Yesterday Matt Yglesias flagged a survey showing that people who spend longer in school tend to spend more on alcohol.
Kevin Drum and James Joyner both pointed out that educated people drink more expensive alcohol (e.g., mixers or craft beer rather than schlitz).
When I saw Matt’s chart, my first reaction was that the amount that people spend on alcohol probably has a lot to do with the amount of money they make. High school graduates would probably not turn up their nose at Laphroaig, but they also want to drink more often than once a month. With that in mind I combined the chart with comparable data from a 2008 Department of Commerce survey on income by education level*.
From this I can conclude that graduating high school alone does not change drinking habits much. You earn a little more, you spend a little more on booze. A few college credits also has little effect. The most surprising result is that although people with a college degree make significantly more money, they spend significantly more on booze and then some. If you stay in school for another degree the effect flips; you make quite a bit more still but the amount that you spend on drinking changes hardly at all.
The last two data points make sense to me. The burden of doing well enough in college to meet my goals (in my case, getting into grad school) still left plenty of time to work on pickup lines, learn to mountain bike and climb and so on, and especially to refine the hell out of my drinking habits. If I hit the job market at that time, I am sure that most jobs that I could get in 1999 would have left me plenty of time to do it.
Grad school hardly killed my interest in booze, in fact just the reverse. Most Fridays the students in my cohort would hit a dive bar for margaritas and epic, cathartic grousing sessions about our advisors, our research, our teaching and any other indignities the universe thought up that week. As often as not I needed beer like I never did in college. There just wasn’t time.
Needless to say there are a million reasons to qualify a direct income-to-booze-money comparison. But hey, it agrees with my experience so it’s good enough for me.
(*) To make comparisons easier I multiplied the amount spent per year by a constant so that income and booze expenditures are equal for high school dropouts. When categories did not precisely overlap it was usually because the DoC data contained extra sub-categories (e.g., Master’s versus PhD), so when necessary I averaged those together along with the separate (and still disturbing) numbers for male and female.
Villago Delenda Est
I think part of it is also peer pressure (from your fellow yuppie scum) that you drink more expensive alcohol, and not that cheap stuff you drank in college just to get smashed.
So whether they’re actually drinking more alcohol is problematic to be sure.
psycholinguist
Why you want to bash the Schlitz? I love getting Shlitzfaced every now and again.
Corner Stone
Being able to afford what you enjoy drinking is a good thing.
Mike Goetz
While watching debates, those blue lines grow like Halperin’s pecker watching Perry slip on his fuck-me cowboy boots.
Gravenstone
And the full service alcohol-centric blogging continues. Well done, Tim.
Omnes Omnibus
It looks to me as though there might a certain amount of money one can spend on booze and still hold down a job, stay in school, and such. That amount appears to be the Bachelors degree level. Physiology, physics, and biochemistry probably come into play.
Mike Goetz
@Mike Goetz:
Obviously, the blue lines are not watching the debates. Way to dangle that participle, genius.
jeffreyw
On a surely related note, time spent playing with food increases with the amount of time you have to spend.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
You probably shouldn’t be drinking too much if you haven’t completed high school yet.
OriginalSibling
I wonder what would happen if you separated out MBAs from the rest of the “Advanced Degrees.” College professors don’t make as much money as a Wall Street hotshot, and the latter not only will develop a taste for luxuries, but will also feel the need to show off his wealth by buying the expensive stuff when he’s with his colleagues and “friends” (i.e., those colleagues who aren’t trying to stab him in the back that month).
ericblair
~hic~
Sincerely,
ericblair, PhD
My read is the same: more money means better booze. Enjoying better booze started in grad school. Undergrad was large quantities of bad beer. I seem to recall, maybe.
Violet
@Corner Stone:
Elitist.
Violet
@OriginalSibling:
Exactly. I remember during my short stint working with traders that they used to go out to dinners with brokers and other Wall St. types and drink $1,000 bottles of wine. The younger guys who were just starting out would tell me about it, still sort of awestruck. The guys who had been there a year or two were jaded. They ate at the best restaurants in town four nights a week as part of their “work.”
Corner Stone
@Violet: I would give you a witty rejoinder but at the moment I’m quite soused on excellent hooch.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I belive the chart is saying there is room for $50,000 bottles of alcohol. The market hasn’t filled in the upper educated’s ability to spend more.
gbear
Reading Balloon Juice is turning into the equivalent of listening to albums by Fountains of Wayne.
