Do you have champagne wishes and caviar dreams? Or maybe just enjoy some celebratory cocktails? You’ve worked hard, and now you want to enjoy yourself. Cut it out, says a new study out of the United Kingdom that advocates, “people who exhibit a lifestyle associated with affluence and with a ‘successful’ ageing process” should drink less.
The study focuses on drinking habits of those over 50 and concludes, “the over 50s who are ‘successful agers’ — healthy, active, sociable and well off — are more at risk of harmful drinking than their less successful peers.”
Following England’s Department of Health, it classifies harmful drinking as consuming seven or more standard glasses of alcohol per week for women or 10 or more glasses per week for men. Yes, one glass per day is deemed risky. An I-know-what’s-good-for-you attitude by researchers can sometimes be understood through the lens of a researcher studying bad outcomes. Particularly puzzling in this case, however, is criticizing behavior associated with good outcomes.
Why should we criticize choices that are positively correlated with education, affluence and good health? We know, for example, that managers and other professionals drink more than those in routine and manual jobs (20 percent more alcohol for men and 50 percent more for women) and that people with less education are statistically more likely to be non-drinkers.
Holding many variables constant, my own research found that drinkers earn 10 percent to 14 percent more than otherwise similar non-drinkers. Social drinking likely improves social networks that can help one’s career. Of course, drinking too much isn’t good, but one needs to drink a lot before one earns the same as a non-drinker. Studies also find alcohol associated with higher IQ, better cardiovascular health and lower chronic diseases overall.
Like anything, including all types of food, alcohol can be over-consumed and those whose drinking causes problems should be offered support. But telling successful people who make more money, are healthier and have better social connections that they need to change their behavior is like going up to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic and saying their tennis game is all wrong.
These proposals represent a much bigger program: government busybodies, sometimes with poor facts behind them, telling us what to do. Government has a long history of pushing particular diets that scientists later find to be questionable. We all remember the faddish calls to consume margarine, not butter — only to see an about-face with recent calls to ban trans fats. Or government’s questionable food guidelines from the 1990s that advocated consuming mostly carbs.
How much should we trust these people anyway? On broader economic questions, regulators often regulate businesses that they do understand. As I discuss in my book “Private Governance,” individual initiative and individual responsibility help make the world great. Paternalists think they know what is best for everyone, but the fact is, they are not everyone’s parents and they should not attempt to act like it.
When a group of people have figured out how to be richer, healthier and have more social contacts, instead of chastising them for drinking more, let’s raise a glass to their success.
