I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
strken|3 months ago
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
llbbdd|3 months ago
llbbdd|3 months ago
dragonwriter|3 months ago
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.