Milking the Memo

A spectre is haunting Harvard—the spectre of the Summers Memo. Over the past few months, president-elect Lawrence H. Summers 1991 World Bank memo on pollution trading has been forwarded, without comment, across several campus e-mail lists. The lack of meaningful discussion accompanying the letters seemed to be an attempt at shocked silence, letting the memo’s statements—notably, its assertion that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable”—speak for themselves. I had never before realized that emails could be sent in hushed tones.

There has been some question as to whether Summers wrote the memo, or just signed it, or sent it tongue-in-cheek. I don’t know what Summers actually thinks on the issue, and frankly, I don’t care. As president of Harvard, Summers will be the last person on earth with power over international trade in toxic waste. What concerns me is that students at Harvard are preferring to wave the memo rather than debate it.

The proposition the memo offers—to pay lower-wage countries to accept our pollution—is rather straightforward. Consider a machine that could magically suck grime and litter off the streets of Los Angeles and deposit it in Calcutta. Given that the Calcutta city government has more important things to worry about, it seems reasonable that it might value clean streets somewhat less than we do and be willing to take a little bit of grime for the right fee—a fee that could be immediately redirected into other, more pressing priorities, such as saving scores of lives through cleaner drinking water. No one would force Calcuttans to take the grime; they would choose to only because they feel the price is right. They get what they want, we get what we want; everybody wins, it seems.

There are, of course, several problems with this scenario. There are transportation costs, although with this magical machine we can temporarily do without them. There might be unequal information, where we send more and dirtier grime than they were expecting, but presumably Los Angeles would be required by contract to be up-front. There might be a “moral hazard,” in which Angelenos will litter more, knowing that their actions will have less effect; but the same could occur after more frequent street sweeping. And there might be agent problems, in which the Calcutta government might negotiate in its own best interests and not those of its people; but if this is the case, we’ve got bigger problems, since virtually all of our trade with them is suspect.

The more serious question—and the more difficult one—is whether trade in grime should be considered a prohibited exchange. We could let people choose to be prostitutes, or to work in environments that lack basic health or safety standards, but society has decided that these issues are simply too important to be left to employers and labor to negotiate—that discrepancies in economic power shouldn’t be allowed to push people into such exchanges. Does the grime trade fall in that category?

Some would say it does. In a 1997 op-ed piece for the New York Times, Michael Sandel campaigned against the trade in pollution, arguing that it would allow wealthy countries to buy their way out of pollution limits and “undermine the sense of shared responsibility” necessary for cooperation. Yet we let wealthy people buy their way out of cleaning sewers, and that’s pretty degrading work. It would certainly give a greater sense of shared responsibility if every household had to clean its own sewers or make its own steel in a backyard smelter, but no one seems to be pushing for these laws quite yet.

Alternatively, one might argue that it’s wrong to put a price on pollution. But we frequently decide how much grime-free streets are worth to us, in dollars—we decide that every year, when our city governments allocate a certain amount of our limited resources to street cleaning instead of schools and hospitals.

This need to put a price on invaluables becomes the sticking point when the topic shifts from grime to toxic waste. The earlier questions—transportation, agency, moral hazard—increase their importance dramatically, but that’s not what’s behind the memo forwards. Instead, the unspoken sentiment appears to be that toxic waste is horrible stuff, and we don’t like to think of it being produced or stored anywhere near people. But it has to be stored somewhere, and although we may not want economic power to influence the distribution of waste and all its health risks, that’s by no means a settled argument. We pay people to work at nuclear plants and large construction projects, which we know bring health risks and might end up killing them; but we think society will benefit, that it’s worth it to let them run that risk. Deciding where toxic waste falls on this scale will require detailed examination, not a cursory glance in a Telnet window.

Whether an exchange should be prohibited or not is in many ways an emotional question. But my guess is that most of the emotional gut reaction to it doesn’t come from the idea of letting other people take our toxic waste. It comes from the realization—and a sickening one at that—that there are people on this earth so desperately poor that they would be willing to live amongst our deadly toxic chemicals for what is to us a relative pittance. And that even if we decide not to let them take our waste, we haven’t really done anything to better their condition—only moved it out of sight and out of mind.

Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of arguments against trade in toxic waste, some of which may very well be compelling. I count six of them in this column alone. But rather than engage the question, the protestors who held signs and chanted outside Loeb House have preferred to use the memo as a moral bludgeon, perversely changing the subject to Harvard’s labor policies. I support a living wage, but assuming Summers must atone for his views on toxic waste, why would giving $10.25 an hour to Harvard workers be the proper penance? Just because it’s the cause du jour?

But no one has a chance to ask those questions, in part because doing so would be talking seriously about an unspeakable memo. Perhaps Harvard should stop forwarding Summers’ memo and start reading it.

Stephen E. Sachs ’02 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.