Beer may be associated with an increase in earnings. But it also is associated with a decrease in productivity. How can this be?!? What am I to do? Drink and make more money? But then also be less productive? There is a crisis brewing here. Luckily, though, as it turns out, we’re all reasonably happy.
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9 Comments
in principle i have no problem with the idea that alcohol can yield prosperity. indeed, a grad school professor of mine said the most valuable lesson the students learn at Princeton is not in class but in the eating clubs where they strenuously train for such McKinsey/WallStreet skills as how to a)instantly ingratiate themselves to strangers and b) drink you under the table.
That said, some of the health literature suggests that the benefits to moderate alcohol consumption go away when you disaggregate lifetime teetotalers (who have good health) from recovering drunks (who tend to have terrible health). I would have the same worry for research on income attainment.
Speaking of beer, some of us in my department run a “beer madness” beer tourney to coincide with March Madness. Beers play each other in pairs, with voting based on blind taste tests, determining the winner of each “game.” Lots of fun, even if it is not good for productivity. See
http://home.twcny.rr.com/jtonole/slothbrew/madness08.pdf
for the bracket.
scorrell: Looking at your brackets just made me nostalgic for the U.S. That doesn’t happen often.
This has to be a curvilinear realtionship.
2 beers + schmoozing + making connections = promotion + more $
12 beers + dancing naked on the bar = termination + less $
I would think . . .
Naturally, I’m skeptical of this one. It occurs to me that prior to the advent of clean drinking water, a much higher proportion of the drinks people consumed were alcoholic (beer being the #1) and, yet, there were still plenty of epic thinkers. Marx was once arrested for public drunkenness outside a pub across from the British Museum on New Year’s Eve. And one very famous sociologist I know well is often euphemistically referred to as “the life of the party.”
scorrell: great brackets, but: how does the tiebreaker work when it’s tied 4-4?
Good question, Jeremy. Using secret ballots, we vote on the beer we prefer and also assign it a score between 1 and 5 to indicate how much we preferred it over the other beer. When ties happen, and they have, we sum up the strength of preference score for each beer. Thus far, this has produced a clear winner.
The collective amount of time and thought that goes into this tourney makes me think that beer drinking, at least done this way, surely decreases productivity.
andrewska,
a few years ago malcolm gladwell had a book review arguing that the industrial revolution and the enlightenment were a result of the switch from beer to tea and coffee.
I enjoyed the story about beer limiting scholarly success. But it made me wonder - did they control for rank/age? Seems that it would be a serious confounder!!