Can teenage binge drinking lead to adult success?
It’s official: people who binge-drink as teenagers tend to earn higher wages ten years later.
According to research done by Jeffery DeSimone of the University of South Florida along with Pinka Chatterji of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, there is a positive correlation between binge drinking as a teenager and higher earnings as an adult. The Oracle, USF’s daily student newspaper, reports that the study “took other factors into account, such as achievement, prior income and adult drinking, which could possibly explain the correlation”, but doesn’t attempt to show that there is a causative relationship between the two phenomena.
“We just started guessing that this had to do with some socialness of these people,” said DeSimone, in a summary of potential reasons for the correlation. “They’re the ones who are social; they’re the ones going to parties - drinking parties - in 10th grade, so maybe they’re entrepreneurial in the sense that they’re less risk averse.”