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First of all you can tax cancer, you make people who engage in voluntary cancer-inducing activities such as smoking pay higher health care costs. But secondly

by avar 8y ago

First of all you can tax cancer, you make people who engage in voluntary cancer-inducing activities such as smoking pay higher health care costs. But secondly that WHO page is frequently cited by people who apparently haven't understood the numbers behind it. It's not worthwhile to tax meat as a cancer risk because the health impact is a rounding error. According to the WHO: > about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat. That's the population of a village worldwide. To turn that into a death rate for the world population in 2015 is 34000/7400000000*100000 = 0.45. That wouldn't even make it onto this table[1] of most common worldwide death rates. You can see rates like 15 for diabetes, and 115 for heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to diet. If everyone in the world adjusted their diet so they wouldn't be overweight or obese, but kept eating processed red meat, then diet-related illnesses would be rare enough that nobody would even bother talking about them, as opposed to being the one of the leading causes of death in the western world. Citing a WHO report which says that evidence of carcinogenicity is strong without context is correct but misleading. As that page points out you can have strong evidence but tiny effect sizes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate#By_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

jakobegger 8y ago
That red meat is carcinogenic was just an example for illustrating my point that externalities are hard /impossible to tax. I could just as well have said that red meat increases risk of heart attacks, red meat increases choleserol, raising cattle for meat uses lots of fresh water in areas that don't have enough, that a lot of feed is required to produce very little meat... It just happens that one externality (methane emissions) is easily measured, but all the other externalities of meat consumption are not, hence a tax makes sense.
- avar 8y ago
  You're right that it's impossible at the micro-level, but things don't need to be taxed down to that level. E.g. are we going to tax farmer John more than farmer Bob because John feels he needs to smoke cigarettes while farming (and thus makes some small extra contribution to CO^2 emissions), no. Measuring things at that level would be silly. But it's easy enough to get sufficiently right for the purposes of discouraging externalities and encouraging innovation. Farms, power plants, cargo ships etc. are all major contributors to pollution, and the taxes they pay can be calculated as a function of regular inspections, which all those industries need to undergo anyway.

by avar 8y ago

jakobegger 8y ago

That red meat is carcinogenic was just an example for illustrating my point that externalities are hard /impossible to tax. I could just as well have said that red meat increases risk of heart attacks, red meat increases choleserol, raising cattle for meat uses lots of fresh water in areas that don't have enough, that a lot of feed is required to produce very little meat... It just happens that one externality (methane emissions) is easily measured, but all the other externalities of meat consumption are not, hence a tax makes sense.

avar 8y ago
You're right that it's impossible at the micro-level, but things don't need to be taxed down to that level. E.g. are we going to tax farmer John more than farmer Bob because John feels he needs to smoke cigarettes while farming (and thus makes some small extra contribution to CO^2 emissions), no. Measuring things at that level would be silly. But it's easy enough to get sufficiently right for the purposes of discouraging externalities and encouraging innovation. Farms, power plants, cargo ships etc. are all major contributors to pollution, and the taxes they pay can be calculated as a function of regular inspections, which all those industries need to undergo anyway.