I read this interesting article in Newsweek by Jerry Adler, this week concerning some studies done about smoking...here is part of it... click on the link for the rest of it...
Increases in life expectancy in recent decades have left behind those who didn't go to college.
Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, is a fanatical opponent of smoking, and if you had his life, you'd want to live as long as possible, too. Things might look different to, say, a waitress at a roadside chain restaurant, like the ones Barbara Ehrenreich described in "Nickel and Dimed" (2001), who smoke out of "defiant self-nurturance," because "work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself." Don't they know that cigarettes are bad for them? Yes. That message has reached "well over 90 percent" of the population, according to Harvard economist David Cutler. Although smoking has declined steeply in the United States from its peak in the early 1950s, when nearly half of all adults smoked (compared with about 21 percent today), it is proving remarkably intransigent at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. As of 2006, 35 percent of Americans with a ninth- to 11th-grade education—like the ones Ehrenreich wrote about—smoked. The figure for Americans with a graduate degree—like Bloomberg, a Harvard M.B.A.—was 7 percent!
http://www.newsweek.com/id/128568
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