The down-side of ‘evidence based policy’ is that people with agendas get to make up some pretty big numbers. [Insert fun activity here] costs the economy eleventy zillion dollars in lost productivity, increases the probability of being struck by lightning by 8.65789324 percent, not to mention those unsightly hairs growing on the palm of your hand.
Seriously though explaining to people that death is a private cost and not a public cost is quite difficult. An argument I heard last year was that ‘Treasury has estimated your life to be worth $2 million and if you die that money is gone’. I tried to explain that the value of life is to the person living that life. So if you die you don’t get to enjoy life – kind of obvious, I thought. In terms of other people, the dead are missed and mourned by their family and friends, but more or less people get over it and get on with their own lives.
Nick Cater has a great explanation of the social cost of death on the economy.
The impression one gets from reading The Social Costs of Smoking, however, is that the authors at the Centre for Health Advancement, Population Health Division don’t actually believe this nonsense themselves. As they point out in the small print: “A problem with this approach is that estimates of tobacco-attributable costs contain certain (sometimes very large) components that are not measured in conventional national account measurements of GDP.”
You can say that again. Conventional economists estimate that the current unemployment rate among the dead is running at 100 per cent.
While not wishing to pass judgment on their willingness to work, these dear departed souls are, to all intents and purposes, unemployable. They would be a drain on the economy if they were alive, but regretfully they are not.
They use no roads, do not require their dustbins to be emptied and, remarkably, given their fatal lifestyle choice, are not a burden on the health service. They may be missed by many, with a pain that cannot be quantified, but their tangible net contribution to the economy, earnings minus spending, is about zero.
This was particularly good:
Naturally, in the rapidly growing field of shockonomics, there is an accounting stream to get around that little hurdle: the cost of household labour. Had these folk not sneaked out in a box, and stayed around to help empty the ashtray and generally keep the place looking tidy, they could have earned $3.163bn in 2006-07, according to computer modelling.
And the bottom line:
Which means the minister, if she had thought about it, would have told the health bureaucrats she would not be supporting a pointless, irritating piece of legislation promoted by do-gooders addicted to the sound of the cracking whip.
The dead are such lazy beggars. Something should be done about them. Make them join the public service ?
Is there a figure for the amount of COST to the economy for each non-productive (lifetime welfare) person?
Seeing as we have quite a lot of them (and likely more arriving by boat each week) it seems relevant.
Nick Carter is starting to become a must read.
What about the yet unborn? Aren’t they equivalent to the dead?
Sir Humphry, in Yes Prime Minister, observed that smoking caused premature deaths, thus saving the State from much expenditure on the elderly.
Yet another example of the awful tendency to justify controls on your choices because of how they might impact on how productively you will contribute to the commonweal. If that is not an element of a totalitarian structure then I don’t know what it is.
From the Grauniad:
So it is doubtful that a poor smoker would contribute anything like $2 million to GDP, unless they were scamming heaps of benefits from Centrelink.
Let’s turn this around then and hammer those vile Emily’s List Mandels with it (Maria Mandel nicknamed ‘The Beast’ was female Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, responsible for at least 500,000 murders of women, girls and infants).
What is the cost to the economy of the millions of Australian citizens who have been murdered in abortion clinics over the past generation or two?
In spite of applying an air tax, since Joh Bjelke-Petersen cut state death taxes, the Trade Union Party haven’t worked out how to tax the dead (yet!)
The high public cost of self inflicted health problems is a direct result of the TUP’s socialisation of the health industry; it’s a feature, not a bug.
So what is something is not measured in GDP. As John Stone has acknowledged, GDP is merely an imperfect statistical shadow of market-based economic activity – it is not a measure of welfare.
Once again we have a Libertarian (or someone cited favourably by a Libertarian) using dodgy economics to try to criticise something that disagrees with their ideology. There may well be problems with ‘cost of death’ estimates, but the fact that some of the components are not counted in GDP is not one of them.
So what IF something is not measured in GDP…
William Bragg – there may well be good arguments to quit smoking (or not start in the first instance) horrendous social cost isn’t one of them.
