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buybuydandavis comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (131)
Difference, with what? Where the guy stares blankly at a wall? Where he ceases to exist?
The structural difference between libertarianism and various collectivisms is the gap libertarianism creates between "I want you to do X" and "You are subject to sanction if you don't do X". You define the zero level where the sanctions start.
EDITED TO MAKE THE POINT OF THE EXAMPLE CLEARER
Alice, what's the total economic impact on you from everything, if I do X?
+$475
Alice, what's the total economic impact on you from everything, if I don't do X?
+$476
So, X causes a difference of -$1.
Alice, could you reconsider things from a negative point of view, now? Thanks.
Alice, what's the total economic impact on you from everything, if I do X?
-$7032
Alice, what's the total economic impact on you from everything, if I don't do X?
-$7031
So, doing X causes a difference of -$1.
Works out the same.
What is the dollar value of not living next to a rendering plant? For my friend W, zero, because he has no sense of smell.
What about the value of living above a sports bar? For me, it's mostly negative, since I don't like sports. But for lots of people, it would be a positive.
... so?
As I said, you add them all up from all different people for both (all) cases of what you could do. Then you take the differences between them.
That captures what you're talking about.
Sorry for not making the example clear.
I don't understand how to take a sum across a speculative set of possible futures like this -- in particular, in cases where everyone has every incentive to lie (W doesn't have to tell anyone about his anosmia, and if he cares about the resale value of his house, he won't mention it).
For purposes of policy, you can simplify by finding typical values for people in various reference classes, by analyzing what choices they make to avoid / approach cases of the external transaction.
Just because I defined it as an integral doesn't mean you can't closely approximate it as a small number of multiplication problems.
Doesn't this have all the usual problems of average utilitarianism?
Alternately, doesn't this lead to just dumping toxic waste in poor communities, since people there can't afford to spend very much to avoid it?
A: There is a strong resemblance here, yes. Which specific problems do you think would also apply here?
B: The choices, not the flat money spent. You're allowed to take the available resources into account. Dumping toxic waste where there's no one at all seems like it would come out ahead of putting it in poor communities.
Imagine that I say that everything costs me a million dollars in value. Maybe there's a sense in which it's true -- I'm just really sensitive. Still, it doesn't seem fair to give me that level of disproportionate influence.
I'm afraid I don't understand this.
For a number of waste products, there does not appear to be an unpopulated place that they can be dumped -- and if there were, environmentally-minded people would put a high value on not doing so, since it would disrupt unspoiled wilderness.
This is a good argument for why it's hard to measure external costs by asking people. It doesn't undermine the definition.
And the situation isn't quite as bleak as you imply, in terms of measurement. We have techniques, such as revealed preference, for measuring costs when people have incentives to lie. We also routinely, in the legal system, apply estimates of "reasonable" costs for things.
The question was, 'how do we measure the intensity of externalities'? We can measure this by peoples' economic choices. The nice thing about money is that it's more objectively quantifiable. You can actually see where money moves. Therefore, the scale, at least is set.
The line of reasoning that this would lead to dumping on the poor relies on the idea that the only way we'd measure economic choices is by adding up the dollar amounts spent. The dollars let us see the choices, but we can be cannier than an adding machine about combining them. At least we can use a disposable income correction, and of course a knowledge correction (if you don't know you have a problem and never end up spending money fixing it - 8Hz noise pollution, say - then we have a bit of a problem with this approach)
What waste products are you thinking of? At the very least, the inside of a carefully constructed toxic waste container won't have any jukes or tree narfs in it.
Thanks for getting more specific, but you left out the particular part I was asking for.
That's not a particularly identifiable state. If you play basketball for an hour, during that hour I know you're not doing a lot of things. If all I know is that you're not playing basketball, you could be doing a zillion other things, all of which have a different economic value to me.
If you play basketball, that has a range of economic value too, but a much much smaller range than not playing basketball.
Choose an arbitrary action as reference, then! You'll be taking the difference in the end anyway.
This is just a non-physics example of gauge symmetry.
Ok, so if we take the action with the greatest value to me as the reference zero, then all other actions count as negative externalities.
That may be how utilitarians do it, but it isn't the way libertarians do it, and that was the context of the original question. Libertarians set a less than greatest value action as the reference zero. Before they talk about what to do about negative externalities, they need to identify that zero, so they can know what they're talking about when they say "negative externality".
An externality is when A's action results in costs for B who wasn't a participant. B isn't acting at all. And it's usually obvious and uncontroversial what counts as "action" or "inaction" on the part of A.
Which bring me back to my previous question:
You can define a reference zero that way. Libertarians generally do not.