My stance on alcohol
We should reduce the social status of alcohol yet this does not imply abstention
Bryan Johnson is yet again trending on X, revelling in his usual notoriety. It appears that only taking the edge off a hard day at work with a pint of your son's blood, as opposed to a refreshing hoppy beverage in a bucolic pub, is acceptable to him…
Here is my response, which (by my standards as someone in the early stages of developing as a public intellectual) was very popular:
“I was once receptive to this claim that all alcohol is unhealthy, yet the "science" linking these transitory signal peaks to accelerated ageing is confounded and p-hacked to death. You control for recovering alcoholics, and the J-curve often still holds.
As for the MR studies used to demonstrate a causal linear relationship between alcohol consumption vs longevity, they introduce nonlinear proxies to get results for moderation specifically; eliminating the very randomisation we wanted in the first place. @cjsnowdon often makes this point. Here's my conversation with Chat for more on this topic: chatgpt.com/share/69dfe7d4…
Teetotalers are simply gaslighting you [1]. The threat to our social and public life from this nascent temperance movement is perhaps one of our greatest threats to happiness.”
You can find the conversation with Chat here. Regular readers know why I ultimately retracted my longevity series. The harms of alcohol were always disproportionately concentrated in heavier consumption patterns. Needless to say, I think that teetotalers also alienate the very individuals they need to convince to cut down or go abstinent. Absolutist and extremist statements like these give the longevity industry a bad name, which is a shame as ageing is one of life's greatest and most ubiquitous of tragedies and suffering, and to say it's socially costly is an understatement.
When I was physically dependent on alcohol, if I was told I must go abstinent forever, I wouldn't have been motivated to address my addiction. I now drink 5-11 drinks (14-30 units) a week and am healthier than ever. Moderation works well for me. Perhaps for most it fails, yet for a large subset this strategy not only works but is arguably most effective given the less strenuous lifestyle changes. This is indeed consistent with a process of rational addiction whereby preferences change such that unstable consumption in equilibrium shifts to a stable steady-state over time.
However, I do agree with the notion that we should reduce the status of alcohol. Numerous arguments have been made against our drinking culture [2], and one can broadly summarise them via these 12 points (I also offer my counterarguments to stimulate the discussion):
Crime externalities. By some estimates (you can type in “alcohol” into the Marginal Revolution search function too), drunkenness is implicated in half of violent crimes. However antisocial drunks tend to be antisocial individuals which introduces some endogeneity via selection, and if you subscribe to heritability estimates north of 50% for most traits, then this isn't an issue easily fixed without decapitation or stark disincentives to crime. Nonetheless it's fair to say that being drunk does impair inhibition and decision making, which leads to my next point.
Cognition. Yes being drunk does make you stupider. This is prima facie common knowledge. Far more contentious is whether moderation impairs cognition, and there's yet to be reliable evidence of a linear relationship between cognitive decline in IQ vs alcohol consumption. My priors are that to the extent there is a linear relationship, alcohol likely impairs the frontal lobe (important for impulsivity and resisting temptation) and the amygdala first: consistent with increasing marginal utilities (certainly an abnormality!) under rational addiction. Anecdotally my cognition did not reflect my IQ when I was undergoing active addiction.
Health. Whilst I've just argued against a linear relationship, the effects of heavy drinking are stark. Cancer, liver disease, dementia, heart disease - these are just some of the chronic illness that heavy alcohol consumption is implicated in. Whilst we lack strict causal evidence for the link (except for cancer where acetaldehyde is a known carcinogen), this thesis isn't contested. Gout, death by asphyxiation, alcohol poisoning, accidents, brain and abdominal haemorrhages, Wernicke's, physical dependency, liver cirrhosis, blackouts, one-punch murders - these are just the implications of hard drinking that I can list off the top of my head! Mortality is higher when one accounts for suicide too, and my focus on the tangible and measurable physical health effects ignores the mental health costs, so in fact understates the tail risks.
Discounting. I've argued previously in favour of nonzero discounting, yet reducing your discount rate is one of the best means you can improve your life outcomes, and I can attest! Think of it as analogous to the returns to investing. It's not cost-free however, as the credibility of commitments demonstrates, so more virtuous lives must satisfy IC constraints to be feasible. This broadly constrains the extent to which abstinence as a norm is possible (at least in the West: in cultures that revolve around religious or kin-based social institutions, teetotalism does in fact seem to be the norm). Regardless, human capital determines lifetime wealth even in the Becker and Murphy model, so the more you can invest in this (and the less in costly substitutes given fixed time constraints) the better.
