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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

You're replying to a comment that proposes a market-based solution. Shipping has externalities. Those externalities should be included in the cost of shipping. Then the market will make the right decision.

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Every time I see somebody make an argument about "externalities" it's never actually backed up with any fact-based analysis about the magnitude of them. It's always exclusively vibes-based, "this thing you like is too cheap, it should be prohibitively expensive to make up for the thing I just thought of"

How do you expect people to discuss them across the scale of a whole economy without giant spreadsheets? Externalities are a well understood economic concept whose study goes back a century.

https://www.acton.org/node/6427

I'm not saying externalities don't exist, I'm saying that basically every time somebody makes an argument relying on the concept, there's no attempt to quantify the externalized cost, it's just a vibe. Just go upthread, the argument is just "the stuff you're buying is crap that I don't think you really need, therefore it should be more expensive, however much more it takes for you to stop buying it".

The economic concept implies that we're going to have an evidence-based discussion about how we're tracking specific dollar cost amounts of pollution or something, and then in practice that essentially never happens and it's just "I've decided you don't really need that thing you want"

That’s because it would not be possible to discuss reasonably these things without writing a thesis. It’s better to hand wave the cost of the externalities and those that are familiar with the domain will understand - rather than writing a thesis on “the externalities of manufacturing and distributing <product> in this <industry> <subsector> in <country> and relative cost to export versus produce locally.”

How do you see it differently?

Well, if some bureaucratic governing body provides decisions based on some opaque system, and forces these upon market participants - usually that is regarded just the opposite of market-based solutions in economics. Those decisions do have zero chance of internalizing external costs, but most likely will just add an other layer of externality and move the process even more into the field of non-market based coordination mechanisms.

They did not make the argument of externalities. My impression was that they tax the shit out of things they don't like personally, to minimize their consumption.

This is much closer to a sin tax.

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