900,000 Australian Dead since 1950
Friday, May 29th, 2009
One of the subjects from my MBA this semester was Economics for Managers, boring subject matter with interesting applications in the real world (even if I don’t agree with everything being proposed). One of the assignments led Dominik Ziomek and myself to explore Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposal to remove all branding from cigarette packets and dramatically increase cigarette tax.
To put cigarettes into their real context… the Australian population is around 21.5 million. Since 1901, including both World Wars, we’ve lost 102,807 servicemen to conflict (according to the official records of the Australian War Memorial). That’s since Federation.
The official figures for Australian deaths as a result of cigarette addiction since 1950 are 900,000. Yes, nearly a million people have died as a result of smoking cigarettes in the last 59 years.
So, if you count all the costs of cigarette smoking including palliative care and other medical expenses of maintaining a mass of slow deaths within the population, as well as lost productivity of 900,000 potential workers then we’re definately not doing as well out of cigarette addiction in the long run as we appear to be in the short run. In fact, Kevin Rudd is actually right and regardless of whatever the cigarette companies whine about their loss of branding – they are costing our country significantly. In fact, were any other country responsible for 900,000 dead Australians we’d be demanding a war.
