

High pollution cuts most Indian lives short by three years - alexcasalboni
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/02/26/high-pollution-cuts-most-indian-lives-short-three-years?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UChicago+%28The+University+of+Chicago+News+Office%29

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ChuckMcM
Does anyone do these studies in the context of life expectancy changes as a
result of industrialization? I'm trying to recall where I read whitepaper on
how the pollution was killing people in China but the factories creating the
pollution were part of an economic engine that was lifting people out of
poverty and increasing their life expectancy.

The question for me at the time, and with this one, is what is a better
measure of 'better' ? Is there a single standard to use to determine that
India at time T0 vs India today is 'getting better' or 'getting worse' ? And
if it is getting better, where does the pollution / labor laws / corruption
penalties become the dominant factor in slowing down the rate of improvement ?

This sort of trade-off appears in all sorts of unlikely places, like how long
do you burn capital making your product "better" until you focus entirely on
customer acquisition? Which is a better measure of a company getting "better"?
Is it total sales, customer satisfaction, or product reliability? Some mix of
those?

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hga
Good point.

A start for India might be in looking at the decrease in calories and food
quality of the poor (a very large faction of the population) over the last 2
decades or so. Rather sobering.

