Comment by sbuttgereit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbuttgereit | Hacker News Reader

OK... naturally this is a political discussion; but I find the politics of this interesting and maybe even amusing. I don't live in DC and at don't really have a horse in this race but I sense a contradiction.

I think many would consider Washington D.C. to be governed solidly by American progressives. While the rationale for this law fits solidly within their views on egalitarianism, I wonder why no one is discussing another proclaimed progressive area of concern environmental impact and climate?

I have to think in this case cash must be significantly environmentally more impactful than the electronic payments. Cash requires a surprising amount of raw materials to produce, not all of which I expect to be environmentally friendly. Cash requires specialized transport, not just of the actual cash to and fro, but also of those raw materials. Sure electronic payments require power to operate, but I assure you hard cash is just as counted electronically as electronic payments. Disposal of used cash I expect to have its own unique environmental impacts.

In essence making each unit of currency physically real rather than electronic would seem to have unaccounted for negative externalities, something my more progressive friends go on and on about when convenient, which I don't even see getting lip service in relation to this law. Or maybe in the eyes of the progressive establishment enacting these laws climate just isn't nearly so important as equity/social justice?

Again, not my fight, and I think the vast majority of "negative externality" arguments are made for rhetorical points rather than referring to some well considered analysis not to be ignored... but I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate given how those issues are typically couched.

I've generally noticed, when I think "why haven't they thought of X" - they have, and I'm not paying attention.

> unaccounted for negative externalities

The scale of these is uncertain, as are countervailing externalities. Looks like someone wrote a paper on it in the UK and came to the conclusion that it's not clear which is worse (i.e., the externalities either way aren't big/clear enough to matter) [1]

> I would be curious to understand how progressives decide which priorities are of greater urgency than environment and climate

I don't think progressives think this way, rank ordering a hierarchy of preferences (to their credit and detriment, at different times). I think it tends to be more "we noticed [problem X] in [Community Y] - let's solve it!" leading to an amalgam of policies.

[1] https://www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/field/document/Iss...

Yes. They are uncertain, though I would contend that the vast majority of times that "negative externalities" come up in political argumentation that there's a certain disingenuousness about the reasoning: usually what counts as "negative" is presumed in such cases even though what is really counted as a negative or not is itself ambiguous. Ultimately the complexity of the subjects discussed most frequently leave so many variables on the table that such discussions seem, at least to me, silly and only serve the speaker's desire to rationalize their position. I do find that the discussion of "negative externalities" is really always from the progressive point of view: the phrase sounds intellectual and progressives tend to like that more than conservatives... modern conservatives have long ago abandoned the Buckley-esque pretentions of erudition and embrace simple in-your-face ignorance as more palatable.

This might not be clear... but I very much liked your response. I skimmed the report that you linked. I think they may have missed something in their analysis. I might be reading it wrong, but I think they've underplayed the transport of physical cash. They do mention it, but I didn't see it really discussed very thoroughly and daily transport of cash in the normal course of business is where I would think the greatest efficiency variances would be found. I kinda got the sense the transport they were talking about was between the mint and the banks and the banks and the mint: essentially the cost of transport to the government itself and not more broadly across the economy. That's not unreasonable for the report if they were trying to figure out the difference from their own perspective rather than the broader economy. However, there's significant transport for businesses that trade with cash. The first ~15 years of my career was spent in the corporate management of a few retail chains and providing professional services to others. Cash management was resource intensive relative to electronic payment processing. In one chain I worked in, armored trucks would do cash pickups from each of our stores daily (and sometimes more) and in many locations we had to have extra security staff to escort cash off the retail floor and watch the cash office (which means more people to transport, etc), not to mention other specialized equipment for dealing with cash (counters, etc). All of the chains I was involved in had some variance of this... at least the trucks showing up.

What about electronic negative environmental externalities? It requires a while network of internet (backbones, cables, satellites, telecoms) and constant electricity generation to feed it, creation of credit cards, etc.

This all seems to have a significantly greater effect than the creation of a new physical bill that lasts 6-10 years.

The communications equipment is obviously already there, and not going anywhere due to the utility of the internet. The externality of using the communication equipment for payments is negligible.

This feels much more like a rationalization rather than a thought out argument. Let's pause to think about this.

- Cash and electronic payments both are accounted for in pretty much the same way; there are some differences when you zoom in enough, but in terms of energy consumption not materially different: both are accounted for using computers and the same mechanisms are used in communicating results.

- Electronic payment mechanisms use electronic terminals to collect payment, but cash (mid-20 century onward) uses electrically driven devices such as cash drawers or data entry terminals to track. We won't get into retail cash office details too much other than to say that for our purposes cash is either break-even in terms of energy consumption vs. pure electronic payment (though really cash is probably at a slight disadvantage since there other devices are often at play).

-- Transfers of capital between banks and banks, and banks and reserve banks, are typically all electronic, though cash will need additional transport steps which will consume additional energy to the mere communication of transactions which all payment types require. We still could consider this break-even.

-- Bank to retailer and retailer to bank conveyances are where I expect electronic payments to dominate in the energy efficiency contest. Retailers need to carry a minimum cash on hand for making change in transactions (we'll mostly ignore crime related externalities for this discussion). When the retailer falls below their minimum cash on hand, they need to have cash physically delivered. Retailers also, because of crime issues, need to clear the excess cash out of the store quickly as well, another physical transfer. This often means big abnormally heavy trucks prowling around city streets; in fact you might draw some inverse relationship to the energy efficiency of the transport mode to the suitability of its use in transferring cash. But remember that any physical transfer of tangible cash is also backed by an electronic transaction accounting for the transfer.

And I think that last point hits the biggest error in your reply. Cash transactions may supplant some electronic transactions, but do so with physical movements which also consume energy... and unless your prepared to say moving a kilobyte or two across town over a wire is less efficient than moving that same cash across town in a big truck my guess is you might agree that electronic payments will tend to be more energy efficient... and remember even with the physical move you probably don't save the electronic transaction anyway because of accounting needs: you just change its nature.

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