We've been hearing this "alcohol is more affordable now than it has ever been" thing for a while now. It certainly doesn't ring true based on our own experience of buying booze - which is fairly extensive. So where's the number from?
Actually from the NHS, as it turns out, and the figures behind the assertion can be seen
here in pdf. It's interesting stuff.
In fact, as anyone who regularly buys alcohol could tell you, booze is hugely more expensive than it was in 1980. Its price has almost quadrupled, increasing by 367 per cent.
But surely that's true of all prices? Perhaps everything else - food, fuel, other stuff - has increased by an even huger margin, leaving booze comparatively cheap. Maybe that's why the neo-prohibitionist tendency argue that liquor is too affordable?
Well no, actually. Retail prices in general have gone up, but not the way booze has - overall, prices are up by 309 per cent. Alcohol has increased in price substantially more than most things have.
So how in the world is it more affordable than it used to be?
Well - so goes the thinking - it's because we have more money. While on average the price of stuff has tripled since 1980 in pounds and pence, on average we have about six times as many pounds and pence in our household disposable income as we did then - our real household disposable income has effectively doubled. Thus we can afford more stuff than we could back then - more booze, if we choose, though mainly we don't. Percentages of household budget spent on booze are down by a third, indicating that in real terms household expenditure on booze is stable or increasing only slightly.
Still, by rather convoluted logic, alcohol is 69 per cent more affordable - to householders - than it was in 1980. But that's because all retail products are more affordable - most of them much more so than alcohol. Using this sort of ridiculous economic voodoo, any ordinary retail product has become a hundred per cent more affordable than it was in 1980, as opposed to liquor which is up by only 69 per cent.
Hell - let's play this game ourselves. Booze has failed to increase in "affordability" at the same rate as other retail products. It has actually lagged in relative affordability compared to other products.
Yes, you read it here first, people. Booze is not only hugely, inflation-bustingly more expensive than it was: it has actually fallen behind 30 per cent in affordability compared to other retail products since 1980.