Years to Your Life

While doing my research on an upcoming cancer causation post (see Thursday’s post for the backstory), I scanned a chapter on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s web site, which promotes the messages that chemicals have been enormously valuable to us all and the health risks are trivial, followed by a cartoon depiction of the precautionary principle. See for yourself.

As with the controversy over teaching intelligent design versus evolutionary theory in science classrooms, presenting the “sound science” counterpoint to the precautionary principle in environmental health doesn’t necessarily constitute a balanced debate. But that’s a topic for another day. What drew my attention to the CEI’s paper was the opening argument that the American lifespan has increased immensely over the past century, and that we have pharmaceuticals, pest control, water treatment and plastics to thank for it. True, in part, though what phthalates in the bottles containing Mountain Dew have to do with any of it is a bit of a mystery.

We might be living longer, but are they quality years? CEI doesn’t talk about that, because the data probably wouldn’t support its thesis statement. According to the Centers for Disease Control:

At least 80% of seniors have at least one chronic condition, and 50% have at least two. These conditions can cause years of pain, disability, and loss of function. About 12 million seniors living at home report that chronic conditions limit their activities. Three million older adults say they cannot perform basic activities of daily living, such as bathing, shopping, dressing, or eating. Their quality of life suffers as a result, and demands on family and caregivers can be challenging.

This isn’t the way I want to live my rapidly approaching elder years, which is why I tend to pay much more attention to my own health promotion. How quality of life links to multiple environmental carcinogen exposures is uncertain, but that’s the point underlying the precautionary principle; that uncertainty should make us more thoughtful about creating exposures unnecessarily. The practice of “manufactured uncertainty” turns this concept on its head, almost in effect saying that because our understanding of potential health risks is uncertain, we can proceed full-speed ahead in producing and distributing chemicals into the environment (an antidote to manufactured uncertainty can be found here).

Coda: while a bit off-topic, it’s still an interesting point. Poor health, disease and environmental contamination perversely contribute to economic well-being (the latter pays my bills), by being included in the Gross Domestic Product. In an article published in Atlantic Monthly in October 1995 by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe (no longer available online, but is discussed further here), the GDP was described as:

. . . a Mad Hatter's accounting system which adds but never subtracts. It lumps together just about everything that happens in the economy (the monetized portion, at least) under the archaic assumption that people become happier and better off whenever money changes hands. If you have been maimed in a multicar wreck, or gone through a grueling and costly divorce, or installed water filters in your home because the water supply is so bad, then please take a bow. You have caused economists to smile, and made your contribution to the GDP.

That quote was from an article by Jonathan Rowe, “Down Among the Economists”, about attending an annual meetings of the American Economic Association. It was published in Adbusters some years ago (not available online there – but can be found here). It’s still entertaining reading after all of these years, particularly in the observation that even Paul Krugman apparently was blind to the value of the Genuine Progress Index.