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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (172142)	10/7/2005 4:51:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the data Noel. See what I mean? Asbestos damage was small compared with lead damage. Only 10,000 a year of old Americans dying due to asbestos damage. That's not much compared with 200 million Americans poisoned by lead from gasoline causing a quarter IQ point deficit at the beginning of their lives, resulting in a lifelong economic loss. Putting some values on them, the old Americans lose, I guess, about 10 years of life. Let's say their lives are worth about ummm, how about $20,000 a year, to be generous. I doubt it's 10 years of life lost on average. I shall ask Google for their age of death. Sure enough. Old geezers. But you are out by a factor of 10!!! There are NOT 10,000 a year dying of asbestosis. There are only 400!! There are also 800 with "contributing cause". That's only 1,200 total. cdc.gov cdc.gov cdc.gov The median age is about 75. cdc.gov Note that "contributing cause" deaths are included there. So the loss of years of life is only about 1 or 2 for most of those people. So, 1,000 early deaths per year x $20,000/yr x 2 years they lose = total USA loss = $40 million per year. Almost nothing. Here's the lead poisoning cost. 200 million people losing 0.25 IQ points. GDP per capita = $40,000 and that's not all that far off average income either. Smarter people, around IQ110, earn about 50% more than the duller around 90IQ see chart Message 21771971 So that's about $50,000 vs about $30,000 or $10,000 a year, give or take a bit. 20IQ points in the average sort of human are worth about $500 per IQ point per year or $100 per quarter IQ point per year. 200 million people x $100 = $20,000,000,000 per year. That's $20 billion per year. You can see that lead is worse than asbestos. Note though, there is a crucial difference. The lead poisoning happened when one was young, so one's brain never properly developed and one suffered a lifetime of harm, unlike the asbestos victims who got the loss at the end of their lives. We therefore need to compound the lead loss over the person's lifetime. $100 loss this year is $100 not invested to earn a compounding return over the next 40 years of life. Same the next year. And the next. Each year, $100 was lost and not invested to earn a return for years and years. Over say 40 years, that $20 billion per year is, without ANY allowance for compounding return on investment, $800 billion. Now, do some compounding at treasury rates over 40 years. That would be say $3 trillion [and the rest] that has been lost. Yes, yes, you can fiddle at the fringes, argue over the numbers and assert that people would simply have drunk the extra profits, but the numbers are about right. Lead in gasoline was one of the great blunders of the 20th century. Class action suit lawyers should be all over it like a rash. The problem is, proving harm to an individual would be well nigh impossible. Unlike dying from something obvious like a stake through the heart, the harm from an elevated blood lead level is hard to pin down in any particular individual. But nevertheless, the harm was real. Asbestosis is trivial, in the big picture. You can see that once I figured that out, when my job in BP Oil International was looking after gasoline, I was not a happy camper to have lead in petrol. Governments were dopey and were very slow to ban lead in petrol. When I was first given lead in petrol as an issue to deal with, I thought it couldn't matter and that the lead would just blow away in minuscule proportions. That idea soon faded as I read lots of data on the effects and thought about what was going on. As with smoking, there was lying about the effects, to maintain sales; one lead supplier, who I won't name here so that I don't get sued, lied about some information, which I only found by going back to the original data to check it for myself. Tobacco companies denied that tobacco smoke caused lung cancer too, when it was obvious that the data showed cause. Mqurice