Quote of the Day: On the social benefits of drinking

 

“The basic fact is that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way. There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate.”
~ Kingsly Amis, from his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

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Are you drinking enough? [updated]

 

Are you drinking enough? This is not a trivial question.

It used to be said that non-drinkers lived longer, although maybe without consuming Bacchus’s fine gift it just seems longer. Yet health researcher after health researcher is discovering that in general teetotallers actually do die younger, yet this now-established fact is still conspicuously absent from most “official” alcohol guidelines, which are generally written by wowsers instead of researchers.

Consider new British guidelines which, despite all the abundant new evidence,

still recommend that men cut back their drinking from 21 units per week to 14, the amount suggested for women. They also advise pregnant women, who had previously been told they could safely drink one or two units per week, to completely abstain. And, in a rather prophetic move, the new guidelines offer the same advice for women who ‘think they could become pregnant.’
    Fourteen units is the equivalent of about six pints of lager or seven glasses of wine. We were helpfully reminded of this by press reports, because normal people measure drinks in glasses or bottles, not in scientific units.

Very true. Although I do like to measure my own by the gallon.

Public-health bores want us to be afraid of alcohol. But this doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering the substantial amount of evidence that drinking in moderation has health benefits. It is what’s called a ‘J curve’: the risk of mortality is lower for people who drink moderately than for people who do not drink at all. The risk only starts to rise once drinking increases past a certain point; and you would have to consume a significant amount more than the weekly guidelines allow to reach the same risk of mortality as a teetotaller.

And you’d at least you’d be having more fun.

    I am nothing if not meticulous in my research. So, having polished off my 14 units, I took the online Drinkaware quiz, ‘Are you drinking too much?’. I was told my drinking habits were ‘low-risk’, but not completely safe, ‘because drinking alcohol is never completely safe’. Given that drinking some alcohol is less risky than not drinking any, shouldn’t the website also provide a quiz for teetotallers titled, ‘Are you drinking enough?’.

I agree it should. It might also proffer the advice to drivers who drive while stressed – dangerously -- and as we all know, there’s one sure and rapid solution to that too!

Anayway, I went and tested our own local “Is Your Drinking Okay?” quiz, to be told my drinking is “medium risk.” It doesn’t say of what, but it does recommend cutting down rather than abstinence, so at least it’s better (somewhat) than the Brits’ version. Although our own official lemon-sucker, Doud Sellman, is still sicking to the ‘no safe level’ drivel.

As Naomi Firsht concludes at Spiked however:

While it is nice that the government has decided to stop scaremongering about the odd night down the pub, it would be nicer still if it realised that, while health information is useful, telling the public how many drinks they should have is not in its remit. Hopefully everyone will take the guidelines with a large pinch of salt – before downing a tequila shot.

Or two.

UPDATE: Good to see a young man setting an example on the weekend. A drink? He’d sure as hell earned it:

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The New Puritanism of 0.05 [updated]

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”
- H.L. Mencken

Well, we knew this was coming, didn’t we—there have been enough trial balloons around for long enough to let you know the fix was already in: from bogus studies on the alleged “social costs” of alcohol, to manufactured outrage about what goes on after dark in cities’ hotspots, to reality-TV clips on both prime-time infotainment shows of celebrities knocking back a few drinks and being even stupider than normal.

You know what I’m talking about: the new Brownlee Law, the government’s move to lower the drink-driving limit from 0.08 to 0.05 mg/ml of blood—the latest move in the war against pleasure, hailed instantly as such by New Puritans country-wide as “a great move to change our alcohol culture.” (“There ought to be a law against it!”)

Frankly, I wonder, what’s wrong with a culture that enjoys alcohol?

What’s wrong with a few drinks with your mates?

But nail up this latest Law next to the ban on beer tents (“how dare they promote an alcohol culture around children!”), the finger-wagging about South Auckland liquor stores (“it’s okay for us, to drink darling, but not those people”), the crackdown on Courtenay Place (“there are people out on the streets after my bedtime!”), and the hysteria about what youngsters might get up to after a few drinks (“they wouldn’t have done that in my day!”). The fear that someone, somewhere, night be having a good time !

Oh, but it’s all about safety.

Really? The overwhelming majority of drivers causing injury have blood-alcohol readings of well over .08, so these are recidivists already not listening to the law. The folk the Brownlee Law will discourage is not them, it is good folk having a few drinks. It is folk who share a jug with colleagues after work, or a few bottles at dinner with friends, or enjoy a few coldies watching the footy with mates, or in front of a great band, or after a drive out  to a country pub for lunch. Look to their being many fewer such social lubricants in future, as responsible folk who do enjoy a few are too discouraged to risk themselves. 

