EA - Taxing Tobacco: the intervention that got away (happy World No Tobacco Day) by Yelnats T.J.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Taxing Tobacco: the intervention that got away (happy World No Tobacco Day), published by Yelnats T.J. on June 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRThe death toll of tobacco dwarfs traditional EA global health focuses (e.g. Malaria).Taxing tobacco is the most effective and yet most neglected form of reducing tobacco consumption.Multiple EA orgs have ran cost-effectiveness numbers that would put a tobacco taxation NGO on GiveWell’s list (both in expected value and contingent on success) and even at the top in some cases.Despite this, no enduring tobacco-taxation advocacy organization has emerged from EA (which would be the only advocacy organization in the world exclusively dedicated to tobacco taxation)Join Joel Tan (Founder of CEARCH) and J.T. Stanley, who as incubatees of Charity Entrepreneurship closely examined tobacco taxation, on June 10th (Saturday) at 14:00 UTC for a virtual discussion about the intervention and what’s next to make it a reality.Thanks to Moritz von Knebel for providing feedback on the draft.Yes, I cite WHO a lot. Not all WHO citations are the same WHO link FYI.Problem spaceTobacco kills over 8 million individuals a year—that’s 13x Malaria (WHO) (CDC).Another way of framing it: annually more people are killed by tobacco usage than malaria, HIV, and neonatal deaths combined. twice over. And while the death toll of the latter three has been decreasing over time, death from tobacco is increasing.Of the 8 million deaths, 1.2 million are bystanders killed from secondhand smoking (WHO).Facts not related to death:Tobacco consumption displaces productive forms of spending. Tobacco consumes 1.5 to 17% (with a rough median around 4.5%) of a person’s income depending on country and socioeconomic status (table of results) (de Beyer et al., 2001). Spending on tobacco typically displaces spending on education and nutrition in low-income households (John, 2008) (Nonnemaker and Sur, 2007) (Pu et al., 2008).For example, smoking households spent 46% less on education than non-smoking households in surveyed townships in rural China (Wang et al., 2006). Another study states, “Average male cigarette smokers [in Bangladesh] spend more than twice as much on cigarettes as per capita expenditure on clothing, housing, health and education combined” (Efroymson et al., 2001).Smoking decreases productivity (Tobacconomics, 2019) (Halpern et al., 2001). One study in the United States found that it cost 1,807 USD per year per smoker in lost productivity compared to non-smokers (Bunn III et al., 2006).Tobacco increases individual healthcare costs (Tobacconomics, 2019). A study in China found that individual medical spending attributable to smoking increased the poverty rate by 1.5% in urban areas and 0.7% in rural areas (Liu et al., 2006).Tobacco strains the healthcare sector and taxpayers foot the bill (Wunsch and Brodie, 2021) (Tobacconomics, 2019).The annual costs of tobacco from healthcare expenditures and losses in productivity are 1.8% of the world GDP, breaking down to 1.1% to 1.7% of LMICs’ GDPs (Goodchild et al., 2018) (Tobacconomics, 2019).One last fact: without intervention, tobacco is on track to kill a billion individuals during the 21st century (WHO, 2008) (Savedoff and Alwang, 2015) (Jha, 2012).The interventionThe scientific literature on tobacco consumption is lengthy. The interventions that have the most significant effect on reducing tobacco consumption have been formalized in WHO’s MPOWER framework (Kaleta et al., 2009).Of the MPOWER tobacco control measures, taxing tobacco has been demonstrated consistently in the scientific literature to the be the most effective intervention (WHO) (NIH).Taxing tobacco has a price elasticity around -0.5, meaning that for a 10% increase in retail price of tobacco, consumption decreases by 5%...