I do think you, if anything, understate what proportion of the harm is done by that top 1%, it's really the vast majority. That 1% also tends to be poor and dysfunctional, which is why alcohol taxes are so good. Specifically, we want a tax *per unit* of alcohol, to discourage the very heavy drinkers.
This concentration of damages in the most dysfunctional members of society also, therefore, overstates how much social influence anyone reading this piece is likely to have. The local drunks in the park do not give a damn about my values or my example, because I'm not in their reference set.
This is importantly different than the example of meat, where
1) Each incremental meat purchase is clearly harmful
2) There are meat eaters in my social circle who are influenced by my example
3) The vast majority of meat eaters eat meat from factory farms (so are in the 'problematic' category that only a small minority of drinkers are in).
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that; your cultural impact isn’t quite as straightforward and direct as you seem to be imagining.
The idea isn’t that drunks in the park are going to see you happily sober and put down the can, but that over years and decades, fewer and fewer people drinking will lead to fewer and fewer people drinking, and 50 years from now there will be significantly fewer drunks in the park in the first place (this is also a vast oversimplification, but adds back in enough detail to illustrate a more plausible mechanism).
I don’t think we will ever get alcohol less socially acceptable than something like heroin, and there are still plenty of heroin addicts. Even over fifty years I don’t think there’s a path from my behavior to affecting the worst 1% of users. But I also don’t necessarily think it’s true that the worst 1% of users cause the vast majority of the harm, especially if you put more weight on the harm drinkers cause to others than what they cause to themselves. There are too many drunk drivers and partner abusers for them all to come from the one percent. And the behavior of normal people probably can affect those users.
The thing is, I'm not sure an alcohol tax puts off the heaviest drinkers, because they are chemical addicts. They are not following the same decision-making processes over personal spending as the rest of us, because the chemical has hijacked their brain to make getting their next hit the only thing they care about. The evidence I've seen is that minimum unit pricing largely serves to impoverish alcoholics rather than making them cut back.
I think you’re ignoring or dismissive of the benefits of alcohol, which may be quite large.
In personal relationships, alcohol does a great deal to relax people and lower boundaries. This is often very positive, leading to friendship, romance, and generally having a good time. You could argue that we should be able to get by without that liquid encouragement, but it is baked into our culture and there is no ready replacement.
At work, drinking similarly lowers inhibitions and allows coworkers and bosses to open up in a way that they simply would not otherwise. Again, ideally we would not need this, but in practice the best way to get the real scoop on what people at your company think is to share a few drinks and spill some tea together.
I do agree that raising the taxes on alcohol substantially would probably be a good idea. The first two drinks have a lot of utility that the next six probably don’t.
The social benefits typically occur out of the house. You could get a lot of mileage out of taxing liquor stores at a far higher rate than bars to discourage day drinking and drinking on your own I suspect. That could move us toward a happier medium.
Also a very good point. Although, a lot of alcohol bought at liquor stores is consumed in good company too. I'm certainly down for focusing higher alcohol taxes on liquor stores - maybe you could get some mileage out taxing the bottom shelf stuff the most, on top of that. Probably don't need to make a $50 bottle of scotch more expensive, but that $15 handle of "brandy" is probably not societally good.
Scotland, for one example, imposes a minimum per unit price, so the nicer and more expensive stuff is unaffected because it’s already over that price. It just raises the price of things that were previously the most price-efficient ways to get drunk.
Its introduction was a bit of an apocalypse for me and my friends as students at the time, but it is a simpler way of achieving the effect of your ‘tax the bottom shelf’ idea, with fewer logistical difficulties.
I think a flat per unit tax is an easy to administer solution to this. As the bottle gets more expensive, the tax becomes a smaller proportion of the overall cost. Your hypothetical 750ml bottle of Brandy has 16.6 shots in it with 1 unit of alcohol per shot, if we tax at $0.30 per unit we add $5 to both the high end bottle and the low end one. Higher proof liquor gets a higher tax, and it’s easy to apply to other forms of liquor, too, just figure out how many units of alcohol are in each container.
I’ve been sober since I was 15. I’ve been married for 26 years, have many very good friends and have worked professionally all my adult life. There hasn’t been a single time in any of those domains where alcohol would have improved my life, work, or relationships. However, I can confidently state that it could have made any of them worse.
Just because you were not aware of any moments where your life could have been improved by alcohol, does not mean that countless opportunities did not exist.
One dynamic that I often notice is that people who do not drink still benefit tremendously from the consumption of alcohol by others. Sometimes it may be from the social inhibition at a bar or happy hour. A girl may never have messaged you first on a dating app if not for that fact that she had just had come back from a wine night with her friends. And so forth.
This is a great article but its so hard to calculate the nonlinear positive effects. I love the article but alcohol is how I met my wife and maybe my kids don’t exist if I follow this? Or something just as fine happens and one shouldn’t over think it when you laid out the known harm so well. I genuinely don’t know.
Have you read Ed Slingerland's Drunk by any chance? I'm not sure what to think about the subject but he seems to be the most serious proponent of alcohol out there
This is the biggest problem with not tallying up the benefits in the other side of the ledger. There are literally tens of millions of marriages that exist bc of alcohol, because it lowered initial approach anxiety and out people in a more open and friendly mood when meeting. I'd warrant hundreds of millions of babies exist that would not, if their parents hadn't had liquid courage when they met. The number of friendships created and cemented bc of alcohol is so vast I can't imagine how you'd quantify it. Then there are the reduced conflicts and frictions with families, the business deals that get sealed, etc. There's a reason that per-country alcohol consumption is so strongly correlated with GDP...alcohol is a social lubricant that helps relationships happen and solidify.
I say this as someone who cannot have more than one drink per day bc if I do I get a raging headache. And who had one previous relationship completely blow up because of severe alcoholism and an individual who sadly ruined their life. But that's one person, compared to the dozens and dozens of friendships, business contacts, and romantic relationships I've had in my life that have been facilitated by alcohol to get over initial awkwardness and create a warmer and more open psychological state for bonding. It's not a fair analysis without a full accounting on both sides of the ledger.
I take this objection super seriously. I guess I just don't see many issues coming up in cultures that don't drink as much. I'm curious about how much of alcohol's social lubricant effects would just be replaced by other social practices.
