1) Didn't realize this was Ben's piece. The "back when I lived in DC" should have given it away, but I glossed over this. Was this his first major article here? Congrats to him if so. It's a pretty big forum for emerging writers. Over 100K subs, right? That's bigger than the vast majority of US newspapers.
2) Ben's writing style is very similar to that of Matt Y. (another reason I didn't initially notice).
2) The subject of judicial review comes up fairly regularly here. Our gambling situation is a good example of why less is more in that regard. The black robes just can't help themselves, can they?
To be clear -- the judicial review here was *correct* on the law. The way that Congress had regulated it previously was to prohibit states from modifying their existing sports gambling laws, which was basically Congress making it illegal but carving out exceptions for Nevada and a couple other states.
The problem with judicial review is the same as the problem with ballot referenda: it legalizes without regulating. I think lots of states that legalized marijuana by ballot referendum have run into this problem as well.
The referenda depend on the details - I think there might have been some states where the drafters of the referendum actually put together a reasonable set of regulations to include in it. But it’s true that there’s no way to edit it during the process the way there is if it comes up legislatively.
Hard disagree on no 2. We need judicial review, it doesn’t follow that we’re going to like every decision. We need law, doesn’t mean we like every law. We need regulation, doesn’t mean every regulation is good or necessary.
What you need to ask yourself is the alternative? Would it be better to live in a society whose govenment has unlimited powers? In anarchy? In lessaiz-faire capitalism? Heck no for each of the three. I’m not going to become an anarchist just because bad , sometimes very bad actors, can be in power (nor will I stop supporting democracy because sometimes they get *elected* to power). In the same manner it’s silly to stop supporting judicial review just because I don’t like scotus current composition much less any individual ruling.
You misunderstand, judicial review where the black robes decide according to my preference is good (Roe/Obergefell). Judicial review where black robes decide against my preference is bad (Heller/Murphy).
If they just asked me, I'd be happy to tell them which is correct.
> We need judicial review, it doesn’t follow that we’re going to like every decision<
I tend to agree we need judicial review. But I think it's used far too promiscuously. I'd suggest the compromise of requiring a supermajority, which was in fact the precedent set by Marbury.
Congress can change or eliminate the first amendment if they don’t like how much judicial review is occurring under it, but it doesn’t seem there’s support for that.
I remember reading somewhere that Denmark is slightly outlier-ish as far as the Nordics go when it comes to vice. They're fonder than their cousins not only of gambling but apparently smoking, too.
The past 20 years has seen a remarkable loosening of vice laws. Now we are seeing the social disorder and harms that caused people to support those restrictions.
(Alcohol is available everywhere it seems and don’t get me started on the number of midday drivers I see smoking marijuana. Sheesh.)
It’s a bad time to be a person with poor impulse control. And the effects of the pervasive day drinking/weed smoking—not just the smoke hanging in the air, but, as you note, people driving/biking/working/whatever while drunk or high—are everywhere (at least in big cities), in my experience.
It's just another version of the anthropic principle, after all. The reason why we find ourselves surrounded by short-sighted, hasty, irrational people is because the prudent, deliberate, circumspect, people considered life on earth and decided to take a pass.
Except that the people who had the foresight and self-restraint to defer becoming a person until Ozempic was available are the people who probably don't need it anyhow.
I'm not a c-suite millionaire or anything, but I've been moderately successful in life, and I think it's at least in part because I more strongly recall bad feelings. So with the few times I've gambled or dabbled in drugs, when I think back on those times and contemplate doing them again, I remember how bad I felt afterwards when I was coming down, or had a terrible hangover, or when I lost money, not how good the opposite felt.
I’m very similar. Easily hung over, I don’t like feeling intoxicated or full. It’s easy for me to exercise because I feel so much worse when I don’t. When I spend money on something stupid, or sit around wasting time watching dumb stuff streaming, I feel disgusted with myself and am able to stop for long periods of time. Luck of the genetic draw, I guess, but it’s served me pretty well. I feel especially fortunate since I have seriously alcoholic relatives on both sides of my family.
