April 01, 2004
NOT ECONOMIC?
Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, in commenting on the current Administration's environmental policies, remarked that "it's so incredible that they have this denial fo any responsibility...as far as the environment goes. . . They're just sloughing off the human health impacts--the premature deaths and asthma attacks caused by power plant pollution."
Obviously, Senator Jefford's heart is in the right place. But he just doesn't get what I learned over twenty-five years ago when I argued that our county should not be locating a landfill in an area where there was a good chance it would pollute people's shallow wells.
What was explained to me then, and is still true today, is that keeping drinking water clean is not "economic." The economic solution to polluted well water, you see, is to hook up each house to a central water supply system and make people pay for the water they use.
"Free goods," such as clean air and clean water, are by definition not economic because only those things people pay for are included in the economy. The economy only grows (growth being good) when more people pay more for the goods and services they use.
So, you see, it's Senator Jeffords who's out of the loop on this. Healthy people don't pay nearly as much into the health care industry as sick ones, except when they can be persuaded to pay into the insurance industry just in case they get sick. Then, having already paid, people quite naturally expect something in return. So, regardless of whether they're actually sick or just a little uncomfortable, they run to the doctor more often than they might. All of which registers as an increase in the economy. Though it's highly unlikely that people are any better off.
The current Administration's policies towards clean air and water are entirely consistent with its desire to promote economic growth. Though it escapes me why economists consider cleaning pollutants out of industrial chimneys to be uneconomic while dealing with the effects of pollutants on human lungs registers as growth--an increase in the medical services sector of the economy is.
I get the logic of economic calculations; they just don't make any sense.