Countries are only able to ban alcohol because they’re otherwise so illiberal that they’re bad to live in. I can think of areas of America with less drinking I’d like to live in, but if a country’s able to ban alcohol there are so many confounding variables that I don’t think it’s a useful question.
Well prohibition showed pretty clearly that banning alcohol is ineffective. One could easily argue that the only path to a teetotalling society is through illiberal methods. At least in the foreseeable future. From where i'm sitting, those dry counties in America that you reference are just about as "illiberal" as almost anywhere in the middle east. Death penalty, limited healthcare, religious bigotry, children being forced to have their rapists baby, legalized misogynistic polygamy, you know, heinous stuff like that.
1) If the only way to reduce drinking were laws banning alcohol, I wouldn't want to reduce drinking anymore. I try to make it clear in the post that I only want people to voluntarily drink less.
2) Do you really think the reason these regressive practices happen in these states is that the people in them drink less? That seems to get the causality exactly backwards. There are specific places in America that both have less drinking that I'd enjoy living in, I didn't say that everywhere people drink less is always better than places they drink more.
Zero is a special case. But there are societies where drinking is twice as common as others, and within countries there are subcultures where drinking is ten times as common as others. Those seem like some of the more relevant comparisons.
Certainly, although most of those places are religiously motivated, which is fair enough, but hardly a basis for good global policy. This includes muslim majorities and much of India.
The best example of cultural moderation i can think of is China, where drinking for the sake of drinking is very frowned upon, but almost everyone drinks at big dinners. At least that ensures very few people drink alone.
Which cultures? You mean like Afghanistan?? 😉 I think MOST cultures with no drinking at all are actually quite terrible and awful. I give an exception to the Mormons, but teetotalers are usually harsher people with extreme social hierarchy. That's actually another plus in alcohol's favor...it gives the underdogs the courage to rebel a bit against those above them. The first thing most tyrants want to do is ban alcohol, because of this. Interestestingly, our current president has famously never had a single drink.
I mean 3 out of 4 of our last Presidents were teetotalers! Obama was the only President who drank in the 21st century. I'd be interested in actual stats on this, again very open to being wrong here. I'm not sure how much of this pattern is only because people enjoy drinking and the only places that outright ban it right now are otherwise hyper authoritarian and religious.
I agree that we should weigh the alleged costs and benefits. However, every point you make is either speculation or anecdotes. The author provided hard data about the costs of alcohol; you just made guesses. Ones that are probably incorrect.
I don't know of any research on friendships and relationships. But there's recent research that claims alcohol reduces fecundity and fertility, which directly contradicts your claim about "hundreds of millions" of people born because of alcohol.
You shouldn't go around claiming things like "tens of millions of marriages existing because of alcohol" without ANY evidence of it. You even mentioned Mormons, which have a higher marriage/fertility rate than the general population (and other religious groups). Also, regarding the relationship between alcohol and GDP, do you actually think that's causal? Gimme a break!
> there's recent research that claims alcohol reduces fecundity and fertility, which directly contradicts your claim about "hundreds of millions" of people born because of alcohol.
These aren't contradictory at all, depending on how "fertility" was defined in those studies. If it's really about "fecundity" (number of pregnancies per attempt), that can easily go down even as number of births goes up (if the number of intentional attempts goes up).
It's important to not claim that things are for sure true without several independent lines of evidence supporting it. But it's also important not to claim that things are for sure irrelevant without several independent lines of evidence supporting that.
There are many important factors that haven't been studied, many of them because they're extremely difficult to study, and we shouldn't use that to just claim that these factors aren't important, because they haven't yet been proved to be important.
These are 100% contradictory. I mentioned 2 studies: one that measure fecundity and another that measures fertility. I think you might be misunderstanding me.
Regarding your latter points: I completely agree. But citing actual research is much more useful than spitting out random opinions. I am not claiming alcohol definitively reduces fertility. But there's some evidence supporting it and essentially no evidence against it. You're right: it's almost impossible to study alcohol. But poorly-reasoned anecdotes provided literally zero value (see below comments)
Did you cite actual research? There was no mention of a researcher or link to a study in the comment I replied to, but perhaps you included that information elsewhere.
It very well might be casual, the correlation is extremely high, though it's not like we have control histories where we can go back and change a whole country's alcohol rules. There are almost 9 billion people on earth, guessing hundreds of millions of babies have been born bc of alcohol is not a claim I'm even slightly uncomfortable making, it's probably more like billions of you actually counted everyone ever born. Pubs, taverns, parties etc have traditionally played a gigantic role in most western cultures for dating, mating, and initiation of marriages (an unplanned pregnancies) that's not really refutable. Most stuff you'll find online is by organizing dedicated to finding alcoholism, so they're hardly pro alcohol, yet even their own studies show that more than a third of people are drinking on first dates. First Dates & Relationships | To Drink or Not | Survey Results https://share.google/ZZunCmD3gGQjJqXXo
High correlation doesn't imply causality. It could easily be the case that high GDP causes more alcohol consumption. Or there could be other things that are correlated with both simultaneously. I'm pretty sure there's a litany of research that shows alcohol decreases GDP anyway. It would be easy to find.
And like I said, recent research implies alcohol REDUCES both fecundity and fertility. We can discuss the reliability of the findings if you want, but you being "comfortable" making a claim does not matter whatsoever. I'm comfortable making the claim that alcohol reduces overall fertility... So what? That shouldn't persuade you.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not denying that alcohol can induce social interactions. And I'm not denying that those interactions can result in pregnancy. I'm claiming that, in the counterfactual world where there's no alcohol, there are more births. Technically, even if there are 200 million births as a direct result of alcohol, as long are there are 200 million and one births that would have occurred otherwise, alcohol reduces fertility. Of course we can't observe this world, which is why we need to carefully research these things.
Okay I get it. You're right, in Afghanistan there are more births. And other bad places. I was talking about babies made by people who were having fun, with people they liked, not babies resulting from the husband their dad just sold/arranged her to as a second wife 😂.
I know that correlation is not the same as causation, but also, you realize that alcohol actually had to be invented at some point, so you kind of DO know what happened in most places before and after alcohol. I think you are thinking very narrowly of modern times, while I'm taking a cross-cultural historical look, and plenty of anthropology and history s jolars now argue that alcohol basically created civilization and that developing into the agrarian age would not have happened absent desire for alcohol and political structures that resulted. Not everyone buys those arguments but it's not a minority or quack viewpoint.
