Up to 34,000 totally avoidable premature deaths a year, happening now. Deaths that could have been avoided at any time for about $70,000 per life saved. Deaths that may now be prevented, going forward, assuming that the recently finalized Cross State Air Pollution Rule is not blocked from going into effect and the EPA is not defunded.
And you may ask yourself, how could this be? We may spend a million dollars on medical treatment for one person, where it may or may not be effective. We may spend trillions of dollars to avenge lives that are lost and that are not coming back. We may spend trillions more avenging the lives that were lost while avenging those lives that were previously lost. But we can’t spend a few thousand dollars per life to save the lives of ordinary, anonymous, hardworking Americans.
Because we don’t know the names or faces of the people we would save. And the difference is …
Everything.
Personalization vs Anonymization. When you know their names and see their faces, then sometimes, just sometimes, you care. If you can picture that it could be you, then you care. Anything else is just a number. This split drives stunningly irrational decisions and perceptions across a wide swath of our society. This split is used vigorously by those who would take advantage of all of us.
Back in 1982, seven people were killed after taking Tylenol which had been laced with cyanide by an unknown criminal or terrorist. The response was rapid and widespread. Johnson and Johnson, maker of Tylenol, recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol at a cost of over $100 million. This was followed by quick industry action and federal regulations that were not, to my knowledge, controversial. For as much as you’ll ever need to know about it, see dsteffen’s excellent diary, part of a series 'How Regulation Came to Be."
So why did the fate of 7 people drive what amounts to an instant and vigorous response, while action to save the lives of 13,000 to 34,000 people (per year!) has had a 20-year journey to get from legislation to a final regulation that has not even gone into full effect yet?
The Tylenol case represents the perfect storm of conditions that would cause vigorous action. The people who died did so because they took pills that had the manufacturer’s name on it (never mind that the manufacturer had done nothing wrong by the standard of the times). The affected people were customers rather than members of the general population, so the pool of customers had extremely strong leverage. Also, the threat of rapid onset and death was very scary to people.
These conditions are the polar opposite of the air pollution case. The affected people may or may not be customers. The pollutants don’t come in a bottle with the manufacturer’s name, it actually requires (gasp!) science to determine that people are being harmed. The effects are not instant but may take years to manifest.
Guess what. The people killed by air pollution are just as dead as the Tylenol victims.
Now we get to use the fun word of the day: “Externality”. In business terms, Externality means
“Something external to what I care about, which thus is your problem, so stop yammering on about it.”
In the Tylenol case, the deaths could not be set aside as an externality because the victims could be so immediately identified as customers of that specific company. In the air pollution case, pollutants wander away from where they were generated and become anonymous enough that they can be externalized unless tracked diligently.
Diligent tracking of consequences requires effort. And science. Science that is under fire from the right wing every day, to create denial and doubt.
It seems so contradictory, that the same industries that rely so heavily on science and technology to advance their business processes work so hard to dismiss of the science of evaluating consequences of those processes.
But in that contradiction we find a core difference, perhaps the difference, between progressive and right-wing views.
Progressives believe in total cost accounting of actions.
The right wing, so called “conservatives” do not.
That’s it. Seems so simple, yet pedantic. Come, on, accounting? For real?
Let’s try it on for size.
It turns out that solar power is cost-effective today in many parts of the US, if you use total cost accounting to consider the public health effects of combustion sources of power. So, out of progressives or conservatives, who advocates the use of total cost accounting in this case?
Remember Enron? It’s not a coincidence that the heart of their scheme was based on pushing costs off the books, so that they became financial externalities to be absorbed by someone else. There’s a pattern here.
Imaginary friends, so well presented here, describes innovations in corporate structuring so that a subsidiary can funnel all its “profits” to a parent but not be responsible for any of its costs or even criminal or civil liability.
Out of progressives or conservatives, who even wants to consider the fully loaded cost of war including the cost of caring for veterans over the course of decades to come?
The elephant in the room and the ultimate externality: the consequences of carbon pollution to us and our children.
These examples (and there are so many where these came from) expose and lay bare one of the great right-wing lies, the one that says that anyone who believes in regulation and effective government action is some kind of freeloader. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. The freeloaders are those who would push off their costs on the rest of us, as “externalities”, and avoid paying the full freight of their actions.
It all comes down, strangely, to accounting. A business that accounts for all the costs that it creates will be a socially responsible business, of necessity. A business that evades its true costs will harm all of us while profiting a few.
Many, perhaps most, of the actions on the right wing can be interpreted as having a single purpose, which is just this:
They want to protect and further develop their ability to externalize costs.
- Attack science, in order to cripple the ability to show externalized costs
- Attack government, the one body that could enforce the use of full cost accounting
- Control government so that it does not enforce total cost accounting
- Obscure and depersonalize business interactions to hide true costs
The only good reason for money to exist is to account for the delivery of value (and cost) from one person to another. That concept has taken a beating. The more that money is divorced from delivering value, the more it is complexified and mystified and number-crunchified in someone else’s computer, then the more we all lose because we lose the ability to connect that money to the most basic question of all: How does this help actual humans?
What you can do:
- Personalize! Any time you see a number, see the individual people. Any time you communicate about a number, identify individual people. When you hear about a number, ask about individual people.
- When you consider any activity, on a personal or business level, spend some time and effort to understand the full loaded costs of the activity.
- Advocate for effective regulation that provides a fair and level playing field for delivering value and not harm
-Advocate for science
[Postscript: One could argue that uncontrolled air pollution from coal-fired electrical generators is “worth it.” After all, that electricity is pretty important. In addition to making our lives more convenient and prosperous, it also saves lives and improves health in all kinds of ways direct and indirect. So what about that?
To clarify, the example is not about electricity. It’s about choices – because a better choice is available. Pollution control equipment and/or modern generating design can deliver more reliable electricity and less pollution. Not in the future, but right now, with proven technology available for just a few dollars per life saved. That’s the choice, and it’s representative of the kinds of choices we could be making if we used total cost accounting across the board.]