But the assumptions in many of them were made a long time ago and don't necessarily apply anymore. In the case of air pollution for example, there probably exists a price that could be paid to significantly reduce it and improve the overall health of everyone.

The issue is that the price is paid by a set of people who are different from the people who benefit from this.

And the people who benefit are the ones in power, whereas the ones who suffer are the ones without power.

So the trade offs are largely not accepted because they are acceptable to society at large, but because the people who have the power to make the decisions are insulated from it.

In the US wealth is a decent proxy for power, so this claim can actually easily be quantified.

Simply draw maps correlating the wealth of a neighborhood with the adverse effect being discussed. Whether it’s air pollution levels, or it’s deaths due to car accidents, or mercury in water, or lead in walls, it will invariably be the case the problem correlated strongly with the wealth of the area.

I don’t disagree. But we seem to be bad at re-evaluating old decisions (definitely in my case), and it doesn’t help when politics is basically a team sport in the US.

I didn't know that "killed by bandits" was a standard in medieval trade logs! Is there a book or article you could happen to recommend to learn more about that?

I was not being literal, though I’m fairly sure I’m right for some not-too-loose definition of the term.

Inspiration did come from The Narrow Corridor[1], which has a good history of the building of state capacity in Europe, and how it affected trade. In particular, cost falls, which is one way “attacked and/or killed by bandits” could be proxied. Another thing that drives down cost is reducing the number of tolls along the road, as discussed in this paper:

https://mason.gmu.edu/~mkoyama2/About_files/StateCapacitySur...

So again, while I don’t think that it’s a stretch to assume traders who had to cross dangerous territories accounted for the dangers, I don’t have a direct source. :-)

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555400/the-narrow-c...

Great thanks for the references!