{"id":48057,"date":"2012-06-12T11:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T16:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=48057"},"modified":"2017-09-17T15:02:10","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T20:02:10","slug":"public-goods-and-individual-mandates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/06\/12\/public-goods-and-individual-mandates\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Goods and Individual Mandates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Air pollution is what economists call an \u201cexternality.\u201d\u00a0 It is not an intrinsic part of the economic bargaining between producers and consumers.\u00a0 The usual market forces — buyers and sellers pursuing their own individual interests — won\u2019t help.\u00a0 The market may bring us more goods at lower prices, for example, but it can harm the air that everyone, in or out of that market, has to breathe. To create or protect a public good, the free market has to be a little less free.\u00a0 That\u2019s where government steps in.\u00a0 Or not.<\/p>\n

Case in point: My son and his girlfriend arrived in Beijing ten days ago.\u00a0 The got-here-safely e-mail ended with this:<\/p>\n

…was blown away by the pollution! I know people\u00a0talk about it all the time, but it really is crazy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it is.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a photo I grabbed from the Internet:<\/p>\n

\"\"
Flickr creative commons by nasus89<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At about the same time, I came upon a\u00a0this link<\/a>\u00a0to photos of my home town Pittsburgh in 1940.\u00a0 Here are two of them: \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>
\nToday in downtown Pittsburgh, the streetcars and overhead trolleys are gone.\u00a0 So are the fedoras.\u00a0 And so is the smoke.<\/p>\n

The air became cleaner in the years following the end of the War.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t become clean all by itself, and it didn\u2019t become clean because of free-market forces.\u00a0 It got clean because of government — legislation and regulation, including an individual mandate.<\/p>\n

The smoke was caused by the burning of coal, and while the steel mills accounted for some of the smoke, much of the it came from coal-burning furnaces in Pittsburghers\u2019 houses.\u00a0 If the city was to have cleaner air, the government would have to force people change the way they heated their homes.\u00a0 And that is exactly what the law did. To create a public good — clean air — the law required individuals to purchase something — either non-polluting fuel (oil, gas, or smokeless coal) or smokeless equipment.*<\/p>\n

Initially, not everyone favored smoke control, but as Pittsburgh became cleaner and lost its \u201cSmoky City\u201d label, approval of the regulations increased, and there was a fairly rapid transition to gas heating.\u00a0 By the 1950s, nobody longed for the unregulated air of 1940.\u00a0 Smoke control was a great success.**\u00a0 Of course, it may have helped that Pittsburgh did not have a major opposition party railing against this government takeover of home heating or claiming that smoke control was a jobs-killing assault on freedom.<\/p>\n

————————<\/p>\n

* Enforcement focused not on individuals but distributors.\u00a0 Truckers were forbidden from delivering the wrong kind of coal.<\/p>\n

** For a fuller account of smoke control in Pittsburgh, see Joel A. Tarr and Bill C. Lamperes, Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy.\u00a0Journal of Social History<\/cite>\u00a0, Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Issue on Applied History (Summer, 1981), pp. 561-588.<\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Air pollution is what economists call an \u201cexternality.\u201d\u00a0 It is not an intrinsic part of the economic bargaining between producers and consumers.\u00a0 The usual market forces — buyers and sellers pursuing their own individual interests — won\u2019t help.\u00a0 The market may bring us more goods at lower prices, for example, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,2123,253,1772,3920],"class_list":["post-48057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-environmentnature","tag-history","tag-nation-china","tag-nation-united-states"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48057"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71534,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48057\/revisions\/71534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}