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Comment by throwawaywindev | Hacker News Reader

It’s an economic problem that boils down to not putting a high enough price on negative externalities.

The idea that a regulator can pre-run the economic actors to price in all known and unknown negative externalities before transactions occur is disingenuous. Competitively breeding an evolving species of ever more creative amoral actors seeking to concentrate benefits and externalize negatives and then somehow hoping you can contain them is madness. In an environment were the 'guards' can and frequently do swap places with the inmates it is beyond madness.

Furthermore, even if that were true there is nothing to stop a malevolent actor, either deliberate, by ignorance, or by lack of better alternatives, to just eat the cost.

Yes perfect regulation is impossible and yes it's an arms race but it's one we have to keep fighting. The alternative (less regulation) is far worse. We've tried that.

Just to be clear: I was not at all advocating less regulation.

Agreed. This is a major problem in the energy sector as well. I regularly hear "oil and gas are cheap energy compared to the alternatives" but they're really not. They're just punting the real costs down a generation or two.

Plus why in the heck do we have fossil fuels being subsidised? That always felt absurd to me, at least these days

Almost all of what are called subsidies for oil and gas (can’t speak for coal), at least in North America, are just the fact that we don’t price in externalities. There are a few token non-operational subsidies that oil companies enjoy, but they are orders of magnitude smaller than the taxes we apply to oil and gas at multiple levels of production, distribution, and sale.

Oil and gas, if you ignore global warming, really is very, very cheap.

That in turn boils down to a reluctance people have to acknowledging the magnitude of an externality of they are the ones imposing it on others, or even its existence.

It's particularly severe when it's up to an MBA running a company, but an engineering education only goes so far in mitigating that tendency: the Koch brothers majored in chemical engineering at MIT. A major component of their education was all about externalities. And yet they've devoted their political activism to nurturing anti-intellectualism in the Republican party specifically so that the GOP would deny any and all externalities.

the 11000 lawsuits against Monsanto are the high price of the negative externalities. the article is about them attempting to game the political process to neutralize that.

I'd say it's a regulatory problem. Any kind of innovation that can be applied to massive scale, like pesticides, mobile phones, cars, computers etc. should be tested for decades if not more before it is allowed to disturb the society.

No one does any risk analysis and the short-term upside makes the long-term downside invisible.

No one knew how problematic pesticides can get. We are just now discovering the effects.

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