Zombie alcohol stats

We thought we'd killed it with fire a decade ago. But BERL's social cost of alcohol has shambled out of the grave. I hit it anew over at Newsroom:

Zombies are hard to kill. Since the classical zombie only really occurs in fiction, accounts vary. But it never seems easy. Things that would kill or at least stop any normal living creature barely seem to faze the undead.

Zombie statistics are at least as hard to kill. These statistics, despite being horribly unsound, insinuate themselves into public debate and stay there. Tim Harford’s excellent BBC series More or Less makes a running feature of the statistics that, no matter how often you think you’ve cut them down, pick themselves up and lumber on.

I was very surprised to see one of New Zealand’s worst zombie statistics come back to life a couple of weeks ago. Put to the grave almost a decade ago, it returned at Alcohol Action New Zealand’s conference in August. BERL’s Ganesh Nana was reported to have claimed that alcohol-related harm costs every New Zealander $1,635 per year, for an annual total of $7.8 billion.

The figure seems to be an inflation and population-growth update of BERL’s 2009 estimate of the social costs of harmful alcohol use. The figure was nonsense at the time; an inflation adjustment to nonsense is hardly an improvement.

Let’s go through just what went wrong in that prior study, and why I was surprised to see its resurrection.