Just another way Nanny makes our lives that little bit less enjoyable, about which the New Puritans will and do applaud regardless of any argument about safety. (To paraphrase our quote from last week: “Pub culture is over. Five blokes talking rubbish over a pint died with the War Against Pleasure”).

And let’s look at the safety. Eric Crampton, responsible for exposing so much of the manufactured hysteria about the so-called “social costs of alcohol” (“it’s easy to get into the billions when you make you your costs, and ignore the benefits”), has taken a preliminary look at the figures bandied about over the Brownlee Law.

We're talking about something on the order of 13,000 car trips per day involving drivers in the affected range, or about 4.7 million car trips per year undertaken by those in the .05 to .08 range.

How many crashed, compared to those who weren’t in the .05 to .08 range?

If drivers in the .05 to .08 range had accident rates proportionate to those below .05, we'd have expected them to have had 1.3% of the total number of crashes net of those crashes involving those above the .08 limit. And so that would be 3.3 fatal crashes and 21 serious injury crashes, or about 24 fatal and serious injury crashes… [What we have, if we believe Brownlee’s own numbers*] works out to 29 per year. If this is ballpark correct, then we had about five crashes more than expected in 2011 among those in the .05 to .08 range.

Five.

Across the whole country.

In a single year.

Whose cause may not even have been their few drinks.

But this is all about “public safety.” Yeah right.

* And this is part of a political campaign, where numbers are routinely inflated.

UPDATE: Comments and info from around the traps:

• “I'm guessing that what the research really shows is that there's quite a lot of missed revenue to be gathered from people blowing between .5 and .8 when randomly stopped.” – James Stephenson
• “The wowsers have won and another kick in the guts is delivered to rural New Zealand who cannot access crown cars, taxis, buses or shanks pony after a couple of beers on the way home from a hard days work, paying the country's bills…
  ”Already the campaign to reduce the limit to zero is underway.” – GraveDodger
• “If you note the coroners’ reports, most drunk people crashing are up around 209-300, not just a fraction over 50 or 80.” – Bruce Hoult
• “Staying awake for 16 hours leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to having a blood alcohol level of .05%” - SleepPro Australia
• “Another nail in the coffin of rural hospitality, because a meal without wine is called a takeaway…” – Mark Hubbard
• “I see in 2011 259 fatal accidents and 8 of these 'alcohol offenders.'  That means 251 fatals were not alcohol 0.8 or above. Almost as though there were other factors involved in fatal accidents.” - Evan

UPDATE 2: Stats Chat looks at Brownlee’s announcement, as reported in the Herald, and finds three errors in just four paragraphs. The most egregious:

“Mr Brownlee is quoted as justifying the change by quoting total costs of drink driving. The social cost number in the fourth paragraph is 22 times larger than the [quoted] estimated benefit. You’d think that sort of discrepancy would draw some journalistic comment.”

Given journalists’ inability to aske the right questions, “hope” would be a better word than “think.”   Further …

“later in the story we are told about a victim of a drunk driver. A driver whose blood alcohol concentration was 190mg/100ml, more than twice the existing legal limit, and who was duly convicted and sent to prison under the old laws. Not the sort of person whose behaviour is likely to be affected by this change.”

Not the sort of thing journalists bother themselves about. Radio NZ’s Moaning Report this morning was happy to do the same.

UPDATE 3: You want “safety”? Right, let’s ban all drivers over 64, and under 30. And put everyone in between in aspic.

Graph from FiveThirtyEight.Com

Beer is beneficial

Politicians and other busybodies obsess about the cost of drinking beer.  Too little analysis focuses on the benefits, so former NOT PC beer writer Neil Miller has undertaken the serious scientific research on the topic for you. Here are the top ten benefits of drinking beer.

1. Beer lessens the constant anxiety of watching the Black Caps bat.

2. After beer, Gareth Morgan's constant lectures become slightly less annoying.*

3. Beer enables people to hold strong opinions on every issue without resorting to research.**

4. Without beer, no one would date in the provinces.

5. Television beer ads employ all young Kiwi actors not talented enough to be on Shortland Street

6. The Government gets lots of money from beer through excise tax, GST and company tax on anyone who manages to make a profit.***

7. Frank Zappa said "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons." Without beer, New Zealand would only be half a real country.

8. The late-night takeaway food industry depends on beer for patronage.

9. Beer production provides the main ingredient in Marmite.

10. Drinking a frosty beer annoys President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Professor Doug Sellman.

* There is not enough beer in the world however to make Gareth Morgan sound sane.
** And to voice them with greater eloquence.
*** This is not exactly a benefit.

