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> It's not in your interest for them to pollute the air... Not at all a settled point. There is a strong correlation between air pollution and rapidly improvin

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > There is a strong correlation between air pollution and rapidly improving quality of life. There is a strong correlation between air pollution and industrialization and a strong correlation between industrialization and quality of life. That doesn't mean pollution improves quality of life, it means you want industrialization without pollution. To take a specific example, the ban on leaded gasoline was Good. Lead is powerfully toxic, the science on this is solid, and the negative consequence of the ban is that gasoline costs marginally more if at all. Now you can list many more examples of the EPA imposing stupid rules with a marginal benefit that doesn't even exceed their implementation costs which in aggregate significantly increase the cost of everything while having negative overall value. But it's not physically impossible to repeal all of those and keep the ban on leaded gasoline. The question is how to accomplish that in practice, and to maintain that as a stable equilibrium.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    > it means you want industrialization without pollution. If we have the option of industrialisation without pollution, why are the corporations polluting the air in your example? Nobody pollutes for the sheer joy of annoying their neighbours. The issue we face in the modern world is nobody knows how to do industrialisation without pollution. Governments banning pollution has just stifled industrialisation. Industrialisation and pollution is a better equilibrium point for all of us than the slow choking out of industry. The natural market equilibrium is typically fast improvement. Moving away from the equilibrium because the elites are inconvenienced by the side effects is rarely a good idea. I'll give you leaded fuels were a mistake, but by and large the anti-industrial policies have been more harm than good.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > If we have the option of industrialisation without pollution, why are the corporations polluting the air in your example? Because it costs less. You can install a catalytic converter on a car and it substantially reduces certain types of pollutants, but catalytic converters cost money. This is a tragedy of the commons problem. The emissions from your car over its lifetime cause e.g. $0.01 in damage to everyone in the city including you, which is a million people, so you'd be causing $10,000 in damage, and breathing the exhaust from a million cars over the same period would be causing $10,000 in damage to you. But breathing the exhaust from your car would only be causing $0.01 in damage to you. And a catalytic converter costs e.g. $500. So you're better off if everyone has one including you, because you pay $500 and don't have to suffer $10,000 in damage. But you don't get the same result as an individual choice, because you'd rather suffer $0.01 worth of incremental damage than pay $500, and then what anyone else does is out of your hands, but they have the same individual incentive as you. > The issue we face in the modern world is nobody knows how to do industrialisation without pollution. Governments banning pollution has just stifled industrialisation. What we haven't figured out how to do is regulate pollution efficiently. If you leave it up to individual choice it's a tragedy of the commons, but if you give it to elected officials it's the opposite problem. Someone proposes a rule that would impose enormous costs on the industry to prevent only 5% that much total damage. This isn't worth it, the cost/benefit is way underwater, but if you put it up for a vote, 95% of people don't work in the industry and don't care if they drive it out of the jurisdiction, so it passes. So you need some kind of additional constraint on what regulations can pass that require them to survive a cost/benefit analysis, and we don't currently have an effective system for that. Maybe something like: The government has to provide a cost/benefit analysis for each provision of each regulation, provisions with negative expected value are stricken, and you can sue the government if their cost/benefit analysis is in conflict with reality.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        > So you're better off if everyone has one including you... That is transparent bullshit [0]. The west hasn't been competitive at producing cars in 40 years and all the benefits of the industrial know-how flowed to Asia where they've built several civilisations worth of capital. I'd be much better off if we'd adopted pro-industrial instead of pro-environmental policies and captured the growth ourselves. The Asians have consistently been building wheeled scrap boxes, working them up to something that meets western standards later on after the industrial foundations are in place; it is these regulations that are killing us and distracting attention from the process efficiencies that actually make people better off. The tragedy of the commons here is that competent people have to share a regulatory framework with the same naturalists who would have turned back the industrial revolution because they thought coal was too polluting. We're still fighting those fools off centuries later and it was absurd to ever give them the time of day given the destruction they have wrought on our industry. And this isn't even considering that by mass western governments are welfare and warfare. This sort of administrative trivia is the most civilisationally crippling but not really what "the government" is by budget. [0] Although on reflection, I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse than the more traditional opaque bullshit. If I were being less inflammatory I might say "you've forgotten to account for the positive externalities of cheap processes; which are decidedly nonlinear and really quite important at the low end of the cost curve".