Enzo
-----Original Message----- From: Henry C.K. Liu <hliu at mindspring.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, December 03, 1998 1:22 AM Subject: Re: World Bank memos
>Brad Delong:
>
>Its not all that hard to figure out.
>Take Hong Kong and the Pearl River delta, the environmental impact on
public health and life expectancy, not even
>counting "quality of life" cannot be compensated by the increase in "cash
wealth" of the population. Even if HK and
>China were to spend their entire combined foreign trade surpluses on the
restoring the damaged environment, they cannot
>bring it back to pre-1970 levels, not to mention losses in fisheries and
agricultural production due to environmental
>damage.
>The so-called emerging economies or NICs can apply a simple Pareto Optimum
test to evaluate policies and projects. And
>if that should slow down "development", so be it. The difference between
dying from hunger and dying from lung cancer
>is academic.
>Pollution for hunger is a Western strategy to shift a politically explosive
condition (hunger leads to riots) to a
>politically benign condition (pollution is debated in universities). It is
a more sophisticated version of the
>British's selling opium to 18th century China. The post-war international
division of labor has degenerated into the
>export of pollution and sub-standard working conditions from the developed
economies. And it has to stop.
>
>By the way, Larry Summers has as little credibility in Asia as he does in
Congress.
>
>Henry C.K. Liu
>
>
>Brad De Long wrote:
>
>> >G'day Brad,
>> >
>> >You write:
>> >
>> >>> Go easy on Larry. Remember the papers that he and I wrote late in the
1980s
>> >>> supporting a Tobin Tax...
>> >
>> >I risk going over old terrain here because I've had to resort to
trashing
>> >unread posts of late. Are we talking Larry Summers?
>> >
>> >That Larry is, it seems to me, a slightly more forthright and honest pig
>> >than the pigs Patrick lists. He knows well enough that of which he's
part.
>> >As he did in the case of his oh-so-forthright-and-honest argument for
>> >poisoning people in the third world. How did that bit of forthright
>> >honesty go again? 'They're all gonna die soon anyway, so it won't
hurt',
>> >wasn't it?
>>
>> It wasn't, actually...
>>
>> In a lot of manufacturing industries, "dirty" production processes are a
>> lot cheaper than "clean" ones. Since labor productivity in many
developing
>> economies is still very low, a demand that developing countries adopt
>> first-world standards of pollution control may be a demand that they not
>> industrialize--that they stay very poor.
>>
>> It's not clear what the right policy is. It is clear that taking
expensive
>> steps to reduce the risk of prostate cancer (the reference in your last
>> sentence) which kills you a long time from now when you are old should
not
>> be a high priority as long as you still have amoebic dysentery and
cholera
>> in your water. And to the extent that industrializing faster in a
>> cheap-and-dirty way gets your government the resources to clean up the
>> water, industrializing faster is a good thing.
>>
>> Things are complicated--and this is why it is hard to figure out what the
>> right thing to do is--by the fact that the beneficiaries from
>> cheap-and-dirty forms of industrialization (the bosses of manufacturing
>> firms, and those workers employed in them who aren't whomped by
>> pollution-related diseases) are different from those who suffer from
>> pollution (children who get lung diseases, and nearby residents poisoned
by
>> heavy metals). Will the profits from cheap-and-dirty industrialization go
>> to cleaning up the public water supply? Or will they go to Swiss bank
>> accounts?
>>
>> As I understand the context of Lant Pritchett's memo, it was written in
an
>> internal World Bank debate with a whole bunch of guys who were ducking
this
>> whole set of issues, and simply saying that no factory should be built
>> anywhere in the world that does not use best-world-practice emissions
>> control methods--and thus had gone overboard on the "Malthusian" side:
>> arguing (implicitly at least) that the best policy is to keep people in
>> developing economiespoor so they won't pollute very much...
>>
>> Brad DeLong
>
>