Pollution is a big deal

from Healthcare Economist at http://bit.ly/2OmT28E on November 27, 2019 at 06:33AM

You may know that pollution is bad for your health, but how bad is it? Patrick Collison has a nice blog post summarizing the evidence.

• Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days.  – Künn et al 2019.
• An increase in pollution is associated with increased risk of Alzheimers (Fu et al 2019) and dementia (Bishop et al 2018)
• Increased pollution is associated with increased cognitive aging. –  Weuve et al 2013.
• Stock market returns are lower on polluted days. – Hayes et al 2016.
• Baseball umpires make worse decisions on polluted days. – Archsmith et al 2018.
• Politicians use less complex speech on polluted days. – Heyes et al 2019.

Wired also has an interesting article on the cognitive impacts of pollution in China.

In short, if we are a society that values innovation and improved cognitive functioning, we need to insure our air and water remains clean and pollution levels fall over time.