Comment of the week

"The short answer is from the very same things that result in pollution.

Don't think so? then how did that kidney get rushed from California to New York overnight?"

So people with asthma have less liberty and rights then those with kidney failure?

I don't look at this as a cost issue as much as one of externalities that violate others liberty and personal rights.

I would assume for believers in liberty liberty comes even before profits.

And no,no,no… you don't just get to assume the other increases in life expectancy are a result of pure market forces.
If you are going to require a complete cost benefits analysis because we shouldn't assume the cleaner air dollars weren't well spent then you will be required the same of your own speculation on the markets influence on these trends.

And finally there's those 33 other more socialist countries with better longevity then us that should give you pause about your assumptions of market forces and longevity.

Yeah… lots of confounding factors… bottom line is reducing fine air particulates saves lives, particulates are an external ity of markets and markets need to include them in there cost regardless of baseless assumptions on cost;benefits analysis. Profits do not trump liberty.

Russ,
I agree with you that you can't say that a policy was worthwhile by focusing only on the benefits. That said, there is a good deal of evidence that there is still too much air pollution in the air, especially sulfur. It turns out that sulfur dioxide has a role in forming small particulates in the air that are deadly to some and hazardous to all. Whether the benefits of reducing sulfur are worth it depends critically on the value of a statistical life. The clean air interstate rule that President Bush implemented will, starting in 2009, reduce sulfur dioxide levels and is expected to have benefits 25 times compliance costs. Not only is the cost- benefit ratio good, the magnitude of the benefits is huge! Benefits are expected to be between $85-100 billion.
see: http://www.env-econ.net/2008/12/a-requiem-for-e.html

What bothered me about this post is that it seems to imply that the environmental regulation is a uniform bad or can't be measured because we will never know how the money would have otherwise been spent. If you don't like the way regulation is done currently, please argue for a more market oriented approach a la the the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC). It is both more helpful and productive.

Another question to consider is whether the air is cleaner because of regulation. The standard assumption is that the air is cleaner because of the Clean Air Act, but air quality steadily improved until the Clean Air Act was passed and then the rate of improvement dropped dramatically. In all likelihood, has we continued to use common law rules instead of federally mandated rules, the air would be cleaner today than it is. In that case, the federal rules are making things worse than they would otherwise be. Listen to the Roberts/Yandle podcast at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/_featuring/bruce_yandle/ – 27k. They talk briefly about teh Clean Air Act vs. the common law.

Actually there's no real distinctin between negative versus positive rights. All rights place a duty on others. 'Don't use initiating force&fraud' = 'You must refrain from using force&fraud or face the consequences'. To argue for rights in a 'Robinson Crusoe' in the sense of one person alone is defunct since any perceived right Crusoe would perceive doesn't place a duty and besides freedom of speech is meaningless unless there's someone to listen to you.

Quote from muirgeo: "… bottom line is reducing fine air particulates saves lives, …)"

Again a wild claim with no factual back up (which I think was the point of the original post).

The claim that lives are saved because of envirnmental regulations is inherently false, because there is no control to substantiate the claim wasn't caused by something else, wouldn't have happened without the regulations, or was simply a random occurrance.

It's one thing to say these laws are supported by politics or culture, but these correlations aren't scientific.

Geoih,

"The claim that lives are saved because of environmental regulations is inherently false, because there is no control to substantiate the claim wasn't caused by something else"

This is just not true. I suggest that you read about the statistics of program evaluation, the early work of James Heckman is a great place to start.

I also suggest you google fine particulates (PM 2.5) or health impacts of sulfur dioxide. How we should deal with the problem of air pollution, if at all, is separate from the health impacts it causes. The health impacts in this case are large and significant. See:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1280392

"You obviously don't understand the difference between a negative and a positive right."

Posted by: muirgeo | Jan 23, 2009 2:52:00 AM

You obviously didn't understand what he meant by "positive".

If there's no control, then what are you comparing to?

I know all about the health effects. I work in an environmental field. Everything being cited is aggregated and completely divorced from reality.

Posted by: geoih

There are controls. You most likely have never looked at one of these studies. In areas where pollution levels have not changed over the same time deaths rates were not improved. likewise in areas that had greater reductions in pollution life times were improved even more then the study averages.