Here’s how the American Heritage Science Dictionary defines “pollution”:
The contamination of air, water, or soil by substances that are harmful to living organisms. Pollution can occur naturally, for example through volcanic eruptions, or as the result of human activities, such as the spilling of oil or disposal of industrial waste.
(This entry can be found by scrolling down at this link.)
I don’t, however, wish to argue over semantics. My “Cleaned by Capitalism” series is meant to show the countless familar devices and processes that keep us modern folk cleaner and healthier than were our pre-industrial ancestors (and, in many cases, cleaner and healthier than were our ancestors from even just a generation or two back). It’s important to reflect on these mundane, familiar things in our lives precisely because, to us, they are mundane and familiar. We forget how unusual our lives are compared to those of the vast majority of human beings who’ve ever lived — how much cleaner, healthier, less-hazardous, and more pleasant our lives are compared to theirs.
The chief reason people worry about pollution is because they fear that it will degrade their quality of life by making life more dangerous and more unpleasant. My point is that, while it’s true that industrial and commercial processes emit into the environment contaminants that are harmful, the net effect of modern industrial and commercial processes is to make our lives cleaner and healthier.
None of this is to say that we ought, therefore, ignore pollution caused by industrial and commercial processes. But it is to say that we ought to be more aware than we are of the great sanitization of our lives that capitalism and modernity have achieved lest the degree to which we hamstring these processes in an attempt to make our world cleaner makes our world less clean.
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Professor, I tried using the share button at the bottom of the post to share it on my facebook page. It links to the disqus discussion thread, and not to the blog post. One has to scroll up to read the actual blog post. Is this how it is meant to be?
Sure but it’s not all capitalism. Capitalist didn’t plan or build the sewer systems or the water treatment plants etc ect…
I could easily do a series Cleaned by Government Planning as well. We need both good markets and good planning.
To try to give all the credit to capitalism is disingenuous. Most of the products you detail have lots of public money in their development histories.
Really? Go for it, muirgeo. I’d really love to see a parade of products that make life safer, longer and healthier that were produced by government directive. If any actually exist.
You could, for example, post one such example in the comments to every one of the examples posted here. Good luck.
But give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s not attempting to be exhaustive here. If Don said something like “capitalism cleans everything up, there’s nothing it can’t handle, and government can’t clean anything up”, I’d be with you and Gil. But give credit where credit is due. The market does a great job cleaning up pollution that imposes internalizable costs. And in the case of number X – it does it a step better. The market is handling non-internalizable costs (namely, the negative externality associated with personal hygiene and the spread of communicable disease).That’s not to say your first two paragraphs are wrong. They’re not. It’s your last paragraph and the accusations of being disingenuous that I have concerns about.
Actually my pet, this idiotic comment just once again demonstrates how little you know of markets and capitalism.
Capitalism requires healthy creative individuals to, if nothing else, show up every day, day after day, healthy and fit to perform designated functions which they either assign themselves, or have assigned to them by an employer.
Socialism, the state, only concerns itself with the redistribution of capitalist wealth in order to buy votes. Yet, even being stupid socialists, sometimes one or two are actually bright enough to understand it is to their benefit to not stand in the way of capitalism, after all, where does the wealth they steal come from?
It is in the best interest of an enlightened firm, enlightenment which began to occur approximately the same time the means with which to actually build sewer systems and water treatment plants, to have employees and business partners who are healthy and fit to be productive. No capitalist benefits from being surrounded by chronically ill people who are subject to plagues, and/or frequent outbreaks of disease because of raw sewage being present in their housing and communities, or from the lack of fresh clean water.
So, my little pet, are you so certain that capitalism didn’t drive the planning and construction of sewage systems, treatment plants, and of fresh water systems?
I think you are so fucking wrong, and that it is typical of you to jump in with your stupid socialist head up your ass.
Really vidyohs? How does a free market operate a sewer and water piping systems? If you change your sewer provider you get your yard ripped up and your pipes replaced and connected to the new provider? When the free market system operated there was septic tanks and free market providers currently delivers large quantities of bottled water.
The great sewer system of London was a government initiative – only the government could engage in a monopoly of large underground tunnels.
Then again what happens when innovations improve hygiene but for the wrong reason? The great sewer system of London as well Semmelweis hand washing were both based on the concept that disease was caused by ‘miasma’.
Your first three paragraphs were hyperbolic, albeit still agreeable. What I absolutely cannot fathom is how you could hold such a perceptive understanding of socialism and then write this:”It is in the best interest of an enlightened firm, enlightenment which began to occur approximately the same time the means with which to actually build sewer systems and water treatment plants, to have employees and business partners who are healthy and fit to be productive.”Which reveals a complete ignorance of the tragedy of the commons, which is the whole PROBLEM with socialism.Socialism’s failure is that it imposes a commons, which is inevitably tragic. That doesn’t mean the market doesn’t still fail when there is an unimposed commons like the sea, the air, etc. You people mock the idea of market failures, but the driving concept behind market failures is the same as the driving concept behind the opposition to socialism – nobody has any incentive to do anything about it, so there is sub-optimal investment.
Great series.
I have kids in diapers. Everytime I change one I am reminded of what life must have been like without disposable diapers and wipes and hand sanitizer, let alone indoor plumbing and running water. Unimaginable.
Professor,
I think one of the best things a person can do to appreciate capitalism (in every regard, not just cleanliness) is to travel to a rural area in a third-world country, particularly one that has followed a socialist policy for decades. I know, from my personal experiences in the villages of India, how much this has solidified my support for free markets.
Cleaner doesn’t mean healthier.
http://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/article/254958/Dogs_help_children039s_allergies.html
Cleaner means only more profit for cleaning product companies, which, of course, is fine.
Which is why I stopped using the industrial chemical cleaners years ago. I only use an organic citrus cleaner now.
Does anyone else have the problem of instead of going to the Home page you end in the ‘Agriculture’ archive?
Yes. Usually at night… but sometimes during the day.
Occasionally–and for long blocks of time.
No, just another case of overprotection
Like imposing on the banks the credit rating agencies to guide their credit analisis
Like printing out on your bottled water that it contains zero calories
Like the mind boggling “be careful” swimming pool instructions I see around US pools.
Harry Pitka, one of the dog sled mail drivers that delivered the diphtheria serum to Nome in 1929, was over at my cabin on the Yukon River playing cribbage with me one day. I asked him, “Harry, you’ve been around since basically the stone age to the space age, what’s the most amazing thing you’ve seen?”
Harry responded, “No doubt about it, bug dope. You can’t imagine what it was like in an Indian village before insect repellent and DDT. Everybody was lousy, everybody. Women spent most of their free time picking lice off of little kids. The whole summer was spent standing around a smudge trying to keep the mosquitoes and gnats off. People couldn’t wait for winter and freedom from mosquitoes. Bedbugs gnawed on people every night. Yeah, bug dope is the neatest thing I’ve seen.”
I don’t think that’s a valid definition, pollution should be defined as a type of unwanted aspect. E.g. light pollution and noise pollution, not necessarily bad for the environment but can be irritating.