“The biggest shake-up since the end of six ‘o’clock closing…”

Bars, restaurants and alcohol shops fear new licensing restrictions will send them out of business in a shake-up billed as the biggest since the end of six o'clock closing. [AUDIO, RADIO NZ]

But advocates for the new licensing restrictions are cock-a-hoop at the new powers it gives them that the new licensing gives locals a say in when and where liquor outlets can open.

What the report linked to above doesn’t say—and neither do the advocates for restriction recognise this—but locals already have a say in when and where liquor outlets can open. In fact, they have virtually complete control. 

Let us suppose, for example, that there are parts of South Auckland in which there were a bottle store on every corner (and I use South Auckland since, as these restrictions are another elitist measures to control the working man’s simple pleasures, South Auckland is the place where they will be most controlled. If there really were a bottle store on every corner (there are 350 bottle stores in Manukau, but many more corners) then that would in fact be a sign that this is precisely what “the community” does want—because the customers of those bottle stores, who come from “the community,” are the very people who are keeping all these bottle stores open, demonstrating as clearly as you can that this is precisely what “the community” does want.

They already have a say in where and when outlets are open—having a say by voting with their wallet every time they make a purchase.  Buy readily, shops stay open. Don’t frequent the shops, the shops close.  This is the power of the consumer to direct the activity of retailers.

So what the control freaks should admit, and what you others who’ve given the control freaks the power should understand, is that the control freaks don’t want communities to have a say; they simply want power to say “this is not what I want.” “The community, c’est moi.”

Because these new restrictions do not at all give a say to communities. Because everyone in the community is having their say every day—every time they choose to visit, or not, their friendly local bottle store. Who it gives “a say” to is council planners and bureaucrats. To the self-anointed guardians of other people’s morals. To those opposed to the working man’s simple pleasures. To the wowsers. The teetotilatarians. People without a life who want to make your life less colourful and less enjoyable, and with less access to the ingredients that make your private life more enjoyable. And in giving a say to the busybodies, they are taking it away from the communities themselves.

Fuck ‘em.

“A bottle store on every corner…”

Announcing yesterday’s package of puritanism, Simon Power-Lust signalled that he will be continuing the attack on small bottle-store owners begun by Helen Clark the very week bottle-store owner Navtej Singh was shot.  One of the three big “improvements” delivered by his reforms, says Simon, is that it “gives communities a say in when and where liquor outlets can open.”  The unspoken announcement being: “We’re going to make it damned hard to get a new license, or renew an existing one.”

This frankly just blames small-business owners for selling to wiling customers.  It’s the same sort of finger-pointing in which several hundred people indulged in Manukau last week, marching on council buildings to complain about what other people are doing. One woman in the rally, who revealed to the interviewer that she had a god on her side (she didn’t reveal which one), complained that in Manukau there is now “a bottle store on every corner.” “That’s not what we want as a community,” she huffed.

Well, I beg to differ.

If there really were a bottle store on every corner (there are 350 bottle stores in Manukau, but many more corners) then that would in fact be a sign that this is precisely what “the community” does want—because the customers of those bottle stores, who come from “the community,” are the very people who are keeping all these bottle stores open, demonstrating as clearly as you can that this is precisely what “the community” does want.

So what the woman should have said was “this is not what I want.” “The community, c’est moi.” But why is her voice more important than any other?  And why should her puritanism give her any power to to tell you and me when and where we can buy a bottle of wine? 

Well, on that one you’ll have to ask Simple Simon. Because in “giving communities a say in when and where liquor outlets can open,” he is simply giving a say to busybodies like this one, and taking it away from the communities themselves. Because like that woman, Simple Simon is completely unaware that communities already are “having a say” in where and when outlets are open—having a say by voting with their wallet every time they make a purchase.  

They’re called customers, Simon. At the end of the day it’s not you or I or anyone else who decides whether or not a bottle store or any other store stays open.  They do: their customers.  And these customers are the community.

Perhaps you should listen to what they’re saying. Because shutting down these small businesses won’t limit demand for alcohol, it will simply change where it’s bought. And meanwhile, as Eric Crampton observes, there are a lot of immigrant families whose businesses are going to be destroyed.

