Environmental Pollution,Social Costs,and Health Policy in the United States

Abstract

National environmental policy as it is presently conceived has excluded a wide array of problems stemming from the degradation of the human and social environments and has placed sole emphasis on the marginal relationships between pollution levels and disease rates and property damages, with federal environmental expenditures clearly reflecting these views. This paper argues that the term “environmental pollution” ought to be broadened to include social environmental problems. For policy purposes, the conversion of the pollution/health-property interface into social costs is more relevant than the mere documentation of this interface. Social environmental concerns, presently neglected and underfunded, account for over 80 per cent of the total social costs of pollution and as such should attract greater attention and investment from the federal government, which currently allocates more than 90 per cent of its environmental expenditures to physical pollution areas such as land, water, and air.