I think you are clearly very anti alcohol, so it's somewhat pointless to argue with you if you are a priori dedicated to only thinking alcohol is negative and won't admit any positive, when it's obviously both.
My views do not come from cross-country comparisons, as places like Afghanistan are much different than USA for many reasons other than no alcohol. So your point about Afghanistan doesn't make any sense.
If you want to talk about having babies with people you don't like: alcohol plays a role in many cases of rape. The lower bound estimates are like 30%+. The upper bounds are ~70%.
In particular, the fertility research I'm citing exploits Soviet Union's anti-alcohol campaign (as there are not really any good examples within the past 30 years). It's a working paper currently. The fecundity research was published in Nature; no one really disputes it. Obviously fecundity is not what we're discussing, but it plays a role in fertility.
That's great many historians think this about alcohol. But the article is talking about drinking alcohol today. (And ostensibly we are too.)
You're correct. I'm against alcohol. But I'm not dedicated to only seeing the negatives. I'm just dedicated to calling people out for making egregious unfounded claims like alcohol causes millions of births. As with anything, I see the positives. But some of the things you mentioned are against common sense. Alcohol reduces family conflicts? You don't even try to cite research or anything.
The only substantial point you make is that alcohol is this social lubricant and can therefore facilitate social interactions. This is obvious. And it's one of the benefits of alcohol that the author even mentions. However, his main point is that the costs outweigh the benefits. I have not given my stance, but I want to hear yours: at what point would alcohol become too costly for society? If dozens of millions died every year directly because of alcohol, would you want to do something about it? (i.e., tax, ban, or discourage it) What if we lost 10% of GDP every year to alcohol?
The person you're replying to didn't make any claims about health benefits - the benefits they were claiming were of various social types. Some of those benefits could clearly be had from cannabis, others from caffeine, others from kava, and there are different benefits that can be had from hallucinogens. I would be surprised if any of these substances had significant health benefits. But it's also likely that some of the benefits that each has can't be replaced by the others, and the question becomes the tradeoff between the health costs and the non-health benefits.
I'm surprised to read several comments extolling the social benefits of alcohol consumption. I thought the main idea here would be a slam dunk.
Yes, it's a social norm, it can help lowering inhibitions... but:
1) Replacing alcohol consumption with innocuous social habits would not require a Manhattan project, only social will and experimentation.
2) I personally know many people (and I feel that way myself quite often) that alcohol consumption makes feel out-of-place and prefer to clam up, not open up. This norm is pretty much imposed on (I suppose?) many people who just don't enjoy it (think: it's tough to meet people in universities, neighborhoods and even firms without attending alcohol-heavy parties and culture).
I suppose aggregating the good and the bad in these less obvious situations is challenging, so Arbituram is probably right that we might want to focus on the 1% unambiguously, critically bad outcomes from alcohol -the case is strong enough with this.
I don't think of it as lowering social inhibitions. I think of it as making friends, and getting to know existing friends better.
All my very good friends — people who have been friends for thirty years or more — are friends that I used to go to the pub with a lot. I don't have a single friend now who didn’t come drink with me in the past.
Similarly, I just came to a new city. I’ve made plenty of new friends and I met them at the pub. They call me and say “Wanna go to the pub?”. By contrast, my adult children who don’t drink, have made no friends. They go to coffee shops, but they never make friends there. They drink their coffee alone.
So, for me, it’s not about lowering inhibitions, it’s about meeting people and making friends.
Thank you, Sean. I appreciate your suggestions. Sincerely.
My kids actually do go to things like this. Climbing & Thai Boxing & Pole, for example. I do think the combination of something like these with “Wanna go for a beer?”, though, makes it easier to make friends. “Wanna go for coffee?” should work too, but it doesn't seem to for them.
Have you read “Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable”? An individual could find an alternative to alcohol without too much difficulty; I think getting society as a whole to do it would be considerably harder than the Manhattan Project. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
I find it interesting that teenagers/students/etc are finding it harder to make friends and find lovers at the same time that the social power of beer fades. I expect much of this can be blamed on sitting at home with video games, but I wonder if even that comes about because going to the pub for a beer is less attractive.
I just re-read the SSC post. Scott makes some good points about changing society.
I'm not sure I buy the Minecraft analogy. In that scenario, sure, I wouldn't play Minecraft – I would just play a different video game. But alcohol isn't easily substitutable in that way. If the situation was "Video games in general are killing 140,000 Americans every year," I would still play video games!
Even being out of the corporate world for almost 2 years I am still blown away at the sheer number of people who would drink dangerously and excessively in company time during conferences and offsite because alcohol was so normalized.
The last training of every day during a conference had a joke about getting to the bar, and each day starts off with a joke about bad hangovers and somehow barely functioning.
Scary to think how many people are likely harmed by this, me included.
A huge issue. Do you have a best guess as to how great a negative externality the marginal drinker produces?
Relatedly, some actions around alcohol seem especially bad on the margin (e.g. posting positively about alcohol consumption on social media, introducing alcohol to environments/occasions where it wasn't already). More ceremonial consumption seems quite fine (e.g. drinking a toast at a wedding or special occasion, or communion wine at church).
Really no idea, I haven't done as deep of a dive. I find that the super basic negative stats are enough to change people's behavior. Definitely agree that the ceremonial consumption seems fine and that the main concerning stuff is on the margin. I think I've actually had a moderate effect on the behavior of people around me just by not drinking.
Great post, thanks for writing! As a beer-loving Belgian who personally loves the low prices here, I reluctantly agree that it would be better for society if it were taxed much higher.
The point about alcohol taxes is an interesting one, but misses something huge: “vice taxes” disproportionately affect the poor and working class. Vices (cigarettes, alcohol, lottery, etc) are more prevalent among the poor in general, because they appeal to people who feel hopeless and helpless. The college professor who drinks a glass of wine with dinner every now and then and smokes a cigar with the Provost at the monthly get-together is barely affected by the taxes. The destitute, borderline-homeless guy with undiagnosed mental illness and no high school diploma is going to spend not only numerically, but proportionally more on vice taxes because he’s self-medicating for his hopelessness. So if your goal is to extract more tax revenues from the poor and continue to worsen their economic prospects, by all means, raise those vice taxes.
