I have been battling with the issue of how economics, as a basis for decision-making, can move us closer to an environmentally benign way of life without artificially having to intervene with moral arguments. There is a tendency among environmentalists to use economics arguments when environmental issues receive "appropriate" treatment as a result of incorporating environmental externalities in economic analysis, but to resort to morality when economics fails to grasp the environmental agenda. This argumentative flip-flopping serves nobody. But what is the alternative?
I don't have an answer yet, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, here's an interesting thought from David Galbraith: The market is not benign, and there could be the free-market equivalent of viruses that David calls 'benes':
These benes could be merely be specific memes to do with money - such as a speculative or panic rumor, or indirectly such as businesses based on memes e.g. horoscopes. But they could equally be financial instruments, business practices or business environments themselves that are attractive and therefore become widely used, but are damaging to the free market that creates them. (An example of the latter might be lobbying, where businesses such as Verisign, for example, protect a monopoly over .com domain names more effectively by seducing legislators than being competitive.) These are somewhat different from memes since they become much more like organisms, with a life of their own. In some cases, like the SWIFT transaction system or retail bank buildings, they arguably have a phenotype.
The idea that capitalism is prone to periodic viral infection through benes, seems like an obvious thing to investigate. It also creates a middle road between the doomsayers that claim that macro economics is dead and the libertarians who say that it would have been OK to let everything fail. The message: ‘Capitalism works overall, but be careful’. Just how careful, might be something that could be ascertained scientifically.
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