Things That Matter Are Boring

Tobacco laws matter more than the war in Gaza

Which causes more deaths: smoking or war? Take a moment to think to yourself what the answer is before I reveal it.

In most years in recent history, war deaths have been below 150,000, though they spiked around 2021 reaching 235,000, before having a height in 2022 of 310,000, and falling in 2023 to around 150,000. It’s usually less than 150,000, but let’s be generous to war, and round it up to 150,000.

Smoking, in contrast, kills 8 million people a year. Most smokers start when they are minors and actively want to quit, but struggle to because of how addictive smoking is. Second hand smoke alone kills 1.3 million people a year, around 10 times as many as war. So even if you think that smoking deaths are less significant because people choose to smoke, it’s still responsible for over a million people being unfairly killed without choosing to smoke. In the U.S. alone, smoking causes almost half a million deaths per year, and around 22% of the world smokes. Half of those who smoke are killed by smoking.

Bans on indoor smoking have been highly effective in reducing aggregate smoking, and other smoking restrictions tend to be effective. Now I, like Rutger Bregman, would support a wholesale smoking ban, because I think highly addictive substances that people begin using when they’re teenagers, mostly regret using, and is “a greater killer than malaria and tuberculosis, car crashes and climate change, war and disasters combined,” shouldn’t be produced on an industrial scale by a profit-driven industry with a financial incentive to addict people to deadly poison. The case for banning tobacco is better than the case for banning cocaine. But even if you’re less of a social (smokesial) conservative than I am about this, you should think policies that restrict smoking indoors and in the workplace are a pretty good bet.

This is not an important issue to anyone other than me.

Huge numbers of Democrats didn’t vote for Kamala Harris because they did not like her position on Gaza. I assume none refused to vote for her based on her failure to take aggressive anti-smoking action. But the war in Gaza kills many times fewer people than smoking. And while the war in Gaza has various negative effects other than just killing people, so does smoking! Decimating the health of a fifth of the world is pretty significant! Smoking kills four times the entire population of Gaza on an annual basis.

Now, those who are single issue Gaza voters would probably reply by saying the difference is that we are actively involved in the war in Gaza, while the U.S. government doesn’t sell cigarettes. But this can’t be right—most of the way the U.S. facilitates the war in Gaza is by allowing American companies to sell arms to Gaza. Now, we do provide some direct military aid, but if the main way that the U.S. facilitated the war was by allowing sales of arms, rather than providing arms directly, I doubt many people would be substantially less concerned. And as I argued above, most of the people killed by the tobacco industry are not significantly culpable, being drawn in by the billions of dollars of funding by major U.S. corporations, becoming addicted when they’re minors, and literally millions die from second-hang smoke for which they bear no culpability.

So why is it that the war in Gaza—to take one issue of great political salience—gets so much more play than smoking? While smoking causes a truly mind-boggling number of deaths, it’s a less significant political issue than than almost every other political issue. The reason is that tobacco policy is boring. When you talk about tobacco policy, you can’t be outraged and yell at people the way you can when you talk about healthcare policy or Gaza. It’s the sort of wonky subject that Matt Yglesias would write about, rather than the kind of viscerally outrageous thing Michael Shellenberger or Matt Taibbi would write about.

Or to take another example: self-driverless cars are probably one of the most important political issues. Currently, they’re kept significantly in check by being in a state of regulatory limbo, of wildly unclear legal status. If the U.S. switched to mostly autonomous vehicles, this could save about 25,000 lives per year and hundreds of billions of dollars.

No one cares about this, even though it’s in their direct interest to care. Fostering the development of self-driving cars is one of the things governments might do that would make your life dramatically better. But because it’s boring, no one cares about the staggering death toll. If self-driving cars went global, they could save almost a million lives a year. Yet despite this, they get well below 1% of the coverage of healthcare policy, the war in Gaza, and other issues. Because the good of self-driving cars isn’t through averting perceived injustice, people care less about them.

Now, I specifically choose the war in Gaza because—depending on ones assumptions—it has the potential to be one of the most consequential areas of U.S. policy that is of public salience. Other issues, like trans people in sports, are orders of magnitude less important. Even healthcare policy is probably less important than getting self-driving cars, and certainly less important than tobacco policy.

The things that matter most politically are mostly not viscerally outrageous (though there are, of course, exceptions). Most of the time, they’re the sorts of things that appear in briefs by Washington-based think-tanks, that no one else reads because they’re boring as heck. Only true heroes like Matt Yglesias take the time to learn about them.