[strken]

I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:

> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.

> ...

> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.

If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.

[llbbdd]

I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.

[randycupertino]

I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!

https://archive.ph/hSc5Z

“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

[llbbdd]

Probably, I don't make a habit of reading this kind of thing. In any case I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of the thread.