Intended consequences

In the book, I make much use of the concept of ‘unintended consequences’ – the way that, in particular, rational-legal rules give rise to effects that were not only different to those intended but run directly counter to what was intended. My last post on the VW emissions scandal provided a current example.

But sometimes the situation is more complex, and I return here to the case of regulations around smoking, about which I have written in another post on this blog, and, with Jo Brewis, also written an academic paper (Brewis & Grey,2008). The latest development is that today a law has come in to force banning smoking in cars when a person less than 18 years old is present in the car. It’s by no means an objectionable law, in and of itself, because who would want to claim that smoking in a car with children is in any way a good thing?

What is interesting about this law, though, is that it is manifestly doomed to failure. Police representatives have already said that it is unenforceable, partly due to lack of resources but also because of detection problems. For example, electronic cigarettes are not included in the legislation so a police patrol would not easily be able to tell whether an offence was being committed, nor is it easy to know the age of passengers from a patrol car. Moreover, the legislation allows 17 year olds to smoke in cars if the passengers are 18, allows smoking in convertibles with the hood down, and allows smoking in caravans and motorhomes, even if children are present, so long as the vehicle are not at that point moving.

We might, then, assume that the intended consequence is to stop smoking in cars with children and that the unintended consequence is it not working. But in fact the situation is more complex. The long-term aim of anti-smoking activists is the eradication of all smoking, but they approach this goal stealthily because smoking is such a strongly culturally embedded practice. From that perspective, the failure of this latest legislation will be desirable, because when it fails it will justify a new law banning all smoking in all vehicles in all circumstances.

Social science research is sometimes criticised for lacking the predictive power of natural science, so here I will make a prediction. Within, say, five years (and I would expect less rather than more) a total smoking ban in cars will be in force. And as soon as it is, or even, possibly, before there will be lobbying for a ban on smoking in houses where children are present. Once again few will object, because no one could really mount a case that it would be good to allow it. So a law will follow, which will of course be even more unenforceable than that against smoking in cars with children. From which will ‘logically’ follow that all smoking by anyone in any house will be banned.

By that point, the situation as regards public spaces (e.g. bars) and private spaces (e.g. homes) will be identical: smoking in both is banned. So what happens then? Well, look at what is happening around the regulations on public spaces. At first, it was just indoors. Now, it is increasingly in parks and on beaches which are public spaces but outdoors, including outside pub doorways. The rationale for this is not that others might inhale the fumes, but that those (especially children) seeing it might think that smoking was ‘normal’. So, once there is a ban on smoking inside homes, it will get extended to smoking outside home, for example in gardens. In other words, as each new rule ‘fails’, that failure provides the rationale for a new rule. It is in this sense that failure is an intended consequence of regulation since it paves the way for successfully extending regulation.

With smoking now very much a minority activity in the UK and many other countries, few will shed a tear about any of this (and it’s not my intention that anyone should: I just want to provide an interesting illustration of a particular phenomenon around unintended consequences). But it’s worth reflecting that with the campaign to reduce smoking now being acknowledged as the gold-standard of public health campaigns, the same tactics are being applied to another deeply culturally embedded practice (as smoking was a generation ago), namely alcohol consumption.

As with smoking, the initial restrictions have been around advertising. Then (rather like the 1970s campaign that smokers should choose cigarettes with filters and leave long stubs) there has been the definition of safe drinking limits, which turn out to have been ‘plucked out of air’. Now, as happened with smoking, some campaigners say that there is no safe limit for alcohol, and although that is not mainstream in the way that it is for smoking it is accepted to be true for pregnant women. Meanwhile, just as there used to be a differentiation of ‘light’ or ‘social’ smokers from the hardcore we have a similar differentiation of social and ‘binge’ drinkers, with a binge drinker being someone drinking more than 3 pints of beer. The key move in anti-smoking discourse was to establish the notion of passive or secondary smoking, and the same shift has been mooted by former UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, who is also responsible for the Orwellian declaration of aiming for the complete denormalization of smoking.

So here’s another prediction – as smoking fades away, restrictions on alcohol will increase along with restrictions on sugar and ever more demonization of obesity. Each restriction will give rise to failures which far from being unintended will have been designed to fail, in order to justify further restrictions. But the law of unintended consequences will still hold, and indeed it is already very clear that this is so. Because the more that unhealthy practices, such as smoking, drinking and over-eating are reduced, the more we see the degradations of dementia, of old age blighted by complex and intractable multiple illnesses, of obscure cancers that were rarely known before.

Moreover, since taxes on smoking are, massively, a net contributor to the NHS (and the same is true for alcohol) the less we smoke the more difficult it will be to fund the healthcare for the longer lives we will indubitably – for, of course, the anti-smoking campaigners are quite right to point to its dangers – be living. But that, too, is not really an example of an unintended consequence since, as Jo Brewis and I argued in our article, the real motivation of the anti-smoking movement is not public health, but the imposition of a morality about smoking that long precedes, and proceeds quite independently of, any scientific or medical rationality. They simply reproduce, in modern language, King James I's (1604) Counterblaste to Tobacco:

Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

 

Happy birthday?

