Statisticians were recruited by the tobacco industry to appear before Congress to promote the line used by the industry to attack epidemiological determinations ... "correlation doesn't prove causation." When chanting this mantra, they were correctly stating a rule that the mathematical association between the incidence of smoking and rising rates lung-cancer, don't necessarily prove that smoking CAUSED the lung-cancer.

Statisticians are able to retain academic 'face' in their profession because they are upholding the purity of the discipline: numbers of this kind are simply static measurements of distance ... they are not dynamic determinants of direction. They can show proximity or the distance between two items, but not which came first.

Only when statistical measurements are coupled with systematic research into molecular biology, or used with clinical observations, or with any of the other thousands of medical research techniques (where statistics are essential to determine patterns), is causation established. Statistics in isolation is simply a measurement device — it can only provide the one component of proximity or pertinance.

Economics does the same on a macro-scale. Economics statements can be presented at a superficial level — just as benefits and/or costs. So economists in the pay of the tobacco industry can quite correctly claim that smokers with their cigarette excise probably "pay their way because they die young, and aren't a burden on the health-care system." Of course this only has relevance if you see human society as simply an end-product of economics rather than economics as a tool of the society.

The more narrow-minded 'purist' economists — especially those with political views of "limited government, and unfettered free-enterprise" felt few qualms about supporting the tobacco industry's "social cost" and "ad ban" positions, when their personal financial well-being from making these simplistic pronouncements was made worth their while.

The stupidity of these pronouncements only becomes apparent when you question whether other considerations are of higher importance — such factors as tragic early deaths and disabilities, the need for welfare to support family survivors, the problems associated with passive-smoking by non-smokers. the high cost of unnecessary medical and drug research, smoking-caused death and disfigurement by fire, etc.

Add to this the secondary economic costs, such as the multibillion dollar annual tragedies of house-fires and forest-fires which are almost exclusively caused by cigarettes ... and the high cost of smoke alarm systems, local fire-departments, fire-proofing of home furnishings ... the clean up costs of street cigarette butts ... the increased energy costs in air-conditioned buildints...etc. The list can go on.

That's the point. Any economist can take tobacco's dollar to promote the industry's propaganda at this simplistic level without much professional disapproval,because he is chanting the mantra of free-enterprise zealotry. Alternately, a more liberal and socially involved economist will treat this as a serious political-social-economic problem, and observe that isolated numbers like excise charges and health-care costs, are only the tip of the monetary iceberg — and even this iceberg is only a transitory phenomenon. Social substance is elsewhere.