If citizens decide that the pleasures of smoking are worth the risk then that is, or should be, up to them. Surely I have seen in Cat in the past that taxes on smokers more than cover the medical costs invoved.
It doesn’t have to be Bragg, you donut.
Smokers pay far more of their way as a result of excise taxes which justly ought to be spent on them instead of going to general revenue.
Furthermore smoking is a private health issue, not a public one.
Now go explain your JFK conspiracy theory and how you support Iran’s treatment of homos to the person asking about you on the other thread.
No doubt private costs are the key consideration, and I am fine with individuals deciding to smoke on if they wish (as long as their taxes cover the net social costs too). But that is no reason for pretending that social costs do not exist, or for using dodgy economics to minimise them.
Tanya Plebeserk tells me this morning that the drab olive “plain” packaging is making people quit smoking…because Plebeserk is all up on addiction behaviour, she speaks with authority. It’s a truimph, she tells me. Then she invited some anti-smoking talking head to make his voice heard too. The genius stated that in the near future ciggies will not be freely (?) available from shops, petrol stations and the like.
These prohibitionists ought to be put down (metaphorically speaking).
The article contains a fairly blinkered view of the economic worth of the many sufferers of rigor mortis.
They could all be put to use as an A.L.P. “think tank” and as senior policy advisors. I’m CERTAIN that they would make far fewer catastrophic blunders than the A.L.P.’s current incumbents – the dole-bludging, sandal-wearing, straggly-bearded, bicycle-riding, tree-hugging, vegan, work-shy, soap-phobic, Tasmanian Brown Movement.
They could also be used to great advantage as “economic advisors” to Wayne Swan ( or if you feel that might be beyond their scope, perhaps they could attempt teaching him to read, write, add up and possibly to walk and chew gum at the same time?).
Finally, let’s not forget that the dead have been amongst the A.L.P.’s most devoted and repetitive voters at every Federal, State and Local election for the last 100 years. Many rigor mortis sufferers who never voted for the A.L.P. in their lives, have been known to vote for the Party a dozen times or more per election since they have been dead!
Braggs, you’re more or less sticking your paw in your mouth with the last comment.
If you believe that individuals have the right to act out their lives as they see fit then what would be the purpose of counting da social costs? There’s none other than creating make works schemes for someone on the taxpayer dime.
One other little point… if you were really concerned about people paying their own way… I’m guessing you’d really hate 90% of the welfare currently on offer. Single mothers? How about people practicing unsafe sex?
Braggs, you’re an idiot. Go away. Shoo.
This sounds problematic to me.
Tanya is married to a convicted former drug dealer. Isn’t she concerned that prohibition (this time cigs) could tempt him again to go into “business”?
And how does the behavioral scientist Plebeserk know people are quitting becuase of the drab olive “plain” packaging? Well! people are ringing her office complaining; some people are placing bandaids over the nasty pictures on the packs (source?) and others are complaining that the ciggies now taste different! So in Tanya’s words: the plain packaging is having a psychological effect.
* no actual figures or sources were cited in the drab olive press conference.
Gab
It’s having absolutely no effect. None. Zip. I bought a pack for the festive season and couldn’t give a shit what the color of the pack was. Other smokers have the same attitude as i asked some.
Morons like Tanya have absolutely no fucking idea what they are doing. You regulate a market like that and you end up with stasis. There’s absolutely no competition between the makers to try and make cigs safer and impedes the ability of new entrants to enter the market with potentially safer better cigs.
If this eternal moron wants to know who’s killing people if they smoke, she only has to look in the mirror. By god she’s stupid.
There’s a special place in hell reserved for plibersek. It’s where they send the morons with attitude.
Plebeserk’s next project is to paint all guns in the U.S. an unfashionable shade of olive green, in order to halt their twice-weekly gun massacres, and then she will attempt to save the Titanic by tinkering with the decor of the deck chairs.
No doubt about the A.L.P.! They’ve got almost as many clues as Peter Garrett has hairs on his head!
Well if plain packaging cigarettes makes some smokers cut down to a low level of cigs per day, that’s a good outcome.
