Leaden analysis

I'll be spending much of this week researching and reporting posts evaluating President Bush's new "Import Safety Action Plan." [1] Apparently he's just noticed that our pet food has been poisoned [2] and that our toys are toxic. [3] Meanwhile, while I dig into the particulars, here's a tidbit I learned along the way.

In the New York Time's dispatch [4] on Bush's new plan they quote an FDA associate commissioner named William Hubbard who resigned in 2005 in disgust at the starving of his agency, going on to help found the Coalition for a Stronger FDA [5]. I decided to do a little research on Mr. Hubbard, who's been with the Department of Health and Human Services since 1973, and though there's not much information on him out there—a single mention in the Washington Post, from 1975!—he strikes me as one of those exemplary civil servants who kept his head down and did good work protecting the public; among his good works was designing the first food nutrition labels [6].

Then I looked up the man who replaced him as the FDA's Associate Commissioner for Policy and Planning, and learned a lot. Dr. Randall Lutter was an economist at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and an E. coli conservatism poster child. His specialty is econometric studies that claim lead is over-regulated. In his 1996 masterpiece, for example, "Abandonment of Residential Housing and the Abatement of Lead Based Paint Hazards" (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management," Vol. 15, summer, 1996), he writes: "The high cost of a regulatory program to clean up lead-based paint in housing may have the unintended effect of increasing abandonment of residential housing." That "lowers the quality of urban life and strains city budgets through increases in homelessness, fires, and criminal activity and through a reduction in tax revenues."

So: let them eat lead! Even though, as he helpfully explains, "In young children, the most vulnerable population group, lead has been linked to impairment of intelligence, small motor control, hearing, and emotional development even at low concentrations where obvious symptoms are not present."

There's a method to his madness. In another essay—or should we call it a job application for the Bush administration?—with the Orwellian title "Valuing Children's Health: A Reassessment of the Benefits of Lower Lead Levels" (AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies working paper, 2000), our new FDA associate commissioner notes that previous cost-benefit analyses of lead abatement have found that it saves the government about $9000 per child per IQ point recovered from potential lead poisoning. He's re-run the numbers, and thinks it really saves only $1100. So, all in all, "agencies should consider relaxing their lead standards."

You might wonder how these absurd numbers are arrived at. Or why other economists have estimated the average American household would be willing to pay $257 to save the bald eagles but only $80 for gray wolves. Or that, extrapolating how much extra workers need to be paid to accept accept more hazardous jobs, a human life has been calculated to be worth $6.3 million.

These questions are explored in a fascinating 2002 paper I read while researching Lutter, "Pricing the Priceless," by Frank Ackerman of Tufts and Lisa Neinzerling of Georgetown, in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. (I was delighted to read that they've since published a book together, Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing. [7] You can read a nice précis of their argument here [8].)

"You cannot buy the right to kill someone for $6.3 million, nor for any other price," they point out. In short, they demonstrate that the kind of cost-benefit analysis of regulation practiced by our new FDA association commissioner is often amoral and nuts. The old $9000 bonus for saving an IQ point was arrived at by extrapolating from children's future earnings(!). Dr. Lutter calculated it instead by looking at how much money parents think it's worth spending on "chelation therapy," a chemical treatment that may (or may not) cause excretion of lead from the body. Ackerman and Neinzerling do a bang-up job of showing how this type of regulatory analysis is necessarily arbitrary and downright capricious, "neither objective nor transparent"—and thus easily gamed by bad-faith scholars uninterested in actual regulation at all. "In fact, Lutter presents no evidence about what parents think, only what they spend on one rare variety of private medical treatment (which, as it turns out, has not been proven medically effective for chronic, low-level lead poisoning.) Why should environmental standards be based on what individuals are now spending on desperate personal efforts to overcome social outcomes?"

Why indeed? Here's one answer: the $1100 figure fits his ideological agenda. So he came up with a clever argument to justify it. (I couldn't find any papers in which Lutter says the data forces him to conclude we should spend more on lead abatement.) Here's another—which explains why even the $9000 figure should be suspect: "philosopher Henry Richardson argues that reliance on the cost-benefit standard forecloses the process of democratic deliberation that is necessary for intelligent decision making.... Cost-benefit analysis turns public citizens into selfish consumers and interconnected communities into atomized individuals."

And isn't that the kind of country conservatives want?

As I review what Bush's Interagency Working Group on Import Safety has come up with, I'll be keeping these insights in mind.