Hard Times Need Strong Beer

One has to agree, hard times need strong beer! Life’s guilty pleasures usually thrive during hard economic times. Though we may abandon new dresses or fancy dinners, we do tend to turn to smoking and drinking — to help ease our pain.

Beer consumption, unlike other categories of alcoholic beverages, apparently increases with unemployment, as noticed by Economists David Blake and Angelika Nied in 1997. So basically, one can use beer as an example of ‘income inelasticity’, that is, less income does not translate into spending less on beer. Now the subject becomes fun!

Dickens, in his novel, Hard Times, pointed out towards the poor conditions of the working class, and how the education gave importance to facts and notions, but not to sentiments and interpretations. His fictional productive town, Coketown has a clear separation between classes: it has been built for industrial aim. On the whole, Dickens’ characters needed a beer, and they would all have been happy! But then again, they were not meant to feel happy!

I have seen people treating beer as a mini luxury in the hard economic times. People find comfort with friends over beers about job losses and high fuel prices, and with this scorching summer heat, people find comfort over a chilled beer for the weather as well.

So go grab a chilled beer, and fight the hard times of life!

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