So this blog is just about exactly one year old, reflecting the fact that the third edition is also a year old. It is ‘fairly interesting’ to look at the site statistics. So far there have been 3367 visits (390 in the last month), although there is no way of telling whether this represents a small number of people looking at it several times, or a larger number of less frequent visitors.  The most viewed post is the one about Thatcher’s death and legacy. The top 10 country breakdown is:

United Kingdom	1219
United States	647
Germany	148
Russia	133
Ireland	82
France	73
Ukraine	68
China	67
Norway	65
Australia	53

 

But what is more surprising is to see occasional visitors from far flung places: this week, Aruba.

Anyway, there has been another birthday this week, namely my own 49^th anniversary (or, as a colleague rather depressingly put it, I am now entering my 50^th year). I am becoming more and more grumpy as I get older – in fact, I realise that somewhere along the line I have turned into my father. My current pet hate is people walking around looking at their mobiles, requiring others to jump out of the way to avoid a collision.

Another peeve is more directly related to the book where, on p.131, I talk about the free labour that customers perform when dialling up call centres through automated telephone systems, sometimes even paying for the privilege. Something very similar is becoming more and more common in shops, where increasingly the checkouts are self-service. Thus we scan our goods, bag them and pay without the need for a checkout operator. This is presented as an extension of choice, but the choice is limited by the fact that there are fewer and fewer staffed tills with longer and longer queues as a result.

Yesterday I was standing in one such queue, with most of the self-service tills unused, a sign in itself that, as a matter of choice, many people, not just me, prefer not to use them. My particular dislike is the way that the recorded voice barks aggressively at you – for example ‘foreign item in bagging area’ or ‘item not scanned’ or ‘return to bagging area’, the last of which I don’t even understand.  I half expect to hear it say, like a bossy schoolteacher, ‘you’re only letting yourself down’ or ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed’.

As we queued, a member of the shop staff kept reminding us that we could use these tills and, like all good English people, we pretended we could not hear, or that the message was for someone else. But after being told this two or three times I muttered ‘I hate those things’. It obviously came out louder than I had intended, because suddenly everyone in the queue started pitching in and complaining about the fact that they had staff standing around telling us to go self-service, whilst all but one of the manual tills was closed.

Of course it was not the fault of the staff – they were simply doing what they had been told to do. But the sad thing about that is that eventually, perhaps, we will all be duly accultured to serve ourselves and the expectation of being served by a human being will become, to use the term that has been applied to smoking, ‘de-normalised’. All the manned tills will disappear (and, with them, even the chimera of ‘choice’). And almost all of the staff will be out a job as we become their replacements, labouring unpaid, belaboured for our faults by the pitiless shouts of the automatic overseer. It depresses me to think that we will probably not even notice or, worse, will celebrate it as a new found freedom.

Or perhaps we will be found to be such unsatisfactory workers that the recorded voice will tire of us and announce that we, too, have been sacked. Or perhaps bagged. Or perhaps, even, ‘returned to the bagging area’ for re-programming.

Not smoking

In 2008 I published an article, with Jo Brewis, about workplace bans on smoking. It’s an interesting organizational issue. If the proverbial Martian visited a workplace in, say, 1980 and again today, one of the most noticeable things would be how cigarette smoke had disappeared between the two visits (and how smokers’ huddles outside the workplace had appeared). Smoking bans are also an organizational issue in that they are justified in terms of protecting workers from ‘passive smoking’ – so that although most public debate has been about the effects on leisure places like bars, the rationale is that these leisure places are in fact the work places of bar staff.

In our article, we suggested that the modern scientific and medical discourses of anti-smoking (i.e. that it is bad for smokers’ health and, supposedly, for non-smokers) were better understood as an inflection of a much more longstanding moral discourse about smoking and smokers: that ‘smoking is bad’ and ‘smoking is bad for your health’ were interlinked in complex ways. Historically, moral disdain for smoking long predates issues of health (see Ian Gately's book for detail). To give just a couple of examples: Murad the Cruel , ruler of the Ottoman Empire 1623-1640, had at least 25,000 suspected smokers put to death, whilst at about the same time in Persia those caught selling tobacco had molten lead poured down their throats; and in the 1920s employees of the Ford Motor Company were subjected to night time raids on their homes to check whether they were smoking – if so they had their wages docked or in some cases were sacked. Nor are smoking bans new: some German, Italian and American States had them in the mid-19th Century. The more contemporary hatred of smoking stems in part from its equation with death at a time of secularism. Given widespread acceptance that there is no afterlife, there seems to be a kind of fantasy that if only one does the right things, then death can be abolished at least for long enough until a cure is found. Smokers are an affront to this fantasy, and that is why no condemnation is strong enough for their presumption.

