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Please do your calculations in the margins
Which do you think takes a bigger toll on the environment, owning a dog, or owning an SUV? My bet would be on the dog. I'm thinking of all of the resources that go into dog food.
That is from Arnold Kling. And if you believe in a zero or very low discount rate, don't forget to count all those puppies too.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 11, 2008 at 12:47 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
1) Spencer's comment at Kling's blog is a good start. SUVs cost more to buy and maintain, hence they use more resources. This assumes the price reflects the underlying costs, as it should in a perfect market.
2) More to the point, if all prices reflected true costs (including externalities), then there would be no need for environmentalists to shame SUV owners or other polluters. The extra resource cost of an SUV would, on the margin, equal the extra benefit an SUV creates for the buyer. However, if there are significant externalities (as there likely are for gas), then the "shame" system and/or the "regulation" system need to kick in to supplement the imperfect market.
The key question is whether, on the margin, there are external costs BEYOND those taken into account by the buyer, for SUVs vs. dogs.
Posted by: A student of economics at Feb 11, 2008 1:01:58 PM
My dog presumably values his life a lot more than an SUV values its existence. (This is in reference to Tyler's recent comment that the unborn's valuation of their lives should be taken into account in any welfare calculations.)
My dog creates plenty of negative externalities (barking, excreting, etc.) but also many positive externalities. Walking a cute dog in a big city I am constantly stopped by people who want to pet him and walk away smiling. He facilitates interaction between strangers, which is important for neighborliness and very rare in crowded cities. In contrast, I rarely see people who stop and touch an SUV, smile at the owner and walk away happier.
-- Dog lover.
Posted by: at Feb 11, 2008 1:30:45 PM
without any numbers to back up his assertion, it appears that king is either trolling or making some stupid satire.
Posted by: a person at Feb 11, 2008 1:31:31 PM
typo: that should be kling, not king.
Posted by: a person at Feb 11, 2008 1:32:41 PM
A substitute for an SUV is a fuel-efficient, smaller car
A substitute for a not-publicly-littering pet dog is a cat (?), a tank of goldfish(?), a child(?), or a loyal human companion (?)
The true cost on the margin should be calculated based on the cost of substitution.
Posted by: Yan Li at Feb 11, 2008 1:33:16 PM
1) I think the cost question isn't quite as simple as calculating the total cost of dog vs suv, but rather the marginal cost of ownership of an suv as compared to a car. Compare that to the cost of a dog, and your answer isn't quite so clear. My colleague down the hall just spent $1600 on surgery for the family dog.
2) I think Arnold's point is to raise the question of what causes the environmentalist's shame system, as the first commenter aptly puts it. In the model implicitly presented by the first commenter, the shame system is a second-best optimal response to substantial externalities and mispriced resources. Arnold's model is one in which the shame system is knee-jerk anti-industrialism. Which model is closer to the truth? Don't know, but it's not obvious -- and maybe that's something important.
Posted by: Don at Feb 11, 2008 1:41:12 PM
Is this a marginal or absolute comparison? Is this owning an SUV vs. owning a Prius (and hence owning a dog versus owning a cat) or vs. not having one at all? Since the car is an SUV do we have to assume the dog is a German Shepherd, rather than Sheltie?
As implied by Spencer's comment, Kling's claim seems unlikely based purely on cost. Is Kling considering the impacts of "producing" either a dog or SUV, or the toll from disposal?
Count me skeptical.
Posted by: Daniel Hall at Feb 11, 2008 1:41:52 PM
Im so confused, what is a perfect market again? LOL.
Posted by: john pertz at Feb 11, 2008 1:43:10 PM
What if the dog is a small dog; 5 pounds small. Like a Yorkie?
Posted by: chug at Feb 11, 2008 2:01:17 PM
I'm not sure whether the externalities (as opposed to internalized costs) vary that much with a dog's size. This seems to be different for cars.
Posted by: at Feb 11, 2008 2:37:29 PM
I don't like dogs and I'm highly skeptical of environmentalism, and still I find this claim ridiculous.
As economics student points out, to compare the internalized costs one need only compare the market prices. Certainly dogs have externalities, but (even if SUVs had no externalities) it's hard to imagine how the dog's externalities could possibly be large enough to make up for difference in price. If every dog imposed $40K of costs on the neighborhood, I'm fairly sure that teams of neighborhood vigilantees would be regularly taking out dogs.
Most Americans who aquire a dog as a pet have it spayed or neutered, which makes the puppies line of argument hard to maintain.
Posted by: David Wright at Feb 11, 2008 2:46:16 PM
Theoretically, you don't have to feed a dog dog food. You do have to feed an SUV gas.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Feb 11, 2008 2:52:55 PM
quick googling results ==
in 2004 the dog food industry output was $34.4 billion according to the national association of dog food manufacturers.
each year Americans consume about 120 billion gallons of gasoline.
If that is at $3.00 a gallon it gives a cost of $360 billion or over ten times the size of the dog food market.
Anyone want to look up the number of auto mechanics compared to the number of vets, etc.?
Posted by: spencer at Feb 11, 2008 3:06:39 PM
Absent regulation or other exogenous factors, the price mechanism does not do a very good job of taking into account *environmental* costs. If it did, fossil fuels would likely be the most environmentally friendly fuels society could use. This is basically the sole reason that industry is typically sluggish (especially in past decades) to adopt more environmentally friendly processes: it costs more to adopt (and sometimes maintain) new technology that is cleaner than what a firm has been using. If the cleaner fuels were cheaper to begin with, they would have been used from the start (assuming perfect substitutability).
