Alcohol is bad, too much alcohol is really bad, and we could go a significant distance toward solving this problem if we could work out…’
Who ‘we’ Paleface? People who think alcohol is a ‘problem’ that needs fixing are censorious busybodies who don’t like the idea of others being free to do as they wish or have fun.
Regarding Fergus McCullough's post on alcohol. We've already run the experiment on alcohol prohibition. It didn't work. Anyone wanting to read a good book on the subject should read Daniel Okrent's "Last Call." One thing Okrent points out is that during Prohibition alcohol was available 7X24. After repeal, there was much tighter control. Much better to tax & regulate.
I'll need to follow the school one as I'm curious (and usually education intervention studies are interesting to look at the test and evaluation methods), but I'm always struck by statement like this:
"In layman’s terms, under this program, there is potential to close the math achievement gap between black and white students in less than three years"
Which reminds me of DeBoers argument. Namely, is this intervention somehow only targeting black students? Or does it lead to uniform improvement while keeping relative achievement the same?
"Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school."
I don't buy this. I don't think there's really any circumstance in human affairs where constant reputation management sucks up that much time and energy. Can anyone name another historical period where people really lived like crabs in a bucket? I sure can't. Crabs aren't social animals; humans are. We form factions, gangs, cliques, hierarchies, clans, classes, etc. Competition between groups discourages too much status jockeying within groups, and more importantly, a stable hierarchy obviates the need for reputation management in the first place.
Furthermore, how do people get to be popular in the first place? Well, one great way is to do something creative or inventive or artistic. Do we think the money, fame, adulation, and sexual opportunities that come with a successful music or acting career just, ya know, sprang out of nowhere in the last few decades? Sorry, but "society stagnated because of too much status competition" is an argument that rings hollow in my ears.
Edit: to clarify one thing, I do think that zero sum status competition can of course be destructive and wasteful, but I don't think there's anything really very special about sub vs super Dunbar numbers in that regard. Channeling male or female status competition into productive or at least net neutral activities would have been of value at virtually any stage of human evolution.
Re: Mr. McCullough, I think the problem is not alcohol but culture.
I recall a long time ago going to the cafeteria of an Italian university and noticing that the automatic drink dispensers included choices of red and white wine, as well as beer. I imagined the scene if such options were provided at American universities. But it was a big nothing for the Italian students because apparently drinking wine with a meal was just a normal culinary affair, not an opportunity to become inebriated. And despite the high production and consumption of wine in Italy, the Italian rate of alcoholism is stated to be in the 1% range compared to about 14% in the U.S.
In my experience, adults usually form intimate friendships under three circumstances, consanguinity, shared stressful experience, and alcohol consumption. If you aren't an addict or atypically vulnerable, I'd say it would be foolish to shut down that friendship channel.
Compare two recent studies by economists, experts in the field, about prevalence, tax incidence, and changes in prevalence in response to increases in excise taxes on alcohol:
1) Nirupama Rao and Yinan Wang, "Who Pays Sin Taxes? Understanding the Overlapping Burdens of Corrective Taxes" (Cato, 2022):
"Our analysis begins with documenting the high concentration of beer, wine, spirits, and cigarette purchases. Just 10 percent of households account for more than 80 percent of alcoholic beverage purchases by volume [... .]
To account for both the multiple dimensions of dependence and the extreme concentration in sin‐good purchases, we assign each household to one of eight mutually exclusive data clusters. These clusters explain 80 percent of the overall variation in sin‐tax burden, while demographics alone explain less than 4 percent. [...]
Households in the third‐most‐taxed cluster, which we label “Heavy drinkers,” on average purchase the equivalent of 11 alcoholic drinks per adult per week and make up 6.7 percent of the population. They are most likely to come from the highest education and income groups. Most previous studies suggest that wealthier households are less price‐sensitive and respond to price increases by switching to less expensive products rather than away from alcoholic beverages altogether. This suggests corrective taxes may be less effective at discouraging consumption among these households. If negative externalities grow more than proportionately with alcohol consumption, this group along with the 'Everything' group [i.e., people who are both heavy drinkers and heavy smokers] would compose 9 percent of the population yet be responsible for almost 60 percent of alcohol’s external damage."