Times when laws and social norms served as disincentives to excessive drinking/gambling/getting high. The onus is now on each person to strike an acceptable balance, and it looks like a lot of people are having trouble doing that.
I remember discussing paternalism in some ethical theory class I took in college and we discussed helmets, how as long as I don’t hold the other driver responsible for the death, requiring the cyclist to wear a helmet is a law that forces someone to not take a risk they are willing to take and doesn’t harm others at least directly. A lot of discussion in the class was “ what about the indirect costs? The guys kids will struggle and will possibly become criminals, the hospital will waste resources on him that he cannot repay bc he is dead, etc.”. My take on it was more along the lines of “fuck worrying about paternalism let’s just prevent the guy from dying by requiring a helmet and that’s that.” Anyway not the most thoughtful point but I am pro-paternalism for a lot of things particularly drugs, alcohol, and I guess now gambling. We have direct to brain addictive clickbait advertising hitting people’s neurons all day we have to be a little bit paternalistic sometimes companies are just too good at convincing folks to do and buy things. Please stop advertising marijuana everywhere in my city all of a sudden as well.
I think we should try to minimize harm. There is a limit, like how can we get that last bit of people to wear seatbelts (majority of vehicle crash deaths)? At what point is the marginal cost too great for the relative benefit?
It's much easier to make the helmet argument--and it applies even better to mandatory seat belt laws--to just say that streets are government run spaces, and thus they can make some restrictions on privileges in those spaces as a condition of that privilege.
That argument just shows that the government has the power to make helmets mandatory - and they would also have the power to make it mandatory to wear a green bow tie while biking if they wanted. (Nothing about that argument depends on the difference between a helmet and a green bow tie.)
The paternalism case is about whether they *shoul* do it to protect people.
Yes. But our system is not well-equipped for the problem of "that's going to be a bad idea for some people, but do we really want to arrest folks for it?"
I suppose the mention of social disorder attempts to attach an externality, but in many ways these are very individual problems.
I hear you, but can you walk your intuition out to a full policy position?
Like, in truth I probably benefited from weed being illegal when I was younger and would have been high a lot more. And now I benefit from it being legal because I only enjoy the occasional mild edible (as a sleep aid).
Full criminalization I think was bad policy, right? Locking people up for weed seems ridiculous.
Was decriminalizing "personal use" possession a good compromise solution?
Is something like the tobacco ad restrictions the right approach re gambling? I could totally support that. No reason anyone should be encouraged to gamble.
As a less likely approach, I sometimes wonder if the country might be ripe for a social movement that provides both community and a peer support group for a variety of good decisions. (I sometimes look at Mitt Romney and think I should live more like a Mormon but without all the specific religious beliefs.)
the one thing I'd add here is that I'm not sure how different Portland has been with respect to public substance abuse compared to comparable super blue cities that didn't decriminalize at what turned out to be the absolute worst possible moment.
I once spoke to a marketing manager at a large beer company that said a typical customer for their cheap light beer peaks as a relatively new consumer at “21” (he used air quotes) and slowly declines through their 20s and they have to maximize when they’re at the top of the curve at “21”
I was really taken back by all the weed shops opening near me as well but then I reflected how easy it is to get all the alcohol you want. Not only liquor stores but every single supermarket, 7-11, minimarts and so on. Weed shops are a drop in the bucket compared to all that.
Funny thing is that in many places you weren’t able to purchase alcohol at minimarts and 7-11 20 years ago. It’s a general liberalization of unhealthy decisions.
You could even put UberEats in this category of vice facilitation.
Except for tobacco, which we've oddly (and correctly) decided needs to be strictly regulated. But vaping! Vaping started out as a way for smokers to quit and then Juul came along and said "hey what if we got teenagers hooked on it?"
The tobacco exception is not that odd because that did result in a genuine bad side effect in second hand smoke being to non-participants as a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst. It also makes be wonder, per Dan's top level comment, where cannabis smoke will fall.
