The textbook definition of "externality" is where some activity has an effect (whether positive or negative) on people who are neither party to that activity, nor in a contractual relationship with those people.

So, creating a meetup group that other people will enjoy has a positive externality, but note if SilasBarta had been hired by those people to create that group there would be no externality (unless it also benefited some people who hadn't hired him).

As for the reference to counterfeiting, that I believe is (based on previous discussions with SilasBarta) a sly reference to Keynesian economics, and you should probably leave it to one side if you're still trying to get your head around externalities.

In the present environment, at least the in the US and most of Europe, it is conceivable that counterfeiting money has positive externalities. There is a very high unemployment rate, and low capacity utilization across most sectors of the economy. There is a fairly broad school of economists who believe that this is the result of a shortage of aggregate demand brought on by poor macroeconomic management due to an irrational fear of inflation -- that the central bank can and should do more than it is doing to stimulate the economy, and failing that, central goverments not facing high or rising borrowing costs should be willing to run large short-term deficits. If this bunch of economists is correct, then these policies would be good for the global economy. Since counterfeiting money is essentially equivalent to monetary stimulus, it also would have positive externality. It would be much more likely to put some resources back to work and have little or no effect on the value of assets denominated in that currency.

If all economic actors are perfectly rational, and none suffer from money illusion, hyperbolic discounting, or other effects, then you would be right in all times, not just in normal times of close to optimal fed policy and near full labor and capital usage. That would also mean that the economists to which I refer would be wrong about the current state of events.

I agree, though, that buying junk you do not want would destroy most of any utility gained by counterfeiting. It would be far better to buy things you do want, or failing that, to simply give the money away.

The disagreement here isn't about the term "externality", it's about the consequences of counterfeiting.

Right now, the U.S. economy is in such a screwed-up state that injecting more currency into the economy (regardless of whether it's done legally by the Federal Reserve or illegally by counterfeiters) may indeed have net positive effects instead of net negative effects.

According to my preferred expert, the best macroeconomic model for our current situation is that of a demand shock brought on by the recent financial crisis: people lost a lot of money, which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (people are buying less stuff), which has led to a drop in output (people are making less stuff), which has led to higher unemployment (you don't need as many employees when you're making less stuff), which has led to a fall in aggregate demand (newly unemployed people no longer have the money to buy stuff)...

We don't seem to be in a downward spiral any more (unemployment stabilized at around 10%), but business investment is extremely low; corporations are sitting on cash instead of spending it to expand production because nobody is buying. Right now, the bottleneck to economic growth in the United States isn't productive capacity, but people's desire and ability to purchase finished products. We're at the point where having the government hire people to dig ditches and fill them up again, or even dropping cash from helicopters, would actually improve the economy.

(Note that in spite of the 2009 stimulus bill, government spending in the United States has actually decreased because spending by state and local governments has dropped more than federal spending has increased.)

On the bright side, at least the developing world is indeed continuing to develop, in spite of the mess the developed world has gotten itself into.

I'm guessing that this is in reference to willingness to try low-risk activities which have a reasonable chance of paying off.

I said "mainstream" because I'm assuming that the statistical good effects from religion require a social infrastructure that neo-paganism doesn't tend to have.

That was a very interesting article; I had not previously encountered such a perspective on the subject.

I don't agree with all of it, though:

And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won't be able to --- because you can't reach and program the unconscious mind that way.

...

Only...that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one. For full understanding, the Apollonian/scientific mode is essential; for direct experience, the Dionysian/ecstatic mode is the only way to go.

Needs more joy in the merely real, and maybe some how an algorithm feels from the inside. But still, very interesting.

Most worthwhile thing I've read by someone (ESR) who has written a lot of worthwhile things even though I will concede that he is a little full of himself sometimes.

ADDED. Actually, "Sex tips for geeks" is also in the running for most worthwhile thing written by ESR.

When I first read that, it seemed slightly odd that he would place so much trust (provisionally?) in this particular psychological explanation. Later I read The Jung Cult, which includes a persuasive argument against the validity of the evidence for a collective unconscious. (And I guess the author had to fill the rest of the book somehow.) You'll have to decide if you think the prior probability suffices.

Mind you, I doubt this argument would make all the phenomena go away.

My grandparents were Quakers. I've been to a few of their meetings. A Quaker meeting consists of everyone in the congregation sitting silently in a room, with individuals standing up to speak at irregular and unplanned intervals. In my experience, when people stand up to speak, they talk about the things that are important in their "spiritual" lives, which, in practice, means their emotional/moral lives. God was mentioned only in passing, and, aside from these mentions of God, I don't remember anything mystical.

As with Unitarians, there are apparently some groups of Quakers that have relinquished belief in God.

Quakers run the gamut from very conservative to explicitly atheist.