2) Henry Saffer, Markus Gehrsitz, & Michael Grossman, "The Effects of Alcohol Excise Tax Increases by Drinking Level and by Income Level" (NBER 2022):
"The results presented in this paper are an advance over prior empirical studies of the effects of higher alcohol prices by drinking level and by income level because, unlike past studies, these results: 1) are based on all forms of ethanol, 2) rely on Nielsen price data, which is superior to the price data used in past studies, 3) rely on an exogenous tax increase, 4) bypass endogenous selection by defining drinking status before the tax increase, 5) rely on a quasi-balanced sample which allows for observation of the same households before and after the tax increase and 6) are based on a sample of almost one million transactions over four years from both license states and control states. [...]
[...] we conclude that heavy drinkers reduce purchases in response to excise tax increases. This reduction is not statistically different from the reductions in total ethanol consumption by other drinkers. [...]
[...] the variety of ethanol prices available provide options for drinkers to substitute to relatively cheaper products in response to an increase of excise taxes. [...]
[...] low-income drinkers, unlike other drinkers, pay more for ethanol after the tax increase. The results for low-income drinkers show that they reduce purchases but pay more for ethanol after the tax increase. [...]
[...] heavy drinkers purchase almost 9 times more ethanol than low-income drinkers and low-income heavy drinkers account for only 22% of all heavy drinkers. Hence, the harm done to the low-income group by tax hikes may be more than offset by the benefits of reductions in heavy drinking."
Agree on schools. Fryer doesn't change the forces that create bad schools--especially the incentives and political interests of elected officials and teachers unions. Those forces remain despite his intervention. Hence, the intervention is temporary when left on its own. Best intervention to address bad incentives? Defund government schools?
Black Mathletes. From following the chain of links it appears that to close the gap, black students received more learning and more intensive learning. Arnold is right in saying that as soon as the tenets program eases off, the gap will likely reappear. Regression to the mean happens when quality controls are removed. I'm cool with the principle that some people need more help to become productive. Making people productive is the whole and only purpose of skills training.
I am a big fan of Roland, but one thing he failed to focus on was Curriculum and instructional methods. Siegfried Engelmann got better results without the ability to hire and fire, by using a engineered and tested curriculum and training the teachers to use it. See https://zigsite.com/prologue_NeedyKids_chapter_5.html
I didn't buy nor yet read The Dawn of Civilization, but this was a great review. Erik the reviewer has his own theory about the gossip trap as the reason Homo Sapiens for 100,000 years was without civilization. A speculative yarn.
"I think it’s a true yarn, I really do. I think the gossip trap is real, or at least, explains more than other hypotheses about prehistorical life I’ve read. I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself."
Richard Wrangham's book The Goodness Paradox has a better, but not exclusionary answer. Homo Sapiens has taken 200k or so years, using language, to self-domesticate itself. By conspiring to kill the alpha male tyrants that are "too tyranical". And in this way, we moved away from the chimpanzee type nasty & brutal lives, to those with more cooperation. [Great side story of genetic selection of most friendly silver foxes in Siberia since the 50s ... becoming domesticated]
Another not-yet read book, by Edward Slingerland is:
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
"intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication."
It might well be that agriculture without alcohol isn't worth keeping - but adding drink makes it worth it, and aids in faster domestication. (or not?)
I'll admit that this response (https://snowdon.substack.com/p/temperance-nutt) has more than a hair of confirmation bias for me, but any reading of Nutt (including a second hand review of his book) and similar temperance writing, should be accompanied by a rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, even if just to steelman a coherent opposing view.
