The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Blivet

Feb. 25, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- I've commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing: the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that’s responsible for most of what we call culture.

Sometimes that conversation takes place second- or third-hand -- for example, when ideas from two old books collide in an author’s mind and give rise to a third book, which will eventually carry the fusion to someone else further down the stream of time -- but sometimes it’s far more direct.

Last week’s post here brought an example of the latter kind. My attempt to cut through the ambiguities surrounding that slippery word “progress” sparked a lively discussion on the comments page of my blog about just exactly what counted as progress, what factors made one change “progressive” while another was denied that label. In the midst of it all, one of my readers -- tip of the archdruidical hat to Jonathan -- proposed an unexpected definition: what makes a change qualify as progress, he suggested, is that it increases the externalization of costs.

I’ve been thinking about that definition since Jonathan proposed it, and it seems to me that it points up a crucial and mostly unrecognized dimension of the crisis of our time. To make sense of it, though, it’s going to be necessary to delve briefly into economic jargon.

Economists use the term “externalities” to refer to the costs of an economic activity that aren’t paid by either party in an exchange, but are pushed off onto somebody else. You won’t hear a lot of talk about externalities these days; it many circles, it’s considered impolite to mention them, but they’re a pervasive presence in contemporary life, and play a very large role in some of the most intractable problems of our age. Some of those problems were discussed by Garret Hardin in his famous essay on the tragedy of the commons, and more recently by Elinor Ostrom in her studies of how that tragedy can be avoided; still, I’m not sure how often it’s recognized that the phenomena they discussed applies not just to commons systems, but to societies as a whole -- especially to societies like ours.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-externality-trap-or-how-progress-commits-suicide-john-michael-greer

[House of Roberts]

1. I think he's got that backwards.

...what makes a change qualify as progress, he suggested, is that it increases the externalization of costs.

Increasing externalities is the goal of capitalist corporations. Take toxic waste from refining petroleum, re-label it 'fracking fluid', pump it into a hole in the ground, and get a positive result, more petroleum to refine. That may be 'progress' for an oil company, but progress for society as a whole is to internalize that cost to society to that oil company. The same goes for other environmental pollution. Making the corporation own its damage to everyone else is real progress.