RELATED POSTS:

• Drinking-age humbug – NOT PC
• The alcohol law reform package (updated) – ANTI DISMAL
• Never mind our liberty, feel the Power-lust – NOT PC
• Drinkers are paying for themselves – NOT PC

Never mind our liberty, feel the Power-lust [update 2]

On the weekend in which Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of the rights of man is rightly celebrated elsewhere, here in New Zealand Simon Power-Lust feels the power of the Nanny State flowing through him:

Mr Power said he had recently driven through Auckland early in the morning.
“What I saw on the streets of Auckland, on corner bars and the like, at half past four in the morning – no good can come of that,” he said.

I have some advice for Mr Power.  If you don’t like what you see out on the street and in the corner bars of the city at 4:30 in the morning--you know … people enjoying themselves, having fun, paying their own way, pursuing their own happiness—then just stay the fuck home in Palmerston North.

What sort of pin-headed power-luster sees a city full of people out enjoying themselves, and whose first thought is “BAN IT!”?  Answer: Another lemon-sucking unbridled wowser with not even an original idea of his own.

Why does this pin-headed politician wish to use the bad behaviour of a few to impose his own schtick on all the rest of us?

Why does he think it’s his business to tell us how we’re all going to spend our evenings?

He goes out after dark and discovers, shock horror, that people like drinking!

Simon, you pinhead, if you don’t like it then just stay home.  Because what those people are doing after dark is none of your damn business.

UPDATE 1: Some other useful and somewhat related commentary around the traps:

DIM POST: “This is yet another issue which would have the National Party screaming itself senseless with outrage if Labour suggested it: ‘Nanny state passing laws on bedtime for New Zealanders!’”

Brendan O’Neill at SPIKED cracks open “a bottle of unhealthy fizzy stuff and celebrates the possible passing [in the UK] of an irritating political era” of “celebrity-fronted, dodgy science-fuelled, fear-injected authoritarianism.” Says Eric Crampton (In ‘Repudiating Jamie Oliver’) “I do wish that National here would be paying a bit more attention to the direction of change in the UK.”

UPDATE 2: NO RIGHT TURN, ‘Illiberal authoritarian wowsers’:

“…the government is going to impose a nationwide closing time, and try and dictate when people drink.  This is simply illiberal, authoritarian wowserism. As I said when the report was released, it is none of the government's business when people party.”

Michael Mikee Earley :

“National assault on gigs begins... “

Smoking out the alleged statisticians

Here’s a more than appropriate cartoon above (from John Cox Art) to accompany Eric Crampton’s pursuit of the sudden, explosive* rise in estimates of the “social cost” of tobacco from the 2007 estimate which put the cost of $300 to $350 million per annum; to the current and still-to-be- substantiated work somewhere within the bowels of the Ministry of Health that suggests, for no good reason, that the figure has now jumped to be “as high as $1 to $1.6 billion per annum.”

Given that sudden jump is being used to justify the sudden inordinate hike in taxes on poor smokers, you think there’s maybe some politics going on here?

Keep up with Eric’s pursuit through his Tobacco posts.  The denouement promises to be good.

And make sure too to congratulate him and Mrs Eric while you’re there on the birth of their new bundle of sleeplessness joy—the announcement of which must be among the most anti-climactic ever.  (“Only an economist…” etc.)

* * * * *

*Yes, I know: if it’s explosive it must by definition be sudden.  But how else to explain the inflation of tobacco costs by one billion dollars in one year except by an inflationary use of words?

Drinkers pay for themselves [update 3]

A big “hello!” to Leighton Smith’s listeners.

Leighton argues that as long as you and I are paying the medical bills of irresponsible drinkers, then irresponsible drinking is everybody’s business.

But, as a simple matter of fact, you’re not paying their medical bills.  You’re not paying their medical bills, because the taxes that are already extracted from drinkers more than make up for their external costs, including their public health costs.

Don’t take my word for that.  Listen to University of Canterbury economist Eric Crampton and Victoria University economist Matt Burgess, who concluded after extensive analysis just last year that the “external costs [of alcohol consumption are] roughly equal to collected tax revenues.”  They conclude, unequivocally

    “We find net external costs to be zero once full account of excise taxes is made.”

Or as Eric summarised on his blog yesterday:

    “Matt and I found last year that collected alcohol excise tax revenues exceed tallied external costs of alcohol misuse, which include the public health costs. It's consequently pretty depressing when we keep reading folks claiming that alcohol tax increases are a good idea because of the costs of drunks to the emergency room system. Those costs can be good reason for doing something like punishing actual behaviours that lead to costs while drunk, like drunk and disorderly or fights or drink driving. But they're not reason for hiking the tax: the tax already covers those costs.

So much for the argument that the “external costs’ of alcohol consumption make the consumption of alcohol everybody’s business. 