Alcohol is bad, too much alcohol is really bad, and we could go a significant distance toward solving this problem if we could work out…’
Who ‘we’ Paleface? People who think alcohol is a ‘problem’ that needs fixing are censorious busybodies who don’t like the idea of others being free to do as they wish or have fun.
Regarding Fergus McCullough's post on alcohol. We've already run the experiment on alcohol prohibition. It didn't work. Anyone wanting to read a good book on the subject should read Daniel Okrent's "Last Call." One thing Okrent points out is that during Prohibition alcohol was available 7X24. After repeal, there was much tighter control. Much better to tax & regulate.
I'll need to follow the school one as I'm curious (and usually education intervention studies are interesting to look at the test and evaluation methods), but I'm always struck by statement like this:
"In layman’s terms, under this program, there is potential to close the math achievement gap between black and white students in less than three years"
Which reminds me of DeBoers argument. Namely, is this intervention somehow only targeting black students? Or does it lead to uniform improvement while keeping relative achievement the same?
"Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school."
I don't buy this. I don't think there's really any circumstance in human affairs where constant reputation management sucks up that much time and energy. Can anyone name another historical period where people really lived like crabs in a bucket? I sure can't. Crabs aren't social animals; humans are. We form factions, gangs, cliques, hierarchies, clans, classes, etc. Competition between groups discourages too much status jockeying within groups, and more importantly, a stable hierarchy obviates the need for reputation management in the first place.
Furthermore, how do people get to be popular in the first place? Well, one great way is to do something creative or inventive or artistic. Do we think the money, fame, adulation, and sexual opportunities that come with a successful music or acting career just, ya know, sprang out of nowhere in the last few decades? Sorry, but "society stagnated because of too much status competition" is an argument that rings hollow in my ears.
Edit: to clarify one thing, I do think that zero sum status competition can of course be destructive and wasteful, but I don't think there's anything really very special about sub vs super Dunbar numbers in that regard. Channeling male or female status competition into productive or at least net neutral activities would have been of value at virtually any stage of human evolution.
Re: Mr. McCullough, I think the problem is not alcohol but culture.
I recall a long time ago going to the cafeteria of an Italian university and noticing that the automatic drink dispensers included choices of red and white wine, as well as beer. I imagined the scene if such options were provided at American universities. But it was a big nothing for the Italian students because apparently drinking wine with a meal was just a normal culinary affair, not an opportunity to become inebriated. And despite the high production and consumption of wine in Italy, the Italian rate of alcoholism is stated to be in the 1% range compared to about 14% in the U.S.
In my experience, adults usually form intimate friendships under three circumstances, consanguinity, shared stressful experience, and alcohol consumption. If you aren't an addict or atypically vulnerable, I'd say it would be foolish to shut down that friendship channel.
Re: Fergus McCullough on alcohol:
Compare two recent studies by economists, experts in the field, about prevalence, tax incidence, and changes in prevalence in response to increases in excise taxes on alcohol:
1) Nirupama Rao and Yinan Wang, "Who Pays Sin Taxes? Understanding the Overlapping Burdens of Corrective Taxes" (Cato, 2022):
https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/who-pays-sin-taxes-understanding-overlapping-burdens-corrective
Excerpts:
"Our analysis begins with documenting the high concentration of beer, wine, spirits, and cigarette purchases. Just 10 percent of households account for more than 80 percent of alcoholic beverage purchases by volume [... .]
To account for both the multiple dimensions of dependence and the extreme concentration in sin‐good purchases, we assign each household to one of eight mutually exclusive data clusters. These clusters explain 80 percent of the overall variation in sin‐tax burden, while demographics alone explain less than 4 percent. [...]
Households in the third‐most‐taxed cluster, which we label “Heavy drinkers,” on average purchase the equivalent of 11 alcoholic drinks per adult per week and make up 6.7 percent of the population. They are most likely to come from the highest education and income groups. Most previous studies suggest that wealthier households are less price‐sensitive and respond to price increases by switching to less expensive products rather than away from alcoholic beverages altogether. This suggests corrective taxes may be less effective at discouraging consumption among these households. If negative externalities grow more than proportionately with alcohol consumption, this group along with the 'Everything' group [i.e., people who are both heavy drinkers and heavy smokers] would compose 9 percent of the population yet be responsible for almost 60 percent of alcohol’s external damage."
