America Needs More Functioning Alcoholics

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This post is adapted from the Daily Caller’s Substack, State of the Day. Click here to sign up.

If you haven’t seen the television show Mad Men, set in New York City at the peak of the advertising industry in the 1960s, all you need to know is that every character – from the creative directors to the partners, the copywriters to the secretaries – drinks a lot. And I mean, a lot. Drinks in the morning. Drinks at lunch. Drinks in the afternoon. Drinks in the evening. Nervous drinks before a meeting. Celebratory drinks afterward. 

It all sounds terribly dysfunctional. But during this Mad Men era, when many Americans were, in fact, more likely to get zooted at lunch, and it wasn’t so taboo to have a liquor cabinet in your office, GDP was humming at a red hot 5%. We were in the post-WWII golden age. People might have drunk more between 9 and 5, but were still wildly productive, and perhaps drinking made them better problem solvers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that mild intoxication can actually have creative benefits. From a 2017 study: 

Alcohol impaired executive control, but improved........

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