Most Externalities Are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination

I find, as usual, that Maximum Progress is offering a hubristic take.

Yes, plastics now are superior to ivory for any purpose aside from signalling wealth. But guess what, that last purpose is enough that ivory poaching remains a perpetual problem and elephants would probably have been wiped out by now if not for the dedicated efforts of governments and non-profits to combat poaching and to lock down the ivory trade.

Yes, solar power is getting very cheap, but it's a little early to declare the carbon emissions externality solved. Fossil fuel companies are still investing in infrastructure (pipelines, refineries, etc) with multi-decade payback times, so I expect we'll still have a long time yet to wait. And carbon emissions are a problem with a deadline.

Aquaculture is a growing source of fish, but overfishing remains a major unsolved problem, and there are also concerns about aquaculture itself having negative impacts on wild fish populations.

The list of counterexamples at the end is a little light.

The Montreal Protocol is probably the most famous example: https://www.unep.org/ozonaction/who-we-are/about-montreal-pr...

And the German feed-in-tariffs helped renewables quite a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_Germany

Or the European emission standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards

They achieved their two goals of (1) minimizing the externality and (2) driving technology innovation.

It's not either-or. Coordination provides the market incentives that encourage the adoption or development of the technologies; technological development reduces the cost of compliance.

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381599