'm surprised to read several comments extolling the social benefits of alcohol consumption. I thought the main idea here would be a slam dunk.
Yes, it's a social norm, it can help lowering inhibitions... but:
1) Replacing alcohol consumption with innocuous social habits would not require a Manhattan project, only social will and experimentation.
2) I personally know many people (and I feel that way myself quite often) that alcohol consumption makes feel out-of-place and prefer to clam up, not open up. This norm is pretty much imposed on (I suppose?) many people who just don't enjoy it (think: it's tough to meet people in universities, neighborhoods and even firms without attending alcohol-heavy parties and culture).
I suppose aggregating the good and the bad in these less obvious situations is challenging, so Arbituram is probably right that we might want to focus on the 1% unambiguously, critically bad outcomes from alcohol -the case is strong enough with this.
I don't think of it as lowering social inhibitions. I think of it as making friends, and getting to know existing friends better.
All my very good friends — people who have been friends for thirty years or more — are friends that I used to go to the pub with a lot. I don't have a single friend now who didn’t come drink with me in the past.
Similarly, I just came to a new city. I’ve made plenty of new friends and I met them at the pub. They call me and say “Wanna go to the pub?”. By contrast, my adult children who don’t drink, have made no friends. They go to coffee shops, but they never make friends there. They drink alone.
So, for me, it’s not about lowering inhibitions, it’s about meeting people and making friends.
Even being out of the corporate world for almost 2 years I am still blown away at the sheer number of people who would drink dangerously and excessively in company time during conferences and offsite because alcohol was so normalized.
The last training of every day during a conference had a joke about getting to the bar, and each day starts off with a joke about bad hangovers and somehow barely functioning.
Scary to think how many people are likely harmed by this, me included.
I'm not sure I buy the Minecraft analogy. In that scenario, sure, I wouldn't play Minecraft – I would just play a different video game. But alcohol isn't easily substitutable in that way. If the situation was "Video games in general are killing 140,000 Americans every year," I would still play video games!
Great post, thanks for writing! As a beer-loving Belgian who personally loves the low prices here, I reluctantly agree that it would be better for society if it were taxed much higher.
This was interesting to read, and I appreciate your attempting to keep a more objective position in your analysis. Personally, I've never been a drinker and never gotten drunk... but I grew up around a lot of people struggling with it, and I've never understood the appeal, considering the very real dangers and bad consequences of drinking (both the first hand and second hand).
Ok, so it loosens people up a bit socially. Is that really worth all the possible results on the extreme bad end of the spectrum? I don't think so. I think even people who are or may make apology for alcohol here in your comments, are being a little dishonest with themselves in the face of overwhelming facts that alcohol is a net negative for humanity. Always has been, always will be. Pretending that it's good for helping people socialize (instead of, I don't know, dealing with discomfort like a grown up?) in equal measure with the amount of destruction it causes (interpersonal violence, DUIs, disease) is extremely silly, to me.
Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts here and I think I basically agree. It kind of sickens me to think of how some people are locked up for years because they got caught with some mushrooms or weed, but alcohol is advertised in commercials and on huge billboards everywhere here in the US, at least.
There might be very real dangers and (potentially) bad consequences from drinking, but I never experienced those. Drinking alcohol has been, without a doubt, a net positive for me.
The article makes a powerful argument that we should all give up alcohol to save the vulnerable in society from problems. It might even be correct. And maybe alcohol is a net negative for humanity, as you say. But it wasn’t a net negative for me. It has always been an effective way to make new friends and to strengthen the bonds with the friends I already have.
The way that you characterise those of us who enjoy alcohol is either mistaken or dishonest.
And I'm sure there are plenty of anecdotal examples of people who, like yourself, consider it a positive thing... The original poster said similar. I think you probably could've met those same people and bonded just as much (maybe more) without alcohol, if you wanted to. The feelings were there, you could (in theory) have expressed any of that without alcohol, too. It seems to me like you're giving too much credit to the substance to defend it. But whether you are or aren't, I think that's a fair point. It hasn't been a bad thing for you, that's good.