As for vaping, the path that I still see as promising is nicotine free vapes.
The science behind the harm of secondhand smoke was actually sort of iffy -- nonsmokers didn't like being around cigarette smoke, but most of them were not going to be around it nearly enough to suffer any real harm for it. It just made for a convenient pretext.
Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas remains an all time master class in slippery slope arguments:
"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices."
Is alcohol actually more available now than it was thirty years ago? I suppose Massachusetts has legalized Sunday sales, but how much else has changed?
In addition to what Dan said the alcohol tax is per unit and not indexed to inflation so it has fallen a ton in real value in the last 30 years. In doing some googling though I did notice that drinking actually hit its peak in 1980 after states had gradually loosened regulations in the 40 years after prohibition. Between 1975-1984 a lot of states raised their drinking ages culminating in the drinking age act in 1983. This was also accompanied by a lot of other restrictions (nominally targeted at drinking and driving but also just making it harder for bars to serve people) and generally resulted in a decline in liquor consumption after 1980. So that gives me some hope that we can recalibrate and drive drinking down again with sufficient societal commitment.
Yes. There has been tremendous reforms on location of sale, times of sale, deregulation of distribution (big one), breweries, and liquor licenses.
Cirrhosis rates have gone way up, particularly among younger (prime-age) women. Heck even marketing wine as “mommy juice” is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Interestingly, even though rates have been increasing for the past 20 years, they are only just now getting as high as the *lowest* levels before 1980, which occurred in the depth of prohibition.
The “wine mom” phenomenon is definitely an important new one - but this is just one of many trends that have occurred in American alcohol culture in recent years, including the move from beer to wine or cocktails, the rise of non-alcoholic beers and cocktails, and the rise of alcoholic sparkling water. It’s a complex set of trends that don’t all point in the same direction.
I think to Kenny's point about trends cutting two ways, I think drinking has become more "pro-social" meaning it is accepted at a lot of public type events, people do it around their kids more, etc... but probably the number of guys drinking 5 beers after work every night has declined... So net net this means less people drinking an absolute ton but more people afflicted with some level of elevated drinking, especially women.
I think I agree with this. There are a lot more places where it's socially acceptable to drink now, but it's way less socially acceptable to blow off your wife and kids and go get shitfaced with your buddies.
Then again, in absolute terms I don't think the number of drinkers is up overall -- it's probably more that the woman who wasn't opposed to having an occasional glass of wine on a night out now does that twice a week?
An interesting piece of this is that folks under 35 are drinking a lot less than millenials and boomers, which may be because they are more racially diverse and white people drink the most. But in any case that may augur a more favorable environment for increasing regulation.
I don't know that it's more "available" now, but there's a lot more alcohol that appeals to what I would call "social drinkers" -- e.g. in 1990 your options were basically mass-produced swill beer and hard liquor. Zima was just barely coming on scene, but you didn't have hard seltzer and the like.
Which is probably a really good sign -- you want the housing abundance movement to be able to accommodate both libertarians who are concerned about property rights and paternalists who are worried about poverty/homelessness. Oversimplifying, obviously, but you get the idea.
Issues where the harms mostly accrue to the individual are a big dividing point there. I feel like adult seat belt laws should be a bigger divider than they are but they're so accepted by now that campaigning against them would make you look like a loon.
You write: "It’s a $280 billion marketplace that’s generating massive tax windfalls for the state legislatures that legalize it."
I think you are overstating the size of the industry, and therefore the size of the problem. Throughout your piece, you use the total amount bet (the handle) to describe the size of the industry. That is the wrong way to think about it.
Per your first linked piece, the actual revenue (i.e., the losses to the public) are much, much smaller -- averaging about 8% per my quick perusal. So it's more like a $24B marketplace -- smaller than the revenue of Starbucks. Seems like there are better places to spend political capital to me.
