By: Salik Mehboob
Published By: ANI News Agency
There is a peculiar kind of kindness in neighbourhood that lits fire that protects domestic animals from mosquitoes or flies, cleans the street's rubbish and generously delivers its smoke into the lungs of innocent families. Now neighbours have discovered a remarkable formula for public service to improve own surroundings while making others life unbearable.
When mosquitoes threaten their livestock, they light fires to drive the insects away. When rubbish accumulates in the street, they gather it into a pile and burn it in the noble pursuit of cleanliness. Their animals receive protection and their street appears tidier and for them consciences perhaps enjoy a peaceful evening. Meanwhile, the smoke travels through the air that crosses the invisible boundaries of property and enters others houses that consequently settles into the lungs of others family members and innocent children.
Can anyone imagine how much wonderful economical formula it is?
In the language of Economics, this is called a negative externality; a cost imposed on a third party who is not responsible for the activity generating it. Neighbours receive private benefits of protecting their livestock and disposing of rubbish but a third family bears part of the social cost in the form of polluted air, discomfort and potential harm to their health. The smoke is theirs while its consequences become others.
If Economics had a sense of humour then it might call this formula an ingenious system of cost management. Why invest in safer methods of mosquito control or proper waste disposal when the neighbourhood air or lungs can serve as a free dumping ground?
Yet the joke becomes painfully unfunny when the smoke enters a home where children and other family members are trying to breathe. What looks like a small, convenient fire outside ones house may become a serious nuisance inside another.
This is precisely where private interest collides with social welfare. The benefits of an activity remain concentrated in one household while its costs spill across the neighbourhood. The decision-maker calculates the cost of firewood, time or effort but overlooks the invisible price paid by others. In terms of Economics social private cost is lower than the true social cost. In human terms somebody else is paying for a decision that he never made.
Surely cleanliness is a virtue but burning rubbish and sending its smoke into neighbouring homes is a strange interpretation of this word. Moving waste from the street into the atmosphere does not make it disappear but it merely changes its location and distributes its consequences. The street may look cleaner but the air becomes dirtier. Actually it is not the elimination of pollution but it is just the relocation of responsibility.
I do not argue that livestock should be left vulnerable to mosquitoes or that streets should remain littered. These are legitimate concerns deserving practical solutions. The problem is not the desire to protect animals or maintain cleanliness. The problem is the assumption that one's own convenience matters more than another family's health.
A decent society requires more than good intentions. It requires an awareness that our actions do not end at the boundaries of our homes. The air we share makes neighbours participants in one another's lives whether they acknowledge this responsibility or not.
Perhaps neighbours believe they are solving problems but economically they are transferring costs and morally they are overlooking the people who bear them.
So I remain grateful for their extraordinary commitment to livestock, welfare and street cleanliness. I would be even more grateful if my family did not have to sacrifice its clean air to finance these noble projects.
After all, true cleanliness should not require someone else's lungs as its dustbin and true prosperity should not be built on costs imposed upon innocent neighbours.
