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The Economics of Addiction

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The Economics of Addiction 2
The Economics of Addiction
Individuals are increasingly becoming more intellectual and more advanced to the many forwarding changes in society, yet humans are still subject to make immature decisions. Immature in the sense they lack cognitive moral development, the stages of maturity in terms of making ethical decisions, and this lets their flexible minds be influenced and persuaded negatively. Drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and using drugs are a large part of these negativities. However, these individuals do not lack rational thought. One can be persuaded out of addiction and also one can be persuaded into addiction. Therefore, individuals can rationally choose to become addicted, and according to the increase in addiction rates over the last 50 years, they have. The reasons however, are different depending on the age group. The age groups that will be focused on are baby busters and echo boomers. Each of this age groups have progressed to certain stages in life where rational thought has been renovated. Therefore the idea of addiction can seem to be an appropriate compromise to an individual. Baby busters and echo boomers are often the generations that are associated with abusing alcohol, cigarette, and drug usage. These are generations that include pre- and early post-adulthood which have shown to be experimental with the many dangerous risks in life. The reasoning behind their rational thinking has been studied by many scientists and the most popular reasons are peer-pressure and personal problems. Peer-pressure can be defined as an influence strained on an individual by his peers; this process has proven to be effective on these generations. School friends or perhaps work colleagues can be present in some negative form of pressure to experiment. Pressure can even be provoked through an individual indirectly such as for

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