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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...

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They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics.

Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.

If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.

Coase did his most relevant work in the 1950s, and it wasn't as if he invented the idea of externalities. It was first given serious academic weight in the 1890s, and Pigou created the concept of externality correcting taxes in the 1920s. His work was important because it proposed a more market based solution than Pigouvian taxes.

I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.

There's a wide gap between "ignored" and "received the attention they deserved".

Externalities arguably haven’t received the attention they deserve outside of economics, but I would disagree; what are climate change discussions, if not a discussion about externalities? Hell, just about any global issue is, in part, about externalities.

Inside of economics, they have more than 130 years of work, and are taught in any intro class.

If your argument is that we are bad at correcting for them, then yes. But that is different than not considering them.

> what are climate change discussions, if not a discussion about externalities?

Climate change has been discussed for well over a half century, yet one of the main priorities of the current administration has been to hamstring renewable energy and promote coal and oil. I think it's pretty fair to say the issue is being ignored.

Carbon tax, plastic bag tax, etc. are from the learnings from economic externalities that is applied to climate policy. Other non climate externalities based policies are sugar tax, alcohol/cigarette/drug tax, education, healthcare, etc.

Ignored by the administration, not by economists. The administration is a political body and proved over and over they don’t care at all about economists opinion (see everything from this admin about tariffs and trade policy)

The gutter mud soaked knife-fight practice of economics and the erudite study of economics is one of the more jarring discontinuities between how we talk about how something works and how it actually does.

The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.

I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.

You means guys like William "3°C rise in global temperature would reduce global GDP by approximately 2.1%" Nordhaus?

No, the USA wasn't crippled by over-investment on climate action. Trade and tax and social policy are where the mercenary think-tank economists did the damage.

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