calculate the value of their lives in terms of income or whatever. Suppose we put that factory in Sao Paulo or some even poorer area. Many fewer people will die of cancer because they'll die anyway of something else, and besides, their lives aren't worth as much by any rational measure. So it makes sense to move all the polluting industries to places where poor people die, not where rich people die. That's on simple economic grounds. Combine that with the other document. What it says is that the Third World should stop producing and protecting its own population because that's irrational. We should send our polluting industries to them because that is rational. Summers in this memo points out that you might have counterarguments to this based on human rights and the right of people to a certain quality of life. But he points out that if we allowed those arguments to enter into our calculations, then just about everything the World Bank does would be undermined. That's quite accurate. That's supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. Obviously we can't undermine everything the World Bank does, so obviously we can't allow such considerations to enter. We consider only economic rationality, of course geared to the interests of the World Bank. That's what you do with pollution. Try to convince the Third World to stop producing and to stop protecting their own population and to accept our pollution. It's all perfectly explicable on rational economic grounds. Any graduate student in economics can prove it to you. DB: Apropos of this blindness of the planners: you have a fantasy ... It's not blindness. I think it's very reasonable on their part. DB: Within their framework. Yes. DB: You tell of a fantasy that involves the Wall Street Journal and the greenhouse effect. Someone asked me once and I simply said that if I had the talent, which I don't, I would write a short story about the Wall Street Journal. I suppose their offices are on the sevente...
