Dinius’s First Index

Maturing social consciousness and concern with human well-being has resulted in attention being directed to the problem of pollution. As a result, many segmented studies of the sociologic aspects of pollution and pollution abatement programs exist, as do numerous broad philosophical papers that emphasize the need to develop pollution evaluation techniques. To the investigator’s knowledge, however, the concepts of social accounting have never been extended to.the development of an actual comprehensive reporting system that would be explicit and workable rather than general, and that would bring together and relate to each other within one framework the multitude of individual social cost studies. As pollution multiplies, and billion-dollar use and control programs result, the development of a social accounting system that would ultimately record the quality of the supply of natural resources at a given moment in a region must be begun. In addition changes,resulting either positively as a result of dollar outlay and social efforts to decrease pollution or negatively as a result of contaminating forces working to increase the pollution level, must be measured. Such a reporting and measurement system should (1) specifically in form the administration and the public of the quantity and location of pollution and (2) indicate the results of money and community effort expended for the control of natural resources. The system should also encompass more than monetary terms;indeed, society will no longer accept only this mode of accounting. Costs and benefits of pollution must also express concepts of human benefit and welfare.

An absence of effort to introduce data into a social economic accounting framework exists, probably because only now are we being forced to think and act in terms of our overall social economic well-being. Social quantification of costs has been attempted in very few instances,for example, by Ernst and Ernst with respect to urban improvement in Cleveland, Ohio[Smith, 1966], by Touche, Ross, Bailey and Smart with respect to the Detroit, Michigan, waron poverty [Beyer, 1969], and by Price Water house with respect to the Philadelphia school system [Rappaport, 1968]. A system of index numbers to evaluate levels of pollution was introduced by Horton [196.6], but no attempt was made to extend the technique to a complete accounting system.

This paper reports the design of a rudimentary social accounting system. The approach has required first the actual physical measurement of important polluting substances in the water in terms of the usual measuring unit of each substance.Second, the quantity of each of the sevarious substances present in the water has been converted into one broad quality unit; the conversion involved the use of a standardized rating scale, which was developed to express the relationship between the existence of various polluting substances in the water and the degree of distress that each separate polluting substance caused to various classes of water users. This system could be put into immediate use,possibly on an experimental basis, in measuring water pollution in the specific area of Alabama; only minor changes in the current data-gathering equipment would be required. The system was tailored to a definite area and a specific type of pollution to demonstrate the actual methodology of bringing water quality data together within one unifying measuring and evaluating system. The framework and basic concepts of the system ‘could, however, be adapted to the measurement and evaluation of all types of pollution. A new group of polluting factors would need to be employed, and the rating scale restructured, but the plan itself should have wide application.
This particular system is only a beginning,and this paper is intended more to demonstrate possible measuring and evaluation techniques than to pretend to be the presentation of a finished system. However, inherent in a system of accounting for water quality are the objectives of producing water pollution information in a form easily understandable by the general public, and in a form allowing ready comparisons between levels of water pollution in different areas. Such a system, even when it becomes more refined than the present one, must be a total system, must be simple, and must be in terms of one universal unit. This investigator feels that the literature today contains too many segmented statements based on a complex array of standards;as a result, the statements tend to be subjective they lack comparability and they confuse the significance of the varying standards. Similar standards and one universal unit must be used in all areas so that the general public in each community can familiarize themselves with these standards and terms and appraise their own pollution problems. Like any accounting system, therefore, this system must give up perfection for pragmatism; it must use standards that reflect the preferences of the greatest number of people rather than each individual, and it must use information that can be easily and universally attained. Once a total system is set up as a controlling framework, supplementary refinements can be added to answer special needs, individual problems, and assess pollution damage.

Hopefully the described evaluating and system at sizing techniques may lay the groundwork for the development of a simple universal social accounting system out of which may grow a system so refined and so perfected that the government and the public will have the means to recognize, assess and thereby use their dollars and their time most effectively to control all classes of pollution