Comment by timmmmmmay
4 hours ago
Every time I see somebody make an argument about "externalities" it's never actually backed up with any fact-based analysis about the magnitude of them. It's always exclusively vibes-based, "this thing you like is too cheap, it should be prohibitively expensive to make up for the thing I just thought of"
How do you expect people to discuss them across the scale of a whole economy without giant spreadsheets? Externalities are a well understood economic concept whose study goes back a century.
https://www.acton.org/node/6427
I'm not saying externalities don't exist, I'm saying that basically every time somebody makes an argument relying on the concept, there's no attempt to quantify the externalized cost, it's just a vibe. Just go upthread, the argument is just "the stuff you're buying is crap that I don't think you really need, therefore it should be more expensive, however much more it takes for you to stop buying it".
The economic concept implies that we're going to have an evidence-based discussion about how we're tracking specific dollar cost amounts of pollution or something, and then in practice that essentially never happens and it's just "I've decided you don't really need that thing you want"