That said, I have no idea whether an SUV or a canine would generate more social costs. I think the most important variable would be the resources used and emissions created in the process of creating dog food.
Posted by: jn at Feb 11, 2008 3:37:25 PM
I have three dogs and I find this claim difficult to believe, but there are certainly things you can do to lessen your dogs environmental impact. Are they spayed or neutered? What type of food do you feed them? Is it organic? Is it vegetarian? Where is it manufactured? Where do you buy it? What do you do with their waste? Leave it, trash it, compost it, pay someone to pick it up? Plastic bags or biodegradable bags? Do you keep your home heated to keep them warm when you're gone? Do you take extra car trips to run them to doggie daycare? Do dress them in outfits? It's not really as cut and dry as it is with an SUV.
Cats are mentioned as being better on the environment on Kling's posting, but cats also have a whole host of environmental considerations around them. Many cat litters require strip mining. There are issues around toxoplasmosis getting in the water stream and harming wild animals. And the effect that outdoor cats have on birds is a huge source of contention.
Posted by: Jen (SLC) at Feb 11, 2008 4:08:19 PM
Spencer,
To compare the two you'd have to look at what the difference in gas consumption would be if no-SUVS were used. Its the difference between the two which would determine the effect of SUVS, unless you think people would quit driving altogether if they couldnt drive their hummer...
Posted by: A Good Man at Feb 11, 2008 4:14:22 PM
How can you take seriously someone who thinks that if you're "for" clean air, soil, water, and food, you're anti-industry?
Posted by: Old Tomorrow at Feb 11, 2008 4:35:38 PM
spencer,
I think your $34.4 billion is total expenditures on pets, including vet care, etc. See here.
Food expenditures were $16.8 billion, including dogs and cats. As for environmental impact, let's remember that much of what goes into pet food, such as various animal organs and so on, would otherwise be waste product from production of human food, so the marginal environmental effect is not so big. Of course it has to be hauled around, but the impact of that extar transportation can't come anywhere near the impact SUV's have compared with smaller vehicles.
I think Kling stepped in some dog externality.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Feb 11, 2008 5:31:49 PM
The externality of neighbors letting their dogs do there business on my lawn is certainly greater that $360 Billion a year.
Posted by: asiequana at Feb 11, 2008 6:03:59 PM
The externality of neighbors letting their dogs do there business on my lawn is certainly greater that $360 Billion a year.
You mean you wouldn't give permission in exchange for $359 billion?
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Feb 11, 2008 6:12:53 PM
I view the thought experiment as either "ban SUVs" or "ban dogs as pets," with both laws being adequately enforced. *Some* pet dogs are the ones having puppies. At a Stern-like discount rate I think Kling is right. There's lot of invective against him, and a variety of asymmetric assumptions ("spay your dog!" but not "don't drive your SUV!"), but no real answer to his challenge.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Feb 11, 2008 6:18:25 PM
no real answer to his challenge.
Huh? What challenge?
Kling makes a blind assertion and those who find it dubious are supposed to either dig around and come up with an analysis to disprove it or accept it? That's ridiculous. Kling offers nothing but conjecture. When he supports his argument it will be worth making an effort to refute it. Until then the answer, "that's absurd," is just as good, maybe better, than his "challenge."
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Feb 11, 2008 6:26:48 PM
"Huh? What challenge?"
Seconded. All there was a blind assertion, with no evidence provided whatsoever.
"spay your dog!" but not "don't drive your SUV!"
How are these at all functionally equivalent? Are you suggesting that a spayed dog loses all of its usefulness to the family? If so, Bob Barker would like to have a word with you.
Posted by: Mike Moffatt at Feb 11, 2008 6:31:37 PM
ASE: The problem comes, of course, in "valuing externalities". That's very difficult to do when we have such a wide range of even scientific opinions about the effects of, say, car exhaust and the production of metals on the overall environment, and where the wide range of opinions has such low confidence. (Of course, it could be done by fiat, but that rather ruins the economic value of the valuations as a source of information about the externalities...)
Bernard: I think Kling's entire point was that it's an interesting conjecture. I didn't read his post as making a challenge at all; more pointing out that people prefer to blame things that are unpopular and have obvious costs for ill effects, even when it's quite possible that lovable things that have fewer obvious costs could have more ill effects.
(Which of course assumes that either have a substantial ill effect on "the environment", but arguendum that's given.)
Old Tomorrow: Because in practice, that's what a lot of "environmentalists" are, to all appearances, from their own words and actions.
One need not be anti-industry to be for that list of Good Things, as it were, but people who are already anti-industry for whatever reason find the modern environmental movement a popular way of spreading their effective goal.
The semi-luddite anti-industrialist subset of environmentalists might not be large (I don't have the data to say, and perhaps no-one does), but they're quite vocal, and they definitely exist.
Posted by: Sigivald at Feb 11, 2008 7:12:44 PM
Using my made-up law that for commodities (SUVs, gasoline, dogs, and dog-food,) cost is approximately equal to total direct and indirect energy inputs, and energy input is pretty well correlated with environmental impact, the per annum environmental toll is about 10x for an SUV compared to a dog.
Posted by: gorobei at Feb 11, 2008 7:40:26 PM
