Economautists are the only people who think just like me. (Check out how they measure the cost of increased dementia through air pollution to society) http://www.nber.org/papers/w24970 pic.twitter.com/ntcqAli6fi
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The protective effect of high IQ could be far larger than the negative effect of pollution. But yes, they plot state PM2.5 pollution & state dementia and even given all the other factors there's a raw correlationpic.twitter.com/xnj7HmM5AY
Smog (largely from auto exhaust) was radically worse in Los Angeles than in the rest of the country from WWII to late 20th Century, perhaps an order of magnitude worse. Ill health effects from smog in LA County (pop 10 million) should leap out at researchers. But they don't...
The important thing here (which I've just realised) is the type of pollution they're studying (PM2.5s) isn't actually visible and doesn't make up smog, I believe it needs to be PM10+ to make up smog. Smog doesn't necessarily correlate highly with the sort of pollution they study
So Los Angeles, through dumb luck, dodged a bullet by having most of its air pollution come from auto exhaust, which was highly annoying (cough, wheeze), but not all that bad for you in the long run? That could be ...
Los Angeles didn't have too much heavy industry. The local steel plant was built far inland in Fontana during WWII to be out of range of the guns of Japanese battleships. Air pollution was horrific in Fontana. I knew a guy on Fontana HS cross-country team; they trained at night.
Yikes that is grim. Hear similar things from friends in China who only exercise in indoor, air filtered gyms
Fortunately, most people in Southern California lived upwind from the far inland Fontana steel mill. Ironically, pollution control benefited real estate values of Chinese the most because in 1970s they started moving to inland San Gabriel Valley because they didn't mind smog.
Today, beautiful old-time San Gabriel Valley suburbs of L.A. like Pasadena, San Marino, and Arcadia are smog free and heavily Chinese because they started buying in during the cheap smog years because they didn't care about going outside.
My vague impression is that the massive health problems that smog ought to have caused in Los Angeles haven't really happened. I could be totally wrong, but smog-related health woes don't come up much in L.A. Times. My dad died at 95, the lady across the street at 101.
I think it's more like Californians tend to be naturally healthy, and the place has other benefits (eg sunlight). But pollution is pushing health downwards, even if it's not so bad that it's wiping out those other positive factors
My grandfather moved from Oak Park, IL to Pasadena, CA in 1929 because he was a paranoid health food nut who thought commercial foods were poisoning him and he could grow his own fruits and vegetables in California. The roots of hippiedom often found in German-American paranoia.
Funny thing about my paranoid health food nut grandfather was he had been 1895 delivery boy for Dr. Roentgen, first Nobelist in Physics, while inventing X-ray machine. So he became an X-ray machine salesman. He'd put his hand under rays to show bones. Had radiation ulcer on hand.
My grandfather, the early x-ray machine salesman with radiation burns, retired in 1929 at age 53 to grow health food in California. He lived until 89 in 1965. So maybe this health food stuff really works?
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