The fact still remains that thousands (not a couple thousand, but hundreds of thousands) of people die from effects of alcohol every year. I don't know exact numbers here, and I don't know if that just means from diseases or DUI crashes or whatever else, feel free to research that for yourself, but I know it's a fuckload and in general, from my own personal experience, it just doesn't seem to me like alcohol should be taken as lightly or generally encouraged, as it currently is. I'm really only commenting on the ratio of societal encouragement and ease of access, to how obviously bad for humans and humanity it's been, historically.
Also just to be clear I don't support prohibition or anything like that, or even stopping alcohol companies from advertising. But I'm talking from an almost anthropological point of view, it doesn't make sense for a species to pretend something is "good" for us when there are centuries of evidence indicating it isn't.
> people who are or may make apology for alcohol here in your comments, are being a little dishonest with themselves
We may, in the future, invent some other social convention that helps us to bond and brings such joy, but we don’t have one yet in my country. Alcohol will have to do for now. Fortunately, it tastes good.
Try this on as an analogy: Google tells me that 2.8 million people die each year from obesity related diseases each year (31,000 in my country). Which foods should we consider giving up to discourage other people from becoming obese?
I think there are a lot of foods like that. Do you think people shouldn't eat healthy (if they want to be healthy)? Lol, sorry, I think I'm missing your point with that. I mean, I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm pretty sure too much sugar is bad, too much fat, sodium... I've heard "high calorie, overly processed," etc... Again I'm no expert of any kind but I think there's a bit more room for nuance with consumption related to food, versus alcohol. I do think people should probably eat healthier, since you asked. Again, I don't think things need to be against a law or anything, I just don't understand why some things are clearly detrimental to society but still generally encouraged, very uncritically. Based on what you've said to me, I assume you would encourage your own kids to drink, right? That's fine with me. I wouldn't. And I wouldn't try to stop them if they decided to, but I wouldn't encourage it. Like I said, I think it's a net negative and statistically not worth getting into in the first place.
If we were friends and you were clearly making yourself sick eating nothing but Twinkies and chips and soda, and expressed that you wanted to be healthier, then I'd encourage you to stop eating that shit and get healthier. I don't think Twinkies and soda are things that should be encouraged just because people like them and they're legal, either.
The point about alcohol taxes is an interesting one, but misses something huge: “vice taxes” disproportionately affect the poor and working class. Vices (cigarettes, alcohol, lottery, etc) are more prevalent among the poor in general, because they appeal to people who feel hopeless and helpless. The college professor who drinks a glass of wine with dinner every now and then and smokes a cigar with the Provost at the monthly get-together is barely affected by the taxes. The destitute, borderline-homeless guy with undiagnosed mental illness and no high school diploma is going to spend not only numerically, but proportionally more on vice taxes because he’s self-medicating for his hopelessness. So if your goal is to extract more tax revenues from the poor and continue to worsen their economic prospects, by all means, raise those vice taxes.
I mean this is true of most things in society no? Rich people have more resources to get around barriers to stuff. Seems like we still need to try to put some barriers up
Yeah if we can't do something because it will hit the poor worse then we can't do anything. Negative heath outcomes also affect the poor more so encouraging poor folk to not smoke via tax policy is still good.
I would imagine that in the short term, it would be very crappy for poor people, but it would likely have a positive effect on younger people who haven't yet gone down that path. When I was at uni/college, the drinking culture was crazy and the alcohol was cheap, so people just did it. If the alcohol was significantly more expensive, it would probably put off a lot of these drinkers. It could also help prevent people getting to a point where they are drinking alcoholic-levels in the first place because they don't have so much opportunity to develop an addiction. For sure though, any tax should be accompanied with better support programmes for existing drinkers. (Then the taxes could maybe even serve as a push-factor for some to recover).
Plausible, although I'm sceptical that merely personally abstaining from alcohol has marginal effects. I think there's a stronger case that individuals should vocally not drink alcohol to try to start a norm shift. I don't expect to see a norm shift just from not drinking, but this is a much more costly action to take than just not drinking.
The other argument is that you're making alcohol cheaper for people at risk from alcohol by drinking. I think this is only true if the long run average cost curve for acohol production is continuously downward sloping. Given that we have small alcohol suppliers, I suspect that that isn't the case, although I can't be sure (although I don't expect that R&D is a significant input for alcohol companies.) I don't think your 1/38 case goes through - just intuitively it seems like alcohol companies will be able to sell their product at around the same price if alcohol consumption dropped by half.
