Happiness is a more expensive nicotine hit

Would smokers prefer that cigarettes be expensive? The Office of Fair Trading seems to think so, to judge by its recent announcement alleging that some supermarkets and tobacco companies had been fixing the price of tobacco.

Certainly, higher cigarette prices would make smokers healthier. There is plenty of evidence that smoking is very bad for you, and almost as much evidence that people smoke fewer cigarettes if they are expensive. But “healthy smokers” are not the same thing as happy smokers.

So, do high cigarette prices make smokers happier? If smokers are rational, they don’t. But if smokers are wracked by temptation and are trying unsuccessfully to quit, then higher prices might make them happier by encouraging them to smoke less, or even to stop entirely.

This turns out to be a controversial point for economists, surely members of the only profession that could argue about whether smoking is rational. The “rational addiction” theory was put forward by the celebrated pair Kevin Murphy and Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate. They argue that people weigh up the health risks of smoking, the possible social and psychological benefits and the fact that it is habit-forming, before deciding whether to light up.

That is not as absurd as it sounds. Even smokers know that their habit is dangerous; in fact, the economist Kip Viscusi established that smokers overestimate the risks. And there is nothing necessarily irrational about deciding to embark on a course of action that many find enjoyable but that is painful to reverse. Otherwise marriage would be irrational, too. Addictive or not, the question is whether, for some people, the benefits might reasonably outweigh the costs.

A second possibility is that, rather than acting rationally, smokers are helpless puppets who will pay any price for a smoke. If so, expensive cigarettes are bad news for them; making them poorer without encouraging them to quit. But that possibility doesn’t fit the facts: we know that smokers respond to price signals by smoking less. They also smoke less if prices are expected to rise at some later stage. This implies that smokers both think about the future and recognise their own addiction, because a self-diagnosed addict who expects prices to rise may try to begin the difficult process of quitting before the habit becomes expensive.

A third possibility is that smokers are neither puppets nor ultra-rational robots, but simply creatures of flesh and blood. They recognise the risks and would like to quit, but keep valuing the short-term bliss of the nicotine hit over the longer-term benefits of kicking the habit. For smokers who fit this description, expensive cigarettes can indeed be a blessing by encouraging them to cut down or quit. Rational and temptation-wracked smokers behave in similar ways, smoking less if prices rise; they just feel differently about price-fixing in the cigarette market.

One way to resolve the debate is to ask smokers how they feel. Six years ago, the economists Jonathan Gruber and Sendhil Mullainathan did the next best thing, looking at two large sets of data on overall happiness, one covering Canada and one the US. By comparing what happened to happiness in US states and Canadian provinces where cigarette taxes rose, they were able to take an educated guess at whether high prices made smokers more or less cheerful. They had to make some heroic assumptions, but the results did point in the direction of the temptation model: where cigarette taxes rise, “potential smokers” – the people whose age, class, income and domestic circumstances suggest that they are likely to smoke – are happier. If the tobacco industry did collude to fix prices, at least it may have spread a little cheer while it did so.

Tim Harford is author of “The Logic of Life”

吸烟带来的快乐比带来的伤害更贵

烟民们愿意香烟卖的更贵吗？公平贸易署貌似是这样认为的，因为他们最近一个声明宣称一些超市和烟草公司限定了香烟的价格。

当然，更高的香烟价格能使烟民更健康。有太多的证据证明吸烟有害健康了，同样也有很多证据表明过高的烟价会减少烟民的吸烟量。但是，“健康的吸烟者”与“快乐的吸烟者”是两码事。

那么，高烟价能让吸烟者更快乐吗？如果吸烟者是理性的，答案则是否定的。但是如果吸烟者被诱惑所折磨并且很难戒掉烟，那么更高的香烟价格可能会使他们更快乐，因为那样能促使他们少抽烟，甚至完全戒掉烟。

吸烟是否是理性行为，这对经济学者来说这是一个非常有争议的话题，当然也只有经济学者才会在这个问题上争论。“理性上瘾理论”是由大名鼎鼎的凯文·墨菲和加里·贝克尔(诺贝尔经济学奖得主)提出的。他们认为人们在确定是否吸烟之前，会在吸烟的健康风险、可能带来的社会和心理上的收益以及吸烟容易成瘾的事实之间进行权衡。

这听上去很荒谬，其实不是。经济学者吉帕·维斯库斯指出，尽管烟民知道他们的习惯是有危害的，但事实上他们还是高估了危害性。决定做一件当时愉悦但事后痛苦的事并不是什么非理性的，否则结婚也是非理性的。上瘾或者不上瘾，这个问题对一些人来说其实就是得益相对于付出来说是否合理的问题。

另一种可能性是，烟民的行为并不理性，他们是愿意为吸烟付任何代价的无助的木偶。如果是这样，那么更贵的烟价对他们来说绝对是噩耗，高价只会让他们更贫穷而对戒烟丝毫无助。但是这种猜测与现实不符：我们都清楚烟民对烟价上涨的反应是减少吸烟。预期的烟价上涨也会使他们减少当前的吸烟量。这意味着烟民不但考虑长远而且对自己的上瘾症认识清楚，因为一个自我诊断的上瘾者，如果他预期香烟的价格将上涨，那么他将在他的(吸烟)习惯变的更贵之前尝试戒烟。

第三种可能是，烟民既不是木偶也不是极度理性的“机器人”，而是有血有肉的人。他们知道吸烟的危害并也想戒掉烟，但是他们会在尼古丁带来的短期快感和戒烟带来的长期益处之前权衡。对于符合以上描述的烟民来说，更贵的香烟确实能促使他们减少吸烟或戒烟。理性的和定力更差的烟民同样会以相似的方式行事：价格上涨便减少吸烟，他们只是对香烟市场中的定价感觉不同罢了。

解决争论的一个办法是了解吸烟者的感受。六年前，经济学者Jonathan Gruber和Sendhil Mullainathan做了一个很棒调查：他们研究了两个很大的数据库中关于综合快乐的部分，两个数据库一个关于加拿大一个关于美国。通过对比香烟税提高后美国各州和加拿大各省烟民在快乐上的变化，他们能对以下做出有根据的猜测：即高价是提升了还是降低了烟民的快乐感。他们需要做出一些冒险假设，但结果需以“诱惑类型”来定：当香烟税升高时，潜在的吸烟者－－即以年龄、阶层、收入和家庭环境来判断的将来可能会吸烟的人－－会变成更快乐。如果烟草业的公司们串谋定价，那么至少会给部分人带来一些快乐。