Embarrassment and hangovers. I needn't say more. An underrated benefit of moderation for me is that my credibility and reputation as a public intellectual has markedly improved: my former anonymous X account was a stain on my legacy. 4) and 5) in particular are why I'm always open to the idea of future sobriety, so I guess I'm still sober curious.
Markups. Booze cross subsidises hospitality and entertainment. A key argument in favour of our drinking culture yet drinkers pay a steep tax on eating out [3], and I like my meals too! Teetotalers that enjoy abstinence, rather than self-forcing themselves away [4], benefit from being free-riders.
Peer effects and spillovers. Although you cannot live in a free society that values individual responsibility if all decisions are made appealing to the lowest common denominator (which is where Masley's argument, and EA more broadly, is especially weak), there are valid distributional concerns regarding the centrality of alcohol to our social lives.
Suboptimal information aggregation. Tyler Cowen makes this prescient observation, which undermines the claim that drinking is necessary for socialisation. I suspect social anxiety, as a transaction cost to socialisation and matching, is more salient than he thinks. After a few rounds, I've noticed a tendency for conversations to descend into debates, where the usual tribal and signalling incentives hamper Aumann-style convergence to the optimal posterior.
One's lifetime probability of addiction, which is the most compelling reason to avoid drinking in my view. Alcohol use disorder affects roughly 1/10 British adults (according to Gemini). As 1/5 are teetotal, this gives a conditional probability of 1/8. For men, non-Muslims, and those not in Gen Z (where teetotalism is rapidly gaining in status), the risk is higher. Almost 1/3 men exceed the recommended limit of 14 units per week (admittedly myself included), so if you regularly binge drink on a weekend, your conditional probability can rise to almost 1/3. Simply put, you stand a good chance of developing a harmful habit if you drink regularly.
Endogenous preferences. So far I've treated utility functions as given, yet our social dynamics act as microfoundations for them. The externalities driven by the right-tail of alcohol consumption are arguably offset via the cross-subsidisation of hospitality, entertainment, and the arts. Economists refer to such norms and institutions as VCG mechanisms. Yet this is analogous to a value of θ=1 (unemployment=vacancies) in a DMP search model, yet v+u rises (Beveridge Curve shifting outwards). VCG mechanisms are endogenous to tastes, and changes in taste can raise welfare within a VCG. One could make the same arguments I've made against abstinence being IC (socially and individually) for smoking too, yet smoking rates have massively declined throughout the last half-century, due to tastes alone.
Drinking actively increases discount rates, consistent with the disinhibition. This impairs the effectiveness of pricing the externalities, although a social planner could just raise the price higher. Yet this reintroduces distributional and fairness concerns. Should we really lock up drunks for longer or stigmatise them more when those that can take alcohol or leave it can abandon the habit?
There does not exist a separating equilibrium. Suppose we have two types, “moderates” and “alcoholics”. Our agent is oblivious to their type ex-ante, and only learns ex-post. Ideally the “moderate” equilibrium will drink and the “alcoholics” abstain. Yet it's impossible for those entering the drinking culture to make an informed choice regarding their type. This is my main criticism of the Becker and Murphy model, and I would like to augment it with incomplete information and heterogeneity regarding the parameter encapsulating the exogenous drug effects.
What alcohol does have in its favour is the socialisation rituals. I think of our drinking culture as a focal point, especially in Britain where you can make friends simply by being a regular at your local pub. As most people enjoy drinking, our assumption that our friend or date will accept a meeting based on drink is well-calibrated. Substitutes tend to be riskier, especially in the initial stages of investing in social networks (which matter too for human capital). Again, another market-driven solution to textbook market failure. Whilst social media allows for more efficient matches via reducing the search costs to finding like-minded individuals, it can also act as an outside option to in-person socialisation. This is why, when you consider the general equilibrium, I do not blame social media for the decline in in-person socialisation noted by Derek Thompson. I wonder instead the extent to which declining drinking plays a role, although endogeneity is present (people drinking less because they're socialising less).
In any case, I'm weighting the instrumental utility of alcohol far too highly here, when for most drinking in a quaint bar or pub is immensely pleasurable in itself. We focus far too much on the measurable externalities, and less on the consumer surplus. The very fact that establishments (especially in London!) can set such high equilibrium markups in monopolistic competition is testament to the implicit utility gains of alcohol consumption. Our models and estimates of the social costs vs benefits of alcohol consumption must also incorporate the cross-subsidies to all of in-person social and public life, which is harder hence neglected in the literature.