Shinobi
The BLS needs to get smacked upside the head for making such a terrible chart. (Shit, now they will never hire me…)
cleek
there’s also an upper limit on the amount one can reasonably spend on beer and liquor without getting into really obscure, crafty, limited appeal stuff. in my part of NC, a high end 6-pack of beer costs $10-ish in the supermarket these days. and the only way i could spend more is if i buy hard-to-find small-batch stuff produced by Belgian monks and sold for $5/11oz bottle. but for everyday beer, that’s just not gonna happen, no matter how much money i make. and the market for that stuff is pretty small. most people prefer the stuff in the $7-$11range.
likewise with liquor: high end vodka costs $30/bottle. if you want to spend more than that, you’re probably doing it for prestige reasons – and most people don’t need to show off all the time. yes, scotch can get really expensive, but there’s an upper limit there, too – most people don’t buy $700 bottles of Macallan 25 for every day drinking. if they buy it at all, it’s going to be a treasure or a gift, not an every day bottle. every day scotch tops out at about $60-ish/bottle.
even with wine, you hit a point of diminishing returns around $40 – you just can’t buy better quality (you can buy more prestige, tho). and it’s possible to get $20 bottles that are every bit as good as the $40 bottles. and for most people i know a $10 bottle is an every day bottle. an $30 bottle is a celebration bottle. a $100 bottle is just wasting money.
SpotWeld
I think this suggests that after $700/ year, your are buying so much alcohol you can not longer answer a surver coherantly.
Calming Influence
Maybe there’s a limit to how much money you can spend on booze and still work for a living. I personally haven’t seen that yet, I’m just suggesting that there might be.
And maybe people with advanced degrees are smart enough to understand that after three or four Kettle Ones, Smirnoff goes down just fine.
Riggsveda
People who spend a longer time in school need to spend more on alcohol. Looking back on 12th grade, I realize now what a boon a few fifths of vodka could have been to get me to graduation.
scav
Mantra I learned in Grad School:
Beer Again
More Alcohol
Pretty heavy Drinking
NonyNony
Are you really comparing the average annual expenditure on alcohol by education bracket to the median income by education bracket? Or are those tables mislabeled?
evap
I think a lot of it is that those with advanced degrees probably go out to dinner more and hence spend more on drinks. That bottle of wine I bought for $20 to drink with dinner at home will cost me $45 in a restaurant.
It might be interesting to separate out the types of advanced degrees. I have a PhD and most of my friends do not have advanced degrees, but I think we all spend about the same amount on booze.
trollhattan
Booze and beer have one price range while wine has something completely different. Ignoring the outliers, cheapass beer is perhaps a third to a quarter the price of typical good quality craft and import beer. Likewise, popular “super premium” booze is perhaps four or five times the price of house brand rotgut.
But cheap wine is really stinking cheap, especially bought in bulk, making decent to good wine easily ten, twenty or thirty times as expensive and that’s leaving high end and collectable wine completely out of the equation.
If you get the wine bug you’ll blow those bar graphs to smithereens.
Corner Stone
@evap:
If it cost you $20 at Spec’s then expect to pay $80 or more at any mid level restaurant.
lojasmo
I have an associate’s degree in nursing. I spend $3500/year on ale. ($12/4 pints)
I broked the curve.
Edit: Yes, I drink…a lot.
Worked2Death
Bran Van 3000, Drinking in LA, from the Glee album. Awesome. It was on a CMJ CD from the 90s.
edmund dantes
Huh… The one I learned was
Bull Shit
More Shit
Piled High & Deep
goblue72
@cleek: At $10 a bottle, you are stuck choosing amongst some pretty plonky shit at the supermarket. $10 – $20 can get you a decent enough everyday drinking wine, but you’ll generally be stuck skewing towards whites & roses in that range. I wouldn’t call $30 a celebration wine – I’d call it a good, mid-range red for a nice Saturday or Sunday meal at home. But yeah, at $40 and over – yeah, you are starting to hit a bad price/quality ratio.
Course, its all dependent on locality – I live in the Bay Area, so prices for a lot of goods can be higher.
scav
@edmund dantes: Both work, possibly even in parallel and coordinated fashion.
dude
In college I wound up meeting some day laborers who were in the country illegally. One day they told me about how they got drunk the night before… one drank two beers and the other drank three, which they considered impressive. The money to alcohol consumption thing clicked right then… great reminder for how well some of us have it.
goblue72
@evap: I’m always curious about these kinds of data that include the lump category of advanced or graduate degrees. I’d think there is pretty big skew at that level dependent on type of degree – a PhD is not a JD is not a MBA is not a MD is not a DDS, etc. I’d expect the professional degree holders (JD/MD/DDS/MBA) to skew more affluent on average than the academic degrees.
eemom
dunno how I fit in here. All’s I know is I’m a wine lush with a professional degree and I generally try to draw the line at $15 per bottle.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
I quit drinking during the second year of my doctoral program, 17 years ago. I STARTED drinking when I was 13 and drank through all three years of high school and beyond!
