Unintended Consequences of the Smoking Ban

On Tuesday (14.04.09) I’ll be giving a (guest) lecture at Professor Fikret Adaman’s course entitled “Topics of History of Economic Thought” (EC 412.01, Bogazici University, Department of Economics) on The Invisible Hand and Unintended Consequences. The lecture will be based on the Second Chapter of my book The Invisible Hand in Economics. The aim of the lecture is to investigate the set of unintended consequences that is implied by the invisible hand. I’ll be providing some interesting (I hope) examples of unintended consequences. One of my examples concerns the unintended consequences of the smoking ban.

Here is a list of some of the possible and actual unintended consequences of the smoking ban:

• Increase in the number of beer gardens (in order to re-invite smokers to bars, see [1] below),
• Increasing global warming (partly due to increased use of patio heaters, see [1] and [8] below)
• Increasing demand for chefs (in order to attract more customers to pubs which apparently lost smokers as customers, see [1] below)
• Increasing exposition of children to passive smoking (due to increased home-smoking, see [1] below)
• Increased snuffing (due to searching for alternative ways of consuming nicotine. See [2] below)
• Increasing number of drunk drivers (see [3] below )
• Decreased public health! (see [5] below)
• Increased smirting (see [6] below)
• Increased litter (see [7] and [10] below)
• Emergence of unpleasant odors in bars (see [9] below)

The question is whether these unintended consequences have anything to do with the invisible hand. In economic models invisible-hand consequences are not caused by actions of individuals and/or governments who are intending to achieve social ends. Considered from this perspective unintended consequences of the smoking ban should not be considered as invisible-hand consequences because they are caused by actions of governments who were in fact intending to achieve social ends such as improving public health. However, there is a clear sense in which some of the aforementioned unintended consequences could be considered as invisible-hand consequences — as I will try to show in my lecture. Stay tuned for more on this issue.

References:

• [1] Unintended consequences of the smoking ban, BBC News, 01.07.2008
• [2] Snuffing out the smoking ban, BBC News, 01.05.2006
• [3] Adams, S. & Cotti, C. “Drunk Driving after the passage of smoking bans in bars”, Journal of Public Economics, available from Science Direct.
• [4] Uncommon Knowledge, Boston Globe, 10.02.2008
• [5] The hidden dangers of the smoking ban, Spiked, 10.07.2007
• [6] Unintended consequences of smoking ban, Virtual Economics, 10.09.2007
• audio-visual material:
• [7] Smoking ban increases litter, BBC News, video
• [8] Patio heaters under threat, BBC News, video
• [9] Smoking ban’s unintended consequences, Bryce’s beer blog
• [10] Smoking ban as a case study in unintended consequences, HealthLeadersMedia
• [11] Oops, look what’s happened…, BBC News, 23.05.2007