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>Beijing is fairly wealthy these days, yet is still polluted like crazy....The reason it persists is because the the costs of cleaning it up are concentrated on
by jessriedel 10y ago
>Beijing is fairly wealthy these days, yet is still polluted like crazy....The reason it persists is because the the costs of cleaning it up are concentrated on a few, while the costs of being exposed are distributed among many, and there's no mechanism to push those costs back onto the responsible parties.
I don't know the details, but I suspect my explanation is better. Chinese per capita GDP is $6.8k, which is the equivalent of 1910 USA. Beijing is $10k, which is 1940 USA. Parts of the US had similarly bad or worse smog up into the '40s.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/10/25/u-s-once-had-air-pollution-to-match-chinas-today/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
- mikeash 10y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Beijing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Beijing, Beijing's per-capita GDP in 2013 was $15,000 nominal and $22,000 PPP. It's probably a fair bit higher today. That's more like 1990 USA, not 1940.
- jessriedel 10y agoOK, but I think major cities in the US had much larger GDP per capita than the nation as a whole too, both in 1940 and 1990. It's also not clear to me that PPP is the relevant metric here; low cost of consumer prices does not necessarily translate into cheap factory cleaning tech even if it does mean folks will be willing to pay more for clean air. Furthermore, it's not surprising that factory technology may lag economic growth more in China since China is growing faster than the US.