I mean this is true of most things in society no? Rich people have more resources to get around barriers to stuff. Seems like we still need to try to put some barriers up
Yeah if we can't do something because it will hit the poor worse then we can't do anything. Negative heath outcomes also affect the poor more so encouraging poor folk to not smoke via tax policy is still good.
I would imagine that in the short term, it would be very crappy for poor people, but it would likely have a positive effect on younger people who haven't yet gone down that path. When I was at uni/college, the drinking culture was crazy and the alcohol was cheap, so people just did it. If the alcohol was significantly more expensive, it would probably put off a lot of these drinkers. It could also help prevent people getting to a point where they are drinking alcoholic-levels in the first place because they don't have so much opportunity to develop an addiction. For sure though, any tax should be accompanied with better support programmes for existing drinkers. (Then the taxes could maybe even serve as a push-factor for some to recover).
Plausible, although I'm sceptical that merely personally abstaining from alcohol has marginal effects. I think there's a stronger case that individuals should vocally not drink alcohol to try to start a norm shift. I don't expect to see a norm shift just from not drinking, but this is a much more costly action to take than just not drinking.
The other argument is that you're making alcohol cheaper for people at risk from alcohol by drinking. I think this is only true if the long run average cost curve for acohol production is continuously downward sloping. Given that we have small alcohol suppliers, I suspect that that isn't the case, although I can't be sure (although I don't expect that R&D is a significant input for alcohol companies.) I don't think your 1/38 case goes through - just intuitively it seems like alcohol companies will be able to sell their product at around the same price if alcohol consumption dropped by half.
My guess is that if one's in a social group with people who are at risk of significant harm from alcohol it could make sense to publicly stop drinking, and when one is in the position to set policy in some sense one should set it against acohol - e.g don't organise social events around alcohol consumption.
I don’t quite agree with the article. As a teetotaller, I would be very concerned if social benefits of drinking (say reduction of inhibition) meant that society could force me to drink. By extension, I don’t expect social losses of alcohol to result in stopping people from drinking. This, of course, doesn’t apply to specific circumstances (drinking while driving or drinking in minors).
Personally, I don’t care for reduction in inhibition - I consider it a cost, not a benefit, and I think the problems with alcohol, especially the risk of abuse in your most vulnerable time are undercounted and I am happy to defend the stance in front of anyone, just as I would defend allowing adults to make their own choices.
On a side note, often we don’t have complete information (and sometimes the information changes with new developments) about what is good and what is best. The standard example I have is sickle cell anaemia (obviously bad, but protects against malaria). It is quite possible that what is bad today may turn out good tomorrow. In the situation, the best thing is to let people make their own decisions rather than have a totalitarian state obsess with and enforce the one right way to do things.
Whenever I say I never drink alcohol (and advice other's to do the same) older dutch people always call me a "blauwe knoop"(blue knot), which was (apparently) a very popular abstinence movement in the olden days which has almost fully disappeared. Google tells me something similar happened in the US with the "blue ribbon" movement, so maybe that's a symbol/movement that can be revived.
Anecdotally, but from a lot of sources, kids these days are drinking less. My university professor friends tell me that. I see it with my own children and their friends. Kids are just not drinking or partying like they did when I was in university. And those who do, binge drink less. There’s less peer pressure to “get wasted”.
Mostly this is a good thing. But kids these days are also more anxious, less social, and don’t know how to interact in large groups as well. I think this is related.
Maybe there aren't enough good alternatives to drinking/clubbing culture yet? (As well as there probably being a lingering effect on those who experienced their normally social teenage years during the pandemic).
I would have loved non-drinking related activities when I was at uni because I actually hated it, but those were pretty much the only options available at the uni I went to, so I went and did the getting drunk thing.
Perhaps (hopefully) we are only in early days of this shift away from drinking and the young ones will be able to define a whole new 'freshers'/student culture.
I suspect that at least part of the issue is that there are various online social activities that are substituting for in-person social activities, and this has the good effects of substituting non-alcohol-related socialization for alcohol-related socialization, but the bad effects of substituting virtual socialization for in-person socialization. The move from natural homegrown foods to industrial food probably resulted in a lot less food poisoning, but a very different sort of health impact from "junk food".
They are always aware of being on camera. That’s why they have that weird robotic affect. They can’t drink much because they might end up going viral looking like an ass. Anecdotally the zoomers I know who drink do so in private.
People often neglect to compare the costs/risks to the benefits.
In the case of alcohol, I think the benefits of alcohol are smaller than most people believe. I think in the majority of cases, the feelings of happiness from alcohol are not actually coming from alcohol, but from socializing, then being misattributed to the alcohol.
One easy way to verify this: try drinking alone. You'll find it doesn't make you happy. It just accentuates existing feelings.
Then, try talking to people for awhile without drinking. You'll find once you get past the initial awkwardness, you start feeling good.
That's essentially how it is handled in British Columbia where I live, aside from the advertising. We tax the hell out of our liquor, way more than anywhere in the US. We haven't completely banned advertising, but it is very carefully regulated. Hours are only 10am-11pm, province wide. We basically have already done everything you suggest, and it has had very little effect on how much people drink.
Generationally it's a very different story. Gen Z barely drinks compared to older generations.
Yes, that is largely demographic. Both Immigrant populations and Gen Z natives simply don't drink as much as previous generations of Canadians. The laws i mentioned are old, at least 30 years old, so the last few years have seen shifts for different reasons.
I do think you, if anything, understate what proportion of the harm is done by that top 1%, it's really the vast majority. That 1% also tends to be poor and dysfunctional, which is why alcohol taxes are so good. Specifically, we want a tax *per unit* of alcohol, to discourage the very heavy drinkers.
This concentration of damages in the most dysfunctional members of society also, therefore, overstates how much social influence anyone reading this piece is likely to have. The local drunks in the park do not give a damn about my values or my example, because I'm not in their reference set.
This is importantly different than the example of meat, where
1) Each incremental meat purchase is clearly harmful
2) There are meat eaters in my social circle who are influenced by my example
3) The vast majority of meat eaters eat meat from factory farms (so are in the 'problematic' category that only a small minority of drinkers are in).
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that; your cultural impact isn’t quite as straightforward and direct as you seem to be imagining.
The idea isn’t that drunks in the park are going to see you happily sober and put down the can, but that over years and decades, fewer and fewer people drinking will lead to fewer and fewer people drinking, and 50 years from now there will be significantly fewer drunks in the park in the first place (this is also a vast oversimplification, but adds back in enough detail to illustrate a more plausible mechanism).