And no wonder the Crampton & Burgess report was not included in the Law Commission report.

• Read the full 42-page Crampton & Burgess report here:
  ‘The Price of Everything, The Value of Nothing: A (Truly) External Review Of BERL’s Study Of Harmful Alcohol and Drug Use’

UPDATE 1:  Yes, yes, I know the extraction of excise taxes is immoral. And I know the spreading of costs from some drinkers to other drinkers by means of the extraction of excise taxes is equally as iniquitous.  But as long as you accept the system that extracts taxes by force, and returns just a small portion of those taxes in the form of a government-run health system, then you’re stuck with arguing on that basis when you’re arguing about “costs” and “benefits.”

UPDATE 2: Eric points out in the comments that not only did the Law Commission not include Eric and Matt’s analysis as part of their recommendations (analysis which readers might remember, utterly demolished the earlier analysis on which the Law Commission was relying) but has instead commissioned further research that Eric says “could well be described as an orchestrated litany of lies.”

Naturally, he’s begun the task already of unravelling it. See:

• Marsden Jacob on alcohol – Eric Crampton’s blog
• Palmer report - initial thoughts – Eric Crampton’s blog

UPDATE 3: Why this focus on “external costs”?  Matt Nolan explains the way economists think when they’ve got their socks economist’s hats on:

    “Remember the simple fact that, as long as we believe people are responsible, have better information on themselves, and are better able to make choices regarding themselves then arbitrary regulation (or some lesser combination of these points), then we shouldn’t focus on the entire ‘social cost (private + external costs)’ associated with alcohol when regulating.
    “The focus should only be on the external cost – the cost placed on other individuals from the choice of one individual.  The private costs are already being taken account of when the choice is made.
    As a result, if the calls of a 50% increase in excise tax are not based just on true external costs, but also broader private costs, they are asking for ‘too much tax’ in a strict ‘efficiency’ sense.  They may be doing this as they genuinely dislike alcohol (although the risk of unintended consequences spring to mind here--namely people drinking more alcohol beverages if the cost-per-alcohol-unit is lower, and also people brewing their own), or because they think people are inherently stupid.  However, neither of these reasons seems like a good justification for policy.”

Wowsers still on parade

That unbridled wowser Geoffrey bloody Palmer wants to put the boot into drinkers.  Again.  He now wants to ban “being drunk in a public place.”  Well, that would certainly have changed the 1984 election, that’s for sure.

I won’t repeat what I’ve said before about his attacks on enjoying yourself – here it is here, and there’s a lot of it – and here’s a practical objection to his latest bout of inveterate nannying -- I’ll just say again that he has a face that desperately needs punching.

And if you say that’s an initiation of force, then I’ll simply point out that he started it by putting the boot into us.

Unbridled wowserism [update 3]

Seems to me the only people more annoying than the moochers who ask for more and more while doing less and less are those lemon-sucking wowsers who are more and more vocal in insisting we enjoy ourselves less and less.

The age of Nanny is not dead. Her latest incarnation rode in yesterday on Geoffrey Palmer's horse, and has already been taken out for a trial canter this morning by Simon Power. It's a horse that needs to be shot.

The whole thrust behind Geoffrey fucking Palmer’s recommendations on alcohol consumption (yes, you'll be hearing some strong language if you choose to read on) is that we -- i.e., you and I -- are not behaving as they -- i.e., Geoffrey and Simon -- think we should when we consume it. We're drinking too much of it. We're making too much noise when we do. We're swinging from too many chandeliers, singing too many macarenas and getting in the way of too many decent people going about their business at 3am in the morning. We're getting uppity, and something must be done. Geoffrey: fuck you. Simon: fuck you. How about we live our lives and you live yours, and as long as we don’t get in each other's way I'll be very happy.

But that sort of approach was never on the cards, was it Geoffrey.  If your whole agenda wasn’t clear when Helen Clark gave you a truckload of cash to write your report, then it became abundantly clear when you commissioned "independent" research from your tame consultants to inflate the “social costs of alcohol.” And if Eric Crampton and Matt Burgess hadn’t spotted your duplicity you might have gotten away with it, you arsehole. But you didn’t.  You were exposed as trying to bolster your bullying with bullshit, and you got pinged.

But you're completely unashamed by that, aren't you – you’re unashamed because you really do think it's your Government-given self-anointed right to boss us the fuck around. Well, as I said before, fuck you and the unbridled power you rode in on.

You talk about "changing the policy settings" when what you're really doing is telling free people how to live their lives. You talk about "encouraging" changes in behaviour when what you mean is force. Christ, you can't even be honest in your inhumanity.