Arm The Homeless (formerly Third Eye Open)
The mantra I learned in Grad school:
Water is for fightin’, whiskey is for drinkin’
But since I don’t drink whiskey, I will say that a 12oz bottle of Dogfish Heads’ 120 Minute IPA @ $8 a pop would probably put a dent in that $700 number pretty quick
I would also like to see money spent on illicit drugs compared too, lots of advanced degree holders that I know like the Wacky Tobbacky and substitute that for a lot of nights drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade
Paul in KY
@cleek: A regular sized bottle of Louie Roderer Cristal champange was going for $310.00 at the local Giant Liquor Store. Don’t know what year it was, as I’d have to win the lottery to buy one (or a case) so I didn’t check.
Ken
eemom@34; that sounds about right. All I know is that my wife (some college) and I (mba) typically break $2000/yr with wine. Premier has great “double up for a buck” sales periodically.
Sentient Puddle
@gbear: I wish I had some smarmy rejoinder to that…but no, that’s pretty much spot on.
Think I’ll have another glass of Mexican wine.
Arm The Homeless (formerly Third Eye Open)
@goblue72: Any word on Anchor Distillery’s last batches? I would really like to find one last bottle of their Genevieve Gin before all I have are my memories
EDIT: I guess they are still out there for $40 a bottle. Sigh…
Hawes
As someone with a mostly worthless grad degree (MFA, bitchez!), I have to say that spending on alcohol is one of my few perks in life. I can no longer drink Cuervo or Jack Daniels. But a Maestro Dobel or Basil Hayden? Sign me up!
It also makes me easy to shop for at Christmas and birthdays, although those holidays tend to make me look like an alcoholic.
I wonder, too, how much wine consumption over, say, beer at meals factors in to this.
Also, how was this recorded? I can’t imagine people are all that astute in evaluating their alcohol expenditures for the year off the top of their heads.
MonkeyBoy
@NonyNony:
Another thing is that I thought that alcohol consumption was one of those 20%-80% deals where 20% of people drink 80% of the booze (or maybe it is 10%-90%, anybody have the figures?) and that the whole industry depends on essentially functional alcoholics for much of their sales. I don’t know how much I would trust the data since alcoholics often tend to undereport their consumption by a factor of 2.
Maybe the full report (PDF) (which I didn’t realize was about the year 2000) explains this issue but it was too much for me to read.
What also would be interesting is if the 20%-80% (or whatever) holds constant across income and education levels.
FlipYrWhig
@ericblair:
A friend from grad school once said that grad students are beer snobs because they can’t afford to be any other kind of snobs.
gbear
(deleted duplicate)
gbear
@Sentient Puddle: Just to clarify -I wasn’t trying to be dismissive of BJ with my comment. I love Fountains of Wayne.
ericblair
@FlipYrWhig:
Sounds about right. This was engineering school as well, which tends to skew towards beer. Also, you tend to have time to do the homebrew thing and aren’t usually in residence, so have the space for that.
Librarian
Mwaaaaaaahaaaaaa, the French!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFevH5vP32s&feature=related
jze
GUH, as PhD in Switzerland, I think I have blown the curve in a weekend.
Sentient Puddle
@gbear: Oh I understood. Sometimes (mainly in the middle of February) I like to say that my life is like Someone to Love to amuse myself. Nah, being dismissive would be…I don’t know, comparing them to Richie and Ruben.
@ericblair: Engineering school here too, but the beer snobs were actually undergrads. See, they were underage, but discovered that you don’t get carded for buying homebrew ingredients.
AuldBlackJack
$700 annually?
Let’s see 1 $15 bottle of red wine between 2 people for dinner X 365 days …. $5475. Which doesn’t include all the holiday cheers, the occasional frosty libation during these hot summer months and the requisite hot toddy when snow is on the ground.
$700? Pikers.
Malatesta
Actually, we have other data that says that drinking and education are directly related. For example,the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service has data showing that among those 26 and older, people with a 4 year degree are basically twice as likely as those without a high school diploma to have had any alcohol in the last month.