I suspected the figure was inflated. I don’t think Congress should ban sloppy hyperbole in substack posts, but I hope the market will disincentivize it.
I’m not really sure this disproves the point though. I mean, yes I agree the $280 billion figure is an exaggeration for “clicks”. But an increase is problem gambling is a real thing. I think Josh Barro said it right that there is not enough friction anymore with gambling.
I think this gets back to my previous posts about libertarianism; that libertarianism is a useful tool for criticizing government overreach, but as a governing philosophy, it’s found wanting. I think in general it’s good to distinguish between “doing this act should get a person in trouble with the law” vs. “government should take no action to curb this act”. The former is why I think all sorts of vices should be legal; gambling, drinking, smoking and I’ll even throw in prostitution*. But that’s separate and part from, should we allow this vice to be as unregulated as it’s now.
We have laws against drunk driving and allowing people under age of 21 to drink. I honestly don’t think most people think these laws are bad things (people may argue about details like what shouldn’t legal limit be to drive). Not sure why same principle doesn’t apply to gambling; making that much more difficult to gamble but not banning it is probably overall good for society.
I’ll also say, gambling is great example where changing technology changes the debate. When arguments for legalizing gambling were made 20 years ago, there was no “smart” phones. There probably was a lot less downside risk to complete free for all gambling as then there is now when you can gamble from your phone.
* Prostitution is one where I’m most conflicted about how “legal” this act should be. In general I’m against the idea the government has any business telling two consenting adults how they can have sex. But with prostitution, “consenting” and “adults” is doing a lot of work here.
Federal government regulation is like a very large-caliber gun. Well-suited to large problems, but when trained on small issues, the collateral damage is likely to be quite high.
Thoughts:
1) Didn't realize this was Ben's piece. The "back when I lived in DC" should have given it away, but I glossed over this. Was this his first major article here? Congrats to him if so. It's a pretty big forum for emerging writers. Over 100K subs, right? That's bigger than the vast majority of US newspapers.
2) Ben's writing style is very similar to that of Matt Y. (another reason I didn't initially notice).
2) The subject of judicial review comes up fairly regularly here. Our gambling situation is a good example of why less is more in that regard. The black robes just can't help themselves, can they?
To be clear -- the judicial review here was *correct* on the law. The way that Congress had regulated it previously was to prohibit states from modifying their existing sports gambling laws, which was basically Congress making it illegal but carving out exceptions for Nevada and a couple other states.
The problem with judicial review is the same as the problem with ballot referenda: it legalizes without regulating. I think lots of states that legalized marijuana by ballot referendum have run into this problem as well.
The referenda depend on the details - I think there might have been some states where the drafters of the referendum actually put together a reasonable set of regulations to include in it. But it’s true that there’s no way to edit it during the process the way there is if it comes up legislatively.
Hard disagree on no 2. We need judicial review, it doesn’t follow that we’re going to like every decision. We need law, doesn’t mean we like every law. We need regulation, doesn’t mean every regulation is good or necessary.
What you need to ask yourself is the alternative? Would it be better to live in a society whose govenment has unlimited powers? In anarchy? In lessaiz-faire capitalism? Heck no for each of the three. I’m not going to become an anarchist just because bad , sometimes very bad actors, can be in power (nor will I stop supporting democracy because sometimes they get *elected* to power). In the same manner it’s silly to stop supporting judicial review just because I don’t like scotus current composition much less any individual ruling.
You misunderstand, judicial review where the black robes decide according to my preference is good (Roe/Obergefell). Judicial review where black robes decide against my preference is bad (Heller/Murphy).
If they just asked me, I'd be happy to tell them which is correct.
I assume u mean the second number 2.
> We need judicial review, it doesn’t follow that we’re going to like every decision<
I tend to agree we need judicial review. But I think it's used far too promiscuously. I'd suggest the compromise of requiring a supermajority, which was in fact the precedent set by Marbury.
Congress can change or eliminate the first amendment if they don’t like how much judicial review is occurring under it, but it doesn’t seem there’s support for that.