You say that taxes on alcohol should increase? But your colleagues have already stuck your hand in drinker's pocket once this year, haven’t you -- adding around fifty cents to a pint of beer and endangering the whole craft brewing industry – and last year – adding 10% to the cost of spirits – and the year, before, and the year before that.  Fact is, your excise taxes on our alcohol are already through the roof, aren’t they, and heading higher every bloody year (and every year another learned report is handed down recommending yet another bloody increase “for our own good”), making us wonder just how much is enough! Just how much do you want the the working man and woman to pay for their pleasures, you thieving gobshites.

You say too that bars and clubs should be forced to shut down from 2am? Tell you what, if you don't like the look of what goes on after 2am, then stay the fuck home.

You say that new liquor licenses should be made more difficult to get and to keep? Way to go helping out small businessmen by cutting compliance costs, you bullying arseholes.

You say that 18- and 19-year-olds should be banned from buying alcohol from bottle stores and supermarkets? Which means you think they're responsible enough to vote for unbridled power-lusting cretins like yourselves, but not responsible enough to pour themselves a drink when they get home from work.

Tell you what, why not just mind your own fucking business, and we'll mind ours.

And let me tell you something else too: It's not your job to "encourage" anything; it's your job to get the hell out of our way.

And as it happens, in those rare places and situations where governments do get the hell out of the way -- in places like France, say, where youngsters can enjoy a drink with their parents from an early age – it’s there that we do find responsible drinking; and we find it because responsibility is encouraged, not discouraged. That's self-responsibility, Geoffrey -- a concept it's clearly too late for you to learn, but some of us really would like to encourage. That’s the opposite of the restrictive, coercive, heavy-handed six-o’clock-swill mentality that you and arseholes like you would like to bring back.

But here's one final lesson to digest, from a chap called Herbert Spencer: that the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. That goes double for the architects of those shields as well.

Geoffrey: fuck you.

UPDATE 1: Eric Crampton makes a polite clarification:

    Palmer didn't commission the BERL report: MoH and ACC did. As I understand it, the Law Commission views as defamatory that it be construed as having commissioned it. Palmer chose to use the report 'cause it was around, then chose to commission Brian Easton as a neutral party to resolve differences between BERL and us.
    We can wonder whether commissioning Easton as neutral agent here is consistent with the Law Commission wanting a neutral view. . .

UPDATE 2: Chopper Read makes a less than polite point more than appropriate to Simon Power and Geoffrey fucking Palmer: Make Dead Shits History.

UPDATE 3: You think Courtenay Place at 3am is bad?  You should see “closing time” in Africa.  Once a year, a tree in southern Africa produces very juicy fruits containing a large percentage of alcohol – and as soon as the fruits are ripe, animals come there to help stave off dehydration. You can imagine what happens next.
Geoffrey Palmer and his Wellington Wowsers Law Commission observers (who supposedly did late-night research tours around NZ’s seventeen-most popular drinking spots) appear here about 2:02 in.)

What’s the cost of a lost reputation? [updated]

Rather than conceding the errors in their flawed “social costs of alcohol” report (reported here, here, here and here), the alleged economists at BERL are resorting instead to rationalistic nonsense to support the report whose conclusions they were paid to find.  Their alcohol study's lead author, Mr Adrian Slack (whose photo at right, I think, tells you as much as you need to know about how his mind works), begins by arguing that they weren’t paid to study the benefits of alcohol, only the costs -- to do a full cost-benefit study would have cost the client another $135,000 says Mr Slack – and ends by talking palpable nonsense:

    ”So for example someone who murders someone, from the individual’s point of view, Eric would be, I presume, quite comfortable with that.
    The person who decides to murder someone else makes an evaluation of what are the benefits and costs to me of this action? Society says ‘well some people do murder other people’, but society says ‘that’s not good.’”

The argument is as tangled as the grammar.  Perhaps it was something Mr Slack was drinking ?

In response to what BK Drinkwater calls “a pretty damn strong candidate for non sequitur of the year,” Eric Crampton (who co-authored the intellectual destruction of Mr Slack’s work) kicks Slack again while he’s down: Of externalities, elbows, and knowing one from the other.

And Paul Walker also responds to Slack’s rationalistic nonsense, saying in part "I may have had some doubts about what goes on at BERL before now but after reading the National Business Review I really do wonder what goes on inside a BERL economists head.”  He has much, much more as well.

One begins to wonder if someone should commission research on the cost to consultants of a failed reputation. I suspect it would be much greater than $135,000.

