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I investigate the well-known educational gradient in smoking. It is well established that, at least in recent decades, people with higher levels of education are less likely to smoke and, conditional on being a smoker, are more likely to quit than are people with less education. Using longitudinal data on lifetime smoking histories, I explore whether the educational gradient changes when one accounts for differences in the amount of information smokers have about the health risks associated with smoking. At the core of the analysis is a new way to measure not only the flow of information a person receives but also a person’s stock of information in any year. I construct measures of the stock and flow of information with consumer magazine articles that discuss cigarette smoking and health. To calculate exposure, I predict individuals’ reading of particular magazines and link predicted exposure to data on individual smoking status in every year of life. The analysis sample includes many individuals who started smoking in the 1930s and 1940s – well before scientific evidence had accumulated. After replicating the education gradient in terms of smoking cessation, I show that it is mostly explained by the interaction between educational attainment and the stock of knowledge individuals possess. The findings suggest that education affects whether and how a stock of health risk information induces people to quit smoking.

Flow-based leadership exists when leaders commit to maximizing their own peak performance (“flow”) and to facilitating the flow states of others. This results in team and organizational flow. Meaning making is what binds an organization to its purpose. A recent McKinsey study shows that when people work in flow, their productivity increases by five-fold and has the effect of elevating individual, as well as organizational, well-being. However, as leaders come and go in organizations, the commitment to a model of meaning-making and sustained peak performance can be tainted through politics, silos, and personalities as varied as the leaders themselves. How can an organization sustain a flow-based culture over long periods regardless of who is leading it. 

Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD) is an extreme, experiential training program in the fire service. There are over 1,000 GSDs as of this writing. At least 100 of these come back twice a year to help teach the class, which has about 40 students, on their own time and for no pay. They take time away from their families, often using precious vacation time, because they are committed to making firefighters better. This program changes lives. Since 1978, GSD practices mindful leadership development for growing and mentoring leaders. Their model of flow-based leadership fosters cultural intelligence and social capital to identify and nurture leaders over time. This chapter explores the dynamics of how GSD uses design principles to balance deliberate and organically driven leadership development.

This chapter explores a common, but typically overlooked urban practice: smoking outside the workplace. This activity is analysed as an attempt to create marginal spaces of brief retreat from the acceleration and agitation of the workplace. By talking to smokers about what drives them into the street, and capturing smokers photographically, we discover that these people are seeking moments of breakaway from the dominating involvement of the commercial city. The practices we observe in this chapter are typical of what Erving Goffman refers to as ‘away’ activities: strategies for briefly escaping from the absorption of all-consuming social situations. We conclude by asking whether these urban pauses could be stretched to a point where they challenge the compulsion of the overwrought rhythmic order of the capitalist city.

“Being second” refers to a state of mind, an acceptance of circumstance, being content knowing that you are living your life, and not relying on others to dictate what your “best life” should look like. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to make this journey. This chapter recounts Battalion Chief Jodi Gabelmann’s journey to peace and pride in a well-lived career in the male-dominated, family-centric world of fire and emergency medical services. Dr Judith Glick-Smith ties Chief Gabelmann’s story to the theoretical underpinnings of her story.

Purpose – With reference to the long-term struggle to confirm cigarette smoking as a manifestation of nicotine addiction, this chapter explores the extent to which new understandings of addictions as ‘appetitive disorders’ rather than ‘dependence disorders’ derive from treatment technology development as well as advances in basic scientific research.

Approach – Through historical analysis it is discussed how cigarette smoking only became widely accepted as a real drug problem in the 1980s after it had been shown to be amenable to treatment as such through the use of novel nicotine replacement therapies.

Findings – These replacement therapies succeeded in showing that the same drug that drew users into addiction could be redeployed to help draw up them out of it. Nicorette® could serve as at least the partial antidote to nico-wrong (cigarettes). However, as relapse to smoking has remained the most likely outcome of any smoking cessation attempt, so medicinal nicotine has also served to demonstrate that nicotine addiction is ultimately a problem of an uncontrollable appetite for cigarettes in excess of drug dependence.

Implications – Pharmaceutical incursion on cigarette smoking commencing in the late 1970s pointed to the need for a new mental disease model of drug-related problems while also providing valuable new tools and insights for ensuing brain research.

A dynamic model of the evolution of health for those over the age of 50 is embedded in a structural, econometric model of retirement and saving. Effects of smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption, depression, and other proclivities on medical conditions are analyzed, including hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, heart problems, stroke, psychiatric problems, and arthritis. Compared to a population in good health, the current health of the population reduces retirement age by about one year. Including detailed health dynamics in a retirement model does not influence estimates of the marginal effects of economic incentives on retirement.