It was that moment when I knew I was at home in economics. The role of the economist, it seemed, was to point out the PAINFULLY obvious, that you can’t get anything you want without also getting something that you don’t want along side it. The question was not, can we get rid of pollution all together, but it was a question of how to get the most out of the pollution that was necessarily being created.
Since that time I wrote a dissertation on the Political Economy of Repugnance, where I took seriously the issue of change in society and the role economists have played in discussing and describing this change. A key feature of this was the technical feasibility of things that deeply disturbed people. People have intuitive reactions to change that must be revised based on a rational discussion. A sample salvo: Markets in Organs anyone?
The story is not all sunshine and roses, after-all, what about snake-oil salesmen. Not all snake oil is created equal, for instance a popular concoction in the late 19th and early 20th century included turpentine (something close to kerosene). Drinking this would certainly make you feel like you had taken medicine, and it might even make you hallucinate, I don’t know, I haven’t tried. What we seem to forget, though, is that before the days of the FDA and massive testing, unregulated experiments with different medicines is the process which gave us Aspirin and many antacids, many have claimed that these would fail to pass the regulated approval process today. While this doesn’t justify selling turpentine to strangers, the existence of such high-risk markets seems to be, to me, more than simply a market failure.
Starting to think of these problems in terms of repugnance, I realized a whole lifetime of fascination with conspiracy theory. Now, I am a moderate conspiracy theorist, I don’t go in for 9/11 hoax stuff, but I am absolutely fascinated by the conversation surrounding the moon landing. I think this is because such a feat is too big to simply take in in one bite. I don’t deny the actual existence of man-made objects on the moon, but this doesn’t mean that I fail to appreciate the necessity of a conversation around the landing. What is happening here is bigger than simply a factual statement. What is happening is the re-orientation of a mass of people to technological capabilities. The conversation is therapeutic in some way. To have the conversation is to discuss what such a change means for humanity. We have to hit the reset button on many of our intuitions. To deny the moon landing, in some sense, is to re-affirm some consistency in the nature of man. I don’t say the conversation is rational, I say it is therapeutic. This might be one step prior to rationality. Recall my initial analogy, this “pollution” (anti-rational thought) is not desirable in itself, but it is a byproduct of the process of innovation and technological change. The real question is how much?
Now, I have seen quite a few people expressing their repugnance for anti-vaxxers, whose grasp of science leaves something to be desired even in the eyes of a 1st grade teacher. But, I will not simply condemn this group to hell simply because they are wrong. Instead, I want to think about how many anti-vaxxers are needed for society to function well. There is some number of radically fearful parents who cause problems for the medical establishment and produce positive externalities. These snake-oil salesmen either accidentally or deliberately sell medicine that actually works. One of the great outcomes of the anti-vaxxer campaign is that many parents I have met actually understand what the vaccine is doing to their children in a much more complete way than they ever did before. This is a great outcome. I love that people have to sort through information and mis-information, this is an important skill.
It is good for us to question hegemony. Medicine is not the result of a flawless process of monotonic progress. The problem only comes when repugnance becomes systematic. Whole communities of anti-vaxxers live together in community and share snake-oil science, OK, that is bad and it is also threatening herd immunity in various areas of the country. These are problems, and can be addressed. But again, it is not true that the correct level of pollution in society is zero. Things do seem to improve over time. In the 1980s there was massive PM10 pollution in the mountain basin around LA (as well as other cities), changes occurred and the pollution problem has shifted to the less visibly offensive PM2.5. Our repugnance for visible pollution is driving us to reorganize, rationally.
My final analogy, therefore, is to talk about pollution directly. Lets be sure that in the process of trying to reduce visible pollution (PM10) doesn’t make you forget the pollution that is less visible (PM2.5). This less visible pollutant makes life very hard for the young, the elderly, and those with asthma. For this group of people, the lesson of PM2.5 is very clear. What I worry about with much of the anti-vaxxer repugnance going on is that rather than creating information about pollution, we are simply treating the seen and not the unseen. We should be focusing on understanding the problem of pollution, not simply responding enthusiastically to its more visible forms. This means educating parents about the role of medicine in their children’s lives.
This seems to be the real problem that the existence of anti-vaxxers points to. Parents are frightened because they don’t understand what is happening to their kids. Even those of us that are very informed can relate to that fear. Sure, there is a need to educate people about the absurdity of being an anti-vaxxer, but we also should educate people about what the vaccines are intended to do and what we can do to inform parents about the health care of their children. We don’t need to just tell them that the needles, the procedures, the special lab coats make doctors experts that can be trusted, maybe it is possible to involve parents and help them understand what is going on with the health of their children. The way to fight this problem is not with our repugnance of the ignorant, it is rather with voracious defense of rationality. Only through rational science can we sort out snake oil from medicine.
