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The Story of Stuff: Externalized Costs and the $4.99 Radio http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-leonard/the-story-of-stuff-extern_b_490351.html http://www.huffi

• shoo 11y ago
  > Who paid for that $4.99 radio? Some people paid with the loss of their natural resources. Some paid with the loss of clean air, with increased asthma and cancer rates. Some workers paid by having to cover their own health insurance. Kids in Africa paid with their future: a third of the school-age children in parts of the Congo now drop out to mine metals for electronics. the Stafford Beer quote "the purpose of a system is what it does" springs to mind. what's the purpose of our economic system? to extract physical wealth from the environment and distribute it selfishly and unequally. can we imagine other ways of running things? yep. one old idea is a centrally-planned globally optimized economy. e.g. model the USSRs economy as one giant optimisation problem, solve for the things you need to get people to do, then encourage them to do it one way or another. perhaps a more modern spin on things is china's "citizen score" system. if that was deployed and working tolerably, you might not need currency any more. citizen points might do fine. it'd sure have other very unpleasant problems, but it might be an improvement over the capitalist system in some respects. are the alternative systems reachable from the current system? that's more of a challenge!