Economics professors Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn and William
Nordhaus have a new paper in the latest edition of the American Economic
Review that should be a major factor in how we discuss economic
ideology. It won’t, of course, but let me lay out the case anyway.
In their paper, “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United
States Economy,” what Muller, Mendelsohn and Nordhaus do is estimate the
cost imposed on society by air pollution, and allocate it across
industries. The costs being calculated, by the way, don’t include the
long-run threat of climate change; they’re focused on measurable impacts
of pollution on health and productivity, with the most important
effects involving how pollutants — especially small particulates —
affect human health, and use standard valuations on mortality and
morbidity to turn these into dollars.
No comments:
Post a Comment