That's not really correct. The GP is essentially describing standard price rationing of resources. Negative externalities occur when some activity or transactio

That's not really correct. The GP is essentially describing standard price rationing of resources. Negative externalities occur when some activity or transaction imposes costs on some external party that has nothing to do with that activity or was not a participant to the transaction. EDIT: To put it another way, if 'depleting a finite resource' is considered to be imposing a negative externality, then pretty much every act of consumption generates negative externalities. While I guess we can define it like this if we want, it turns it into a pretty uninformative concept.