I don’t think we will ever get alcohol less socially acceptable than something like heroin, and there are still plenty of heroin addicts. Even over fifty years I don’t think there’s a path from my behavior to affecting the worst 1% of users. But I also don’t necessarily think it’s true that the worst 1% of users cause the vast majority of the harm, especially if you put more weight on the harm drinkers cause to others than what they cause to themselves. There are too many drunk drivers and partner abusers for them all to come from the one percent. And the behavior of normal people probably can affect those users.
The thing is, I'm not sure an alcohol tax puts off the heaviest drinkers, because they are chemical addicts. They are not following the same decision-making processes over personal spending as the rest of us, because the chemical has hijacked their brain to make getting their next hit the only thing they care about. The evidence I've seen is that minimum unit pricing largely serves to impoverish alcoholics rather than making them cut back.
The bigger factor is that it discourages people from starting to consume enough to go down that path.
I think you’re ignoring or dismissive of the benefits of alcohol, which may be quite large.
In personal relationships, alcohol does a great deal to relax people and lower boundaries. This is often very positive, leading to friendship, romance, and generally having a good time. You could argue that we should be able to get by without that liquid encouragement, but it is baked into our culture and there is no ready replacement.
At work, drinking similarly lowers inhibitions and allows coworkers and bosses to open up in a way that they simply would not otherwise. Again, ideally we would not need this, but in practice the best way to get the real scoop on what people at your company think is to share a few drinks and spill some tea together.
Yup I worry I'm getting this one wrong, I'm pretty uncertain here.
I do agree that raising the taxes on alcohol substantially would probably be a good idea. The first two drinks have a lot of utility that the next six probably don’t.
The social benefits typically occur out of the house. You could get a lot of mileage out of taxing liquor stores at a far higher rate than bars to discourage day drinking and drinking on your own I suspect. That could move us toward a happier medium.
Also a very good point. Although, a lot of alcohol bought at liquor stores is consumed in good company too. I'm certainly down for focusing higher alcohol taxes on liquor stores - maybe you could get some mileage out taxing the bottom shelf stuff the most, on top of that. Probably don't need to make a $50 bottle of scotch more expensive, but that $15 handle of "brandy" is probably not societally good.
Scotland, for one example, imposes a minimum per unit price, so the nicer and more expensive stuff is unaffected because it’s already over that price. It just raises the price of things that were previously the most price-efficient ways to get drunk.
Its introduction was a bit of an apocalypse for me and my friends as students at the time, but it is a simpler way of achieving the effect of your ‘tax the bottom shelf’ idea, with fewer logistical difficulties.
I think a flat per unit tax is an easy to administer solution to this. As the bottle gets more expensive, the tax becomes a smaller proportion of the overall cost. Your hypothetical 750ml bottle of Brandy has 16.6 shots in it with 1 unit of alcohol per shot, if we tax at $0.30 per unit we add $5 to both the high end bottle and the low end one. Higher proof liquor gets a higher tax, and it’s easy to apply to other forms of liquor, too, just figure out how many units of alcohol are in each container.
I’ve been sober since I was 15. I’ve been married for 26 years, have many very good friends and have worked professionally all my adult life. There hasn’t been a single time in any of those domains where alcohol would have improved my life, work, or relationships. However, I can confidently state that it could have made any of them worse.
Just because you were not aware of any moments where your life could have been improved by alcohol, does not mean that countless opportunities did not exist.
One dynamic that I often notice is that people who do not drink still benefit tremendously from the consumption of alcohol by others. Sometimes it may be from the social inhibition at a bar or happy hour. A girl may never have messaged you first on a dating app if not for that fact that she had just had come back from a wine night with her friends. And so forth.
The same could be said of all the crack I didn’t smoke. Who knows how awesome it might have been? We’ll never know.
This is a great article but its so hard to calculate the nonlinear positive effects. I love the article but alcohol is how I met my wife and maybe my kids don’t exist if I follow this? Or something just as fine happens and one shouldn’t over think it when you laid out the known harm so well. I genuinely don’t know.
I’m kind of in the dark! This is one of the things I’m most uncertain about
Alcohol sales are propping up restaurants, "they say".
Have you read Ed Slingerland's Drunk by any chance? I'm not sure what to think about the subject but he seems to be the most serious proponent of alcohol out there
Will look at it!
This is the biggest problem with not tallying up the benefits in the other side of the ledger. There are literally tens of millions of marriages that exist bc of alcohol, because it lowered initial approach anxiety and out people in a more open and friendly mood when meeting. I'd warrant hundreds of millions of babies exist that would not, if their parents hadn't had liquid courage when they met. The number of friendships created and cemented bc of alcohol is so vast I can't imagine how you'd quantify it. Then there are the reduced conflicts and frictions with families, the business deals that get sealed, etc. There's a reason that per-country alcohol consumption is so strongly correlated with GDP...alcohol is a social lubricant that helps relationships happen and solidify.
I say this as someone who cannot have more than one drink per day bc if I do I get a raging headache. And who had one previous relationship completely blow up because of severe alcoholism and an individual who sadly ruined their life. But that's one person, compared to the dozens and dozens of friendships, business contacts, and romantic relationships I've had in my life that have been facilitated by alcohol to get over initial awkwardness and create a warmer and more open psychological state for bonding. It's not a fair analysis without a full accounting on both sides of the ledger.
I take this objection super seriously. I guess I just don't see many issues coming up in cultures that don't drink as much. I'm curious about how much of alcohol's social lubricant effects would just be replaced by other social practices.
This would be very eye opening to explore.
Name one country that has zero drinking allowed that you would actually want to live in.
Countries are only able to ban alcohol because they’re otherwise so illiberal that they’re bad to live in. I can think of areas of America with less drinking I’d like to live in, but if a country’s able to ban alcohol there are so many confounding variables that I don’t think it’s a useful question.
Well prohibition showed pretty clearly that banning alcohol is ineffective. One could easily argue that the only path to a teetotalling society is through illiberal methods. At least in the foreseeable future. From where i'm sitting, those dry counties in America that you reference are just about as "illiberal" as almost anywhere in the middle east. Death penalty, limited healthcare, religious bigotry, children being forced to have their rapists baby, legalized misogynistic polygamy, you know, heinous stuff like that.
This all seems like a series of huge wild leaps.
