4 responses

1. 

   Scott at Blithering Bunny

   April 6, 2005

   >I’d be up at 6am to buy a bottle of cider.
   Whether or not you actually can buy cider at 6 am, a real alkie would always make sure they had stocks in the house anyway.

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2. 

   Tom

   April 6, 2005

   Well, without looking at any of the figures at all, your calculations look a bit suspect. 1m children may well be 10% of the total child population, but that’s really not the same at all as saying that the parents of 1m children are 10% of the total population.
   For a start, the total population includes children – so on your assumptions we could only say that the parents of 1m children are 10% of the adult population, which is smaller than the total population (assuming that the prevalence of alcoholism is equal across the adult population might be fair enough for back-of-an-envelope purposes, but assuming it’s the same among children too, and therefore across the entire population, seems a bit much).
   For another thing, many parents have more than one child – and any alcoholic parent with more than one child is going to be counted twice by your method of calculating. If, for example, all alcoholic parents had two children (again, I’ve no idea – this is for the sake of argument), then the 1m children would have 500,000 alcoholic parents between them – half as many. If the children are in three-child families, the figure drops again, and so on.
   Finally, the fact that children have more than one parent, of which both could be alcoholics, could take the figure back the other way – in principle, the alcoholic parents of 1m children could be anywhere between 300,000 and 2m adults.
   I’ve no idea what the actual figure is, because as I say I’ve looked nothing up. But your “10% of the population” doesn’t really have much more rigour than if you’d plucked it out of the air, so I think you can stop worrying. Or, to put it another way, no, I don’t think that 10% of the population are drinking their population, but neither does the Guardian.

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3. 

   Tom

   April 6, 2005

   “Drinking their population”? I mean, of course, “drinking their breakfast”. I should have used the preview button.

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4. 

   Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny

   April 7, 2005

   Tom, I had similar thoughts which I e-mailed Tim about yesterday morning. We didn’t really disucss it, but I’ve decided anyway that the fact that most parents have more than one child is irrelevant. (I also don’t see how the fact that the total population includes children is relevant — what Tim is referring to is the total adult population)
   Suppose the average family has two children. (For the moment let’s forget about single mums, divorces, step-parents, etc). If there are, as Tim claims, 10 million children in Britain, then there must be 5 million families (taking ‘families’ here to not refer to families whose kids have grown-up).
   With two kids per family on average, you’d only have to have 500 000 families with an alkie parent for it to be true that there’s one million kids in that position. But 500 000 is 10% of 5 million.
   This logic applies no matter what the average number of kids is. Suppose the average family has 10 kids. That means there’s only one million families. It also means you’d only need 100 000 families with an alkie parent to give you the million figure, but again, 100 000 is 10% of one million.
   You get 10% no matter what the average number of kids is. That is, if 10% of Britain’s children are exposed to an alcoholic in the family, that means that 10% of Britain’s families are affected in this way, and the average number of kids is irrelevant to that. So it seems to me that Tim is correct in this reasoning.
   Where I’m not so sure Tim is correct is in regard to your last point (which I also e-mailed Tim about, but we didn’t sort it out). Suppose the average family has 2 kids. That means there are 5 million families, 10 million parents (forgetting single mums, dead parents, etc.) and 500 000 families of which at least one parent is an alkie. If we suppose that families that have two alkie parents are rare (which may not be true, but let’s suppose it is for the sake of argument), then that means we’ve got roughly 500 000 alkie parents. But 500 000 is only 5% of 10 million, not 10%.
   But 5% still sounds way too high, so Tim’s point is still as good one.
   P.S. An increased number of families with two alkie parents will increase this percentage, because you’ll still have 10 million parents, but you’ll have, say 600 000 alkie parents rather than 500 000.
   The existence of single mums and families where one parent is dead or missing will also increase this figure a bit, because it will decrease the number of overall parents who the kids are exposed to. If say, there are only 9 million parents in touch with their kids, then 500 000 alkie parents is 5.55% of that number.
   But if we can count step-parents as well as biological parents, then the percentage goes down again, because the number of people who count as a parent who can be an alkie increases. (The percentage will also decrease if we can count boyfriends of single mums as ‘parents’).
   P.P.S. One other way in which the figures may be distorted is in the fact that most parents with children (not counting children who have grown up) are going to be aged between 20-50. But people over 50 are (I would expect) less likely to be alcoholics. So there may be a slightly greater likelihood of an adult being an alkie if they are a parent (ie. of school-age children) than if they’re not. But this wouldn’t be that great a difference.
   P.P.P.S. There is one way in which family size could make a difference, and that is if there is an increased prevalence of alcoholism in families with more kids than in families with less kids (or vice versa). To some degree this may be the case, but it probably wouldn’t be a large enough effect to change the percentage too much.

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