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"privatization of profits and socializing losses." This is ideologically biased. You mean "externalize RISK", which governments and NGOs do all the time too.
by jp555 7y ago
"privatization of profits and socializing losses."
This is ideologically biased. You mean "externalize RISK", which governments and NGOs do all the time too.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoI prefer my phrase because it’s not sterile. My intention is to spread the ideology. My comment isn’t addressing an economics class, it’s addressing an electorate.
- jp555 7y agoit just seems to me to be only trading one kind of risk externalization for another. Simple top-down solutions are so very attractive, but are absolute folly for interconnected complex systems. The moral of the Tower of Babel. Or if you prefer a different ancient heuristic, simple utopian visions are always a Siren that will eat you. Nassim Taleb's concept of scale seems to me could be one root cause. The farther away the deciders are to the implications of their decisions, the less accountability they have. The more local and "market based" systems are, the more accountability, or Skin In The Game they have, and therefore more robust the dynamic. Example: Communism has worked wonderfully at the scale of the family for thousands of years, but has always turned monstrous at the scale of a nation.
- licebmi__at__ 7y agoGoing by wikipedia: "Cost externalizing is a socioeconomic term describing how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. An externalized cost is known to economists as a negative externality." I think the here bias is trying to hide with the more general technical term, that in this specific discussion, the third party which assumes the loses is the whole society.