http://fistfulofeuros.net/afem/economics/alcohol-consumption-pro-cyclical/ European Opinion Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:10:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 http://fistfulofeuros.net/afem/economics/alcohol-consumption-pro-cyclical/#comment-1596 teme Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:04:19 +0000 http://fistfulofeuros.net/wordpress/?p=1949#comment-1596 For alcoholism to develop to the point of threat to life takes years, even decades, so I would be suprised if there were a correlation to business cycles... There is a tradition of looking at correlations between total consumption of alcohol and associated harms in Finnish alcohol studies, which is partly political: researches advocate policy of keeping alcohol price high and supply limited. I'm not getting into whether it is a good policy or not here, I have my doubts, but I am fairly certain that it is not that useful framework for looking at the causes of alcoholism. There are the generally miserable: uneducated, poor, unemployed and drunk. Than there are middle-class alcoholics, for example a sales person whose client entertainment gets out of hand. There are mentally ill doing "self medication". There are teenagers, with typical teenager problems and drinking on top of that. And so on. I am extremely sceptical of macro level studies coming up with useful explanations for such a heteregenous phenomena. For alcoholism to develop to the point of threat to life takes years, even decades, so I would be suprised if there were a correlation to business cycles… There is a tradition of looking at correlations between total consumption of alcohol and associated harms in Finnish alcohol studies, which is partly political: researches advocate policy of keeping alcohol price high and supply limited. I’m not getting into whether it is a good policy or not here, I have my doubts, but I am fairly certain that it is not that useful framework for looking at the causes of alcoholism. There are the generally miserable: uneducated, poor, unemployed and drunk. Than there are middle-class alcoholics, for example a sales person whose client entertainment gets out of hand. There are mentally ill doing “self medication”. There are teenagers, with typical teenager problems and drinking on top of that. And so on. I am extremely sceptical of macro level studies coming up with useful explanations for such a heteregenous phenomena.

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