My guess is that if one's in a social group with people who are at risk of significant harm from alcohol it could make sense to publicly stop drinking, and when one is in the position to set policy in some sense one should set it against acohol - e.g don't organise social events around alcohol consumption.
I really appreciate this piece, and the way you frame the issue not as one of individual consumption, but collective responsibility in the face of something that simply destroys and ruins lives.
What, at the end of the day, do we owe each other?
Anecdotally, but from a lot of sources, kids these days are drinking less. My university professor friends tell me that. I see it with my own children and their friends. Kids are just not drinking or partying like they did when I was in university. And those who do, binge drink less. There’s less peer pressure to “get wasted”.
Mostly this is a good thing. But kids these days are also more anxious, less social, and don’t know how to interact in large groups as well. I think this is related.
Maybe there aren't enough good alternatives to drinking/clubbing culture yet? (As well as there probably being a lingering effect on those who experienced their normally social teenage years during the pandemic).
I would have loved non-drinking related activities when I was at uni because I actually hated it, but those were pretty much the only options available at the uni I went to, so I went and did the getting drunk thing.
Perhaps (hopefully) we are only in early days of this shift away from drinking and the young ones will be able to define a whole new 'freshers'/student culture.
They are always aware of being on camera. That’s why they have that weird robotic affect. They can’t drink much because they might end up going viral looking like an ass. Anecdotally the zoomers I know who drink do so in private.
A huge issue. Do you have a best guess as to how great a negative externality the marginal drinker produces?
Relatedly, some actions around alcohol seem especially bad on the margin (e.g. posting positively about alcohol consumption on social media, introducing alcohol to environments/occasions where it wasn't already). More ceremonial consumption seems quite fine (e.g. drinking a toast at a wedding or special occasion, or communion wine at church).
Really no idea, I haven't done as deep of a dive. I find that the super basic negative stats are enough to change people's behavior. Definitely agree that the ceremonial consumption seems fine and that the main concerning stuff is on the margin. I think I've actually had a moderate effect on the behavior of people around me just by not drinking.
Whenever I say I never drink alcohol (and advice other's to do the same) older dutch people always call me a "blauwe knoop"(blue knot), which was (apparently) a very popular abstinence movement in the olden days which has almost fully disappeared. Google tells me something similar happened in the US with the "blue ribbon" movement, so maybe that's a symbol/movement that can be revived.
Completely agree with this post as someone who’s sober and I really appreciate the perspective of mindful engagement with alcohol to benefit other people. So many people don’t ever consider that side of it.
I do think you, if anything, understate what proportion of the harm is done by that top 1%, it's really the vast majority. That 1% also tends to be poor and dysfunctional, which is why alcohol taxes are so good. Specifically, we want a tax *per unit* of alcohol, to discourage the very heavy drinkers.
This concentration of damages in the most dysfunctional members of society also, therefore, overstates how much social influence anyone reading this piece is likely to have. The local drunks in the park do not give a damn about my values or my example, because I'm not in their reference set.
This is importantly different than the example of meat, where
1) Each incremental meat purchase is clearly harmful
2) There are meat eaters in my social circle who are influenced by my example
3) The vast majority of meat eaters eat meat from factory farms (so are in the 'problematic' category that only a small minority of drinkers are in).
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that; your cultural impact isn’t quite as straightforward and direct as you seem to be imagining.
The idea isn’t that drunks in the park are going to see you happily sober and put down the can, but that over years and decades, fewer and fewer people drinking will lead to fewer and fewer people drinking, and 50 years from now there will be significantly fewer drunks in the park in the first place (this is also a vast oversimplification, but adds back in enough detail to illustrate a more plausible mechanism).
I don’t think we will ever get alcohol less socially acceptable than something like heroin, and there are still plenty of heroin addicts. Even over fifty years I don’t think there’s a path from my behavior to affecting the worst 1% of users. But I also don’t necessarily think it’s true that the worst 1% of users cause the vast majority of the harm, especially if you put more weight on the harm drinkers cause to others than what they cause to themselves. There are too many drunk drivers and partner abusers for them all to come from the one percent. And the behavior of normal people probably can affect those users.