No. Congress cannot "change or eliminate the first amendment."
Sorry you’re right, I meant they could propose it. States could ratify it. My point was lawmakers don’t need the courts to change judicial review.
I also didn't realize this was Ben, very well written! Probably my favorite non-Matt post to date.
Correct
When I lived in Denmark there was so much online gambling. People on pensions and government checks use it a lot there.
I remember reading somewhere that Denmark is slightly outlier-ish as far as the Nordics go when it comes to vice. They're fonder than their cousins not only of gambling but apparently smoking, too.
They smoke in front of their infants all the time.
"...Denmark is slightly outlier-ish as far as the Nordics go when it comes to vice..."
Danes: the louche, mañana Mediterraneans of the Scandinavian world.
What if we allow gambling but you're only allowed to spend $X per app unless you [clear some annoying hurdle].
Like you have to write a physical letter and sign it and mail it into the Secretary of State, saying
"Please allow me to lose money and make poor financial decisions. I would like to lose more than $800 this year on gambling. This is my solemn vow."
This way Charles Barkley can keep betting huge sums of money and funding state tax coffers but we keep regular people reasonably protected.
The past 20 years has seen a remarkable loosening of vice laws. Now we are seeing the social disorder and harms that caused people to support those restrictions.
(Alcohol is available everywhere it seems and don’t get me started on the number of midday drivers I see smoking marijuana. Sheesh.)
It’s a bad time to be a person with poor impulse control. And the effects of the pervasive day drinking/weed smoking—not just the smoke hanging in the air, but, as you note, people driving/biking/working/whatever while drunk or high—are everywhere (at least in big cities), in my experience.
"It’s a bad time to be a person with poor impulse control."
Of course I regret the decision now. But at the time, I just couldn't resist being born!
It's just another version of the anthropic principle, after all. The reason why we find ourselves surrounded by short-sighted, hasty, irrational people is because the prudent, deliberate, circumspect, people considered life on earth and decided to take a pass.
Or it's a good time to be a person with poor impulse control, because of Ozempic.
Except that the people who had the foresight and self-restraint to defer becoming a person until Ozempic was available are the people who probably don't need it anyhow.
I'm not a c-suite millionaire or anything, but I've been moderately successful in life, and I think it's at least in part because I more strongly recall bad feelings. So with the few times I've gambled or dabbled in drugs, when I think back on those times and contemplate doing them again, I remember how bad I felt afterwards when I was coming down, or had a terrible hangover, or when I lost money, not how good the opposite felt.
I’m very similar. Easily hung over, I don’t like feeling intoxicated or full. It’s easy for me to exercise because I feel so much worse when I don’t. When I spend money on something stupid, or sit around wasting time watching dumb stuff streaming, I feel disgusted with myself and am able to stop for long periods of time. Luck of the genetic draw, I guess, but it’s served me pretty well. I feel especially fortunate since I have seriously alcoholic relatives on both sides of my family.
It's the best time ever to be alive. Which years would you consider to be better for people with poor impulse control?
Times when laws and social norms served as disincentives to excessive drinking/gambling/getting high. The onus is now on each person to strike an acceptable balance, and it looks like a lot of people are having trouble doing that.
I remember discussing paternalism in some ethical theory class I took in college and we discussed helmets, how as long as I don’t hold the other driver responsible for the death, requiring the cyclist to wear a helmet is a law that forces someone to not take a risk they are willing to take and doesn’t harm others at least directly. A lot of discussion in the class was “ what about the indirect costs? The guys kids will struggle and will possibly become criminals, the hospital will waste resources on him that he cannot repay bc he is dead, etc.”. My take on it was more along the lines of “fuck worrying about paternalism let’s just prevent the guy from dying by requiring a helmet and that’s that.” Anyway not the most thoughtful point but I am pro-paternalism for a lot of things particularly drugs, alcohol, and I guess now gambling. We have direct to brain addictive clickbait advertising hitting people’s neurons all day we have to be a little bit paternalistic sometimes companies are just too good at convincing folks to do and buy things. Please stop advertising marijuana everywhere in my city all of a sudden as well.