While we’re at it, the General Social Survey shows a basically linear relation between alcohol consumption and better scores on the WORDSUM test (which roughly correlates with IQ). See – http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-class-drink-alcohol/ for some fancy charts.
This leads to my new hypothesis. Booze makes you smarter. And more attractive.
dandy
I’ve spent more than 200 on booze in a NIGHT, how drunk were these researchers?
phillygirl
What, were these researchers interviewing Mormons?
I go to my neighborhood bar probably once a week for 2 glasses of mediocre wine. That’s $700 a year right there. Then there’s the rest of the week ….
FWIW, two advanced degrees have not elevated my tastes one bit. But what I lack in quality I make up for in volume.
genghisjon
This song pretty well sums it up.http://youtu.be/H4hGSR5njZE May the gourds be with you.
Ruckus
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
I might have gone to HS with you. Well your doppelganger anyway.
He was 16 drove to school with a fifth under his front seat. When we got to school he would take a big snort. At lunch he would go to his car, take a big snort. Never drank and drove while I was around but he was about a third in the bag during the day.
Brachiator
Some might argue that educated people don’t drink beer. But that would be elitist.
As is often the case, the simplified graph here hides and distorts much. There is a difference between buying stuff to get shitfaced drunk at parties during the weekend (even every day) and having wine or beer with regular meals.
Different social classes and different countries have different approaches to alcohol. I think that depending on your school and level of education, you might encounter and take on some of the habits of your educational peers. It never did anything for me, but I met British grad students who never drank anything other than champagne, so right out of the box they were spending more on booze than a lot of other students.
I also know people, especially from the Midwest and the South, who never drank wine before they went to college. Beer, whiskey and rum, they knew quite well. Some students from either coast had a more diverse experience.
There are other variations. When I went to college, I met people whose parents had wine cellars, whose parents owned restaurants with deep beer and wine lists, and a few whose parents owned wineries.
@cleek:
I don’t entirely agree, but after a point, you can’t argue people’s preferences.
Comrade Luke
Matt Yglesias is an idiot. I wish he’d just go to the Atlantic with all the other jackasses (TNC & Fallows excepted).
Brachiator
This stuff about what people pay for alcohol reminds me of a recent article about the most expensive restaurants in America:
What’s a good meal worth to you?
FlipYrWhig
@Comrade Luke: Or he could just live his dream of opening up a high-rise full of unlicensed barbershops.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
It depends a good deal on the varietal. I can find a zillion very good zins @$10-15 or so, but try that with pinot noirs.
Also, too, why hasn’t Althouse dropped in to straighten out our hippie elitist asses by now?
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Small world coincidence: Grant Achatz was (very) briefly an in-law. Yeah, it’s a complicated family
treestand of brush on wife.gov’s side.Sentient Puddle
@trollhattan:
Holy crap, way to present some corroborating evidence.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Veddy interesting.
This must have made for a few amazing dining experiences.
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan:
Too drunk? Simply a question, not an accusation.
Corner Stone
Yeah!! Take a little 105mm Howitzer action, you zombie bitches! Bring the rain!! Bring the RAIN! Wooo-hoo! How’d you like that 40mm Bofors lacing your ass up!! Step off my bunker or feel a double tap of this gatling you undead scum!!
Whu..what? Sorry, what we’re we talking bout?
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: I think that was an earlier thread, but your enthusiasm is appreciated.
eemom
With respect to J.D.s it is said, “Once you pass the bar, you’ll never PASS a BAR again.” Haw haw.
khead
I’m doing my best to bring down the average for people with an advanced degree.
khead +3
Corner Stone
@khead:
Hmmm, every drink you have contributes to the amount spent on alcohol for people with advanced degrees. So even if you’re drinking cheap you’re still spending money on something alcoholic.
So shouldn’t you abstain if you wanted to really bring the avg down?
khead
@Corner Stone:
What is this ‘abstain’ you speak of?
My $20 bottle of cheap rum is here to offset someone else’s $40 bottle of wine.
Caz
Maybe the people with higher degrees aren’t drinking more, but just drinking more expensive alcohol, like Grey Goose instead of the $6.99 plastic jug of Vladimir Vodka at 7-Eleven.
Corner Stone
@khead:
To hell with you! I’m putting my $40 tequila against your rum, and if you mess with me the tiniest bit I’ll bring out the higher end whiskey.
Strap in son, and let’s do this damned thing!
smintheus
PhD, and smart enough to make my own wine for just a few bucks per year.