Prohibition, Binges and Storage Costs

By Fester:

Newsday is reporting on something that I would have been all over most of a decade ago; College presidents want a lower drinking age.

College presidents from more than 100 schools across the country are calling on lawmakers to do something about binge drinking: Consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18.

"Twenty-one is not working," says the group's statement, signed by presidents from prominent colleges such as Dartmouth, Duke and Syracuse. "A culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge drinking' - often conducted off-campus - has developed.

The logic behind this proposal is an economic logic.  Prohibition that is loosely enforced or fundamentally unenforcable creates an incentive against storage and paced consumption.  There are high costs for a 19 year old to be caught with a case of beer in their dorm room.  In order to minimize the risk of being caught, the case is consumed basically when it is purchased.  This incentive structure is one of the paths towards binge drinking.  That is the incentive that is being addressed.  It is an attempt to change youth drinking culture.

And I think it is a reasonable attempt because 18 to 21 year olds have a highly developped, informal market for booze as it is.  Pushing otherwise legitimate economic activity into the gray and black markets is not a good idea.  If there is a drop in the drinking age, even if it is an informal drop in and around campuses, the storage problem becomes a much simpler problem and it is possible that young adults can be acclimated to a drinking style that is more controlled.  Instead of having four or five pitchers at C.J. Barneys on a Thursday night with three friends (that was freshman year for me), a (better) beer or two two or three nights a week could develop.

This is a worthwhile experiment to address the storage problem and thus one of the binge incentives...