#BanTikTok
I think we should try to minimize harm. There is a limit, like how can we get that last bit of people to wear seatbelts (majority of vehicle crash deaths)? At what point is the marginal cost too great for the relative benefit?
I tell my wife I am not moving the car until she puts her belt on so I am doing my part.
It's much easier to make the helmet argument--and it applies even better to mandatory seat belt laws--to just say that streets are government run spaces, and thus they can make some restrictions on privileges in those spaces as a condition of that privilege.
That argument just shows that the government has the power to make helmets mandatory - and they would also have the power to make it mandatory to wear a green bow tie while biking if they wanted. (Nothing about that argument depends on the difference between a helmet and a green bow tie.)
The paternalism case is about whether they *shoul* do it to protect people.
I think rational basis review by the courts adequately solves such a question
The price of civil society is paying taxes and traffic laws and such.
Without bike helmets, society would crumble!
Yes. But our system is not well-equipped for the problem of "that's going to be a bad idea for some people, but do we really want to arrest folks for it?"
I suppose the mention of social disorder attempts to attach an externality, but in many ways these are very individual problems.
It’s more of “why are we making access to bad decisions easier?”
FFS there seems to be another smoke shop opening up every other week. Like how much weed can these well to do white people be smoking.
I hear you, but can you walk your intuition out to a full policy position?
Like, in truth I probably benefited from weed being illegal when I was younger and would have been high a lot more. And now I benefit from it being legal because I only enjoy the occasional mild edible (as a sleep aid).
Full criminalization I think was bad policy, right? Locking people up for weed seems ridiculous.
Was decriminalizing "personal use" possession a good compromise solution?
Is something like the tobacco ad restrictions the right approach re gambling? I could totally support that. No reason anyone should be encouraged to gamble.
As a less likely approach, I sometimes wonder if the country might be ripe for a social movement that provides both community and a peer support group for a variety of good decisions. (I sometimes look at Mitt Romney and think I should live more like a Mormon but without all the specific religious beliefs.)
I have no answers, though it probably should be more difficult to open a smoke shop in a neighborhood.
Usually I hear "decriminalized but not legalized" interpreted as "we won't make criminals out of the buyers but we will with the sellers.".
the one thing I'd add here is that I'm not sure how different Portland has been with respect to public substance abuse compared to comparable super blue cities that didn't decriminalize at what turned out to be the absolute worst possible moment.
Well that is what you get when you have the ACIG lobby (all crime is good.)
“Social drinkers don’t build breweries”
I once spoke to a marketing manager at a large beer company that said a typical customer for their cheap light beer peaks as a relatively new consumer at “21” (he used air quotes) and slowly declines through their 20s and they have to maximize when they’re at the top of the curve at “21”
I was really taken back by all the weed shops opening near me as well but then I reflected how easy it is to get all the alcohol you want. Not only liquor stores but every single supermarket, 7-11, minimarts and so on. Weed shops are a drop in the bucket compared to all that.
Funny thing is that in many places you weren’t able to purchase alcohol at minimarts and 7-11 20 years ago. It’s a general liberalization of unhealthy decisions.
You could even put UberEats in this category of vice facilitation.
Meh. I remember purchasing beer at a gas stations when I was in high school in the 90s (NY State). I don’t think that’s new.
Vice taxes are that middle ground whether it is for paternalistic or externality reasons.
Except for tobacco, which we've oddly (and correctly) decided needs to be strictly regulated. But vaping! Vaping started out as a way for smokers to quit and then Juul came along and said "hey what if we got teenagers hooked on it?"
The reversal of dwindling smoking rates via vape pens infuriates me to no end.
It's considerably less harmful than smoking cigarettes, so I'll give it that, but vapes marketed primarily to nonsmokers was a big problem.
