Abstract
In 1973, economist Esa Österberg was employed by the Finnish Social Research Institute for Alcohol Studies. He was recruited to collect data for national and international purposes on various indicators related to alcohol policy. Esa's career spanned over four and a half decades. Only he and Robin Room have contributed to the entire chain of publications which started with Kettil Bruun et al. (Alcohol control policies in public health perspective, 1975) and was expanded, deepened and updated by Griffith Edwards et al. (Alcohol policy and the public good, 1994) and Thomas Babor et al. (Alcohol: No ordinary commodity, 1st edition 2004, 2nd edition 2010, 3rd edition 2021).
Esa was a practical researcher. While, in those days, his colleagues encouraged him to write a doctoral thesis, Esa didn’t care for academic merits. Rather than theory and academic discourse, he loved numbers, figures and long statistical series which concretely showed what the world was like and how it changed. In the course of his career, these figures and series came to represent key aspects of his main object of research, i.e., alcohol policy. The majority of his 500 publications deal with prices and excise duties, availability, attitudes and opinions, registered and unregistered consumption, drinking and driving, as well as border trade and travellers’ alcohol imports.
Indeed, Esa was a hoarder of statistical information and documentation, filling his shelves in his office with an abundance of national and international statistics, neatly organised in pedantically marked boxes. In addition to these boxes, binders and folders, we will not forget Esa's never-ending, meticulous to-do lists, often carefully particularised and ranked with colored pencils. A good career is an orderly career! Neither will we forget his home-made (frozen) lunch soups, eaten while working, and his private coffee maker. In his office he kept his “number one suit”, as well as his “number two suit”, always ready to dress in accordance with the expected public event. All in all, Esa's office was a well assorted micro cosmos, a place where he felt happy, both in solitude and with colleagues.
Along the decades Esa had clearly different professional roles. In his first decades he assisted colleagues and stayed in the background, serving projects led by others. In the 1990s, when Finland entered the European Union (EU), Esa made his mark as a busy analyser of the impact of the EU on the Finnish alcohol policy system. However, this was only the prelude to his new role in the 2000s, when he became a well-known, usually respected and sometimes contested media person in Finland, answering tricky questions posed by journalists.
Esa's position as “Mr. Alcohol Policy” in Finland in the years from 2001 to 2017 is due to different factors. First, the tradition maintained by the Social Research Institute of Alcohol Studies in the 1970s–1990s suggested that published research reports should speak for themselves. That is, journalists were welcome to read the reports and use them, but giving interviews was not in great repute. However, in the 1990s this somewhat reluctant attitude became outdated in society at large. Second, Esa's new role was influenced by the fact that in the millennium shift researchers who had previously assumed leading roles in the research unit retired or left for other commitments. Third, alcohol policy became a big media issue in the years preceding Finland's much-debated 2004 alcohol reform, which reduced alcohol taxes by 33 per cent and led to substantial increases in consumption and harm – which Esa managed to predict quite successfully. The fourth and decisive factor, of course, was Esa himself. He developed an effective way of explaining complicated things in intelligible terms in front of cameras and microphones. In doing this, he could draw on his lucid reasoning and sense for figures and, overall, on his strikingly pragmatic way of thinking. As Esa's older and younger colleagues, we also noticed that, although mostly being unexposed to the public in the early years of his career, Esa now seemed to be quite content with being an active talking head. This also had consequences. First, in 2004 Esa was awarded the Finnish A-Clinic Foundation's highly esteemed information prize. Second, on one occasion, at Helsinki-Vantaa airport a man in the street mistook Esa as the General Director of the whole Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) with its 1,000 employees, although he was only a member of a tiny unit at that institute.
Members of “the first generation” of Kettil Bruun Society (KBS) may remember Esa as the Society's first secretary-treasurer. Once, when presenting the treasurer's obligatory but unrewarding begging speech at an annual KBS meeting in the 1990s, Esa started off by saying: “KBS is a friendly society. However, …”.
Esa, we miss you, our diligent, pragmatic and always friendly colleague.