In recent UK news, Britain’s chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson has put forward proposals to set minimum prices for alcohol, in an attempt to put a stop to ultra-cheap supermarket booze and the binge drinking that this allegedly encourages. Gordon Brown reacted today by rejecting such a proposal, pointing out quite rightly that we don’t want the “sensible majority of moderate drinkers to have to pay more or suffer as a result of the excesses of a small minority”.
But Donaldson’s proposal doesn’t just fail in terms of personal liberty, it fails on effectiveness grounds, too. Now I’m about as much a sociologist as the next man (the next man being, in this case, the Chief Medical Officer) but it seems to me that price-fixing ideas like this only work if the people they’re aimed at have an alternative to buying their usual volume of alcohol. But, as we’re always being told, binge drinking is primarily a product of inadequate social circumstances – in other words the disaffected, urban youth of this country have nothing else better to do than get ridiculously wasted every night. Given the choice, therefore, between paying a couple of extra quid to continue getting wasted, or doing nothing and doing it a little more sober … well, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? In fact, if you want to make an analogy here (and do I love me a good analogy) then you can turn to the field of global politics, specifically International Relations. It’s a common place belief amongst IR scholars that economic sanctions on rogue countries rarely work, at least not by themselves; it’s far better to incentivise the country in question: engage them in dialogue, find out what they want and thus make co-operation an attractive option. In the same way, scaring the urban yoof off drink by jacking up the prices just isn’t going to work- you have to give them a reason to not get absolutely battered every single night, or at least a better reason than the chance to have a couple of extra quid left in your pocket in the morning.
Of course I could be miles off there, but what this does tell us, if anything, is that there’s a real problem with the dialogue on these issues. It’s all well and good having a public tennis match between the doctors and the politicians – but where are all the social scientists? Where are the cunning strategies? Maybe we should just recall the experts on Iran and North Korea from their day job of figuring out dictators and tell them to get work on the binge drinkers of Britain instead . After all, when you’ve faced down Ahmajinidad, how hard can it be to tackle a sloshed fella with a can of carlsberg in his hand?
March 16th, 2009 at 18:11
I guess we can see how it works out in Scotland, where it looks pretty likely to go ahead: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13235478&fsrc=rss. Devolution is fast becoming a laboratory for innovative health policies.
I’d generally agree with you, but I also think that 58p per pint (from that article) is absurdly cheap, and surely does promote excessive consumption. Also, I’d vote no on having social scientists run the country. It generally doesn’t work out too well.
March 16th, 2009 at 22:40
I agree with Mark, the 58p thing is ridiculous, and putting a price floor on things like shot deals is hardly going to have an impact on the moderate drinker.
That said I couldn’t agree more with the central argument but I think its more than just having other things to do, I think its the whole balance of the week. Minus evidence, I don’t think people by and large do anything monday-thursday evening they go home watch tv – the droning of the working week is then broken at the weekend. If people had a more balanced week perhaps friday/saturday would not be crammed.
April 6th, 2009 at 00:05
[...] following down the same path of trying to regulate alcohol consumption via price rationing. But as Ed pointed out in a post on this blog not too long ago, this seems to be a really poor way of going about it. The real problem comes not [...]