A new study by the folks at MIT finds that people living on a dollar a day and less are likely to spend 6 cents of it on alcohol or tobacco. That’s 6% of income for those of you who are as bad at math as I am.

I read this the other day and thought – wow, that seems like a lot. Then I thought for a few minutes and said – well 6% doesn’t seem like that much. Then I was just confused as to where exactly in the spectrum of spending that fell. So I got out the paper and started number crunching a comparison.

Let’s take a run of the mill American earning $42,000 a year.
6% of that income comes out to = $2,520 per year.
There’re 52 weeks in a year so $2,520/52 = $48.46 a week available to spend (on beer for ease of argument and visualization).
$48.46 divided $10 a 12 pack (it’s not Bud Light but it’s not Sierra Nevada either) comes out to 4.84 twelve packs being able to be purchased each week or in other terms: 58 beers a week. That’s 8 beers a day.

So where does that leave us? Drunk I guess. If we’re all spending 6% of our income on booze. And really drunk if we’re doing well for ourselves – at a 100,000 bucks a year you’d have to be drinking close to 20 beers a day to be maintaining the same level of spending on alcohol as the extreme poor are supposedly throwing down.

“No wonder they’re poor”, is the easy argument. But as usual, it’s not that simple. Alcohol is not the average American’s only vice or entertainment. I think it’d be pretty easy to spend 48 and half bucks a week on whatever it is we’re all treating ourselves to – eating out, going to the movies, poker night, buying shoes, and on and on.

For the people this kind of study is talking about there is no going to the movies. There is no going out to eat. There’s not even reading a book for the vast majority of them. There’s work. Or not work and sitting around. And there’s entertainment – soccer and drinking.

I guess what I’m getting at is that a headline of a study like that lets the reader walk away with this notion that people in poor places are sitting around squandering there cash on getting drunk. And while some of them certainly are – this overlooks the bigger problem. Why are they spending that kind of percentage?

Because liquor’s cheap* and there’s nothing else to do. But now we’re getting into opinion territory, and I think we’ve had enough of that lately so we’ll leave it at that.

I’m gonna go fix a drink.

kb

*A half liter of caña – liquor distilled from sugar cane – cost .73 cents here. That’ll get you good and drunk.