Externalities Quotes

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.

Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

"Free markets" is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. Most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. That is the source of all pollution problems, of the inequality problem. This reality ensures that the end of history will never come.

Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100.

The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.

In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things

Why would you invest in a company which is out of synch with the needs of society, that does not take its social compliance in its supply chain seriously, that does not think about the costs of externalities or of its negative impacts on society?

I have always seen pollution as theft.

If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.

What I have been trying to remind people of for the past 40 years is that you can’t operate an entire conventional system, whether it’s economics, business or the way we live and surround ourselves, what we eat, without recognizing that there are severe negative externalities that are not being accounted for.

Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

GDP has been a con perpetrated upon the poor of the world: a measure of economic activity and not of actual wealth. What it masks is the way in which we transform their natural capital into our consumption through international rules that regard the ecosystem services upon which they rely as mere externalities.

The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.

The first principle of the market economy is that it is comprised of many small buyers and sellers, which implies a substantial degree of equity. Another fundamental market principle is that costs are internalized in the producer's price.

What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

Just because you have a piece of trash and you throw it away and it gets hauled away, it doesn't mean that it's not affecting someone else.

If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods.

If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.