Organizations and Markets

Amethyst and Public Choice

| Dick Langlois |

Many of you have heard of the Amethyst Initiative, a petition signed (at this writing) by 130 American college and university presidents in favor of lowering the drinking age from 21 back down to 18. As the website puts it, prohibition is not working. The college presidents are hoping that, by removing the black-market character of college drinking in the U.S., lowering the drinking age might be part of a solution to the problem of binge drinking on campus. (Although American 18-year-olds may not buy alcohol because such an activity is unsafe and unhealthy, it is quite alright for the same 18-year-olds to join the military and be posted to Iraq or Afghanistan.) Needless to say, this proposal has generated an enormous amount of controversy, and is vociferously opposed by politically powerful groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The authoritarian response, typified by this column in Slate, is to point to the many studies that show that a higher drinking age reduces driving fatalities, although the Slate article does come around at the very end to the point that economists would make: taxes are more efficient at regulating behavior than is prohibition. (This would also include binge drinking. A student of mine, recently returned from a semester abroad, reports that there is no binge drinking at the National University of Singapore despite a drinking age of 18 — not because of that government’s well-known authoritarianism but because alcohol is highly taxed.) Not, of course, that I would personally like to see higher taxes on my pinot grigio.

My point here is not to engage the debate but to raise a Public Choice point I haven’t seen raised elsewhere. A quick reading of the list of university presidents who have signed suggests that many of them are from private schools. Among the most prominent of these are Dartmouth, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. Public Choice theory might suggest that presidents of state universities are much less likely to sign, since they depend on politicians for funding, and are much less willing to take positions that groups like MADD would oppose. The president of my university is certainly not about to sign it. The six Connecticut schools that have signed are all private, including Trinity College but not including Connecticut College, Wesleyan, or Yale. (Of course, Rick Levin at Yale may be just as reluctant to take unpopular positions given the hungry eye the government has been casting at his endowment.) On the other hand, there are a number of public colleges among the signatories, notably Maryland, UMass, and Ohio State. Are the signatories really biased in favor of private schools? Or are people actually taking moral positions despite possible consequences? That would be interesting. Do we have enough data to tell? Might be an good project for someone talented in the relevant econometrics.

I hesitated at first to post this, since I didn’t see its relevance to the current financial crisis. On reflection, however, it occurred to me that there is an important connection, since the best possible response to the financial crisis might well be binge drinking.

5 October 2008 at 11:24 am Dick Langlois 5 comments