UPDATED 7-28
PRI ran a story on the global asbestos trade that is worth the read – it is a story that runs parallel to that of DDT, long-banned in the US, but still in common use elsewhere. The DDT issue is quite contentious today, as there are many who argue that removing it from use would do more harm than good, as the number of people impacted by a rise in the mosquito population might be greater than the number of people impacted by contact with DDT. What I find interesting about this argument, though, is that practically nobody who makes that argument suggests we should start spraying it here in the US again. This logical inconsistency, I think, has its roots in the differential valuation of human life that operates under a lot of economic assessments of development policy.
The article on asbestos hints at this logic when it quotes John Hoskins, a scientist with The Crysotile Institute (a pro-asbestos organization). Hoskins
believes that the health dangers are negligible. In fact, he told the CPI that “the people who would like to ban chrysotile asbestos are actually committing economic damage” especially to people in the developing world.
In other words, the cost of other insulators is so much higher that it offsets the cost in human health and mortality incurred by its use. This, implicitly, raises the question of what a human life is worth – and implicitly suggests that we can ascribe an economic value to that life. Of course, we do this all the time here in the US – courts routinely decide how much money to award those who have lost loved ones through negligence or other acts, in part making an assessment of what the lost life was worth. However, when we start talking about using materials in the developing world that we would not dream of using here in the US (i.e. asbestos and DDT), we are implicitly suggesting that human lives here have greater value – for under the logic that not using these products in the developing world is more costly than using them and paying the human cost, if we are not using them here it must mean that the human cost is higher here, thus making these products unacceptable. Suddenly, we have an economic argument for valuing the lives of the global poor less than our own . . . and we have done so in a manner that seems apolitical and logical.
Larry Summers laid this logic bare back when he was working as the Chief Economist at the World Bank. In 1991 he wrote (or one of his staff wrote, depending on who you believe) a memo about the location of polluting industries and the value of human life. It is worth quoting at length:
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
Now, this memo has been the subject of a lot of controversy, with some arguing that Summers was effectively a sociopath masking his tendencies in the language of economics. And on first read, way back when I was in grad school, I had a similar thought. However, many years down the road, and having seen Summers intentionally provoke controversy time and again (such that he managed to get sacked from Harvard), I have little doubt that Summers wrote (or signed) this with any other intent than to provoke the economists at the Bank who were making less obvious, but equally egregious, assessments of the impacts of structural adjustment. I mean, honestly, do you really think a man like Summers would ever have WRITTEN THIS DOWN if he meant it? It screams “leak me!” He’s not that dumb – he wanted to provoke, and he might have wanted the leak so as to publicly embarrass some of these economists. Sadly, most people seem to have missed the point.
Salient to this post – Summers is making the same argument about pollution and development, via sarcasm, that I am making about asbestos (and DDT). If someone is going to suggest that people elsewhere should “be allowed” to use materials that we have banned here for reasons of public health, then they should also have to address the implicit valuation of human life that makes such a political statement appear “logical” and apolitical.
Now to see if the folks at Environmental Economics let me have it over this . . . they are, after all, real economists.
UPDATE: They did not let me have it – and I am almost disappointed. But I think John ended up agreeing with me that we are indeed valuing human lives differentially in the “developed” and “developing” worlds – further demonstrating Nullius in Verba’s point (in the comments below) that we run into problems when we start using “universal” measures like money in realms where the moral is pretty important.
“What I find interesting about this argument, though, is that practically nobody who makes that argument suggests we should start spraying it here in the US again.”
I wasn’t aware that Malaria was still a big problem in the US. How many people die of it each year, nowadays? Could that has more to do with it?
That said, I do think DDT counts as a “techno-fix” and that if you look at the countries that used to have significant Malaria/Ague problems a few centuries back but don’t any more, probably the biggest and most obvious difference is not access to insecticides, but prosperity. When we started draining marshes to make farmland, the malaria went too.
“This, implicitly, raises the question of what a human life is worth – and implicitly suggests that we can ascribe an economic value to that life.”
To some extent, you can, but I don’t think that’s what’s being argued here. What you are actually trading is human lives against other human lives. If you ban asbestos, people die in fires. Or you spend so much on more expensive alternative fire retardants that you can’t afford as much healthcare, food, clean water, and all the rest of it. Maintaining life costs money, and not having enough money means more people will die.
