Exclusive to this site, January 21, 2000
Economics of the Smoking Debate
by
Pierre Lemieux
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
- Milton, Areopagitica
On the occasion of the Non-Something Week, a little reflection is in order on the smoking debate.
At the Individual Choices and Liberty Seminar at the Université du Québec à Hull, we wanted one of the sessions to be a public debate between pro- and anti-liberty economists on tobacco issues. Since economists have a methodological and professional bias in favour of free choice, anti-smoking economists are more difficult to find. Yet, there are some. We contacted many of them, but they all refused our invitation, sometimes with a good reason. More significantly perhaps, the seminar’s co-chairman, Prof. Alain Albert, contacted Health Canada to try and get one of their health economists to participate in the debate: the Assistant Deputy Minister to whom he wrote did not reply.
This suggests a little exercise in the economics of public debates: When does a rational individual choose to participate in a public debate? The economic answer is, When the expected reward is high enough. Now, the expected reward is the probability of influencing the debate times the reward one would get from one’s influence. For the average citizen, the probability of influence is infinitesimal, and the reward from one’s own influence is very small. This is why, say, taxpayers do not usually demonstrate against marginal tax increases.
Such is the well-known conclusion of what economists call the “logic of collective action”: spokesmen for concentrated interests will participate more in public debates than the general citizens, who are more numerous but whose interests are more diluted. Special interests have both more to gain (or to loose) and more efficient means of increasing their probability of influence. In the smoking debate, this theory forecasts that tobacco industry spokesmen on one hand, and antismoking, subsidized, Public Health lobbyists on the other hand, will monopolize the debate.
This conclusion has to be qualified in two ways. First, special-interest spokesmen are not the only ones to actively participate in public debates: professional intellectuals – like, say, university professors or editorial writers – are also incited to participate, because that’s what they do for a living.
Second, it is probably not true that only interests (or, at least, narrow interests) matter. Nobel Prizewinner Friedrich Hayek has taught economists that they should not neglect “opinion”, in the sense of what is believed to be right and wrong, proper and improper. Some Public Health activists might continue to wage their public-purity crusades mainly because they are ideological statists, even if the government stopped paying their salaries. At the other end of the political spectrum, I have been defending individual liberty long before the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council gave me a research grant for the 1999-2000 edition of the Seminar – and long before the Non-Smokers’ Rights Association spokesmen had ever heard the word.
NSRA recently attacked us because of this grant. Mind you, it was not a secret as it had been explicitly acknowledged on our posters and on the seminar’s Web site (at www.uqah.uquebec.ca/lemieux). In fact, I am quite proud of this private grant. The prohibitionists’ government wouldn’t give us money to talk economics and liberty and, at any rate, I am not sure I could morally accept stolen money. And one should know that nearly all the revenues of NSRA comes from government – 93,7% according to their 1997 Report.
The economics of public debates should explain why tobacco prohibitionists can get taxpayers’ money, publish substandard pieces in Tobacco Control, and still be viewed as objective, scientific researchers, while the credibility of any serious, but anti-prohibition, economist can be attacked for, say, defending the liberty of smokers and tobacco producers before parliamentary committees.
Back to our original question: Why would a rational individual choose not to participate in a debate – like the persons we invited to debate the social cost of smoking with well-known economists? The economic answer is that a rational person would make such a choice if he can’t win the debate, or has nothing to gain in winning it. Obviously, the second reason does not apply here, since winning a public debate against a well-known pro-choice economist would bring obvious rewards to a Holy Warrior.
I suggest that tobacco prohibitionists often do not want to participate in rational economic debates because they know they can’t win. That is, they can’t present a consistent argument without acknowledging the totalitarian basis of their crusade.
There is another answer. Public Health lobbyists may think the best strategy is, whenever they can, just to ignore scholars who expound rational ideas and defend individual liberty. They may be right in the short run. In the long run, however, we have to believe that truth will win, even if some people don’t want to talk about it.
Buy Smoking and Liberty by Pierre Lemieux at Amazon.com. Original French version also available.