The Kuznets effect is documented in every major environmental area. Err aff—you should overcorrect for negativity biases.
Pooley and Tupy, 22—associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii; senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity (Gale and Marian, “The enemies of progress from the Romantics to the extreme environmentalists,” Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Chapter 10, 434-435, dml)
On the other hand, all humans suffer from a number of negativity biases, which we discussed in Chapter 1. These biases tend to make us underestimate or filter out that which is good, while focusing a disproportionate amount of our attention on that which is bad. The universality of these psychological traits may help to explain why respondents who enjoy a much better quality of the environment perceive the state of the planet in ways that are fairly similar to respondents suffering from a much worse quality of the environment. Unfortunately, our negativity biases also make us underappreciate or ignore the real progress that humans have made in tackling environmental problems in the past. Furthermore, they militate against an attitude of rational optimism about our ability to solve environmental problems in the future. It is in this context that the role of improving standards of living cannot be overemphasized.
Economists have long suspected that there is a link between increasing prosperity and heightened concerns for the environment. According to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), a hypothesis with a large following in the field of economics, the environment worsens in tandem with economic growth until a certain income per person is reached. At that point, resources start flowing toward environmental protection, and the ecosystem is restored.74
As such, a 2006 paper found that “among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per person gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change.”75 Put differently, societies with per capita incomes above $6,200 (in 2019 dollars) either stopped deforestation or experienced afforestation (a development of new forests). Similar EKC effects have been observed with regard to water and air pollution, as well as emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and other environmental hazards.