2) Henry Saffer, Markus Gehrsitz, & Michael Grossman, "The Effects of Alcohol Excise Tax Increases by Drinking Level and by Income Level" (NBER 2022):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4119701
Excerpts:
"The results presented in this paper are an advance over prior empirical studies of the effects of higher alcohol prices by drinking level and by income level because, unlike past studies, these results: 1) are based on all forms of ethanol, 2) rely on Nielsen price data, which is superior to the price data used in past studies, 3) rely on an exogenous tax increase, 4) bypass endogenous selection by defining drinking status before the tax increase, 5) rely on a quasi-balanced sample which allows for observation of the same households before and after the tax increase and 6) are based on a sample of almost one million transactions over four years from both license states and control states. [...]
[...] we conclude that heavy drinkers reduce purchases in response to excise tax increases. This reduction is not statistically different from the reductions in total ethanol consumption by other drinkers. [...]
[...] the variety of ethanol prices available provide options for drinkers to substitute to relatively cheaper products in response to an increase of excise taxes. [...]
[...] low-income drinkers, unlike other drinkers, pay more for ethanol after the tax increase. The results for low-income drinkers show that they reduce purchases but pay more for ethanol after the tax increase. [...]
[...] heavy drinkers purchase almost 9 times more ethanol than low-income drinkers and low-income heavy drinkers account for only 22% of all heavy drinkers. Hence, the harm done to the low-income group by tax hikes may be more than offset by the benefits of reductions in heavy drinking."
Agree on schools. Fryer doesn't change the forces that create bad schools--especially the incentives and political interests of elected officials and teachers unions. Those forces remain despite his intervention. Hence, the intervention is temporary when left on its own. Best intervention to address bad incentives? Defund government schools?
Black Mathletes. From following the chain of links it appears that to close the gap, black students received more learning and more intensive learning. Arnold is right in saying that as soon as the tenets program eases off, the gap will likely reappear. Regression to the mean happens when quality controls are removed. I'm cool with the principle that some people need more help to become productive. Making people productive is the whole and only purpose of skills training.
I am a big fan of Roland, but one thing he failed to focus on was Curriculum and instructional methods. Siegfried Engelmann got better results without the ability to hire and fire, by using a engineered and tested curriculum and training the teachers to use it. See https://zigsite.com/prologue_NeedyKids_chapter_5.html
I didn't buy nor yet read The Dawn of Civilization, but this was a great review. Erik the reviewer has his own theory about the gossip trap as the reason Homo Sapiens for 100,000 years was without civilization. A speculative yarn.
"I think it’s a true yarn, I really do. I think the gossip trap is real, or at least, explains more than other hypotheses about prehistorical life I’ve read. I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself."
Richard Wrangham's book The Goodness Paradox has a better, but not exclusionary answer. Homo Sapiens has taken 200k or so years, using language, to self-domesticate itself. By conspiring to kill the alpha male tyrants that are "too tyranical". And in this way, we moved away from the chimpanzee type nasty & brutal lives, to those with more cooperation. [Great side story of genetic selection of most friendly silver foxes in Siberia since the 50s ... becoming domesticated]
Another not-yet read book, by Edward Slingerland is:
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
"intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication."
It might well be that agriculture without alcohol isn't worth keeping - but adding drink makes it worth it, and aids in faster domestication. (or not?)
social media did nothing wrong
gossip entered the institutions with women
I'll admit that this response (https://snowdon.substack.com/p/temperance-nutt) has more than a hair of confirmation bias for me, but any reading of Nutt (including a second hand review of his book) and similar temperance writing, should be accompanied by a rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, even if just to steelman a coherent opposing view.