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I finally got around to reading @claudiaLpersico’s working paper “Can Pollution Cause Poverty?” It’s a fascinating piece of scholarship, so I wanted to do a thread on it. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3539513
There is a host of research on how prenatal and early childhood exposure to pollution harms development and causes lifelong impacts. I wrote about some of those previously. I particularly recommend the Isen paper. https://twitter.com/twkovach/status/1270097096750833669?s=20
In her recent research (including a paper on air pollution and COVID-19), Persico has been focusing on major point source polluters, which are required to report annual emissions to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), under a 1986 law passed in the wake of the Bhopal disaster.
As she notes, some 221.5M Americans have a TRI site in their zip codes, and 59M (19%) live within 1 mile of a TRI site. She decided to explore how living near these major polluters affects children over the course of their lives.
Using comprehensive data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Cohort from 1979, which follows these children as they grow into adulthood. (n=11,521).
To estimate the impacts of TRI sites, she applies a brilliant methodology, in which she compares sibling pairs where 1 was born within 1 mile of an operational TRI site, while the other wasn’t. She applies 2 approaches to this.
She looks at the impact of in utero pollution exposure on adult wages (in 2000$), years of education, high school graduation rates, college attendance rates, disability rates, use of public benefits as an adult, and a summary index.
The impacts are startling. Children exposed to pollution from TRI sites in utero had 27.8% lower wages, were 14.5% more likely to be on public assistance, had 1.3 fewer years of education & were dropped out of high school 112% as often.
Distressingly, children exposed to pollution were 1.5x more likely to be disabled and 2.6x more likely to have a cognitive disability, illustrating the toll it takes on the developing fetus.
Unsurprisingly, the most disadvantaged children bear the greatest burden. Outcomes appear to be worse for girls, low-income children, and Black and Latinx children. Pollution threatens “to push people at the margins of poverty into poverty.”
These results hold when she controls for a number of potential confounding factors, including parents becoming wealthier or more educated between children, birth spacing, and removing the worst polluting facilities.
To illustrate the uneven distribution of TRI facilities, here is a map of the 276 sites in the Cleveland metro area. They appear clustered heavily in the Industrial Flats, along railroads and the lakefront, and along the southeast side.
Let’s take a closer look at a couple of locations. Say you live in Census Tract 1143 (Kinsman & East 79th area), which has the lowest median household income in the region at $3,998. There are 5 TRI sites within 1 mile of your home.
In turn, if you live in Census Tract 1236.03 (Kamms Corners), where I grew up, where the median household income is $60,219, there are no TRI sites within 1 mile of your home. The only one closed in 2012.
Land use decisions are not innocuous or apolitical. They can even constrain the quality of life for children who have are not yet born. And they can continue to influence those outcomes for years to come. /end