The thing is, I'm not sure an alcohol tax puts off the heaviest drinkers, because they are chemical addicts. They are not following the same decision-making processes over personal spending as the rest of us, because the chemical has hijacked their brain to make getting their next hit the only thing they care about. The evidence I've seen is that minimum unit pricing largely serves to impoverish alcoholics rather than making them cut back.
I think you’re ignoring or dismissive of the benefits of alcohol, which may be quite large.
In personal relationships, alcohol does a great deal to relax people and lower boundaries. This is often very positive, leading to friendship, romance, and generally having a good time. You could argue that we should be able to get by without that liquid encouragement, but it is baked into our culture and there is no ready replacement.
At work, drinking similarly lowers inhibitions and allows coworkers and bosses to open up in a way that they simply would not otherwise. Again, ideally we would not need this, but in practice the best way to get the real scoop on what people at your company think is to share a few drinks and spill some tea together.
Yup I worry I'm getting this one wrong, I'm pretty uncertain here.
I do agree that raising the taxes on alcohol substantially would probably be a good idea. The first two drinks have a lot of utility that the next six probably don’t.
The social benefits typically occur out of the house. You could get a lot of mileage out of taxing liquor stores at a far higher rate than bars to discourage day drinking and drinking on your own I suspect. That could move us toward a happier medium.
Also a very good point. Although, a lot of alcohol bought at liquor stores is consumed in good company too. I'm certainly down for focusing higher alcohol taxes on liquor stores - maybe you could get some mileage out taxing the bottom shelf stuff the most, on top of that. Probably don't need to make a $50 bottle of scotch more expensive, but that $15 handle of "brandy" is probably not societally good.
Scotland, for one example, imposes a minimum per unit price, so the nicer and more expensive stuff is unaffected because it’s already over that price. It just raises the price of things that were previously the most price-efficient ways to get drunk.
Its introduction was a bit of an apocalypse for me and my friends as students at the time, but it is a simpler way of achieving the effect of your ‘tax the bottom shelf’ idea, with fewer logistical difficulties.
I think a flat per unit tax is an easy to administer solution to this. As the bottle gets more expensive, the tax becomes a smaller proportion of the overall cost. Your hypothetical 750ml bottle of Brandy has 16.6 shots in it with 1 unit of alcohol per shot, if we tax at $0.30 per unit we add $5 to both the high end bottle and the low end one. Higher proof liquor gets a higher tax, and it’s easy to apply to other forms of liquor, too, just figure out how many units of alcohol are in each container.
This is a great article but its so hard to calculate the nonlinear positive effects. I love the article but alcohol is how I met my wife and maybe my kids don’t exist if I follow this? Or something just as fine happens and one shouldn’t over think it when you laid out the known harm so well. I genuinely don’t know.
I’m kind of in the dark! This is one of the things I’m most uncertain about
Have you read Ed Slingerland's Drunk by any chance? I'm not sure what to think about the subject but he seems to be the most serious proponent of alcohol out there
Will look at it!
This is the biggest problem with not tallying up the benefits in the other side of the ledger. There are literally tens of millions of marriages that exist bc of alcohol, because it lowered initial approach anxiety and out people in a more open and friendly mood when meeting. I'd warrant hundreds of millions of babies exist that would not, if their parents hadn't had liquid courage when they met. The number of friendships created and cemented bc of alcohol is so vast I can't imagine how you'd quantify it. Then there are the reduced conflicts and frictions with families, the business deals that get sealed, etc. There's a reason that per-country alcohol consumption is so strongly correlated with GDP...alcohol is a social lubricant that helps relationships happen and solidify.
I say this as someone who cannot have more than one drink per day bc if I do I get a raging headache. And who had one previous relationship completely blow up because of severe alcoholism and an individual who sadly ruined their life. But that's one person, compared to the dozens and dozens of friendships, business contacts, and romantic relationships I've had in my life that have been facilitated by alcohol to get over initial awkwardness and create a warmer and more open psychological state for bonding. It's not a fair analysis without a full accounting on both sides of the ledger.