Overall, my priors are hence that the social costs do not outweigh the private and social benefits. Our optimal drinking levels can of course be simply derived via our revealed preferences in a rational addiction model. Therefore our concern with drinking is reduced solely to the externalities [5]. On this front, it makes to consider alternative social norms to reduce, if not eliminate, the centrality of drinking to our lives. Here are some preliminary suggestions:
Sentia Gold - a fantastic substitute. In general most other substances appear to yield lower tail-risks and externalities, yet may be less amenable to socialisation. Cannabis on net reduces extroversion. Cocaine is often incompatible with dining, and arguably complements alcohol for some users.
The sober curious ecosystem. Unfortunately their sober meetups are not nearly as frequent as drinking events, and sober bars not nearly as accessible as pubs or bars. I went to one such event, and I left after half an hour. When the drink itself is the focal point, matches tend not to last. This sharply raises my belief in the hypothesis that the social anxiety search cost is a salient tax. Drink reduces this, agents interact and learn about the other's preferences, which elimimates the asymmetric information and allows more efficient matching.
Exploit peer effects. Set an example of the drinking habits you want to see. This is what I try to do.
Raise the social penalties for drink-fuelled externalities. Rational addiction implies more, not less, stigmatisation of addicts on the margin whilst penalising most vices a lot less. In general I see this as most conducive to human happiness and flourishing.
Give complete information. Treat people as adults. Do not stigmatise or judge, avoid the sanctimonious appeals to virtue, and drop the paternalism. Have we not learnt from the pandemic? Medical professionals are manipulating their patients with anything else. What I like about Tyler is thag he frames his advocacy of abstinence primarily as mentoring. Appeals to self-interest, as we are indeed selfish creatures, will likely go far.
Role models. Teetotalers have an image problem. Where are the fun teetotalers?
Outside options. Hencs Tyler’s emphasis on dining out: a somewhat Straussian rebellion on our drinking culture?
Raising fertility. An underrated cost of declining fertility is that virtue is less incentive-compatible. You socialise and party more. You take more risks [6]. With kids, you're forced into contemplating the future.
The education rat race. Although from a signalling standpoint this could be suboptimal, and it may negatively impact fertility (again endogeneity: does lower fertility mean parents invest more in education rather than such raising the costs of childbirth?), the returns to low discounting lifestyles relative to high discounting increase. In the time constraint, students allocate more hours to studying and less to partying.
Today’s reduced comsumption in itself. Rational addiction implies some degree of path dependency in alcohol consumption. Less individuals form habits with increasing returns. Less individuals are exposed to alcohol which reduces investment into consumption capital. More individuals having zero initial consumption makes addiction much less likely in the model.
One can conceptualise our questioning of the tradition of boozing, and burgeoning interest in alternatives, as reflective of a culture where low discounting is increasingly high-status. Higher life expectancies raise the returns to lower discounting. In large part, I think this explains the renewed interest in self-help philosophies revolving around this. Our attitudes to alcohol are already undergoing a paradigm shift, as perhaps exemplified by my post. A few years ago, even contemplating the very possibility of abstinence would be unthinkable on my part. Yet we won't sober up via deceiving drinkers on public health grounds. Bryan Johnson, and all those misrepresenting the health consequences of a single drink, are a liability to their cause.
Not all obviously yet certainly those claiming the highly uncertain and imprecise evidence is settled here.
It was actually when detoxing when I came across this profile of Tyler. Although I've participated in online economics discourse in some form since 2015, I never became a regular MR reader until then. I did recall when my Mum sent me this article that his Wikipedia mentioned he's teetotal. I decided I wanted to be like him, and this was what ultimately motivated me to address my addiction - even if I'm not abstinent (I've done a few trials; my longest period lasting a year), I've certainly gotten my act together! I discuss the role of role models later in the article, yet it's fair to say that Tyler, by showing it is possible to live a fulfilling life sober, deserves a lot of credit for my progress today. I'll always be grateful.
This is also an argument against state provision of public goods. Markets have designed norms and mechanisms that incentivise their production.
Standard rational choice theory makes no distinction at a given point in the time, yet the latter is clearly at high risk of (re)lapse, so one can introduce a dynamic game of commitment here.
To the extent that drinking harms human capital, I prefer endogenous growth models that incorporate diminishing marginal returns to all inputs, otherwise tradeoffs are simply destroyed by Parfit's regugnant conclusion.
Although the fact that more patience is correlated with increased risk-aversion is another complication.