The pursuit of absolute integrity: How corruption control makes government ineffective

Abstract

Now fruits and vegetables are healthy foods, and diets rich in fruits and vegetables are strongly associated with less cancer. And organic produce is conspicuously more expensive than commercial produce (a point perhaps unimportant for well-off parents, but not so to lower income families). Is Wargo's book, then, indeed likely to promote better health for children? In the face of a 10,000 to 1 ratio of natural to man-made pesticides in our diet, it seems pretty unlikely that the overall pesticide intake of children exclusively eating organic produce could be in fact anything other than larger than that of children eating commercial produce. Wargo urges stringent additional constraints on man-made pesticides. But by ignoring the quantitative grounds for doubts about this, Wargo leaves it wholly unclear why we should suppose that the effect would be a net contribution to health. If this were the Journal of Good Intentions, Wargo's vigorously written but wholly one-sided argument would warrant a lot of sympathy. Even then, noticing that the book essentially ignores what appears to be a crucial count-erargument-a counter familiar to Wargo himself but unlikely to be familiar to most of his readers-might be deemed more than a quibble. But judged as policy analysis (not an unreasonable standard for a review in this journal) Wargo's book stands as an exemplar of how not to do it. It is surely not a small matter to see adverse arguments treated as if a kind of selective logical democracy is tolerable, so that weights can be ignored when convenient: one argument, one vote. Many unkind but not always unwarranted things have been asserted about the distortions that can come with zeal for quantitative cost-benefit analysis. Wargo's book, however, is inadvertently exemplary in showing why some serious quantitative balancing of costs and benefits is nevertheless indispensable.