> Less well-understood is why “place effects” matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
Your argument as it stands would explain why people with college degrees smoke a lot less than people without them. But that's not what the "place effects" is in the article. "Place effects" is the fact that, if we just look at non-college-graduates, the ones who live in rural areas smoke more and have lower life expectancy than the ones who live in urban areas.
The latter effect, I think, can be explained by an argument that's similar to yours: even for non-college graduates, it's a lot more inconvenient to be a smoker in urban areas than in rural areas. You're much more likely to find smoking banned inside the places you go, and to face social disapproval if you try to smoke outdoors in public spaces.
What eras? I went to college in a non-populous place circa ~2001-2005 and in our state smoking bans were just starting to roll out then. Smoking was an everyone thing, and it was normal to go to smokey places on a regular basis even if you didn't smoke. That was nuts and bad of course, but it was normalized.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.