UPDATE: Eric Crampton clarifies:

“I wasn't so much trying to kick someone when he's down as put on record that I'm not in favour of murder, lest someone down the track say something like ‘Eric Crampton, who has never rebutted allegations of being pro-murder, also ...’ "

Treasury gives BERL’s alcohol report another smack

BERL’s now disgraced report on “the social costs” of alcohol use “is work that doesn’t look like it meets the ‘normal standards you would expect’,” says Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Dr Peter Bushnell. “I can see the point being made in the article – it looks pretty shonky.”

Bushnell of the Treasury is essentially agreeing with the demolition of BERL’s report by Eric Crampton of Canterbury University and Matt Burgess of Victoria (reported here and here at NOT PC).

And Eric Crampton reckons the problems with this BERL report belie a more general problem with economic consultancy reports, “in that there needs to be somebody looking at the Requests For Proposals (RFPs) that a ministry sends out, and checking the results when they come in.”

I think he could have stopped with “a problem with economic consultancy reports.”

Meanwhile, BERL are still yet to comment on Treasury’s bollocking of their work.  At this point, the last word from “BERL Chief Economist Ganesh Nana” is that “BERL stands by its report.”  If that’s still the case, I’d suggest you start discounting everything they say.

UPDATE:  Paul Walker comments at his Anti Dismal blog:

    The interesting thing here is that this is a very strong statement coming from a very senior member of the Treasury. It is unusual to see such statements. Treasury can not be happy.
    The NBR also says,

Sir Geoffrey [who commissioned the report and has already started making gravy with it] was overseas when contacted by NBR, and has declined to comment on the matter thus far.

    Is he running for cover? It will be interesting to see what he says, if anything, on the matter when he returns from overseas.

Step 2 of a nine-step programme: Denial.

Ah, so that’s what’s going on.  Defending his firm’s study on the costs of alcohol that a thorough criticism concluded had "few redeeming features" – a study that overstates “the annual social cost of alcohol abuse” by around thirty-three times, just as its sponsors wanted – Ganesh Nana from BERL said that he and his critics obviously have “a different world view.”

Sounds like Mr Nana is living in a different world altogether.  A world of denial.

NOT PJ: A Report into the Costs of Harmful Economic and Other Social Policy Analysis

The government’s pet analysts at BERL will be needing a stiff drink, says Bernard Darnton, after being eviscerated by Not PC reader (and Canterbury University economist) Eric Crampton.

Alcohol was on the menu at a Law Commission breakfast in March, when Geoffrey Palmer floated the idea of yet more government busy-bodying and higher taxes based on a report on the social costs of alcohol conducted by economic analysts BERL at the behest of the Ministry of Health and ACC.

The BERL report estimated the social costs of alcohol – whatever that might mean – at $4.79 billion. That’s a significant fraction of the New Zealand economy that’s supposedly missing or broken because we’re all too hungover to go to work and drunks keep breaking windows and each other’s bones.

I’d be the first to admit to occasionally having such a good time that I forgot to go to work the next day. Sadly the work I missed didn’t just evaporate like evanescent sambuca flames; I just had to catch up later. No lost productivity there (bugger it). Likewise, health costs: Anyone who’s been into Dunedin Hospital’s Accident and Emergency department on a Friday night knows that there are no health costs. You get given a 12-cent photocopy of a leaflet called “So You Think You’ve Broken Your Nose” and told to bugger off.

The analysts at BERL, however, won’t accept my reminiscences as a valid criticism of their cost/benefit analysis. Fortunate, then, that Canterbury University economist Dr Eric Crampton has helpfully produced an arse/elbow analysis of their report.

Economists’ language is usually dry – dryer than Charles’s eyes at Diana’s funeral – but Dr Crampton and collaborator Matt Burgess have trouble restraining themselves. BERL’s estimates of costs are “grossly exaggerated.” They use a “bizarre methodology” and make “very strange assumptions … without any reason or evidence.”

Translating from Academic into English, this is saying that they’re mad. Batshit Crazy. Crazier. Crazier than the shit of vampire bats who’ve been feeding on mad cows and rabid dogs. He’s saying that to believe their conclusions you’d need to have lost more marbles than the Greek Antiquities Commission.

One of the subtle methodological flaws that Crampton and Burgess pick up is that the cost/benefit analysis contains no benefit analysis. My favourite paragraphs in academic papers are the ones that begin, “Astonishingly, …”

The BERL economists assume that anyone who consumes more than two drinks in a session (not that they ever use the word “session”) is irrational and derives no pleasure or other benefit from this activity. Remind me never to go to the BERL Christmas party.