1) If the only way to reduce drinking were laws banning alcohol, I wouldn't want to reduce drinking anymore. I try to make it clear in the post that I only want people to voluntarily drink less.
2) Do you really think the reason these regressive practices happen in these states is that the people in them drink less? That seems to get the causality exactly backwards. There are specific places in America that both have less drinking that I'd enjoy living in, I didn't say that everywhere people drink less is always better than places they drink more.
Zero is a special case. But there are societies where drinking is twice as common as others, and within countries there are subcultures where drinking is ten times as common as others. Those seem like some of the more relevant comparisons.
Certainly, although most of those places are religiously motivated, which is fair enough, but hardly a basis for good global policy. This includes muslim majorities and much of India.
The best example of cultural moderation i can think of is China, where drinking for the sake of drinking is very frowned upon, but almost everyone drinks at big dinners. At least that ensures very few people drink alone.
Which cultures? You mean like Afghanistan?? 😉 I think MOST cultures with no drinking at all are actually quite terrible and awful. I give an exception to the Mormons, but teetotalers are usually harsher people with extreme social hierarchy. That's actually another plus in alcohol's favor...it gives the underdogs the courage to rebel a bit against those above them. The first thing most tyrants want to do is ban alcohol, because of this. Interestestingly, our current president has famously never had a single drink.
I mean 3 out of 4 of our last Presidents were teetotalers! Obama was the only President who drank in the 21st century. I'd be interested in actual stats on this, again very open to being wrong here. I'm not sure how much of this pattern is only because people enjoy drinking and the only places that outright ban it right now are otherwise hyper authoritarian and religious.
I agree that we should weigh the alleged costs and benefits. However, every point you make is either speculation or anecdotes. The author provided hard data about the costs of alcohol; you just made guesses. Ones that are probably incorrect.
I don't know of any research on friendships and relationships. But there's recent research that claims alcohol reduces fecundity and fertility, which directly contradicts your claim about "hundreds of millions" of people born because of alcohol.
You shouldn't go around claiming things like "tens of millions of marriages existing because of alcohol" without ANY evidence of it. You even mentioned Mormons, which have a higher marriage/fertility rate than the general population (and other religious groups). Also, regarding the relationship between alcohol and GDP, do you actually think that's causal? Gimme a break!
> there's recent research that claims alcohol reduces fecundity and fertility, which directly contradicts your claim about "hundreds of millions" of people born because of alcohol.
These aren't contradictory at all, depending on how "fertility" was defined in those studies. If it's really about "fecundity" (number of pregnancies per attempt), that can easily go down even as number of births goes up (if the number of intentional attempts goes up).
It's important to not claim that things are for sure true without several independent lines of evidence supporting it. But it's also important not to claim that things are for sure irrelevant without several independent lines of evidence supporting that.
There are many important factors that haven't been studied, many of them because they're extremely difficult to study, and we shouldn't use that to just claim that these factors aren't important, because they haven't yet been proved to be important.
These are 100% contradictory. I mentioned 2 studies: one that measure fecundity and another that measures fertility. I think you might be misunderstanding me.
Regarding your latter points: I completely agree. But citing actual research is much more useful than spitting out random opinions. I am not claiming alcohol definitively reduces fertility. But there's some evidence supporting it and essentially no evidence against it. You're right: it's almost impossible to study alcohol. But poorly-reasoned anecdotes provided literally zero value (see below comments)
Did you cite actual research? There was no mention of a researcher or link to a study in the comment I replied to, but perhaps you included that information elsewhere.
It very well might be casual, the correlation is extremely high, though it's not like we have control histories where we can go back and change a whole country's alcohol rules. There are almost 9 billion people on earth, guessing hundreds of millions of babies have been born bc of alcohol is not a claim I'm even slightly uncomfortable making, it's probably more like billions of you actually counted everyone ever born. Pubs, taverns, parties etc have traditionally played a gigantic role in most western cultures for dating, mating, and initiation of marriages (an unplanned pregnancies) that's not really refutable. Most stuff you'll find online is by organizing dedicated to finding alcoholism, so they're hardly pro alcohol, yet even their own studies show that more than a third of people are drinking on first dates. First Dates & Relationships | To Drink or Not | Survey Results https://share.google/ZZunCmD3gGQjJqXXo
High correlation doesn't imply causality. It could easily be the case that high GDP causes more alcohol consumption. Or there could be other things that are correlated with both simultaneously. I'm pretty sure there's a litany of research that shows alcohol decreases GDP anyway. It would be easy to find.
And like I said, recent research implies alcohol REDUCES both fecundity and fertility. We can discuss the reliability of the findings if you want, but you being "comfortable" making a claim does not matter whatsoever. I'm comfortable making the claim that alcohol reduces overall fertility... So what? That shouldn't persuade you.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not denying that alcohol can induce social interactions. And I'm not denying that those interactions can result in pregnancy. I'm claiming that, in the counterfactual world where there's no alcohol, there are more births. Technically, even if there are 200 million births as a direct result of alcohol, as long are there are 200 million and one births that would have occurred otherwise, alcohol reduces fertility. Of course we can't observe this world, which is why we need to carefully research these things.
Okay I get it. You're right, in Afghanistan there are more births. And other bad places. I was talking about babies made by people who were having fun, with people they liked, not babies resulting from the husband their dad just sold/arranged her to as a second wife 😂.
I know that correlation is not the same as causation, but also, you realize that alcohol actually had to be invented at some point, so you kind of DO know what happened in most places before and after alcohol. I think you are thinking very narrowly of modern times, while I'm taking a cross-cultural historical look, and plenty of anthropology and history s jolars now argue that alcohol basically created civilization and that developing into the agrarian age would not have happened absent desire for alcohol and political structures that resulted. Not everyone buys those arguments but it's not a minority or quack viewpoint.
I think you are clearly very anti alcohol, so it's somewhat pointless to argue with you if you are a priori dedicated to only thinking alcohol is negative and won't admit any positive, when it's obviously both.
My views do not come from cross-country comparisons, as places like Afghanistan are much different than USA for many reasons other than no alcohol. So your point about Afghanistan doesn't make any sense.
If you want to talk about having babies with people you don't like: alcohol plays a role in many cases of rape. The lower bound estimates are like 30%+. The upper bounds are ~70%.
