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.
