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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid this earns a "well, duh" from me. For a minimal cost to ranches, they can increase both their output and the reliability of that output. And the externalized costs? The ranches aren't held accountable for those, so they may as well not exist.

And you can bet those ranches will fight tooth and nail against being held accountable; it is, after all, the most "logical" way to spend their resources to protect their revenue. Imagine the shareholder response if the profits were to drop significantly, and permanently.

It's simply how we've trained corporations to behave.

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This our biggest problem in the US, externalities are never priced in. Always easier to pay fines for pennies or to declare bankruptcy and start again.

Not to stir the pot, but I’ve long believed that a big problem with conservative ideology is that it does not seem to believe in externalities—either good or bad. Positive societal effects couldn’t possibly arise from investments in education or infrastructure. Likewise negative externalities from increased emissions

As someone who is not a conservative, but is interested in what and why people think and believe thing, I don't think that's a fair characterization. It seems to me that conservative care a great deal about negative externalities that effect the existing social order, or may do so in the future. I think the problem is two-fold some of those negative externalities were baked into existing institutions or don't directly effect them, and the "culture wars" in the US cause people to take up positions that don't make any rational sense in their worldview.

You can make really good conservative arguments for say fighting climate change as it could upend traditional social order, but partisan polarization has made it an issue of "the other side" so mainstream conservatives aren't making those arguments IMHO.

I don't really follow. Do you have any concrete examples of what you're referring to?

Anyone who is Economics literate - which is more common among conservatives - knows about externalities.

They also know that when there are negative externalities, government action to try to counter them is often a cure worse than the disease.

Also "my proposal will be costly, but the positive externalities will outweigh them" is often stated, but rarely proven.

Genuinely curious, in a conservative world, how do you deal with externalities without some kind of intervention that distorts the market or the natural order?

It makes total sense to have debates over what things rise to the level of problem and what the best fix is but, at least in my state politics, Republican's seem to just abandon their principles for pragmatism (which is good) but I can't seem to figure how this doesn't cause an identity crisis. Having a "how a conservative evaluates market interventions" seems less taxing than getting pushed to a breaking point and then begrudgingly doing things not in line with your ideals.

How to deal with (negative) externalities depends a lot on the nature each specific externality, and what the alternatives are.

It's important to recognize that both markets and government action sometimes fail, and why, to have a grownup conversation about options.

Can you provide an example of a government regulation that you see as a net positive? Or private market action that had a negative impact on externalities?

Because IME markets in general are so short-sighted they literally plow ahead with profit over all until the river is burning (pollution in Cleveland) or thousands are poisoned for decades (Flint water crisis). And often don't stop or self correct even in such extremes.

Some governments have certainly overreacted to market failures, but I don't think that means every conversation has to qualify that.

The classic externality is pollution. Some industrial process produces valuable goods, but the air becomes unhealthy to breathe for everyone.

A good government solution to this has been emissions trading¹. The government sets up a maximum allowed emission rate, and producers can trade those rights between them. By making it costly to pollute, producers have incentives to lower pollution, and the allowed rate can be lowered over time, improving the air for everyone.

If markets are so stupid and short sighted, it's hard to understand how they've generated 250 years of huge and sustained increases of material wealth all over the planet. 10x as many people now live far richer and healthier lives than 250 years ago.

True, a river burned in Ohio 50 years ago, but that's very, very small potatoes in the big picture as I see it.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

Not so sure you can attribute 250y of gains solely to markets. In fact much of the health gains come from government funded research.

Now, you admit collective action is needed. Great. Because unbridled markets gave us slavery, child labor, 12h-7d work schedules, company towns, the food pyramid, greenwashing, and robber barons.

So the solution to externalities is largely collective action. Because obviously the market alone didn't make emissions trading happen. Markets were backed into a corner. And it feels like a half assed solution considering we don't need to burn coal any more. The market just values profit more than quality of life of those near the site of production.

If we look solely to markets and careless regulation then the biggest companies will capture regulators. Then we're on the path to modern day feudalism. Seeing Amazon hollow out local competition only makes this feel more and more real here in the Midwestern US.

Even the most die-hard libertarians I know (which I'm using here as a proxy for the most conservative) recognize one of the fundamental roles of government is to account for and price in externalities.

The OP indicates that the incentives of corporations driven by a profit motive is not to price in externalities. If not the government, what other mechanisms do you suggest?

> externalities are never priced in

"A basic principle of modern state is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized." (Noam Chomsky)

Right but that happens everywhere.

Look at the housing market. People take risky loans make a ton of money, they keep it.

Housing market goes to crap, immediately they get bailed out.