I take this objection super seriously. I guess I just don't see many issues coming up in cultures that don't drink as much. I'm curious about how much of alcohol's social lubricant effects would just be replaced by other social practices.
Which cultures? You mean like Afghanistan?? 😉 I think MOST cultures with no drinking at all are actually quite terrible and awful. I give an exception to the Mormons, but teetotalers are usually harsher people with extreme social hierarchy. That's actually another plus in alcohol's favor...it gives the underdogs the courage to rebel a bit against those above them. The first thing most tyrants want to do is ban alcohol, because of this. Interestestingly, our current president has famously never had a single drink.
I mean 3 out of 4 of our last Presidents were teetotalers! Obama was the only President who drank in the 21st century. I'd be interested in actual stats on this, again very open to being wrong here. I'm not sure how much of this pattern is only because people enjoy drinking and the only places that outright ban it right now are otherwise hyper authoritarian and religious.
I'm surprised to read several comments extolling the social benefits of alcohol consumption. I thought the main idea here would be a slam dunk.
Yes, it's a social norm, it can help lowering inhibitions... but:
1) Replacing alcohol consumption with innocuous social habits would not require a Manhattan project, only social will and experimentation.
2) I personally know many people (and I feel that way myself quite often) that alcohol consumption makes feel out-of-place and prefer to clam up, not open up. This norm is pretty much imposed on (I suppose?) many people who just don't enjoy it (think: it's tough to meet people in universities, neighborhoods and even firms without attending alcohol-heavy parties and culture).
I suppose aggregating the good and the bad in these less obvious situations is challenging, so Arbituram is probably right that we might want to focus on the 1% unambiguously, critically bad outcomes from alcohol -the case is strong enough with this.
I don't think of it as lowering social inhibitions. I think of it as making friends, and getting to know existing friends better.
All my very good friends — people who have been friends for thirty years or more — are friends that I used to go to the pub with a lot. I don't have a single friend now who didn’t come drink with me in the past.
Similarly, I just came to a new city. I’ve made plenty of new friends and I met them at the pub. They call me and say “Wanna go to the pub?”. By contrast, my adult children who don’t drink, have made no friends. They go to coffee shops, but they never make friends there. They drink alone.
So, for me, it’s not about lowering inhibitions, it’s about meeting people and making friends.
Even being out of the corporate world for almost 2 years I am still blown away at the sheer number of people who would drink dangerously and excessively in company time during conferences and offsite because alcohol was so normalized.
The last training of every day during a conference had a joke about getting to the bar, and each day starts off with a joke about bad hangovers and somehow barely functioning.
Scary to think how many people are likely harmed by this, me included.
I'm not sure I buy the Minecraft analogy. In that scenario, sure, I wouldn't play Minecraft – I would just play a different video game. But alcohol isn't easily substitutable in that way. If the situation was "Video games in general are killing 140,000 Americans every year," I would still play video games!
Good point! It's been a while and I should probably rethink a lot of arguments here.
Great post, thanks for writing! As a beer-loving Belgian who personally loves the low prices here, I reluctantly agree that it would be better for society if it were taxed much higher.
This was interesting to read, and I appreciate your attempting to keep a more objective position in your analysis. Personally, I've never been a drinker and never gotten drunk... but I grew up around a lot of people struggling with it, and I've never understood the appeal, considering the very real dangers and bad consequences of drinking (both the first hand and second hand).
Ok, so it loosens people up a bit socially. Is that really worth all the possible results on the extreme bad end of the spectrum? I don't think so. I think even people who are or may make apology for alcohol here in your comments, are being a little dishonest with themselves in the face of overwhelming facts that alcohol is a net negative for humanity. Always has been, always will be. Pretending that it's good for helping people socialize (instead of, I don't know, dealing with discomfort like a grown up?) in equal measure with the amount of destruction it causes (interpersonal violence, DUIs, disease) is extremely silly, to me.
Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts here and I think I basically agree. It kind of sickens me to think of how some people are locked up for years because they got caught with some mushrooms or weed, but alcohol is advertised in commercials and on huge billboards everywhere here in the US, at least.
There might be very real dangers and (potentially) bad consequences from drinking, but I never experienced those. Drinking alcohol has been, without a doubt, a net positive for me.
