Once upon a time, long ago, I actually remember seeing this editorial in the Seattle Times (“Why GOP Hate Science, and Dems Hate Economics“). Funny editorial and themes, considering it was written in 1996. A bit prescient? I’m not sure what’s more remarkable, that I remember this specific passage of the editorial … or that it’s freely archived online. The passage:
Most of the same Republicans support HB 2381, which would ban fluoridation of public water systems. Never mind that scientists say fluoride reduces tooth decay for millions of American kids. Call it the Dentists’ Full Employment Act.
Maybe that’s pretty memorable after all. But is it editorial hyperbole and rhetoric? Now, some 13 years later, we might have the answer!
Katherine Ho and Matt Neidell have a new NBER Working Paper that just came out in which they find an answer. Check out the abstract:
In this paper we consider how the dental industry responded to the addition of fluoride to public drinking water. We take advantage of the staggered introduction of fluoridation throughout the country to analyze the changes in numbers of within-county dentists relative to physicians in the years surrounding the change in fluoridation status. We find a significant decrease in the number of dental establishments and an even larger reduction in the number of employees per firm following fluoridation. We also find that fluoridation in neighboring markets was associated with an increase in own-market dental supply, suggesting that dentists responded to the demand shock by moving from fluoridated areas to close-by markets. Further analysis suggests that some dentists may have retrained as specialists rather than moving geographically. Our estimates imply that the 8 percentage point change in exposure to water fluoridation from 1974 to 1992 may have led to the loss of as many as 0.6 percent of dental establishments and 2.1 percent of dental employees, suggesting a substantial net impact of this public good on the dental profession since its inception.
It looks like banning fluoridation of water would indeed do wonders for dentists’ employment! Intuition backed by empirics — excellent.
Given the entertaining discussion at the Env-Econ blog about how “green jobs” are a bogus argument in favor of environmental policy, research like this makes me wonder. Is fluoridating water actually polluting it? The answer probably depends (in part) on whether you define pollution as contaminating the natural with the artificial or you define it as an externality. Suppose that it is polluting the water, in which case we can see a fine example of pollution causing loss in employment.
From the authors’ vantage, on the other hand, the fluoridation creates a public good or, put casually, improves the environment. This could be a fun example of cleaning things up and improving the environment leading to less, not more, jobs. There are loads of jobs out there whose essential task is to clean things up, make us whole, or patch us up after the world wears and tears on us. A nice technological fix (fluoridation) can substitute for all sorts of jobs. I’d also imagine that if you took the sugar out of my drink, more than a few dentists would have to trade in their sportscars for something mundane. If you took the carcinogens out of our food and our environment, we’d probably put a hurt on the healthcare industry, too. It’s useful to recognize that there are entire sectors of the economy that exist to compensate for an imperfect environment. Perfecting it will have consequences (most of them good!).
Ho, Katherine and Neidell, Matthew,Equilibrium Effects of Public Goods: The Impact of Community Water Fluoridation on Dentists(Junr 2009). NBER Working Paper No. w15056. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1415218
