Why is the marginal benefit of cleaning up pollution downward-sloping?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: Why is the marginal benefit of cleaning up pollution downward-sloping?

Option 1: Cleaning up pollution continues to cost the citizens in the area more and more.
This option talks about increasing costs to taxpayers or residents, which describes the marginal cost rather than the marginal benefit. The question focuses on benefits, so this misattributes the concept of downward-sloping MB to costs rather than benefits. It's a mismatch between what marginal benefit measures and what the statement claims.

Option 2: At first cleaning pollution makes a big difference but there are diminishing marginal returns for subsequent efforts.
This option aligns with the standard intuition in environmental economics: the initial cleanup yields large improvements in welfare or health, while further cleanups yield progressively smaller incremental benefits as the most harmful pollutants are removed first. This captures the idea of a downward-sloping marginal benefit curve due to diminishing marginal returns.

Option 3: The benefit can only be seen if you clean large amounts of pollution so there is little marginal benefit otherwise.
This suggests benefits are only observable at large scales and implies a near-zero or undefined marginal benefit at small cleanups, which contradicts the typical notion of diminishing marginal benefits accumulating as you reduce pollution step by step. It misstates how marginal benefits are observed across incremental cleanup efforts.

Option 4: At first you see small effects to cleaning but then see larger differences because of diminishing marginal returns.
This option reverses the typical pattern. Diminishing marginal returns imply that later cleanups yield smaller, not larger, incremental benefits. Describing initial small effects followed by larger effects contradicts the standard downward-sloping marginal benefit idea and would imply increasing rather than diminishing marginal benefits.

In summary, evaluating how marginal benefits typically behave when pollution is cleaned: the strongest gains occur early, and additional cleanup yields progressively smaller gains due to diminishing marginal returns. This makes Option 2 the accurate description of downward-sloping marginal benefits, while the other options either misstate the concept or reverse the expected pattern.

Why is the marginal benefit of cleaning up pollution downward-sloping?

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