It may be one of the few successful Labor policies in that case, but I wish Ms Roxon would stop big-noting herself, she alwaya acts so pleased with herself.
It was a kevni policy anyway.
The difficulty in measurement comes into our attempts to consider World War II from an economic perspective. Sure, there was a boom after the war, which was much better than the depression before the war… but this boom was only better from the perspective of the survivors.
For the people who died during the war, they would have been better off with the depression. Thing is, once they are dead, we don’t consider their point of view to be worth worrying about any more. Darwin always wins every argument (retrospectively).
apologies for being slightly off topic, but what happened to the international legal challenge to plain packaging? doesn’t it contravene laws set in place to protect intellectual property rights, in this respect the name and logo?
Don’t know – will ask.
Poor people tend not too eat too much. On account of this they tend to smoke more to ease the burden of feeling hungry all the time. In a place like Australia, where the GST doesn’t apply to food (generally) and a huge tax applies to smokes, I would say the government is capturing a huge slice of revenue from the poor. In fact, so much revenue is levied off the poor when you include alcohol, it undoubtably contributes to their overall lack of money.
I would also argue that the poor do not seek out medical help as a priority to cure any ailment until its too bloody late, therefore, they contribute more to government revenue, in terms of income, than they take out in medical costs.
A friend of mine switched to electric cigarettes and says that although you can buy them in Australia, the market is much bigger and more interesting overseas. He seemed very happy with the choice, but I wonder if the whole “industry stasis” is what pretty much universally leaves Australia behind the world in, well, in everything the government gets their hands on.
Why would you commit to large scale importing and advertisement of electric durries when at any moment the government could impose a large tax on your product?
When I gave up smoking twenty odd years ago they used to have the tar and nicotine on the pack, this assisted me to choose packets with low tar and nicotine (Sterling Menthol was my last puff), and it helped me to cut back and eventually give up.
That information has been missing from cig packs for years now I think.
(I also said I’d give up when smokes cost more than $2/packet, and I did!)
So are we now saying that death is just another tax avoidance scam?
Nup, I’m out.
You had me looking into statistical values of life , workplace death stats and all manner of stuff I can’t decipher.
The only conclusion I got is that the cost of trying to delay death is skyrocketing for little benefit.
Death has a private cost as well as a public cost. So many costs of life are up front – education, health, training etc which are largely publicly funded. It is only later in (working) life that you start to pay your way (and pay down the up frot costs) but a premature death means that the contibution you would otherwise make is not made – hence the loss. From a purely accounting point of view, the longer you live (and work) the more you can get out of your fixed costs (for yourself and Govt in tax).
That’s a reasonable conclusion, jump. And would fit the way we see things.
Slightly off topic (forest, trees, etc.), but I think you’ll find the true cost was eleventy billion dollars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdSLSoqd1X4
You just have to incentivise them properly. And the way to do that is by offering nice fresh brains for them to eat.
Unfortunately, the Federal government is suffering a total brain famine at the moment.
In the U.S. the Democrats have been very successful in getting the dead to vote.
The ALP’s wowser brigade has alcohol next in their sights. The anti-alcohol lobby does their own nonsense costings.
Eric Hampton over in NZ regularly skewers this drivel that brave ABC/ALP journalists rarely check
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/mutant-smoking-statistics.html
The people who are using dodgy economics are the health economists. They argue that, “virtually all the costs imposed by smokers, even on themselves, can be considered to be social costs,”* because they cannot believe that smokers choose to smoke, “knowingly and freely,” with full awareness of the risks they are supposed to be taking.
That is, they assume that smokers are uninformed and/or irrational. But research has shown that not only do smokers know of these supposed risks but overestimate them (just as does everybody else). As for risk aversion and rationality, the former doesn’t necessarily go with the latter.
* Collins, D. J., & Lapsley, H. M. (2004). The Social Costs of Smoking in Australia [Electronic version]. NSW Public Health Bulletin. 15(5-6), pp. 92-94)
Sure the dead not doing any heavy lifting in the economy, but the government should play fair admit that they are also not responsible for any CO2 emissions (after a while, and not withstanding method of interrment).