[antognini]

> the huge cost imposed on society by smoking.

On your last point, from what I've seen smoking saves society money because it kills people at much younger ages so governments don't have to pay for their health care for nearly as long.

[ByteJockey]

I think if the op was talking about non-monetary costs.

But if we're limiting this to monetary costs only, I believe you're right. I saw a similar study from the UK circa ~2008ish that compared long term smoker/obese/healthy medical costs, and healthy people are indeed the most expensive (mostly because of tremendous end of life care costs).

Edit: I dug around a bit and found the study I was thinking of. It was actually a study on obesity (also not done by the UK), but used (non-obese) smokers as a group for comparison.

Link to article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/

See Table 1 for lifetime medical costs.

[DangitBobby]

Surely most living people are worth more than the economic cost of keeping them alive. They don't seem to even mention the economic value of a living person, other than to say that they didn't take into account the difference in productivity between obese and non-obese people.

[ByteJockey]

Given that most smokers/obese people tend to die right around retirement age, we probably aren't leaving much on the table (from a purely economic perspective). Smokers probably aren't missing enough days of work to cancel out the $60k they save the system by smoking (not to mention all the extra taxes they pay).

But there's more value to human beings than their economic value, hence my talk about non-monetary costs. There's very real suffering that happens, and I'm not sure that's something you can put down in a spreadsheet somewhere.

[throwawaygh]

Lots of tremendously valuable labor is done by people who don't pull down a wage. I.e., retired people who volunteer and watch the grand kids. Many people -- perhaps most -- contribute more value to society in retirement than in their wage labor years.

[ByteJockey]

> Lots of tremendously valuable labor is done by people who don't pull down a wage.

Sure. I can believe that.

Is the unspoken claim here that it averages out to more than ~$60k/person?

[throwawaygh]

I mostly just disagree with the framing of the question. But, yes, I reckon the average retired person contributes as much/more to the GDP of the country than the typical wage-earning person.

[DangitBobby]

This has never made sense to me. I'd be interested to know if there are numbers to back it up. You still have your most expensive years (the ones that come before death), they just come much sooner and are much more likely to involve expensive debilitating disease. In any case, the expense of old age mostly comes from pills and surgery which are artificially expensive due to our shit healthcare system. And I doubt we accurately measure the economic benefit of having the elderly around to help with young families, provide wisdom and experience, etc.