In particular, the fertility research I'm citing exploits Soviet Union's anti-alcohol campaign (as there are not really any good examples within the past 30 years). It's a working paper currently. The fecundity research was published in Nature; no one really disputes it. Obviously fecundity is not what we're discussing, but it plays a role in fertility.
That's great many historians think this about alcohol. But the article is talking about drinking alcohol today. (And ostensibly we are too.)
You're correct. I'm against alcohol. But I'm not dedicated to only seeing the negatives. I'm just dedicated to calling people out for making egregious unfounded claims like alcohol causes millions of births. As with anything, I see the positives. But some of the things you mentioned are against common sense. Alcohol reduces family conflicts? You don't even try to cite research or anything.
The only substantial point you make is that alcohol is this social lubricant and can therefore facilitate social interactions. This is obvious. And it's one of the benefits of alcohol that the author even mentions. However, his main point is that the costs outweigh the benefits. I have not given my stance, but I want to hear yours: at what point would alcohol become too costly for society? If dozens of millions died every year directly because of alcohol, would you want to do something about it? (i.e., tax, ban, or discourage it) What if we lost 10% of GDP every year to alcohol?
There are zero health benefits to alcohol and any social benefits can be achieved in far safer ways through kava, weed, or Microdosing shrooms.
The person you're replying to didn't make any claims about health benefits - the benefits they were claiming were of various social types. Some of those benefits could clearly be had from cannabis, others from caffeine, others from kava, and there are different benefits that can be had from hallucinogens. I would be surprised if any of these substances had significant health benefits. But it's also likely that some of the benefits that each has can't be replaced by the others, and the question becomes the tradeoff between the health costs and the non-health benefits.
I'm surprised to read several comments extolling the social benefits of alcohol consumption. I thought the main idea here would be a slam dunk.
Yes, it's a social norm, it can help lowering inhibitions... but:
1) Replacing alcohol consumption with innocuous social habits would not require a Manhattan project, only social will and experimentation.
2) I personally know many people (and I feel that way myself quite often) that alcohol consumption makes feel out-of-place and prefer to clam up, not open up. This norm is pretty much imposed on (I suppose?) many people who just don't enjoy it (think: it's tough to meet people in universities, neighborhoods and even firms without attending alcohol-heavy parties and culture).
I suppose aggregating the good and the bad in these less obvious situations is challenging, so Arbituram is probably right that we might want to focus on the 1% unambiguously, critically bad outcomes from alcohol -the case is strong enough with this.
I don't think of it as lowering social inhibitions. I think of it as making friends, and getting to know existing friends better.
All my very good friends — people who have been friends for thirty years or more — are friends that I used to go to the pub with a lot. I don't have a single friend now who didn’t come drink with me in the past.
Similarly, I just came to a new city. I’ve made plenty of new friends and I met them at the pub. They call me and say “Wanna go to the pub?”. By contrast, my adult children who don’t drink, have made no friends. They go to coffee shops, but they never make friends there. They drink their coffee alone.
So, for me, it’s not about lowering inhibitions, it’s about meeting people and making friends.
I don’t drink and here is a short list of places I’ve made friends. Your kids may want to try one:
Welding class
Volunteering at a soup kitchen
Farm stay vacation
Work
Church
Art opening
Monastery stay (Buddhist & Christian)
Japanese language classes
Hiking clubs
These are just the few that come to mind.
I’m gonna walk over to the neighborhood welding class with the other parents in the neighborhood to catch up, next week, great suggestion
Thank you, Sean. I appreciate your suggestions. Sincerely.
My kids actually do go to things like this. Climbing & Thai Boxing & Pole, for example. I do think the combination of something like these with “Wanna go for a beer?”, though, makes it easier to make friends. “Wanna go for coffee?” should work too, but it doesn't seem to for them.
They sound like interesting people! I’m sorry it’s harder to make friends these days. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because of phones and computers?
Have you read “Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable”? An individual could find an alternative to alcohol without too much difficulty; I think getting society as a whole to do it would be considerably harder than the Manhattan Project. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
I find it interesting that teenagers/students/etc are finding it harder to make friends and find lovers at the same time that the social power of beer fades. I expect much of this can be blamed on sitting at home with video games, but I wonder if even that comes about because going to the pub for a beer is less attractive.
I just re-read the SSC post. Scott makes some good points about changing society.
I'm not sure I buy the Minecraft analogy. In that scenario, sure, I wouldn't play Minecraft – I would just play a different video game. But alcohol isn't easily substitutable in that way. If the situation was "Video games in general are killing 140,000 Americans every year," I would still play video games!
Good point! It's been a while and I should probably rethink a lot of arguments here.
Even being out of the corporate world for almost 2 years I am still blown away at the sheer number of people who would drink dangerously and excessively in company time during conferences and offsite because alcohol was so normalized.
The last training of every day during a conference had a joke about getting to the bar, and each day starts off with a joke about bad hangovers and somehow barely functioning.
Scary to think how many people are likely harmed by this, me included.
A huge issue. Do you have a best guess as to how great a negative externality the marginal drinker produces?
Relatedly, some actions around alcohol seem especially bad on the margin (e.g. posting positively about alcohol consumption on social media, introducing alcohol to environments/occasions where it wasn't already). More ceremonial consumption seems quite fine (e.g. drinking a toast at a wedding or special occasion, or communion wine at church).
Really no idea, I haven't done as deep of a dive. I find that the super basic negative stats are enough to change people's behavior. Definitely agree that the ceremonial consumption seems fine and that the main concerning stuff is on the margin. I think I've actually had a moderate effect on the behavior of people around me just by not drinking.
Great post, thanks for writing! As a beer-loving Belgian who personally loves the low prices here, I reluctantly agree that it would be better for society if it were taxed much higher.
The point about alcohol taxes is an interesting one, but misses something huge: “vice taxes” disproportionately affect the poor and working class. Vices (cigarettes, alcohol, lottery, etc) are more prevalent among the poor in general, because they appeal to people who feel hopeless and helpless. The college professor who drinks a glass of wine with dinner every now and then and smokes a cigar with the Provost at the monthly get-together is barely affected by the taxes. The destitute, borderline-homeless guy with undiagnosed mental illness and no high school diploma is going to spend not only numerically, but proportionally more on vice taxes because he’s self-medicating for his hopelessness. So if your goal is to extract more tax revenues from the poor and continue to worsen their economic prospects, by all means, raise those vice taxes.
