We can pick up their principles and study their procedures and then design our own procedures as informed by cost-benefit analysis
We can learn and adapt indeed! WHat do you think I was saying? - apply it mindlessly? Maybe I should settle for half-a-loaf with you, lane, but cost-benefit analysis? Read on.
Maybe we have different world views. I am speaking from the perspective of someone trying to advocate remedies to fatal flaws in economics as subscribed to by laissez-fair capitalists and practiced by most corporations. This failure is of two main types: the failure to quantify the true costs of resource extraction and the true costs of waste creation.
Economic accounting begins where resources are magically available and end when the product leaves the store. What happens before and after isn't part of the calculation. But the damage to environment is a true and honest cost that is externalized. It shows up in society as Global Warming, declining fish stocks, desertification of forest land, and species extinction - and in a million other ways (if space permitted). Economic theory assumes that the pool of available resources is infinite. It says that a replacement always exists for every industrial feedstock when the price of another becomes too high. This is patently false. I have said before that the economic value of the "free" resources of the earth is extremely high. Many of these services have no replacements - clean air and water, for instance.
Capitalists are fond of talking about 'price signals' as determinants of what gets made and bought. But the game isn't honest: the true toll on the environment (and us as a part of it) is not being acknowledged.
So tell me - what good is "Cost-benefit" analysis, when economics fails to recognize the flaws in its own accounting?
When I was a child, I saw a poster on a bus. It showed Kruschev, pounding a shoe on a table, with the caption "when we go to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope."
I am not a communist - I think of myself as a reform capitalist. I want to preserve the best of capitalism (its genius in marketing, finance, manufacturing, distribution, etc.) while removing its fatal flaws. |
