Lone Gunman

Drink­ing alco­hol — and the increased social cap­i­tal that it leads to — may not just be respon­si­ble for a pos­si­ble increase in life span; it may increase your earn­ings, too.

In an analy­sis of both the Gen­eral Social Sur­vey and the pub­lished lit­er­a­ture, researchers for the Rea­son Foun­da­tion show that alco­hol drinkers earn, on aver­age, 10% more than abstain­ers (pdf). This is known as the drinkers’ bonus.

Recent stud­ies indi­cate that drink­ing and indi­vid­ual earn­ings are pos­i­tively cor­re­lated. Instead of earn­ing less money than non­drinkers, drinkers earn more. One expla­na­tion is that drink­ing improves phys­i­cal health, which in turn affects earn­ings (Hamil­ton and Hamil­ton, 1997). We con­tend that there is an eco­nomic explanation. […]

Drinkers typ­i­cally tend to be more social than abstain­ers. As Cook (1991) explained, drink­ing is a social activ­ity, and one rea­son peo­ple drink is to be socia­ble. In the med­ical lit­er­a­ture, Skog (1980) showed that mod­er­ate drinkers have the strongest social networks. Furthermore, Leif­man et al. (1995) doc­u­mented a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship between social inte­gra­tion and absti­nence. Whether abstain­ers choose not to be as social or whether orga­niz­ers of social occa­sions involv­ing drink­ing exclude abstain­ers is unclear. Abstain­ers may pre­fer to inter­act with other abstain­ers or less social peo­ple. Alter­nately, abstain­ers might not be invited to social gath­er­ings, work-related or otherwise, because drinkers con­sider abstain­ers dull.

Cor­co­ran et al. (1980), Mont­gomery (1991), and Put­nam (2000) each made con­vinc­ing cases that social net­works are impor­tant for find­ing jobs and earn­ing pro­mo­tions. Mont­gomery (1991) explained that com­pa­nies pre­fer acquain­tances of employ­ees because employ­ees screen poten­tial can­di­dates and thereby reduce the cost of search. Approx­i­mately half the work­ers sur­veyed in the Panel Study of Income Dynam­ics found their job through friends or rel­a­tives, and one-third reported help from acquain­tances in obtain­ing their job (Cor­co­ran et al., 1980). There­fore, a per­son with more con­tacts will have more labor mar­ket options (Burt, 1997). Gra­novet­ter (1995) suggested that a large quan­tity of weak ties or friends-of-friends may be most impor­tant to gar­ner­ing the best job offers.

Thus, if social drink­ing enables greater social net­works, it will also increase earn­ings. In terms of search the­ory: the more one drinks, the more peo­ple one knows, and the more peo­ple one knows, the lower the mar­ginal costs of search.

The study is packed full of excel­lent ref­er­ences to pub­lished stud­ies (as you can tell from the above excerpt), so I sug­gest read­ing the acces­si­ble (and very short!) report. It’s also worth not­ing foot­notes four and five, describ­ing how this is just like all invest­ments in cap­i­tal, in that an opti­mal level exists: “you must drink more than 21 drinks per week to earn as lit­tle as a non-drinker”.

via @phila_lawyer

Despite the var­i­ous and severe health risks that come with drink­ing, abstain­ing from alco­hol appears to increase your risk of dying pre­ma­turely. The rea­sons for this are not clearly known, but it is thought to be because drinkers are more likely to belong to a com­mu­nity (albeit one that drinks), and a feel­ing of com­mu­nity is strongly cor­re­lated with hap­pi­ness and longevity.

Even after con­trol­ling for nearly all imag­in­able vari­ables — socioe­co­nomic sta­tus, level of phys­i­cal activ­ity, num­ber of close friends, qual­ity of social sup­port and so on — the researchers […] found that over a 20-year period, mor­tal­ity rates were high­est for those who were not cur­rent drinkers, regard­less of whether they used to be alco­holics, sec­ond high­est for heavy drinkers and low­est for mod­er­ate drinkers. […]

These are remark­able sta­tis­tics. Even though heavy drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with higher risk for cir­rho­sis and sev­eral types of can­cer (par­tic­u­larly can­cers in the mouth and esoph­a­gus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than peo­ple who don’t drink, even if they never had a prob­lem with alco­hol. One impor­tant rea­son is that alco­hol lubri­cates so many social inter­ac­tions, and social inter­ac­tions are vital for main­tain­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal health. […]

The authors of the new paper are care­ful to note that even if drink­ing is asso­ci­ated with longer life, it can be dan­ger­ous: it can impair your mem­ory severely and it can lead to non­lethal falls and other mishaps […] that can screw up your life. There’s also the depen­dency issue.

The cor­re­la­tions between alco­hol intake and var­i­ous health out­comes (both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive) is con­fus­ing and var­ied. A few things seem to be for sure: it can be good and it can be bad; no cau­sa­tion has been proven; and the effects dif­fer between the sexes.

