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> Caring about a negative externalities and advocating for them to be internalized is a lot more concrete and actionable and not something I think anybody really disagrees with on paper.

Nobody would let you write it down on paper. But a lot of corporations put a lot of money and effort into preventing this from happening. I believe almost all of our economic woes could be fixed with an economic approach that treated negative externalities as an expected and common case in a free market and actively pursued policies to mitigate them (as opposed to idolising the free part of "free markets" and treating regulation to fix externalities as a last resort).

> Nobody would let you write it down on paper.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, it's a regularly advocated for position at all levels.

> it's a regularly advocated for position at all levels.

The position that we shouldn't internalise negative externalities? Who is openly advocating for this?

Oh I see, sorry, I interpreted the exact opposite.

I thought that might be the case. No worries!

> it is unlikely that microplastics being used in say Denmark has the same environmental impact as microplastics being used in say Asia or Africa

Did you ever wonder why Asia and Africa are responsible for so much pollution ? I'm asking that because any amount of research will show you that first world countries are sending hundreds of tons of appliances, computers, smartphones, &c. per day over there for them to be "recycled", and by "recycled" I meant burned/melted in open air dumps. (And also because they're manufacturing all our shitty ultra short lived gadgets, cloths, &c.)

It's literally like throwing your shit on the neighbours lawn and blaming them. Actually it's even worse now that China told us to fuck off with our trash.

> Until recently, half of the collected plastic – especially low-grade plastic – was exported to China, but China has completely stopped its [used plastic] imports. Therefore the majority of plastic will likely end up burnt while just 15 percent will be recycled”

Are we talking about the future of Humanity or about "it's not my problem it didn't happen in the country I was born in" .... we're doomed. The world is a closed eco system so of fucking course the European plastic and the African plastic will eventually end up in your plate (especially if the Europen plastic is sent to Africa for "recycling")

https://www.thelocal.dk/20180910/danes-are-sorting-more-plas...

Well Asia and Africia also often lack proper garbage infastructures in many areas (they are kind of big continents) in addition to being poor enough to wind up regularly taking external trash.

> Did you ever wonder why Asia and Africa are responsible for so much pollution

I hate to parse words but the nuance is important. They are not responsible. Yes, they generate it. But the responsibility belongs to the source (i.e., countries up the economic / development food chain.)

This is why it persists: out of sight, out of mind. Nearly all the consumers in the source countries are oblivious to their contributions. Enlightening them would throttle the consumption-based economy. That's not good for profits.

That's because humans act on a country-scale. We need planetary scale to act reasonably on matters like that. Until then it's always cheaper to exploit poor countries rather than building proper waste recycling. And for some strange reason world government is not happening.

>> ... over there for them to be "recycled", and by "recycled" I meant burned/melted in open air dumps.

I thought the Basel convention covered this in some way. Larry Summers had (has?) a rather infamous opinion on this [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

> Caring about a negative externalities and advocating for them to be internalized is a lot more concrete and actionable

It's less concrete and actionable than you'd think, because measuring (and therefore identifying and internalizing) externalities requires utility assessments, and experienced utility is subjective and immeasurable and it's very, very easy for ones preferred outcome to influence one’s choice of utility estimator. (And even easier for it to lead you to find an excuse to dismiss someone else’s.)

> and not something I think anybody really disagrees with on paper.

I think the general opinion of both the Chicago and Austrian schools is that efforts to internalize externalities are generally a bad idea, and in the Austrian case specifically wrong on principal.

Public figures adhering to those viewpoints are likely to couch them in circumlocution outside of addresses to selected audiences because they are very large groups with which they are dealbreaker positions, but they aren't exactly obscure positions.

> I think the general opinion of both the Chicago and Austrian schools is that efforts to internalize externalities are generally a bad idea, and in the Austrian case specifically wrong on principal.

Why?

Why is it not a tragedy of the commons?

"The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action."

In this case, given that everyone else is going to use plastics, it is in my interest to use them too. But I would be better off (maybe) if noone used them. Does that not fit the definition?

The important bit is "by depleting or spoiling the shared resource".

Plastic is not a "shared resource". It's not at risk of depletion or "spoilage". It's obviously the opposite problem.

I think the example with the sheep makes it perfectly clear what the concept is and isn't.

Soil and oceans are shared resources, which we're (probably) spoiling by permeating them with countless minuscule bits of plastic.

Or maybe I don't properly understand what "spoil" means.

The spoil is by polluting shared natural resources that we depend on for quality of life. Such as clean water, clean air an functional eco system that provides enough oxygen, stable earth temperature.

What is the distinction between negative externality and tragedy of the commons. I had always figured the latter was an example of the former.

Tragedy of the commons is exhaustion of a shared renewable resource as everyone has the incentive to take now when they can and none to steward its growth. Negative externalities are a cost bared by people external to the activity. A common example would be pollution of air or water.

In that view, the air and water are on their way to exhaustion, but not exhausted. So perhaps tragedy of the commons could be viewed as an endpoint on the same process. It’s certainly caused by externalities. (Grazing has costs to others, who lose the ability to graze)

“The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.” It is definitely a Tragedy of the Commons at least according to the Wikipedia definition...

Seconded. Both concepts apply, as is very common.

Attempting to generalize: A tragedy of the commons is when everyone would be better off if everyone avoided an action which produces more negative externalities than captured value, but each one is individually better off if they take that action, so most do take it.

> applying a tax to people in Denmark won't result in the externality being internalized in Nigeria

What if Denmark imposes a tariff equal to the tax on imported plastic goods from any countries not implementing such a tax?

Nigeria doesn't export much plastic to Denmark, or to anywhere, really, so it has very little impact either way.

Nigeria can easily make the same argument for Denmark then nothing ever changes.

Well I mean they could but they would have to provide actual data (similar to what I cited) to back it up. Just because people can make absurd claims is not a good reason to entertain them.