The problem is that all these trades occur in a complex web in which it is impossible to disentangle a specific set of lives traded for the particular measure you’re proposing. This is why economics uses money as a sort of universal utilitarian scale, to enable one to make the indirect comparisons. It has the disadvantage, though, that having a moral absolute on one hand and a metric that also allows comparison with the latest leisure goods on the other tempts people to ignore one entire side of the balance they should be considering.
For a Westerner with the money to spare, swapping a human life for a bigger TV is morally repugnant. For a poor African, swapping a slight risk of death from asbestos in exchange for a far more probable risk of death from poverty-induced malnutrition and disease is a sensible choice. It’s a matter of priorities.
The reason the money in each case is not directly comparable is that the money belongs to different people. It’s a bit like the $PPP argument you gave a little earlier.
It’s not that their lives are worth any less, it’s that their money is worth far, far more.
Well, DDT was in common use up through the 1960s, despite the fact that malaria had long ceased to be a major problem – in short, we used it for a lot of stuff. And where I have seen it used in Africa, it is used to deal with pests that damage crops – I’ve actually not seen it used much for mosquito control.
While wealth matters, don’t forget how important biology is to why we could eradicate malaria here – the species of anopheles mosquito indigenous to the US (quadrimaculatus) is actually a very inefficient carrier of malaria, so it was never quite as virulent as in places like West Africa, where Anopheles gambiae dominates, and is an extremely efficient carrier of the disease. If we had a bunch of gambiae here, we’d have a lot more malaria – or we would have a means of eradicating it by now (which strikes me as more likely), a case that would prove your point.
While I agree that the argument at hand does weigh lives against lives within the Global South, you miss my larger point – that there is also a valuation across world regions. If we think that the tradeoff of lives versus lives for something like DDT or asbestos works out such that we should use it in the developing world, but not in the “developed” world, we ARE making a comparative valuation of human life. And that valuation does not grant the global poor the same value as those of us living in advanced economies. And remember, the connection between the use of asbestos and the loss of life due to poverty is vaguely asserted, at best – just as you suggest, this is a complex web that needs to be disentangled, and I strongly doubt that this connection is all that strong.
But let me close by agreeing wholeheartedly with your take on using money for valuation – and how it falls apart when we start dealing in moral values. It never ceases to amaze me how exactly what you describe happens time and again . . .
“If we think that the tradeoff of lives versus lives for something like DDT or asbestos works out such that we should use it in the developing world, but not in the “developed” world, we ARE making a comparative valuation of human life.”
The valuation of human life is exactly the same, the difference is because we have different levels of wealth.
Perhaps if I give an example in the opposite direction, it might make things clearer. In America there are a certain number of people who get run over on roads and die. If you put all the roads in tunnels, many lives would be saved. In 2100, when everybody is far richer than we are today, they put all the roads in tunnels. It’s cheap and easy to them; they’ve got the advanced future technology to make it so. But we today haven’t. We trade a certain number of lives for the economic benefits of road transport, and we don’t put roads in tunnels because we have better uses for the money it would cost.
So are American lives today cheaper than American lives in 2100?
Or I’ll try another example. You earn $1000 of which you spend $100 on food, $400 on fireproofing your home, and $500 on a new plasma TV. Is the plasma TV really worth 5 times as much to you as having food to eat? Is it worth $100 more than fire safety? On another occasion you earn $400. Should you spend it all on the fireproofing, and not eat? Or since you value your TV five times as much as food, perhaps you ought to spend $200 on a small portable TV, $160 on a cheap second-hand fire extinguisher, and only $40 on food?
Given that you are now making a different trade between essentials and luxuries, do you value your survival any differently? Would you like somebody to ban the sale of cheap and nasty fireproofing, for your own good?
Let me know if that makes it any clearer.
Wow so because I make less to buy up the capital industries crappy stuff that you don’t need anyway, my life is worth less. No wonder no one cares about the poor health care in the U.S. much less really poor countries and areas with worse health care. But is this really surprising?
We base people’s worth largely on their income no matter where they are and somehow think poor people either deserve to be poor because they are less moral, or that they are poor because they are not trying hard enough to keep up with the Jones’, again not following the protestant work ethic.
I hadn’t really thought about applying this argument in the US, but between your comments and those of Nullis in Verba, I am starting to see a really depressing connection. I’ve not looked at the literature to see if this sort of economic argument is being made about the rich versus the poor here . . . but it wouldn’t shock me to hear it was out there.