The article makes a powerful argument that we should all give up alcohol to save the vulnerable in society from problems. It might even be correct. And maybe alcohol is a net negative for humanity, as you say. But it wasn’t a net negative for me. It has always been an effective way to make new friends and to strengthen the bonds with the friends I already have.
The way that you characterise those of us who enjoy alcohol is either mistaken or dishonest.
And I'm sure there are plenty of anecdotal examples of people who, like yourself, consider it a positive thing... The original poster said similar. I think you probably could've met those same people and bonded just as much (maybe more) without alcohol, if you wanted to. The feelings were there, you could (in theory) have expressed any of that without alcohol, too. It seems to me like you're giving too much credit to the substance to defend it. But whether you are or aren't, I think that's a fair point. It hasn't been a bad thing for you, that's good.
The fact still remains that thousands (not a couple thousand, but hundreds of thousands) of people die from effects of alcohol every year. I don't know exact numbers here, and I don't know if that just means from diseases or DUI crashes or whatever else, feel free to research that for yourself, but I know it's a fuckload and in general, from my own personal experience, it just doesn't seem to me like alcohol should be taken as lightly or generally encouraged, as it currently is. I'm really only commenting on the ratio of societal encouragement and ease of access, to how obviously bad for humans and humanity it's been, historically.
Also just to be clear I don't support prohibition or anything like that, or even stopping alcohol companies from advertising. But I'm talking from an almost anthropological point of view, it doesn't make sense for a species to pretend something is "good" for us when there are centuries of evidence indicating it isn't.
I was responding to your remark that…
> people who are or may make apology for alcohol here in your comments, are being a little dishonest with themselves
We may, in the future, invent some other social convention that helps us to bond and brings such joy, but we don’t have one yet in my country. Alcohol will have to do for now. Fortunately, it tastes good.
Try this on as an analogy: Google tells me that 2.8 million people die each year from obesity related diseases each year (31,000 in my country). Which foods should we consider giving up to discourage other people from becoming obese?
I think there are a lot of foods like that. Do you think people shouldn't eat healthy (if they want to be healthy)? Lol, sorry, I think I'm missing your point with that. I mean, I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm pretty sure too much sugar is bad, too much fat, sodium... I've heard "high calorie, overly processed," etc... Again I'm no expert of any kind but I think there's a bit more room for nuance with consumption related to food, versus alcohol. I do think people should probably eat healthier, since you asked. Again, I don't think things need to be against a law or anything, I just don't understand why some things are clearly detrimental to society but still generally encouraged, very uncritically. Based on what you've said to me, I assume you would encourage your own kids to drink, right? That's fine with me. I wouldn't. And I wouldn't try to stop them if they decided to, but I wouldn't encourage it. Like I said, I think it's a net negative and statistically not worth getting into in the first place.
The point is that I shouldn’t be discouraged from eating the foods I enjoy because other people eat too much.
If we were friends and you were clearly making yourself sick eating nothing but Twinkies and chips and soda, and expressed that you wanted to be healthier, then I'd encourage you to stop eating that shit and get healthier. I don't think Twinkies and soda are things that should be encouraged just because people like them and they're legal, either.
I thought your article was powerful and balanced. I don’t think you characterised people who drink alcohol negatively. I was responding to B. Kwax.
Completely misread, sorry!
No worries!
The point about alcohol taxes is an interesting one, but misses something huge: “vice taxes” disproportionately affect the poor and working class. Vices (cigarettes, alcohol, lottery, etc) are more prevalent among the poor in general, because they appeal to people who feel hopeless and helpless. The college professor who drinks a glass of wine with dinner every now and then and smokes a cigar with the Provost at the monthly get-together is barely affected by the taxes. The destitute, borderline-homeless guy with undiagnosed mental illness and no high school diploma is going to spend not only numerically, but proportionally more on vice taxes because he’s self-medicating for his hopelessness. So if your goal is to extract more tax revenues from the poor and continue to worsen their economic prospects, by all means, raise those vice taxes.
I mean this is true of most things in society no? Rich people have more resources to get around barriers to stuff. Seems like we still need to try to put some barriers up
Yeah if we can't do something because it will hit the poor worse then we can't do anything. Negative heath outcomes also affect the poor more so encouraging poor folk to not smoke via tax policy is still good.
