Forcing everyone to cooperate, except a couple, who get permission to defect all that they want, won’t work.

As I can’t really add much to the intellectual discussion, I thought I’d give a view from Wicker Park:

I live 4 doors down from Marshall McGearty – I just stopped in for the first time. (I’m a 32yr old smoker who’s cut it down to less than a smoke per day of late – ‘cept when I drink…) It’s an eerie feeling walking in there – behind the counter and walking around are 4 or 5 young people, dressed to the nines in neighborhood-issued hipster garb and as you come across each one, you get their multinational-tobacco-conglomerate-endorsed greeting, “hi – welcome to Marshall McGearty, are you a smoker?” Not only do I get the feeling these folks are as new to Chicago as the store in which they work, but they act as though if you could unzip their disguises and remove them, you’d find a 65yr old tobacco executive underneath.

Regardless, and more to my point, these broad strokes that anti-smoking zealots work with have now cut the business of two coffeeshops down the street by 40%, if not 50%. Many of their customers are going to the new and beautifully furnished (how can a start-up neighborhood shop afford it??) tobacco lounge because they can get their coffee and have their cigarette there, whereas it is now illegal the aforementioned coffee shops.

Marshall McGearty has liqour, coffee, smoking parapharnelia, and tobacco for sale. From what I have read, they’ll need to get at least 65% of revenues from tobacco in order to stay open after the second phase of the Chicago Smoking Ordinance passes in 2008. I can see how they’ll do it – already they are giving away free coffee and espresso drinks, which got me to thinking – what the hell does RJ Reynolds care if they turn a profit here? They are here to find the smokers, create exclusivity, and breed more smokers. Nothing new here, I know, but meanwhile familiar neighborhood faces from behind the counters of the other coffeeshops down the street are suffering – big time.

Another “unintended” consequence from the anti-public smoking contingent I’m sure, but it the meantime two neighborhood spots with neighborhood owners are being severely affected – all at the hands of big wigs from North Carolina with loop-holes, lobbyists and deep pockets. Now that it’s here, and it has its licenses – it’s here to stay – the city can’t (and likely won’t) go dollar for dollar with RJ Reynolds in the legal arena, and as Marshall McGearty doesn’t really care if it turns a profit, it could meet a “100% revenue from tobacco” requirement, if so imposed.

So, I’d like to add another fews “victims” to the list: my neighborhood, its neighborhood coffeeshops, and its neighborhood coffeeshop baristas, who are now out looking for seconds jobs.

As mentioned in T.L.’s original post, smokers find utility in smoking. When considering whether to ban smoking in gathering places, how does one value the magnitude of this utility and decide whether this benefit outweighs attendant costs? True, this is a problem common to most cost-benefit analyses. Given this problem, however, I don’t see that citations to the New England Journal of Medicine advance the debate very much. In other words, even if the author of the cited article had concluded that smoking increases overall healthcare costs, how would a policy analyst determine if the utility of smoking nonetheless outweighs these increased costs?

Maybe it’s better to perform a rough cost-benefit analysis than to perform no such analysis at all. On the other hand, maybe the analyst should sometimes admit that a significant input cannot be quantified (or monetized) and instead resort to policy-making based on other, non-economic factors.

Having said that, I must admit frustration with the public (i.e., non-academic) discourse that surrounds smoking. Specifically, I wish more people would recognize that policy considerations relating to smoking have much in common with policy considerations relating to driving, fast food, construction, etc. (as discussed in this blog).

Consider driving. To oversimplify, drivers may derive monetary benefits from their ability to commute to work, and they may derive non-monetary benefits from solitude, free reign over the radio, and so on. What are the risks? Among others, there’s the risk that one driver will crash into another, taking that other driver’s life. The question of how we value that risk requires that we value a life. Economists have certainly attempted valuation of a statistical life, but others have suggested that these valuations are simplistic, and even “heartless”. (e.g., “Yes, Johnny earned $100 dollar per month and his family will miss his income. But Johnny also served as a role model for the children he mentored, and he was also a fun person to be around. Given all this, Mr. Analyst, how can you say that a value of Johnny’s life was $X?)

My point is that (a) policy makers should attempt to value monetary and non-monetary when making policy choices and (b) the public, at least in the lost-life debtate, has historically objected to the perceived under-valuation of non-monetary costs. (I wish I had a cite at my fingertips, but I don’t.) If the public accepts the notion of non-monetary costs in the lost-life context, why don’t the non-monetary benefits of smoking get more play in the public discourse surrounding smoking?

Finally, a nod to K.A.’s absurd face-punching example. I’ve historically found it difficult to convince people that policy-making relating to smoking and driving have much in common. My gut told me that face-punching has nothing to do with smoking (or driving or fast food). On reflection, however, I think face-punching is an excellent analogy. (Maybe the utility of punching otheres outweighs the externalized costs. Even if we tried to value this utility, the valuation would have dubious reliability. (The same goes for valuing the costs of living in fear in such a world.) And, thus we make policy based on other, non-economic factors.)

Thank you all for such a high-minded discussion.

We could just ban punching people in the face.

But we could also let stores demand that all their customers consent to being punched in the face as a condition of being in the store. The free market, then, could take care of the problem. If a lot of people don’t want to be punched in the face, stores that allow it will lose customers.

Oddly, we usually take the first approach.

Besides, allowing smoking is a standard prisoner’s dilemma situation. Assume that smokers prefer smoking bars, but are willing to go to nonsmoking bars if that’s all there is.

If every store bans smoking, then they get all the customers and no smoke. This is the all-cooperation scenario.

If every store allows smoking, then they get the same customers with smoke, which makes them worse off. This is the all-defection scenario.

But when every store bans smoking, each individual store has an incentive to defect and allow smoking to gain a competitive advantage. However, every store realizes this, so they all allow smoking, and we end up with the all-defection scenario. They’re all worse off than if none of them allowed smoking.

The free market, in this situation, will fail because it leads to the all-D situation due to each store choosing to defect. However, a government-imposed solution might enforce the all-C situation, and therefore be preferable to the free market.

i do still disagree about whether or not smoking bans decrease smoking (and have several examples), but this is for another time.