The tobacco exception is not that odd because that did result in a genuine bad side effect in second hand smoke being to non-participants as a nuisance at best and a hazard at worst. It also makes be wonder, per Dan's top level comment, where cannabis smoke will fall.
As for vaping, the path that I still see as promising is nicotine free vapes.
The science behind the harm of secondhand smoke was actually sort of iffy -- nonsmokers didn't like being around cigarette smoke, but most of them were not going to be around it nearly enough to suffer any real harm for it. It just made for a convenient pretext.
Hence where the "nuisance at best part" comes into play.
Yep, it all started when the Supreme court struck down sodomy laws.
Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas remains an all time master class in slippery slope arguments:
"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices."
Drugs can kill you and gambling ruin you. What harm does “sodomy” do to practitioners?
Don't talk about the 80s don't talk about the 80s don't talk about the 80s don't talk about the 80s
At Least in DC is also see more speeding, and excessive muffler noise. Surprising these are not more strictly enforced if only for revenue purposes.
DC’s city council didn’t have statutory authority to “defund the police” so they opted to put in a hiring freeze on police in 2020.
With the mass retirement of officers during Covid they have not been able to fill the labor gap.
Then there is the whole no new tax pledge from Bowser and the unfunded programs like increasing SNAP benefits pushed by the council. Sigh.
And Bowser is to the right of the Council!
But I do sense reaction on crime. The problem will be with the budget.
Structural deficits.
And the MD politicians don’t want to repeal Hogan’s tax cuts. So dumb.
What social disorder do you attribute to the loosening of vice laws?
Is alcohol actually more available now than it was thirty years ago? I suppose Massachusetts has legalized Sunday sales, but how much else has changed?
In addition to what Dan said the alcohol tax is per unit and not indexed to inflation so it has fallen a ton in real value in the last 30 years. In doing some googling though I did notice that drinking actually hit its peak in 1980 after states had gradually loosened regulations in the 40 years after prohibition. Between 1975-1984 a lot of states raised their drinking ages culminating in the drinking age act in 1983. This was also accompanied by a lot of other restrictions (nominally targeted at drinking and driving but also just making it harder for bars to serve people) and generally resulted in a decline in liquor consumption after 1980. So that gives me some hope that we can recalibrate and drive drinking down again with sufficient societal commitment.
I didn’t know this about the effective tax rates on alcohol. Now I need to do a dig.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/booze-tax
Particularly hard liquor used to have insanely high taxes.
Yes. There has been tremendous reforms on location of sale, times of sale, deregulation of distribution (big one), breweries, and liquor licenses.
Cirrhosis rates have gone way up, particularly among younger (prime-age) women. Heck even marketing wine as “mommy juice” is a relatively recent phenomenon.
I hadn’t heard about that! But here’s a source I found with a helpful chart (on p. 13) showing cirrhosis mortality rates by year for men and women since 1910: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/sites/default/files/surveillance-report118.pdf
Interestingly, even though rates have been increasing for the past 20 years, they are only just now getting as high as the *lowest* levels before 1980, which occurred in the depth of prohibition.
The “wine mom” phenomenon is definitely an important new one - but this is just one of many trends that have occurred in American alcohol culture in recent years, including the move from beer to wine or cocktails, the rise of non-alcoholic beers and cocktails, and the rise of alcoholic sparkling water. It’s a complex set of trends that don’t all point in the same direction.
I feel like people don't really have a sense for how widespread problem drinking was for a long time.
What we think of as a "problem drinker" (not an alcoholic) in 2024 would have barely registered in the 1950s.
I think to Kenny's point about trends cutting two ways, I think drinking has become more "pro-social" meaning it is accepted at a lot of public type events, people do it around their kids more, etc... but probably the number of guys drinking 5 beers after work every night has declined... So net net this means less people drinking an absolute ton but more people afflicted with some level of elevated drinking, especially women.
I think I agree with this. There are a lot more places where it's socially acceptable to drink now, but it's way less socially acceptable to blow off your wife and kids and go get shitfaced with your buddies.
