Customer Reviews

You Have to Admit It's Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to Environmental Quality

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This book's title suggests that it will show that the environment is getting better. Instead, most of the chapters demonstrate that the quality of human life is getting better. Those are not the same thing.

The authors would respond that the "environmental Kuznets curve" (EKC) shows that environmental protection gets worse at moderate levels of income and then increases with wealth. Thus, as the world gets wealthier, more and more countries will work harder and harder to protect the environment. Two of the authors present some evidence that this EKC logic works in individual countries, but the other authors ignore environmental quality and simply demonstrate that incomes and quality of human life are improving.

The overall claim rests on a fallacy of composition. Let's grant that high-income countries protect their environments increasingly well, and that middle-income countries do the same once they reach some level of income. At the same time, pollution in poor countries increases with development. If every country lives in a vacuum, the authors' optimism is justified - - with development, everyone will pollute less. But in the real world these countries interact. It's entirely possible that increasing pollution in lower-income and lower-middle-income countries reflects the translocation of some higher-pollution industries as high-income countries regulate pollution more strictly. In this case, lower-income countries have a comparative advantage in high-pollution industries because they are more willing to accept a given level of pollution for each dollar of GDP. This would remain true even if every country in the world successfully develops, and even if every country eliminated poverty.

The contributors to this book don't consider this possibility at all. As it turns out, there's a significant controversy about whether rich countries "export" high-pollution industries. For a variety of reasons, coal and steel production have tended to migrate to developing countries while chemicals production has not. With the exception of one chapter, however, none of the contributors to this book want to consider mixed results - - optimism and faith in the market is the watchword of the volume.

The contributors - - again, with one exception - - also tend to use the wrong measure of environmental degradation. They show that countries emit less pollution per unit of GDP as they grow wealthier, so that higher incomes are accompanied by decreasing environmental destruction at the margin. However, pollution still increases with GDP, so higher incomes lead to more pollution in the aggregate. These distinctions between aggregate, average, and marginal values are central to economics, and the contributors are associated with an economics research foundation (PERC), so one can only conclude that ideology has trumped analysis in this book. That's frustrating, because we need a fair-minded assessment of the environmental costs of human development. This book, alas, does not provide that assessment.

Typical non-science approach to examining the environment. If you don't think evolution exists, this book gets you closer to the rapture.