Word: grime
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...proposition the memo offers—to pay lower-wage countries to accept our pollution—is rather straightforward. Consider a machine that could magically suck grime and litter off the streets of Los Angeles and deposit it in Calcutta. Given that the Calcutta city government has more important things to worry about, it seems reasonable that it might value clean streets somewhat less than we do and be willing to take a little bit of grime for the right fee—a fee that could be immediately redirected into other, more pressing priorities, such as saving scores...
There are, of course, several problems with this scenario. There are transportation costs, although with this magical machine we can temporarily do without them. There might be unequal information, where we send more and dirtier grime than they were expecting, but presumably Los Angeles would be required by contract to be up-front. There might be a “moral hazard,” in which Angelenos will litter more, knowing that their actions will have less effect; but the same could occur after more frequent street sweeping. And there might be agent problems, in which the Calcutta government...
...more serious question—and the more difficult one—is whether trade in grime should be considered a prohibited exchange. We could let people choose to be prostitutes, or to work in environments that lack basic health or safety standards, but society has decided that these issues are simply too important to be left to employers and labor to negotiate—that discrepancies in economic power shouldn’t be allowed to push people into such exchanges. Does the grime trade fall in that category...
Alternatively, one might argue that it’s wrong to put a price on pollution. But we frequently decide how much grime-free streets are worth to us, in dollars—we decide that every year, when our city governments allocate a certain amount of our limited resources to street cleaning instead of schools and hospitals...
This need to put a price on invaluables becomes the sticking point when the topic shifts from grime to toxic waste. The earlier questions—transportation, agency, moral hazard—increase their importance dramatically, but that’s not what’s behind the memo forwards. Instead, the unspoken sentiment appears to be that toxic waste is horrible stuff, and we don’t like to think of it being produced or stored anywhere near people. But it has to be stored somewhere, and although we may not want economic power to influence the distribution...