The Silence of the Bugs

Pain. Pain on the personally detectable level, and someone they trust to explain to them why they’re hurting. As it stands now few people feel that pain, and if they do, there are legions of smug pricks telling them tall tales about the cause. If the Arab “Spring” and subsequent crises had been clearly and accurately framed as an environmental issue first, people would be freaking out. Instead it’s gotten every kind of spin short of the reality of drought leading to skyrocketing food costs in depressed economies.

It is fairly easy to see this and some portion of people see it immediately. Unfortunately, another who profit from these things ask "what does it take for people not to see and stop these things?" and the answer is fairly visible in the way global warming has been [not] addressed.

While I agree in general, in this particular case, technology and markets today are trying to get more people onto less land and in arrangements that require less energy. Current public policy is holding it back.

I'm talking about money and finance.

It is supposed to be a tool to help allocate resources efficiently. That means the final outcome was/is supposed to be the real world outcome of where resources end up being used and what for.

However, in nearly all discussions the tool, money, is treated as if it IS the final outcome. If the real world outcome is bad it's never the tool (we used the wrong tool), it always is the real world that has to adapt to the tool instead! For example, now matter how at least modern countries clearly have more than enough food, if we have an outcome of not enough food for a lot of people it's never a question of if we are using the wrong tool, or misusing it.

Also, no matter how complex the issue, finance experts can talk about and solve everything! All discussions, whether it's housing or cancer research, are about where to get money from and how to deploy it. And then the problem magically solves itself. It has worked for all the nice and pretty economic text book examples, so we conclude it works everywhere, all the time. Plus, if we talk about finance, we have beautiful numbers!! We can use math! We can be accurate and precise! If we talked about the real world phenomenon instead we would have a mess, no or few or hard to interpret numbers. The joke about the guy looking for his car keys under the street light is about far far more than about a few poignant examples, it's how humans think much of the time, avoiding uncertainty even if that means leaving the actual problem space, and solve another, less uncertain problem instead.

What does that have to do with the parent comment?

Since we avoid the real world real world outcomes don't matter as much unless they can be measured immediately and easily. Instead, since "money" exists entirely in the human mind space, it's all about perception. Why make a quality product if you know most people won't notice? Or, e.g. because of lemon market stuff, information asymmetry, are unwilling to pay for it? Marketing, PR, but also accounting - manage human perceptions, a much more certain endeavor than dealing with the mess and complexity of the real world. We get more marketing, advertising and PR because managing perceptions of buyers/spenders is far more efficient in a money-based system than the much higher effort of finding out what's going on in the actual world, which also is only very loosely coupled to buying decisions.

Given that even at the very best of times "money" only represents a fraction of knowledge about the real world, if you manage by managing "money" you miss out on a lot. There are many people who have detail knowledge in their space - but they cannot use it! Because finance does not include their knowledge. If you know there is a problem with a product, but the rest of the world doesn't, or it's way too uncertain and long-term to price it in, than nothing is done.

The argument that long(er-term the market will price it in is moot - long-term the investors already got their ROI and don't care. Besides, many problems like the one this thread is about are not priced in even now that most people are aware of it, because how would that even work?

I think people have waaaayyyyyy too little freedom to make decisions based on what they know these days. We have to optimize for an artificial construct that leaves out huge amounts of information actually present in billions of distributed minds.

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Here is a challenge:

For any larger problem such as this one, from poor people to health, try to ignore "money" while exploring it in your mind. Ignore finance, money- completely and utterly. Only think in terms of the real world stuff. "Resources" in terms of doctors, nurses, education to create them - all real stuff. Leave out "money" and "finance" from your thoughts completely. Just as an experiment. It is harder than you may think, we are soooo conditioned to not do that, to always think within this artificial mental system. In economics, everything is measured in "money" and we take that for granted.

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Somebody mentioned "tragedy of the commons". Another model - which I think falls far short. Looking at myself and at other people I know and have met, we could and would be willing to watch out for "humanity" in our actions. But often we can't. For example, if someone at a drug maker decides that while the drug is okay for its original use the billions they made the last decade were due to more and more misuse of that drug, what happens if they do the right thing and scale it all back? So that they voluntarily sell only a hundred million of that drug, when they could sell billions. Could they? Individually you might be tempted to say they could but humans are selfish and that's the reason they don't. I would like to point out that, looking at countless examples from open source software to volunteering to research of what is important to people (when basic needs are met) that's not true, but that our system creates that outcome. Any company that does that is out-competed by those who don't, by those who maximize the profits. So even if "doing the right thing" happens, in the larger picture it will soon be overtaken. The "tragedy of the commons" now doesn't have only the original "people are selfish by nature" element that of course is true, I'd say it also has a huge element that we added by a system that maximizes some things and punishes others, and thinking of the "global good" certainly is not part of what it maximizes.

I'd love to support biodiversity, but i've got a wife that hates bugs and space on my balcony comes at a premium... would be much more sensible to create a muddy pond somewhere outside of the city.

Maybe for anything to get done there has to be some immediate economic benefit to the person doing the preservation. But at this point I'm not sure what that would be, or who would fund it.