It's the stupid, economy: Update

Image via Medscape.

Yet more new findings on bad air quality making people stupid or, if you want to look on the bright side, good air quality making people smart. And I do want to look on the bright side. This study examined 6.9 million Medicare patients over a 15-year period to correlate when (or if) they started suffering from dementia with the counties they lived in and how the EPA scored the county for compliance with the Clean Air Act:

We test whether long-term exposure to air pollution degrades human capital by causing dementia. We link fifteen years of Medicare records for 6.9 million adults age 65 and older to the EPA’s air quality monitoring network and track the evolution of individuals’ health, onset of dementia, financial decisions, and cumulative residential exposure to fine-particulate air pollution (PM2.5). Our instrumental variables framework capitalizes on quasi-random variation in pollution exposure due to the EPA’s 2005 designation of nonattainment counties for PM2.5. We find that a 1 microgram-per-cubic-meter increase in average decadal exposure (9.1% of the mean) increases the probability of receiving a dementia diagnosis by 1.3 percentage points (6.7% of the mean). This finding is consistent with hypotheses from the medical literature. We conclude that regulation of air pollution has greater benefits than previously known, in part because dementia impairs financial decision making. We estimate that the dementia-related benefits of the EPA’s county nonattainment designations exceeded $150 billion. We also find that the effect of PM2.5 on dementia persists below current regulatory thresholds. (Kelly C. Bishop, Jonathan D. Ketcham, and Nicolai V. Kuminoff, "Hazed and Confused: The effect of air pollution on dementia, NBER Working Paper No. 24970, August 2018. Paywall.)

PM2.5 meaning atmospheric particles of less than 2.5 micrometers, the same ones that were found to cause drops in language and test scores in Chinese people the last time we talked about this (the effects in that one being strongest in men, elderly people, and those with relatively low education). It apparently causes early dementia too.

The good news is evidence that we have evidence here that regulating air quality has a a direct beneficial effect on people, making them less likely to succumb to premature dementia, and not only that, it's a benefit you can describe in strictly economic terms, so the EPA really has to pay attention to that, right? Like the EPA is required by law to take the economic consequences of environmental regulation into account, right?

EPA uses economic analysis to meet statutory obligations and Congressional mandates. National decision-makers increasingly request economic information prior to making important regulatory decisions. EPA strives to improve the environment without imposing unreasonable costs on society by grounding its policy proposals in sound economic analysis. Cost-effectiveness and market-based incentives are critical when developing regulations and policies.

Well, maybe, but an editorial at Science by Kevin Boyle and Matthew Kotchen suggests that's being interpreted in a peculiar way in the Trump administration:

many economic analyses that support the Trump administration's regulatory rollbacks conflict with the EPA's previous findings. The 2017 analysis for eliminating the Waters of the United States rule turned favorable only after excluding all benefits of protecting wetlands. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan is supported in another 2017 analysis only after changing assumptions about the scope of climate damages, the measurement of health effects, and the impact on future generations. Differing assumptions also underlie the economic justification of the administration's 2018 proposal to roll back automotive fuel economy standards.

At an institutional level, the EPA also issued a proposal in June to revamp its approach to benefit-cost analysis. Many observers are concerned that this is an administrative move to institutionalize the agency's practices in the economic analyses noted above. This could result in the elimination of counting significant co-benefits. For example, a regulation that targets carbon dioxide emissions from power plants can simultaneously reduce other harmful pollutants, and the resulting co-benefit would not be counted.

Apparently they only meant to consider the economic analysis that gives results that would appeal to Charles and David Koch.

h/t/ John Voorheis for all the sources.