Esa Österberg (22 June 1948 – 26 September 2021)

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, 1 edition 2004, 2 edition 2010, 3 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 homemade (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