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Smoking and class status

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First graph of a NYT op-ed by law professor Jamal Greene:

Antonin Scalia was my hero. He was deeply conservative. He belittled lawyers. His opinions, especially in dissent, could be downright nasty. No justice in the Supreme Court’s history insulted his colleagues more, or more memorably. He was as aggressive and outspoken as I am reserved and cautious. He was a smoker. He was, in short, everything I am not. But I have looked up to him for years.

Sociologically speaking, one difference between Scalia and himself that Greene chooses to highlight is particularly interesting, especially considering how many he had to choose from (For example Greene is black, while Scalia was born the child of Italian immigrants, and eventually became white).

He was a smoker. He was, in short, everything I am not.

Greene is probably not yet 40 — he graduated from college in 1999 — so he grew up amid sharply declining smoking rates: 50 years ago 42.4% of American adults smoked: today less than 17% do. Yet that is an oversimplification.

The relative distribution of this decline in the American population appears to be remarkably uneven. Current rates of smoking by education level:

Nearly 23 of every 100 adults with 12 or fewer years of education (no diploma) (22.9%)
43 of every 100 adults with a GED certificate (43.0%)
Nearly 22 of every 100 adults with a high school diploma (21.7%)
About 17 of every 100 adults with an associate’s degree (17.1%)
Nearly 20 of every 100 adults with some college (no degree) (19.7%)
About 8 of every 100 adults with an undergraduate college degree (7.9%)
More than 5 of every 100 adults with a graduate degree (5.4%)

The two most striking aspects of these numbers are the extremely high smoking rate among people with GED certificates relative to those who are high school dropouts or who have only a high school diploma (perhaps this number is a product some sort of sampling error or other statistical mistake) and, of more relevance here, the roughly 65% decline in smoking rates between Americans with at least a four-year college degree — this is currently about a third of the adult population — and everybody else.

On an anecdotal level, I can’t remember the last time I encountered a legal academic who I knew to be a smoker. This suggests that smoking among Greene’s professional cohort is both a rare and carefully hidden habit — hence its status as a marked category when he considers the “relevant” differences between himself and the late justice. (I wonder how this marking arose for Greene: did he, during his days as a Supreme Court clerk, witness Scalia transgressively lighting up within the quasi-sacred confines of the SCOTUS itself?)

I don’t know what the situation is at Columbia, where Greene is employed — although I suspect after Mayor Bloomberg went about inflicting his personal obsessions with various types of social hygiene on New York City, it’s probably pretty repressive — but at the University of Colorado you are forbidden to smoke literally anywhere on campus, and indeed it’s very hard to find any space other than a private residence within the entire city of Boulder where smoking doesn’t make you an outlaw. (The average sale price of a single-family house in Boulder last year was $946,175).

Smoking, in other words, has increasingly become a key class marker in America. I wouldn’t be surprised if the figure of 5.4% of adults with graduate degrees who smoke is strongly affected by age-related demographics, and that within another couple or three decades cigarette smoking among the upper classes will have more or less achieved the status of an abominable crime against nature.

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