How Much Alcohol Should we Drink?

Recently there has been a big shakeup in alcohol sales. Bud Light, the number 1 best selling beer in America for over 20 years lost the top spot. Modelo is now the top-selling beer in America with an 8.4% share, up from 7.5% in January.

The reason for the abrupt drop by Bud Light is because they attempted a new marketing campaign that involved a trans influencer. The head of marketing for Bud Light wanted to appeal to a new audience.

Bud Light’s base of customers revolted and a huge backlash led sales to fall fast. This is a great example of Nassim Taleb’s Minority Rule. The Minority Rule states that a small percentage (2-7%) of the population can force their preferences on the majority long as the majority doesn’t really care about having those preferences being imposed on them. That’s the mechanism Bud Light was relying on. But in this case the majority did care and it ended badly for them.

The Minority Rule is a great tool to have in your back pocket when examining the modern world. Here are some examples where you can see it succeed:

1) Many people didn’t care about smoking during the 20th century, even if they didn’t smoke. but a small minority was aggressively hostile to smoking and this created segregated smoking only spaces, and eventually led to a ban on all smoking indoors.

2) If you throw a party that has mostly men but includes a few women you will have to switch to serving wine instead of beer. Wine is the Type O blood of alcoholic drinks; you can give it to anyone. The intolerant 10 per cent defeat the easygoing, beer-preferring majority.

3) Schools where only 5 per cent of the pupils are Muslim will keep halal kitchens, because it is assumed non-Muslims can be served halal food whereas Muslims will only eat it. All New Zealand lamb imported into Britain is halal.

4) Veganism has replaced vegetarianism as the popular plant based diet offered by restaurants or stores. Vegans are a small minority of vegetarians

I see something happening with alcohol and the Minority Rule that is much more interesting than the Bud Light boycott. There is a quiet, but growing, anti-alcohol movement happening within certain influential circles that could eventually lead us to a society where we drink alcohol a lot less in public.

The Modern Revolt Against Alcohol

America has always had a strange relationship with alcohol. Take prohibition. America was the only western country in history to amend its constitution to make alcohol illegal. This is something absurd when looked at from today. Even today about 18 million Americans live in dry communities in states like Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas.

The primary reason for making it illegal was the influence of the temperance movement, which held that alcohol was the root cause of numerous societal ills. Various temperance groups, such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, were highly effective in swaying public opinion and political sentiment against alcohol. These groups campaigned vigorously, arguing that alcohol led to moral decay, domestic violence, and other social problems.

Today, the push against alcohol is focused on personal health. It is less about social ills and more about how people feel and long term health implications.

Andrew Huberman has one of the most popular health and science podcasts on Youtube today. His episode on the dangers of Alcohol has over 4 million views. He concludes that "There are literally zero benefits to the body from drinking alcohol.” Jordan Peterson has also come out against alcohol as a danger to the individual. Billionaire Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen published a piece on why he quit alcohol for good recently.

Moreover, during the past year, there’s also been a slew of recent articles about the joy of sobriety and not drinking. (Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Wired, National Geographic)

The anti-alcohol push is being consumed by middle and upper middle class consumers of these influencers and magazines. The higher income you make the more likely you are to drink. This group is starting to be skeptical about alcohol and it hits right at the base of drinkers.

Meanwhile, Gen Zers are drinking less alcohol than young people in past generations: about 20 percent less alcohol per capita than millennials did at their age, according to a report from Bloomberg Research.  

The share of college-age adults abstaining from alcohol has grown from 20 to 28 percent over the last two decades, a University of Michigan study found. The reasons are mostly related to personal health. Even the industry is noticing these trends.

We’re beginning to see a coalition form of a minority that will not drink. There could be a time in the future where certain parties or large events are alcohol-free, in order to appeal to a sober minority. Eventually not drinking may even morph into a status signal. You can already see it emerge in viral tweets. For instance, a water closet instead of a wine cellar as a status signal.