And voters vote for it!

By externalities you seem to mean the choices that other people make.

unless the choice is to not biy their product how or why woukd these get factored in? how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?

How would you justify this being our biggest problem?

Nah man, externalities here means externalities. In this specific instance the meat producing corporations are not paying for the increased risk of producing antibiotic resistant pathogens, which is a cost the rest of the planet has to bear. Price them in the same way any insurance model prices in risk.

> how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?

Nominally free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, as the saying goes. If you want to take actions that affect everyone negatively then you should be paying for that. Inversely there are also positive externalities and we should probably subsidize/pay groups who produce those

Externalities refers to the economic concept of external costs:

"An external cost is a cost not included in the market price of the goods and services being produced, i.e. a cost not borne by those who create it".

The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.

We mostly choose not to price in those costs, because the consequences of such are generally delayed, and it allows us greater standard of living for the moment. When given the options "meat will be cheaper but infections harder to cure in 20 years", or "energy will be cheaper but large scale climate disasters will be common in 50 years", we've chosen cheap meat and energy.

>The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.

I'll add to this that in many cases this also eliminates a lot of the subjective/contextless moralizing around spending of energy/mass surplus that goes on, resulting in more individual freedom. It's common in environmental discussions for example for someone to complain about <xyz> form of transportation, often cars or aircraft but I've also seen it come up in rockets. This can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes in terms of cost/benefit etc. But the entire discussion could be avoided as far as AGW if we'd simply make all hydrocarbon fuels CO2 net neutral (either via producing them directly from atmospheric CO2 with renewable energy or scrubbing an equal tonnage of emissions from the atmosphere for every ton CO2 released). Then whatever price the fuel was would fully reflect the CO2 cost, which would naturally filter out to all users, and everyone would be free to spend on that or not as they wished. All sides would optimize to the pricing, producers would search for ways to make the net neutral hydrocarbons cheaper, users would seek ways to use them more efficiently, and those buying services would do the same. That's a Free Market at work, the emergent result of lots of decentralized individual decisions is a much more efficient allocation of resources, and without any central judgement around "oh, that's not a worthy usage" needed.

That's not what externalities means.

Google "pricing in externalities"

Yeah, the question isn't so much "can't" as "prefers not to". Unless the premium that people will pay for meat without antibiotics is more than the reduced output costs them they won't do it. Alternatively if they are forced to pay for the externalities and that costs them more than the extra profit.

It's simple math to do. Expecting "big meat" to change it's behaviour without changing the inputs to the equation is ridiculous. That isn't how businesses work.

Its always a choice - here is some cheap junk with mediocre taste. Here is some significantly more expensive, less junky stuff with +-same taste, sometimes worse. Rest is sales history.

If we want to actively shield population from eating shit, we would have to remove more than half of items in shelves in most supermarkets, I suspect even more in typical US one. But then why the heck should things like cigarettes or even sugar be legal, we know now pretty well how they slowly kill everybody involved.

Cigarettes are heavily regulated in fact California just banned flavors.

There's also been proposals about a sugar tax and limits on the size of soft drinks but they are difficult to implement due to conservative/right wing pushback.

Your comment is whataboutism but not even that good of a counter since actions are being taken

Didn’t Coca Cola bribe NAACP to call sugar taxes racist.

https://thepostmillennial.com/coca-cola-accused-of-paying-na...

Is NAACP right wing?

A lot of left wing groups also oppose sugar tax calling it racist

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/taxing-bubbles-or-cas...

No idea, what does that have to do with my comments? I'm pointing out that actions are being taken to curtail usage to counter the person who what using whataboutism with sugar and cigarettes

You said the right wing opposed sugar taxes without any links while I pointed out the left wing opposed them with evidence. Isn’t that relevant?

Oh my bad I forgot I did that.

Here's sources showing Republicans against both the soda tax and cigarette regulations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/06/18/s...

https://money.com/soda-tax-gop-partisan-battle/

Your second source, when you say that alot of left wing groups are against it, is about Philadelphia and in the end.

". The city council passed the 1.75 cents-per-ounce sugary drink tax on June 5, and it will go into effect in January. "

The NAACP is a bipartisan group so its stance on the issue has no bearing.

But if you say banned them across all ranches, they would raise prices as would their competitors so the profit position would be basically the same.

Just quickly comparing prices, wholesale chicken is $1.01 per kilogram in the USA and $1.31 per kilogram in Australia. Much better conditions in Australia and no antibiotic use for growth (need a vet to authorize use with a sick flock). 30% wholesale price jump, but it is still cheaper than tofu.

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