The Marginal Cost of A Drink

The first step is admitting you have a problem.  What comes next, though, is figuring out precisely what that problem is and what to do about it. When it comes to drinking at Harvard, this is where most people get caught up. Christian A. Rivera’s recent column in The Crimson is just the latest example of how drunken logic leads one to the wrong conclusion that, because Harvard underclassmen already drink dangerously, making alcohol more available by lowering the drinking age would only cause them to drink more dangerously.

To be fair, Rivera is correct that alcohol is probably over-consumed at colleges in general and at Harvard in particular, and he’s right that a lot of students drink with the goal of getting drunk. But let’s be clear: no one’s goal is to end up in Stillman Infirmary, and when this does occur, it’s because students drink more than they intended to at the start of the night.

There are two separate problems then: First, students want to drink more than what is healthy, and second, students often wind up drinking even more than they intended to.  The first problem pertains to long-term student health, and the second pertains to short-term student safety. Making students healthy in the long term is certainly a legitimate goal, but it is not generally the main subject of discussions about drinking at Harvard; these conversations usually come back to student safety, and so I will focus on the second problem.

Rivera writes, “If you and a group of friends wanted to drink and were on a college budget, would you go to a bar that has $7+ drinks or go buy [a] $15 handle of cheap vodka and a two-liter Diet Coke?” Besides slightly overestimating the cost of a drink and questionably suggesting that a student should buy vodka—not rum—to mix with Diet Coke, Rivera is mostly on point here.

Indeed, the behavior that Rivera describes (what is often called “pregaming”) is risky for a few reasons. First, students pour their own drinks, which means these beverages tend to be very strong. Second, students are able to consume many beverages in a relatively short amount of time. But most importantly, pregames are potentially dangerous because drinks have no marginal cost in this setting. Students must buy alcohol and mixers, but once these transactions are made, pregaming is an all-you-can-drink buffet.

Where Rivera—and the many people who make similar arguments—go wrong, though, is assuming that pregaming is the most dangerous aspect of a student's drinking habits. Rivera says, “The end result of lowering the drinking age would not be more and safer parties that would stop students from pregaming, but more reckless pregaming.” People who harp on the dangers of pregaming miss the fundamental point that drinking at Harvard parties is more dangerous than pregaming simply because parties (by definition) come after pregames. Indeed the same factors that make pregaming dangerous—inexperienced bar tenders pouring strong drinks, drinking quickly, and drinks having no marginal cost—are present at parties as well. Drinking leads to bad outcomes when students drink more than they intended to, and in this respect, we should be focused on where students consume their last drinks of the night.

Rivera argues, in essence, that because it is not feasible on a college budget for a student whose goal is to get drunk to consume all of his or her alcohol at a bar, pregaming would still be popular even if the drinking age were 18, and thus, drinking at Harvard would remain dangerous. Rivera may well be correct that pregaming would persist in a world with a lower drinking age, but drinking at Harvard would be safer, I argue, because more students would end their nights in bars, not at dorm parties.

Consider the following thought experiment: A group of students are allowed to pregame to their hearts’ content. Following the pregame, one-third of the students are placed in a setting where they must pay $5 for each additional drink; another third may consume additional drinks at no cost; and the final third, for whatever reason, are paid $5 for each additional beverage they drink. Which group, then, following the pregame would be expected to consume the most alcohol?  Of course, the group that is paid for additional drinks would consume the most, the group that may drink at no marginal cost would drink the next most, and the group that must pay a cost for additional drinks would consume the least.  Indeed, it would be a remarkable economic result if that were not so!

It is completely intuitive that students drink less at bars than at parties simply for economic reasons, and Rivera is incorrect to assume that underclassmen would never avail themselves of these establishments.  Indeed, upperclassmen do frequent the Square’s bars, and seniors’ financial situations are not significantly better than underclassmen’s.  Were the drinking age 18, certainly some underclassmen would abandon dorm parties in favor of bars, and—even if they had already pregamed substantially—over-consumption would decrease because more underclassmen would be ending their nights in settings where they were forced to pay a marginal cost for drinks.

That is not to say that there are not legitimate reasons for why society might have a vested interest in keeping the drinking age at 21.  There is some evidence—though by no means conclusive—that the current drinking age decreases drunk driving fatalities.  Even though this argument is entirely irrelevant to the Harvard question, as almost no students drive regularly, it is certainly true that Harvard administrators cannot legally disobey Massachusetts state law.  Still, if Harvard were left to its own devices to solve its drinking problem the solution would be simple: allow 18-year-olds to drink at the Queen’s Head and entice undergraduates to come by offering steeply discounted food after midnight.  It would both regenerate a vibrant social space for the Harvard community and nudge students into a safer drinking environment.

Jeremy Patashnik ’12 is an economics concentrator in Quincy House.