Update: I for­got to link to the pub­lished study (Hola­han et al., 2010)… the Results sec­tion is the one worth perus­ing. For those with­out full access to the study (ahem), Over­com­ing Bias pro­vides the full list of con­trols.

Update: Jonah Lehrer dis­cusses this study in an arti­cle titled Why Alco­hol Is Good for You, empha­sis­ing the social side of drink­ing as the key to longevity.

Ear­lier this year The New York Times pub­lished the last of Mark Bittman’s The Min­i­mal­ist: a weekly col­umn designed “to get peo­ple cook­ing sim­ply, com­fort­ably, and well”.

To hon­our this occa­sion he reviewed the 1,000+ dishes that have appeared in his almost 700 columns, the cul­mi­na­tion of which is a list of Mark Bittman’s favourite twenty-five recipes from thir­teen years of writ­ing The Min­i­mal­ist:

• Red pep­per purée
• Chicken under a brick
• Pear, gor­gonzola and mesclun salad
• Spaghetti with fried eggs
• Braised squid with artichokes
• Pasta alla gricia
• Pump­kin panna cotta
• Water­melon and tomato salad
• 45-minute roast turkey
• Crisp-braised duck legs with aro­matic vegetables
• Sichuan chicken with chilies
• Black cod broiled with miso
• Stir-fried chicken with ketchup
• Corn salad with soy and tomato
• Parsley-herb salad
• Socca (far­i­nata)
• Stir-fried lamb with chili, cumin and garlic
• No-knead bread
• Scram­bled eggs with shrimp
• Pernil
• South Indian egg­plant curry
• Braised turkey
• Fen­nel and cel­ery salad
• Mex­i­can choco­late tofu pudding
• More-vegetable-less-egg frit­tata

via Fat is Fla­vor (Where you can fol­low Carl’s progress as he makes all twenty-five of the dishes.)

The pri­mary cause of jet lag (or desyn­chrono­sis as it’s cor­rectly known) is the dis­rup­tion of our cir­ca­dian rhythms based on the daily light–dark cycles we expe­ri­ence. How­ever this is only the case when food is in plen­ti­ful supply, with new research sug­gest­ing that cir­ca­dian rhythms based on food avail­abil­ity are able to over­ride those of the light-dark cycle. This could offer us a sim­ple and effec­tive way of pre­vent­ing jet lag: fast­ing for six­teen hours prior to your new time zone’s break­fast time.

I men­tioned this in pass­ing two years ago (just before under­tak­ing a 25-hour Syd­ney to Lon­don flight), but after recently com­ing across the study again I felt com­pelled to point to it in more detail.

Researchers at Har­vard Med­ical School and Beth Israel Dea­coness Med­ical Cen­ter in Boston have now pin­pointed a sec­ond [bio­log­i­cal clock] that is set by the avail­abil­ity of food. […]

Clif­ford Saper, the senior author of the study, said this sec­ond clock prob­a­bly takes over when food is scarce. It may have evolved to make sure mam­mals don’t go to sleep when they should be for­ag­ing for food to stay alive.

Dr. Saper says long-distance trav­ellers can prob­a­bly use this food clock to adjust rapidly to a new time zone.

“A period of fast­ing with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock,” he said in a state­ment released with the study. Once you eat again, your inter­nal clock will be reset as though it is the start of a new day […] and you should just flip into that new time zone in one day.

It has been sug­gested that the phys­i­o­log­i­cal effects of pres­suri­sa­tion are respon­si­ble for the bland­ness of in-flight air­line meals. How­ever the real rea­son behind “dimin­ish­ing gus­ta­tory food prop­er­ties” (food tast­ing rub­bish) while 32,000 feet above sea level could be a lot sim­pler: the back­ground noise.

A study con­ducted by Unilever R&D and the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter has shown that the back­ground noise expe­ri­enced while fly­ing reduces the per­cep­tion of food prop­er­ties not related to sound (salti­ness, sweet­ness, etc.) while simul­ta­ne­ously increas­ing the per­cep­tion of food prop­er­ties related to sound (e.g. crunchiness)–in other words, the back­ground noise we expe­ri­ence while fly­ing could be respon­si­ble for the food we eat being taste­less but crunchy.

On pos­si­ble future appli­ca­tions of the find­ings, the BBC reports:

“We are still at an early stage of pro­ceed­ings and this is a rel­a­tively small study to really draw defin­i­tive con­clu­sions from […] but they sug­gest that the retail sec­tor could well tai­lor their choice of food for a given environment.”

Also in the group’s find­ings there is the sug­ges­tion that the over­all sat­is­fac­tion with the food aligned with the degree to which din­ers liked what they were hear­ing — a find­ing the researchers are pur­su­ing in fur­ther experiments.