[3][5] Lave went on to publish books and papers on many other environmental issues, including toxic chemicals, soil carbon, and electric cars, and studied methodological tools such as cost-benefit and risk analysis.
[2] Lave was born in Philadelphia in 1939, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in economics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1960, where he studied with economists Carl Stevens, Arthur Leigh, and George Hay.
While studying for a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, which he earned in 1963, he decided to dedicate his career to working on significant problems that would make a real difference to people's lives.
[8] In 1970, Lave and his student Eugene Seskin gained international prominence with the publication of an article in Science linking urban air pollution to higher mortality.
In a 1981 paper published by the Brookings Institution, Lave and Gilbert S. Omenn argued that much of the apparent progress in cleaning the air could be attributed to mediocre economic performance and the gradual switch from coal to relatively cleaner fuels like oil and natural gas.
[12][13] A major methodological problem with Lave and Seskin's research was its reliance on cross-sectional data (based on statistical observations of a large number of essentially anonymous people at single points in time).
[14] The association between urban air pollution and mortality was effectively settled with the publication of the Harvard Six Cities cohort study in 1993, which cited Lave and Seskin's paper in its very first sentence,[15] and its numerous follow-ups.
[2][4] Although Lave was "among the most accomplished practitioners" of cost-benefit analysis, he gradually came to question its value in making socially and politically contentious decisions,[17][18] notably in a scathing 1996 paper,[4] in which he wrote: "The foundation of benefit-cost analysis is flawed: the tool cannot provide what some economists claim... With the exception of economists who are utilitarians or unwitting utilitarians, there is general agreement that the option identified as having the largest net benefit does not have a strong claim to being the best social choice".