I would imagine that in the short term, it would be very crappy for poor people, but it would likely have a positive effect on younger people who haven't yet gone down that path. When I was at uni/college, the drinking culture was crazy and the alcohol was cheap, so people just did it. If the alcohol was significantly more expensive, it would probably put off a lot of these drinkers. It could also help prevent people getting to a point where they are drinking alcoholic-levels in the first place because they don't have so much opportunity to develop an addiction. For sure though, any tax should be accompanied with better support programmes for existing drinkers. (Then the taxes could maybe even serve as a push-factor for some to recover).
Plausible, although I'm sceptical that merely personally abstaining from alcohol has marginal effects. I think there's a stronger case that individuals should vocally not drink alcohol to try to start a norm shift. I don't expect to see a norm shift just from not drinking, but this is a much more costly action to take than just not drinking.
The other argument is that you're making alcohol cheaper for people at risk from alcohol by drinking. I think this is only true if the long run average cost curve for acohol production is continuously downward sloping. Given that we have small alcohol suppliers, I suspect that that isn't the case, although I can't be sure (although I don't expect that R&D is a significant input for alcohol companies.) I don't think your 1/38 case goes through - just intuitively it seems like alcohol companies will be able to sell their product at around the same price if alcohol consumption dropped by half.
My guess is that if one's in a social group with people who are at risk of significant harm from alcohol it could make sense to publicly stop drinking, and when one is in the position to set policy in some sense one should set it against acohol - e.g don't organise social events around alcohol consumption.
I really appreciate this piece, and the way you frame the issue not as one of individual consumption, but collective responsibility in the face of something that simply destroys and ruins lives.
What, at the end of the day, do we owe each other?
Anecdotally, but from a lot of sources, kids these days are drinking less. My university professor friends tell me that. I see it with my own children and their friends. Kids are just not drinking or partying like they did when I was in university. And those who do, binge drink less. There’s less peer pressure to “get wasted”.
Mostly this is a good thing. But kids these days are also more anxious, less social, and don’t know how to interact in large groups as well. I think this is related.
Maybe there aren't enough good alternatives to drinking/clubbing culture yet? (As well as there probably being a lingering effect on those who experienced their normally social teenage years during the pandemic).
I would have loved non-drinking related activities when I was at uni because I actually hated it, but those were pretty much the only options available at the uni I went to, so I went and did the getting drunk thing.
Perhaps (hopefully) we are only in early days of this shift away from drinking and the young ones will be able to define a whole new 'freshers'/student culture.
They are always aware of being on camera. That’s why they have that weird robotic affect. They can’t drink much because they might end up going viral looking like an ass. Anecdotally the zoomers I know who drink do so in private.
A huge issue. Do you have a best guess as to how great a negative externality the marginal drinker produces?
Relatedly, some actions around alcohol seem especially bad on the margin (e.g. posting positively about alcohol consumption on social media, introducing alcohol to environments/occasions where it wasn't already). More ceremonial consumption seems quite fine (e.g. drinking a toast at a wedding or special occasion, or communion wine at church).
Really no idea, I haven't done as deep of a dive. I find that the super basic negative stats are enough to change people's behavior. Definitely agree that the ceremonial consumption seems fine and that the main concerning stuff is on the margin. I think I've actually had a moderate effect on the behavior of people around me just by not drinking.
Whenever I say I never drink alcohol (and advice other's to do the same) older dutch people always call me a "blauwe knoop"(blue knot), which was (apparently) a very popular abstinence movement in the olden days which has almost fully disappeared. Google tells me something similar happened in the US with the "blue ribbon" movement, so maybe that's a symbol/movement that can be revived.
"Teetotal" is maybe the single lamest sounding title ever so I'd really like another word for it
Completely agree with this post as someone who’s sober and I really appreciate the perspective of mindful engagement with alcohol to benefit other people. So many people don’t ever consider that side of it.
People are indeed drinking less and less alcohol. Stats show that.
I recommend you all watch the Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition, we did this thing barely 100 years ago.
I'm not advocating for alcohol to be illegal!