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High pollution cuts most Indian lives short by three years
- ChuckMcM 12y agoDoes anyone do these studies in the context of life expectancy changes as a result of industrialization? I'm trying to recall where I read whitepaper on how the pollution was killing people in China but the factories creating the pollution were part of an economic engine that was lifting people out of poverty and increasing their life expectancy. The question for me at the time, and with this one, is what is a better measure of 'better' ? Is there a single standard to use to determine that India at time T0 vs India today is 'getting better' or 'getting worse' ? And if it is getting better, where does the pollution / labor laws / corruption penalties become the dominant factor in slowing down the rate of improvement ? This sort of trade-off appears in all sorts of unlikely places, like how long do you burn capital making your product "better" until you focus entirely on customer acquisition? Which is a better measure of a company getting "better"? Is it total sales, customer satisfaction, or product reliability? Some mix of those?
- hga 12y agoGood point. A start for India might be in looking at the decrease in calories and food quality of the poor (a very large faction of the population) over the last 2 decades or so. Rather sobering.