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It's better to define "externality" as including all impacts on everyone but yourself, and accept that some amount of negative externality is inevitable. That a
by tlb 8y ago
It's better to define "externality" as including all impacts on everyone but yourself, and accept that some amount of negative externality is inevitable. That allows you to differentiate cases like (in the article) Lojack, which produces a positive externality, from the Club which theoretically produces a negative externality.
- mrob 8y agoYou can already distinguish between positive and zero. If you lump zero in with negative then you're losing information, and you're violating common sense in a way that makes people lose respect for the field in general.
- closeparen 8y agoCar thieves are people too. One could argue that increasing a marginalized population’s chances of life-destroying interaction with the criminal justice system is a negative externality, one far outweighed by the inconvenience of private property appropriation. (That may sound crazy, but it is the governing logic in places like SF that choose not to enforce property crime).