Alcohol is a fun drug, that’s why people are consuming it (besides addiction) - it allows for easier social interactions and a general more lose atmosphere, some people use it to unwind. So it has just completely different use cases than liquids not containing alcohol.
My point was that people would still buy drinks so you can’t count every sale of some alcoholic beverage as an economic benefit and overall alcohol has a lot of economic downsides for society to the point where it would surprise me very much if the tiny little bit of extra people spend on alcohol compared to other drinks would make up for that.
Yes but those health problems build business for the healthcare sector which is part of the economy. Excess drinking leads to medical bills, potentially increased insurance rates after DUIs, increased money to morticians for funerals of dead alcoholics and the people killed by drunk driving
Drinking is good for the economy!
It probably isn’t with all the entailing health problems.
Can somebody do the math? There must be a perfect spot for drinking.
The beach?
Not alone in the cellar?
Relevant XKCD
I strongly suspect that spot is around 0ml of alcohol since it is not as if people do not consume liquids if those liquids do not contain alcohols.
Alcohol is a fun drug, that’s why people are consuming it (besides addiction) - it allows for easier social interactions and a general more lose atmosphere, some people use it to unwind. So it has just completely different use cases than liquids not containing alcohol.
My point was that people would still buy drinks so you can’t count every sale of some alcoholic beverage as an economic benefit and overall alcohol has a lot of economic downsides for society to the point where it would surprise me very much if the tiny little bit of extra people spend on alcohol compared to other drinks would make up for that.
That’s why I was curious if someone would care to actually do some calculations, since I can speculate on that question just as good as you do.
Yes but those health problems build business for the healthcare sector which is part of the economy. Excess drinking leads to medical bills, potentially increased insurance rates after DUIs, increased money to morticians for funerals of dead alcoholics and the people killed by drunk driving