Steve Forbes points out that government subsidies in the housing market weren’t needed for Canadians to become home owners:

“The Bush Administration botched an opportunity in 2008 to put these entities in receivership, with the idea of either liquidating or privatizing them. A winding down of Fannie and Freddie would have led to a birth of new players, well-capitalized and ready and willing to buy, package and sell home mortgages–and subject to failure.

The Obama Administration won’t formally nationalize the current Fannie and Freddie because that would swell the official budget deficit. And it certainly won’t countenance the idea of privatizing them. That will have to wait until we have a Republican President. Fortunately, this individual will have a Congress with enough new members who won’t have been corrupted by Fannie and Freddie the way previous occupants on Capitol Hill were. Certainly public opinion will back privatization. In fact, the two companies should be recapitalized, broken up into at least a half-dozen entities and sent out into the real world, with no ties to Washington.

Studies have conclusively shown that Fannie and Freddie did virtually nothing to boost home ownership. Canada, for instance, has almost none of the props for housing that the U.S. has had, yet the proportion of its population owning homes wasn’t much different from that of the U.S. before the bubble.”

The article then ranges widely, moving from Michael Crichton (best-known, outside his fiction, for his skepticism about anthropogenic global warming) to the ban on DDT, which Forbes blames for a resurgence in malaria world-wide:

“Not only is malaria on the rise because we won’t use DDT to kill mosquitoes but so are other insect-borne diseases, such as dengue fever. “

My Comment:

On the GSE’s I agree with Forbes. But not on DDT, where his argument is one that activists in the field hotly rebut. Water-borne diseases, especially, are largely a product of poor sanitation.  And filthy water, they say, is also to blame for the return of malaria.

Forbes then makes the argument that DDT, properly used, doesn’t have the  bad effects attributed to it by Rachel Carson, in her seminal book, “Silent Spring.”

The operative word here is “properly used.”

(You could, after all, say as much about Credit Default Swaps. Properly used, they aren’t harmful either).

Anything can be “improperly used.” So where do you draw the line? What’s the proper use of DDT?

Experts say it should be confined to dusting the insides of homes, instead of the large-scale crop-dusting that had a toxic effect on the environment earlier. That sounds fairly reasonable, if the DDT is used along with more sustainable, local practices – draining and cleaning stagnant water and sewers, and, most important of all, improving public hygiene. Without that, chemicals are pointless in the long term.

More than half of India (to take an example) lacks access to toilets and defecates in public. Surely that fact, as well as the problem of wet waste, takes precedence in any discussion of health. That means the root of most diseases in India, including malaria, is poverty and bad habits, the solution to which really isn’t DDT, but economic development and cultural reform.

I did a piece on this called, “Cleaning House” (Alternet, Feb 5, 2004), where I discussed the phenomenon of Not In My Back Yard that prevents community best practices from being implemented on a larger scale.

“When I walk over to my nephew’s house, only a mile and a half away in a rural campus, my journey has a Victorian arduousness to it. I have to pick my way gingerly through the dusty path cutting across the field, alert for dozing vipers, lantana thorns, cantankerous goats tethered to the bushes, and random puddings of animal and human excreta. At first, it is a mystery where these come from because the villages are a good bit away. But distance does not dim the force of the NIMBY (not in my backyard) sentiment, which until recent years has been the motto of Indian civic life.”

Beyond poverty and flawed culture (and often driving them), there’s also the government.

The filth in public spaces is one of the tragedies of the commons. When everyone owns something, no one cares for it. That’s the fate of public space in India, socialist since independence in 1947, with a bureaucracy fattened by years of being a poster-child for poverty on the international aid circuit.

At least in the cases of Africa and Asia, then, the social and political context is absolutely crucial in arguments about economic liberty and technology. And the perspective from the ground, in the case of malaria and other tropical diseases, suggests a different kind of technology from bio-tech, one in which regulation isn’t much of an issue at all.

Jason Gale, Bloomberg, May 2007:

“Nair says modern sewers aren’t the answer for India. The country can’t afford to waste water by flushing it down a latrine. Instead, she’s encouraging airplane-style commodes that are vacuum cleared or toilets that are attached to contained pits rather than systems that pipe the effluent miles away for treatment. In Nair’s world, recycling human excrement for use as fertilizer is preferable.

“We need to invent our own devices which are cost- effective, environmentally sustainable and go with our people,” she says. “We cannot afford the things which are simply things that some civil engineer learned somewhere.”

Converting excreta that have been properly dried for 6-24 months into plant food uses less water than traditional sewage systems and is less likely to pollute waterways, Payden says.

Bartram says composted sewage that’s been handled correctly can be used in agriculture and for other beneficial purposes with negligible risk to human health. The challenge is to sanitize it so that disease-carrying organisms are eliminated.”

If cleaning the streets is more important than spraying DDT, in long-term control of malaria in India, then we’ve by-passed the regulatory problems associated with the chemical altogether.

In this case, as in others, activities that have a direct effect on the eco-system or the human organism (DDT) and activities that don’t (housing subsidies) can’t really be yoked together in analysis without problems. I tend to think that using the same model of reasoning for both, then, doesn’t yield correct answers, because it’s a function of a certain degree of ideological fundamentalism or literalism.

Everything is always a matter of interpretation.

Update:

In much the same way, I’d argue that the corrupt culture in Wall Street has to change before bans on this or that financial instrument are considered (that is, if one were to even concede that bans were necessary). Which is why the market-reform movement and the prosecution of crime come first, before changes in regulation.

Update:

The government of India’s rather optimistic schedule is to achieve its sanitation goals by 2010 and it’s using economic incentives to get there. ($48 for each installed toilet in Haryana).* It isn’t likely to get there that fast, but the program does suggest one area in which you can invest confidently – sanitation technology.

*I’m not endorsing this or any other government program, I’m merely noting it.