Of course alcohol has benefits – otherwise I wouldn’t buy it. And I buy loads of it so the benefits must be huge. This column, for example. Then there are the sensuous pleasures: the earthy bouquet of a Central Otago pinot noir, the perfectly balanced palate of a Gisborne chardonnay. And don’t forget the immense pleasure to be had masturbating in public – verbally of course, about the earthy bouquets of Central Otago pinots and perfectly balanced palates of Gisborne chardonnays.

Dr Crampton’s critique goes on to dissect the haphazard accounting, the bad economics, the frequent use of misleading language, the lack of transparency in calculations, and many other crimes against logic committed by the report’s authors. He struggles to keep a straight face while referencing Karl Marx (“students of economic history will recognise … a theory discredited”) to explain some of BERL’s reasoning.

He goes on to point out the vast mass of literature on the subject that BERL completely overlooked, presumably because they didn’t look in any actual economic journals, instead copying a similar study done in Australia – one panned for the same faults. The authors of the Australian study that this one was based on were then called in to provide an “independent” peer review. (Apparently they thought it was smashing – “couldn’t have put it better myself.”)

Dr Crampton advises in his accompanying press release that “the Law Commission should give no weight at all to the findings in the BERL report.”

If Crampton and Burgess are anywhere close to right, this report is so shoddy that the only excuse could be that its authors were drunk.

The only non-sinister excuse, that is. Conclude Crampton and Burgess: “A year-long study commissioned by the Ministry of Health and the ACC at a cost of over $135,000 must surely have some purpose. We leave it to readers to consider what that purpose might be.”

* * Read Bernard Darnton’s column every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

You’ll never get poor promoting the government line

A bullshit study promoting wowserism has been completely overturned by economists Eric Crampton and Matt Burgess. 

Produced by tame economic consultants BERL in order to promote the party line on alcohol, it looks like nothing more than a report whose conclusions were paid for in advance.  The report on so called alcohol abuse is over-egged, the results are over-exagerated, and the consultants are clearly overpaid.

As Burgess says, “At one point BERL makes accidental (we think) use of the labour theory of value, which we discuss on page 35. Never a good look when Marxism makes an appearance in your economic analysis.”

You and I paid $135,000 for this study but because of its, shall we say, “unusual methodology and poor execution” it looks to be suitable for nothing more than filling up a landfill – the work of people paid for lying to order.

Here’s Eric and Matt’s polite summary of its errors:

Reported costs of alcohol abuse "grossly exaggerated" according to economists

A widely publicised $135,000 government report on the cost of drug and alcohol abuse has been slammed by two economists, who say the report’s findings are grossly exaggerated.

Economists Eric Crampton and Matt Burgess have released a research paper which examines the report, by Wellington economics consultant Business and Economic Research Limited (BERL), after Law Commission President Sir Geoffrey Palmer cited its findings in support of proposed new regulations on alcohol.

“What we found shocked us. BERL exaggerated costs by 30 times using a bizarre methodology that you won’t find in any economics textbook,” Dr Crampton said.

The BERL report was commissioned in 2008 by the Ministry of Health and ACC, and put the annual social costs of alcohol at $4.79 billion. Crampton and Burgess said the net social costs instead amounted to $146 million – 30 times lower than that calculated in the report.

“BERL has virtually assumed its answer. The majority of the reported social costs rest on two very strange assumptions which BERL has asserted without any reason or evidence,” said Dr Crampton said.

“The report assumes that one in six New Zealand adults drinks because they are irrational; that is, they are incapable of deciding what is good for themselves. BERL further assumes that these individuals receive absolutely no enjoyment, social or economic benefit from any of their drinking,” Dr Crampton said.

“These assumptions allowed BERL to count as a cost to society everything from the cost of alcohol production to the effect of alcohol on unpaid housework. That’s bad economics.”

Among other serious flaws, Dr Crampton said the report’s external peer review was done by the authors of the report’s own methodology, important findings in academic literature that alcohol had health and economic benefits were ignored, BERL did not properly warn readers about the limitations of its methodology, and used language in the report that was frequently misleading.

The BERL study caught the economists’ attention when it was cited by the Law Commission as the basis for supporting proposed new taxes and regulations on alcohol.

“Our research paper is not commissioned work. We’re doing this because we don’t want to see legislative decisions being misguided by bad research. In our view, the Law Commission should give no weight at all to the findings in the BERL report,” Dr Crampton said.

You can read Eric and Matt’s full demolition of BERL’s mercenary nonsense here.  The BERL report is available from: http://www.berl.co.nz/874a1.page .