We already tried really really hard to reduce smoking in the US. I think all these curves, where effort is on the x axis and benefit on the y, see decreasing returns once you have already put in a lot of effort.
Another way of putting it: People I know who I advise to distance more and wear a mask more might disagree and argue with me, but they’ll at least consider my arguments and say why they’re right and engage. A person I know who smokes, who I advise to stop, will just laugh and blow me off: “whatever dude”. They’ve heard it before. So among people I know, “hey beware covid” is a way more effective message than “hey beware smoking”, so I barely ever bother with the latter.
That's fairly compelling in the US.
But globally it is definitely false. For a trillion dollars, a fraction of he Covid economic loss so far, we could double the government budgets of the highest tobbacoo consuming countries (Egypt, Tanzania, Lebanon). The GoE would happily burn every tobacco farm in the country for a few billion dollars. The cost per life of paying Egypt to enact anti-smoking policy would inevitably be lower than Covid (not that its the most efficient cost per life).
So if we model Americans as rationally pursing QALY's for other Americans,...
I'm surprised none of us mentioned this important explanation. I should have thought of it.
One objection to the position I have taken might be simply that it is too drastic a revision of our moral scheme. People do not ordinarily judge in the way I have suggested they should. Most people reserve their moral condemnation for those who violate some moral norm, such as the norm against taking another person's property. They do not condemn those who indulge in luxury instead of giving to famine relief. But given that I did not set out to present a morally neutral description of the way people make moral judgments, the way people do in fact judge has nothing to do with the validity of my conclusion. My conclusion follows from the principle which I advanced earlier, and unless that principle is rejected, or the arguments are shown to be unsound, I think the conclusion must stand, however strange it appears. It might, nevertheless, be interesting to consider why our society, and most other societies, do judge differently from the way I have suggested they should. In a wellknown article, J. O. Urmson suggests that the imperatives of duty, which tell us what we must do, as distinct from what it would be good to do but not wrong not to do, function so as to prohibit behavior that is intolerable if men are to live together in society. [3] This may explain the origin and continued existence of the present division between acts of duty and acts of charity. Moral attitudes are shaped by the needs of society, and no doubt society needs people who will observe the rules that make social existence tolerable. From the point of view of a particular society, it is essential to prevent violations of norms against killing, stealing, and so on. It is quite inessential, however, to help people outside one's own society.
When a lot of policy is made on the national level I don't think it makes sense to speak about world-wide health problems. US COVID policy is primarily about doing what's good for US citizens.
COVID-19 has no lobbyists that advocate for the economic interests of it while big tobacco has strong economic interests. To the extend that the Chinese are willing to buy US tabacco, the US policy makers are happy that China buys something.
When BAT bullies African countries it's not something that damages US interests and thus the US doesn't try to stop that behavior.
So reason 2. Americans care more about deaths in America than elsewhere. I agree that is much of the explanation.
Smoking is a direct individual choice (unless talking about second-hand smoking, which is a moot subject). Getting infected with a virus is not a choice. An individual doesn't need a government to protect him from smoking. He may need it to help protect him from a virus (all overblown/ineffective/politicized issues and measures aside).
There is a trend to blame poor individual choices on the society. That may be in some part true, but for smoking in 2020 it is not.
Smoking is a direct individual choice (unless talking about second-hand smoking, which is a moot subject)... An individual doesn't need a government to protect him from smoking.
I think you are pointing at this same thing with your final sentence's "in 2020," but calling second hand smoke a moot subject is only true because government has already done so much to protect individuals from it. I'm in my 30s and I remember restaurants with smoking and nonsmoking tables next to each other in the same room. My mother was perfectly able as a kid to go ...
Some very major differences:
Also, I think the premise is misleading. Behaviors are both top-down and bottom-up. Governments influence behaviors in many ways, but they're also influenced by the population. It's worth examining why governments and elite are focusing on COVID more than tobacco, but it's even more worth examining why the populace in different areas is focusing more or less on either (or neither, in some cases).
Policy Elite believes people can rationally decide to consume tobacco (hurt themselves) but not decide to social distance (hurt others)
I think this is basically the answer although I don't know if positing a secret cabal of Policy Elites adds anything. At least in the US, we've done things to prevent smokers from hurting other people (i.e. banning smoking in bars and restaurants) but there's not as much political will to prevent smokers from hurting themselves.
I don't think I qualify as "policy elite", but my thoughts are along these lines. When I see a smoker, I see someone who is behaving stupidly with their own health and possibly as endangering mine, as a threat, not as someone I have any sympathy for. Whereas covid is not a choice, it often hits people who have done nothing wrong its victims can properly be called victims, they are much more sympathetic.