Five years on, this is more obvious than ever. Anti-smoking activists are seeking to expunge all references to, and images of, smoking, in ways that we predicted in the article. Because although at the time the avowed aim was simply a workplace ban, as Jo and I said in our article this coded a much more expansive ambition, which the UK’s former Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson revealed in 2007 to be the “complete de-normalization of smoking”. Of course the dangers of smoking are not in dispute. Those of secondary or passive smoking are rather more contentious, even though forming the basis of the smoking bans. But now anti-smoking activists condemn third hand smoking – the supposed dangers of smelling the clothes of someone who has recently smoked; and even fourth hand smoking – the idea that contact with a non-smoker who has had contact with a smoker is dangerous. At the same time, these activists have successfully pushed for images of cigarettes in films and cartoons to be expunged and for cigarette packets to be hidden from public view, with the current battle line being over plain packaging. The aim of these latter moves, ostensibly, is to discourage young people from taking up smoking even though the most basic knowledge of teenage psychology tells us that making something so taboo that it must be hidden away is to make it more attractive. But of course that justification is just, so to speak, a smokescreen. The real aim is to make smoking, which is perfectly legal in almost all countries in the world, well, de-normalized. The ultimate goal, presumably, is to make it illegal – a strategy which has, of course, worked very well with other drugs!

All this has now taken a remarkable new twist. In the wake of the smoking bans in many countries, more and more people have taken to ‘vaping’ – using electronic or e-cigarettes, which deliver a nicotine hit to their user but emit only harmless water vapour. One might expect anti-smoking activists to approve – these devices, after all, reduce cigarette usage. In fact, they object most vehemently. Which led to an interesting experience I had last week. Standing on my local First Capital Connect (FCC) train station platform I heard the now familiar announcement that smoking was forbidden. This, by the way, is on open-air platforms which are not, under UK legislation, obliged to ban smoking since they are not 'enclosed public places'. But let’s forget that lost battle and focus on the less familiar part of the announcement, which continued by saying that this included the use of electronic cigarettes. Intrigued, I checked the FCC website and it emerged that this ban on e-cigarettes had been introduced on 30th May 2013 “because they can unsettle other passengers and cause people to think that smoking real cigarettes is allowed”. It is difficult to imagine how e-cigarettes could ‘unsettle’ anyone. One wonders how many sensitive souls have complained to FCC, or if anyone has actually been duped by others’ use of e-cigarettes. In fact I wrote them an email asking, but their reply just repeated their policy without answering these questions.

In any case, it is an interesting principle that ‘unsettling behaviour’ should be banned, and we might wonder what its legal basis is. The answer may be alarming. In a statement FCC explained “that a bylaw, dealing with ‘unacceptable behaviour’, allowed it to ban the devices. The legislation states: ‘No person shall molest or wilfully interfere with the comfort or convenience of any person on the railway’”. I am sure that we can all think of things – mobile phone use, say, or i-pad gaming - that fall into this category rather more readily than e-cigarettes (indeed, the toilets on most FCC trains I have travelled on seem hardly conducive to 'comfort and convenience'). As a matter of fact, has even one person’s ‘comfort or convenience’ been interfered with by e-cigarettes? I also asked them that when I emailed them, but there was no answer.

The second part of FCC’s justification is that the British Medical Association wants e-cigarettes to be included in the smoking ban . This is a different issue, to do with whether they are harmful to those using them, as opposed to whether those seeing their use might be “unsettled”. It is a live debate and the clamour of the anti-smoking lobby to ban or regulate e-cigarettes is gathering pace. Thus, France is planning to ban their use in public, but not in private which is strange if the reason is supposed to be that they are dangerous to their users. But, at the moment, there is no such ban in place in the UK and it seems odd that FCC would introduce such a ban on its premises on the basis of the position of a particular lobbying group. Odd, indeed, that FCC should seek to concern itself with the still-disputed health effects of its customers’ habits. For, remember, no one, including FCC, is suggesting that e-cigarettes harm anyone else: ostensibly, the only question is whether they may harm their users, for which there is no evidence, as yet anyway. So what next? Will FCC require its customers to conform to other BMA campaigns, on diet and exercise for example?
Smokers still constitute at least 20% of the UK adult population (and, by the way, they contribute about four times in tax what they additionally cost the National Health Service). Perhaps a million UK adults use e-cigarettes. They, too, are amongst the customers of FCC. So what is going on? The key issue here is the idea that e-cigarettes might be “unsettling”: we have gone from a ban on cigarettes to a ban on things that ‘look like’ cigarettes, reflecting precisely the way that the anti-smoking movement has moved far away from anything remotely to do with science or rationality. Smoking at work is now banned but so too is not-smoking not at work, and this enforced not by government legislation but by the whimsical diktat of a commercial organization.