I would take issue with Buiter’s assertion that ‘The paper is the kind of publication that gives the social sciences a bad name.’ since it comes from medical researchers but otherwise he makes points which cannot be made often enough
I do wonder however if there is a bit of Oxford/Cambridge sniping going on here
I only ask because David Spiegelhalter was on More or Less recently questioning the reporting of the findings about alcohol of the Million Women Survey (another Oxford health research project)
Of course there is nothing new in the recognition that stopping smoking does not come cheap
In the 1970s & 1980s when we had a government Department Of Health AND Social Security ‘everybody knew’ that one side of the department fought against the idea of a major move to stop people smoking. We could not afford to pay the pensions
If there were any official estimates of the cost I do not think that they ever emerged into the public domain, but I did a back of the fag packet calculation in the mid-80s when there were published proper actuarial estimates of the costs of equalising the state pension age for men & women. I do not remember the cost figures, but most people accepted that the idea of paying pensions to men from the age of 60 was absolutely unaffordable
That would have meant paying pensions for another 2½ years per person, averaged over the whole population (the sex ratio is still near enough 50/50 between 60 & 65)
There were some estimates, from the insurance industry, that the average smoker died 7 years earlier than a non-smoker. With a smoking prevalence then of going on 30% this would mean paying the average pension for more than 2 years if all smokers suddenly gave it up
Unaffordable, we had all, by implication, agreed. Especially when we would lose all the tax that smokers had been paying
But our machinery of government has changed. We have a Department of Health, tout court, one of whose major aims is to make us all live longer
And we cannot afford to pay the pensions anyway, so what’s the difference?
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