A rchive Date
[ 18-03-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
A study to ponder over a stiff drink
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun
April 21, 2002
Almost exactly 100 years after it was first perceived, it's interesting to see that the informed view of the Great Canadian Drinking Problem has now precisely reversed itself. By which I mean the following: Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, we Canadians resolved on doing whatever officialdom and respectable opinion seem to be telling us to do. That is, we resolved to stamp out drinking.
It was the source of great evil. Families were impoverished by it; wives and children were often beaten up; men stumbled along the street and fell down. And led by the Protestant churches, a great movement began that embraced the slogan, "Ban the Bar!"
"Look at the squalour into which booze plunges people," said the prohibitionists. "Fathers spend all their pay in the bar. Families go hungry. The rent isn't paid. People are evicted and go on relief (i.e., welfare). Let's put an end to drinking."
"Nonsense!" replied those of the political left. "People are poor because of the capitalistic system. Because they're in misery, they turn to drink. Let's put an end to capitalism instead."
One wearies, lamented the journalist G.K. Chesterton, of this interminable argument between the people who say the poor are poor because they're drinking, and the people who say the poor are drinking because they're poor. He didn't agree with either of them, he said. From what he could see, the poor were drinking because they liked what they drank.
In the end we did ban the bar; we no doubt saved enormous sums of money, but we so badly missed the drinking that we eventually brought the bar back. Chesterton, in other words, turned out to be right.
Fast forward one century. A University of Calgary economist named Chris Auld has noted a strange correlation between alcohol and income.
Studies show, he said, that drinkers, whether moderate or heavy, make more money than non-drinkers. "The more you drink, the more you earn." Those who drink less than once a month earn about 10% less than those who drink moderately. "Heavy drinkers," defined as those who have eight drinks at a sitting at least once a week, earn about the same as moderate drinkers, according to some studies. Other studies say they actually earn more.
Auld has won a government grant to continue this fascinating work and find out why this is. He warns, however, that just because both sets of facts are somewhat parallel (more drinking and more pay) this doesn't mean that the former necessarily causes the latter. Maybe other factors enter into this.
People with tense, higher paying jobs may be drinking to relieve tension, perhaps. Or people who drink tend to be more sociable, get along better with others, and consequently make better business connections.
Winston Churchill, if I recall correctly, upon meeting Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, immediately formed a negative opinion of him. When someone asked why, Churchill muttered. "I never trust a man who doesn't drink."
The effect of alcohol is to gradually paralyse the mind, beginning first with the more sophisticated and subtle mental processes like inhibitions. Drinking people are less inhibited and therefore more likely to say what they actually think. Thus when two men have a drink, there is a certain dropping of the guard - a setting aside of some social conventions and safeguards. Churchill took Diefenbaker's refusal of a drink as a signal he was not prepared to meet him on these terms.
But the most probable explanation of why higher earners drink more has not been raised in the news stories on Auld's work.
Maybe it's simply because they can afford it. In other words, we're confronted with the reverse question of the one we faced a century ago. We may now ask: Do the rich become rich because they drink? Or do the rich drink because they're rich?
Maybe Auld could give me a call. We could talk about this - over a drink, of course.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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