In This Newsletter

1) Do we know if Alcohol is unhealthy for the individual?

2) What does the Lindy Effect say about Alcohol consumption?

3) Let’s imagine the Minority Rule winning on alcohol and our society shifts to drinking much less. What are the consequences?

4) I will tell you why I still drink wine and beer stopped drinking hard alcohol.

Alcohol and Your Health

For most of history people drank alcohol but didn’t necessarily think it was good for them. It just was something they did. It was never put into a health category. It was just culture. Then 30 years ago the first studies came out about how drinking wine was good for you. Alcohol had suddenly become a product that was about “health” and longevity. It was not just about pleasure or social lubrication. Right around the mid to late 1990s articles like this, from the New York Times.

Americans started to learn about molecules called polyphenols, Resvesterol and how wine is supposed to be part of cardiovascular protection. Phrases such as the “French Paradox” became common. The French live longer than Americans and drink lots of red wine, maybe it if we drink wine too we can live longer. Films about wine became popular like sideways.

Suddenly, the narrative on how wine or alcohol is good for you started to change. Around 5 years ago studies started coming out against any amount of alcohol consumption. They linked alcohol to cancer. Humans metabolize alcohol mostly in the liver, where it is converted into acetaldehyde, a known carcinogen. A study published in Lancet Oncology estimated 4% of the world’s newly diagnosed cases of cancer in 2020, totaling almost 750,000 people, were related to alcohol use. The authors of the study found the cancer risk was highest for people who drank a lot, but even more moderate drinkers still had an increased risk of developing cancer.

The narrative has changed.

Every month a new study comes out on health and alcohol. Last Week: Some Alcohol is good for you. 4 weeks ago, No amount of Alcohol is good for you. But then that study was debunked by an independent researcher.

It’s all very confusing. Maybe a Lindy analysis can help us out.

What Does Lindy Say?

Alcohol, in the form of wine and beer, have been consumed for thousands of years. The earliest culture associated with wine, dated between 6000 and 4000 BC, emerged in the South Caucasus and spread throughout the Mediterranean

There isn’t a huge difference between the wine of today and the past. Many of the most popular wine varietals sold today are extremely genetically similar to the wines that ancient Romans drank — and may have existed for thousands of years longer.

Wine is also embedded deep into the Christian religion. Throughout history, humans have added beneficial, or at least, non harmful things to religion because it is a multi-generational carrier of customs.

According to the Lindy principle, if something has been ingested by humans for thousands of years, odds are, it probably isn’t killing us or else we would know by know. Wine has been filtered by generation after generation. Think of cigarettes, they came and went in the 20th century and left millions dead. It took under 100 years to know cigarettes are a problem. However, we must be careful about dose. A small amount of substance could be bad at higher doses.

With wine, you can see the same message over and over in ancient literature. Wine provides pleasure, is social and makes men happy. However, moderation is best. Drunkenness is not recommended. To me like a natural caution against excessive drinking.

Famously, the Greeks had the rule of 3. After the third glass of wine, the Greek man should stop. Unsurprisingly, three glasses for each guest was also considered a reasonable quantity of wine for a symposium. In a fragment of a play by Eubulus, an Athenian poet of the 4th century BC, Dionysus says:

Theognis on Drunkenness

Even today, you can see moderation in drinking in Mediterranean countries. Southern Italian alcohol culture is a small glass (half the size of an American wine glass) of red wine with dinner and a snifter of Campari on special occasions. There are alcoholics just as there are anywhere else, but the culture doesn't lend itself to abuse of spirits.

The alcohol abuse death rate is low in the south:

The hard alcohol consumption is also low in Greece and Italy.

And overall alcoholic drinks are lower in the south.

America, meanwhile, seems to have issues with maintaining a stable drinking culture. There are huge fluctuations. Alcoholism rose by a 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s.

How Society will Change with Less Drinking

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