I mean this is true of most things in society no? Rich people have more resources to get around barriers to stuff. Seems like we still need to try to put some barriers up
Yeah if we can't do something because it will hit the poor worse then we can't do anything. Negative heath outcomes also affect the poor more so encouraging poor folk to not smoke via tax policy is still good.
I would imagine that in the short term, it would be very crappy for poor people, but it would likely have a positive effect on younger people who haven't yet gone down that path. When I was at uni/college, the drinking culture was crazy and the alcohol was cheap, so people just did it. If the alcohol was significantly more expensive, it would probably put off a lot of these drinkers. It could also help prevent people getting to a point where they are drinking alcoholic-levels in the first place because they don't have so much opportunity to develop an addiction. For sure though, any tax should be accompanied with better support programmes for existing drinkers. (Then the taxes could maybe even serve as a push-factor for some to recover).
Plausible, although I'm sceptical that merely personally abstaining from alcohol has marginal effects. I think there's a stronger case that individuals should vocally not drink alcohol to try to start a norm shift. I don't expect to see a norm shift just from not drinking, but this is a much more costly action to take than just not drinking.
The other argument is that you're making alcohol cheaper for people at risk from alcohol by drinking. I think this is only true if the long run average cost curve for acohol production is continuously downward sloping. Given that we have small alcohol suppliers, I suspect that that isn't the case, although I can't be sure (although I don't expect that R&D is a significant input for alcohol companies.) I don't think your 1/38 case goes through - just intuitively it seems like alcohol companies will be able to sell their product at around the same price if alcohol consumption dropped by half.
My guess is that if one's in a social group with people who are at risk of significant harm from alcohol it could make sense to publicly stop drinking, and when one is in the position to set policy in some sense one should set it against acohol - e.g don't organise social events around alcohol consumption.
I don’t quite agree with the article. As a teetotaller, I would be very concerned if social benefits of drinking (say reduction of inhibition) meant that society could force me to drink. By extension, I don’t expect social losses of alcohol to result in stopping people from drinking. This, of course, doesn’t apply to specific circumstances (drinking while driving or drinking in minors).
Personally, I don’t care for reduction in inhibition - I consider it a cost, not a benefit, and I think the problems with alcohol, especially the risk of abuse in your most vulnerable time are undercounted and I am happy to defend the stance in front of anyone, just as I would defend allowing adults to make their own choices.
On a side note, often we don’t have complete information (and sometimes the information changes with new developments) about what is good and what is best. The standard example I have is sickle cell anaemia (obviously bad, but protects against malaria). It is quite possible that what is bad today may turn out good tomorrow. In the situation, the best thing is to let people make their own decisions rather than have a totalitarian state obsess with and enforce the one right way to do things.
Whenever I say I never drink alcohol (and advice other's to do the same) older dutch people always call me a "blauwe knoop"(blue knot), which was (apparently) a very popular abstinence movement in the olden days which has almost fully disappeared. Google tells me something similar happened in the US with the "blue ribbon" movement, so maybe that's a symbol/movement that can be revived.
"Teetotal" is maybe the single lamest sounding title ever so I'd really like another word for it
“Dorks” maybe.
Anecdotally, but from a lot of sources, kids these days are drinking less. My university professor friends tell me that. I see it with my own children and their friends. Kids are just not drinking or partying like they did when I was in university. And those who do, binge drink less. There’s less peer pressure to “get wasted”.
Mostly this is a good thing. But kids these days are also more anxious, less social, and don’t know how to interact in large groups as well. I think this is related.
Maybe there aren't enough good alternatives to drinking/clubbing culture yet? (As well as there probably being a lingering effect on those who experienced their normally social teenage years during the pandemic).
I would have loved non-drinking related activities when I was at uni because I actually hated it, but those were pretty much the only options available at the uni I went to, so I went and did the getting drunk thing.
Perhaps (hopefully) we are only in early days of this shift away from drinking and the young ones will be able to define a whole new 'freshers'/student culture.
I suspect that at least part of the issue is that there are various online social activities that are substituting for in-person social activities, and this has the good effects of substituting non-alcohol-related socialization for alcohol-related socialization, but the bad effects of substituting virtual socialization for in-person socialization. The move from natural homegrown foods to industrial food probably resulted in a lot less food poisoning, but a very different sort of health impact from "junk food".
They are always aware of being on camera. That’s why they have that weird robotic affect. They can’t drink much because they might end up going viral looking like an ass. Anecdotally the zoomers I know who drink do so in private.
People often neglect to compare the costs/risks to the benefits.
In the case of alcohol, I think the benefits of alcohol are smaller than most people believe. I think in the majority of cases, the feelings of happiness from alcohol are not actually coming from alcohol, but from socializing, then being misattributed to the alcohol.
One easy way to verify this: try drinking alone. You'll find it doesn't make you happy. It just accentuates existing feelings.
Then, try talking to people for awhile without drinking. You'll find once you get past the initial awkwardness, you start feeling good.
Proudly straight edge. ✌🏿
That's essentially how it is handled in British Columbia where I live, aside from the advertising. We tax the hell out of our liquor, way more than anywhere in the US. We haven't completely banned advertising, but it is very carefully regulated. Hours are only 10am-11pm, province wide. We basically have already done everything you suggest, and it has had very little effect on how much people drink.
Generationally it's a very different story. Gen Z barely drinks compared to older generations.
It actually looks like alcohol consumption per capita has dropped by almost 10% in the past two or three years, which seems like a big effect!
https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/cisur/stats/alcohol/index.php
But I don't know when these policies were implemented, and I'd want to look at those years to see if there were significant changes.
Yes, that is largely demographic. Both Immigrant populations and Gen Z natives simply don't drink as much as previous generations of Canadians. The laws i mentioned are old, at least 30 years old, so the last few years have seen shifts for different reasons.
I have had two roommates throughout my life that have suffered from alcoholism. For them, one drink is too much, and 1000 is never enough.
That is why I've drastically limited the amount of alcohol that I consume. Less peer pressure and less temptation for the vulnerable.
Also,
* Sobriety saves money.
* Alcohol makes navigating social situations *harder*, not *easier*.
* Alcohol contains calories that will cause weight gain.
* Alcohol affects muscle growth, liver health, cognitive health, testosterone levels, and other various biomarkers.
Zero-calorie carbonated hop water does the trick for me.