Then again, in absolute terms I don't think the number of drinkers is up overall -- it's probably more that the woman who wasn't opposed to having an occasional glass of wine on a night out now does that twice a week?
An interesting piece of this is that folks under 35 are drinking a lot less than millenials and boomers, which may be because they are more racially diverse and white people drink the most. But in any case that may augur a more favorable environment for increasing regulation.
Maybe all the UberEats cuts into their beer money?
I don't know that it's more "available" now, but there's a lot more alcohol that appeals to what I would call "social drinkers" -- e.g. in 1990 your options were basically mass-produced swill beer and hard liquor. Zima was just barely coming on scene, but you didn't have hard seltzer and the like.
Ah, Zima, a product that was just too far ahead of its time....
Zima would have killed if it had hit the market in 2015.
You could definitely buy quality European beers by 1990 in big cities.
It’s fun to see what divides the slow boring community. It looks like the paternalist/libertarian divide is a big one.
It’s also fascinating to see how we can be so alike on some issue and unlike on others.
Which is probably a really good sign -- you want the housing abundance movement to be able to accommodate both libertarians who are concerned about property rights and paternalists who are worried about poverty/homelessness. Oversimplifying, obviously, but you get the idea.
Issues where the harms mostly accrue to the individual are a big dividing point there. I feel like adult seat belt laws should be a bigger divider than they are but they're so accepted by now that campaigning against them would make you look like a loon.
You write: "It’s a $280 billion marketplace that’s generating massive tax windfalls for the state legislatures that legalize it."
I think you are overstating the size of the industry, and therefore the size of the problem. Throughout your piece, you use the total amount bet (the handle) to describe the size of the industry. That is the wrong way to think about it.
Per your first linked piece, the actual revenue (i.e., the losses to the public) are much, much smaller -- averaging about 8% per my quick perusal. So it's more like a $24B marketplace -- smaller than the revenue of Starbucks. Seems like there are better places to spend political capital to me.
https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting/revenue/
By marketplace, I was referring to total handle. There's lots of different estimates out there on revenue, but one thing is clear. It is growing!
I do think certain reforms, especially in the realm of advertising would not take significant political capital to enact.
I suspected the figure was inflated. I don’t think Congress should ban sloppy hyperbole in substack posts, but I hope the market will disincentivize it.
I’m not really sure this disproves the point though. I mean, yes I agree the $280 billion figure is an exaggeration for “clicks”. But an increase is problem gambling is a real thing. I think Josh Barro said it right that there is not enough friction anymore with gambling.
I think this gets back to my previous posts about libertarianism; that libertarianism is a useful tool for criticizing government overreach, but as a governing philosophy, it’s found wanting. I think in general it’s good to distinguish between “doing this act should get a person in trouble with the law” vs. “government should take no action to curb this act”. The former is why I think all sorts of vices should be legal; gambling, drinking, smoking and I’ll even throw in prostitution*. But that’s separate and part from, should we allow this vice to be as unregulated as it’s now.
We have laws against drunk driving and allowing people under age of 21 to drink. I honestly don’t think most people think these laws are bad things (people may argue about details like what shouldn’t legal limit be to drive). Not sure why same principle doesn’t apply to gambling; making that much more difficult to gamble but not banning it is probably overall good for society.
I’ll also say, gambling is great example where changing technology changes the debate. When arguments for legalizing gambling were made 20 years ago, there was no “smart” phones. There probably was a lot less downside risk to complete free for all gambling as then there is now when you can gamble from your phone.
* Prostitution is one where I’m most conflicted about how “legal” this act should be. In general I’m against the idea the government has any business telling two consenting adults how they can have sex. But with prostitution, “consenting” and “adults” is doing a lot of work here.
Federal government regulation is like a very large-caliber gun. Well-suited to large problems, but when trained on small issues, the collateral damage is likely to be quite high.
It really depends on the regulation. There are a lot of sophisticated and subtle things the government can do depending on the structure of the issue.