Why do we still permit tobacco use? (2015)

My grandparents smoked, presumably for 50 years before they passed in their mid-70's. They could have lived past 100, because my grandmother's sister lived to 103. But she also smoked for 80 years. My mother points out that unlike my grandparents, my great aunt was an avid walker, walked a few miles every day religiously. So she makes a fair point, because inactivity and sedentary lifestyles also are cut short. My mother's sister smoked intermittently, but ultimately had quit for 10 years before dying relatively young (58) from breast cancer. My aunt made the observation that cigarettes stink, but insisted that they did not used to stink, claiming that when she was young her parents smoked in the car with her and her siblings, and it never occurred to her to open a window, because the second hand smoke back then was not irritating in the least. Her brother, my uncle, smoked cigars, basically chain smoked them, died at 67. My mother smoked, but quit for decades, then started again and smoked for another 15 years before quitting again only a year ago. She's 79. Then there's George Burns, who started smoking when he was 14 years old and lived to 100 after smoking an estimated 300,000 cigars. See Ecc. 9:11.

Very sorry to hear about your uncle. How old was your uncle when he passed? What did he do for a living? Was he a veteran? How much did he weigh? Is there any history of cancer in the family?

> I only know people died from lung and other cancers or copd on a massive scale long before anything was added to tobacco.

If you could share any reference links to any study performed before the 1950's, then we could all know this.

It all boils down to them enforcing their morality on the rest of us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will

In some contexts we are creatures of cause and effect, interdependent on many chance things. Even yawning is not solely a matter of sovereignty.

My thoughts may not control your thoughts but still the analysis of more than one person at a time is useful.

There's no reasonable way to choose between the two framings. They are both obviously important. An accurate and purely quantitative utilitarian conversion of human suffering into USD is obviously beyond any reasonable assumption on the bounds of human rationality. A purely non-economic assessment ignores the possibility of real zero-sum tradeoffs caused by hard bounds on productive capacity.

Almost all economic activity is not zero-sum. Contrary to the intuitions of household budgets, at the scale of an economy operating over the timeframe of a generation, spending a dollar on X probably doesn't actually mean taking a dollar away from Y, especially if the productive/extractive inputs to X and Y are very different.

Therefore, it's more about finding a (necessarily vague & qualitative) exchange rate between the two. But at the order of $60K/yr in costs, I think that conversation is moot. Let's say retirees produce half of that value -- a grossly conservative estimate. That means we value "all the rest" at $30K/yr, which is prime facie absurdly low (what does a new SUV cost these days? How many "SUV new car feel vs. Corolla new car feel" units of happines equals the units of unhappiness caused by lung cancer? You get the point.).

If the number were $6M or even possibly $600K then the resource allocation question becomes more reasonable because there we approach the realm of starting to consider real zero-sum tradeoffs in what is possible. But at $60K with 50% to >100% offset, the number becomes too small to worry about the exchange rate. At most, in a pathologically broken system, we might, possibly, be discussing what we choose to do (not what is actually possible at minimal sacrifice). But it's not even clear to me that this is true in the US!

So, the framing seems silly, because once you do the work to figure out how to properly compare two radically different things you arrive at the conclusion that $60K is an order of magnitude away from forcing any sort of actual zero-sum resource allocation decisions.

Does that make sense?