No one said they were a secret cabal or anything. I'm not ascribing any collective agency to us other than mostly reading the same newspapers and books.
Sweden precisely shows why your question is misguided. They had significantly fewer governmental restrictions, but their economy did the same or worse over the last year than the other Scandinavian countries. My interpretation is that average people care a lot about their personal pandemic risk and are willing to do all these measures regardless of the laws, while the laws help stop the super-spreader marginal cases.
Because of this, the governmental restrictions have approximately zero economic cost while have a significant health benefit. The governmental expenditures have not truly been COVID-relief. Rather, they have been depression-relief, where the depression is caused by people's desire to avoid COVID.
For a specific example, everyone at my company is allowed to work at the office, both by the government and by the company. Despite that, not a single person does. Similarly, my area currently allows people to eat inside restaurants, but almost no one does.
I think you are correct empirically, people are willing to make large changes in their lives in response to Covid. They do so regardless of government policies, and that does change the cost-benefit calculus about restrictions as a policy. Whatever effect the government restrictions have is very small relative to the voluntary restrictions, I agree.
But my question is "What process precisely makes people so willing to sacrifice for Covid, but not for other ways to save the lives of others." What do you think explains the difference?
I believe (1) and (2) are sufficient in themselves to explain this. It is a common cause of so many issues, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least somewhat central here.
I think it's important here that in general, by default, we humans think in stories and metaphors, not numbers. Tobacco is an old story, we know how it has gone so many times in the past, we expect that if there were an easy way to change it someone would have told us and/or done it. Also, society already has institutions and rules based on that story - the drama and lawsuits and whatnot seem to have mostly already happened. Covid is a new story, we don't yet know how it ends, and so it seems like maybe our leaders can decide the ending more easily (especially for people who really don't have in mind a plausible physical model of how the relevant parts of the world work). Also, stories that seem like they could affect us or that do affect those like us feel more salient than distant stories affecting others. We understand them more intuitively.
You could add the added uncertainty. Covid had all the more reasons to gather lots of attention at its beginning because we had no idea of the possible death rate. Whereas tobacco's risk has been known for a while. We still don't know anything about long term consequences of such an infection. Maybe none, maybe not.
I think most people consider than smokers more or less choose to smoke, whereas covid kills and cripples far more arbitrarilly. This makes it way more of a threat for most people, who "could just decide not to smoke".
Aside from that, can you link to sources as to why only 5 million people would die if no policies or behavior were changed? A death rate of 0.1% out of 5 billion people would be 5 million but
It will have been a year in a month and a half. We are currently at 1.33 million deaths. We are not going to have 3.7 million deaths in the next month. For why that won't happen regardless of the amount of policy attention see https://thezvi.wordpress.com/.
We know COVID has a barrier to reinfection, so Covid is very unlikely to "circle the world for years". Also the tobacco deaths are actually going to continue for decades, so this can't be an argument for more marginal attention to Covid.
Do you believe the marginal cost of preventing a Covid death is lower than the marginal cost of preventing a tobacco death? Why or why not?
The important number is not how many people is not how many people covid does kill, but how many it would have killed if we hadn't tried to stop it.
Extreme example, suppose a meteor headed for earth. We divert it at great cost and effort. Then people come along saying, look how much we spent on diverting the meteor, and it didn't kill anyone. The important question is how many people an undiverted meteor would kill.
So we should look at countries where states spent less on preventing Covid and observe very high death rates, on the order of 5,000 per million, while countries that sacrificed more should have death rates much lower. A cursory look at the data find the difference is much smaller. A few hundred deaths per million is plausible, but differences of 1 thousand per million are clearly not observed. Mexico and Sweden are famous for their feeble responses but are only at 800 / million.
If you phrase the question as "if no one had done anything" than the current Covid response always looks like the best policy. But arguing that spending 10% less attention on Covid and more on Tobacco globally would have cost lives is almost impossible, because we are spending 1,000 times the effort on Covid as Tobacco. So the percentage change in Tobacco effort would be 10,000%. For this money we could go to heavy smoking countries and double their state budgets in exchange for Tobacco regulation.
Tobacco kills 5 million people every year [1]. Covid probably won't pass 5 million this year regardless of our policies or behavior. And yet, Covid has been the focus of far greater scarce political attention than Tobacco. We have accepted an increase of 150 million people in global severe poverty and the trillions in economic damage to prevent Covid deaths. Tobacco eradication has received far less attention. What do you think are the biggest reasons for this difference?
Thoughts?