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> The most compelling option was actually ethanol. But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM could

by air7 5y ago

> The most compelling option was actually ethanol. But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine. I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. What are the solutions to this? What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players? Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?

zionic 5y ago
We could call it hybrid capitalism, mix the free market vs government run non profit.
- shucksley 5y ago
  Or we could just call it what it is - fascism.
foob 5y ago
Intellectual property reform could be a solution. It sounds like they might have gone with ethanol if they weren't motivated by patents so that they could prevent free market competition. We see the same thing with pharmaceuticals and in many other industries. I'm not particularly convinced that intellectual property laws are anywhere close to a net positive for consumers or society at large.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Patents, but also copyright on software. We gain nothing by rewriting the software every time, OSS should be the default. Same for music. It’s more controversial but Spotify is monetizing convenience, not music, which itself is available for free on P2P.
  - arbitrage 5y ago
    It's not controversial, it's the whole point of capitalism.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I hear this frequently, but I don’t think it will do what many people think it would. Part of the power of FOSS is that it often leans on copyright to compel sharing. But, in the absence of copyright, why wouldn’t capitalistic powers simply stop sharing their code?
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      I think the gp post was not suggesting “get rid of copyright and leave oss unprotected” - by “OSS should be the default” i read that it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses
      - kube-system 5y ago
        > it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses Those things are logical opposites. If someone has a right to place any conditions at all on the way people copy their software, that is a copyright. Maybe they meant to suggest copyright reform. I make this point because people often like that GPL forces republishing of derivative works. This is an exercise of copyright, not a lack of it.
        kennywinker 5y ago
        They're only opposite goals in as much as you see copyright and open source licenses as synonymous. I'm not a lawyer, but there are other forms of IP protections that are not copyright (patents, trademarks, etc). Seems like a new form of IP protection could be created to protect open source - i.e. "if someone says you can only modify this code if you re-share it, it is illegal to modify the code without re-sharing".
- kube-system 5y ago
  I’m not sure that removing IP from the equation would have wholly changed the situation. There are other ways to control markets and they likely would have leaned on them instead.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Do you have any examples?
    - kube-system 5y ago
      The obvious example in my mind is a control of the means of production. For instance, if they used [x] instead and also happened to own all the [x] mines. Or using anticompetitive practices to prevent competitors from joining the market. Or by gaining regulatory capture.
G3rn0ti 5y ago
If ethanol was so effective as an anti-knocking agent why didn’t gas stations just mix ethanol with petrol and sold that fuel with profit? Ethanol is cheaper and much safer to manufacture then tetraethyllead. But they didn’t… I am not an expert on combustion engines but the biggest problem with ethanol in the early days was it polluted the engine with water that it absorbed as a water soluble organic compound. Those days engines were not made from Aluminium but iron so it destroyed motors over time due to the formation of rust. Furthermore, production of tetraethyllead got much cheaper once its synthesis was automated. Knocking itself is bad for motors so people actually wanted to use anti-knocking additives to improve the longevity of their cars (aside of better fuel economy). So in the end tetraethyllead prevailed as an anti-knocking agent because of its technical and economical advantages and not because of a conspiracy of oil companies as the article suggests.
- AmVess 5y ago
  Read more on how hard and long GM tried to suppress opposition to leaded gas, it was no conspiracy.
  - smolder 5y ago
    It was a conspiracy... by GM. Conspiracy: n. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act. The word conspiracy doesn't mean the same as "conspiracy theory" and even that doesn't necessarily imply something wacky like reptilian aliens secretly controlling the government.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Actually mixing ethanol with petrol is a pretty common thing... The main issue stations won't do it unless compelled is that it will reduce gas mileage slightly. You don't want to be the company selling gas that has a lower mileage. If they could sell it at a lower price that would be something. The thing is that you need a lot more ethanol than tetraethyllead, so it actually does end up being more expensive, for the same energy. And actually cast iron blocks are still being used nowadays.
Aloha 5y ago
TEL (tetraethyl lead) had and has other advantages over ethanol beyond patentability - Unlike TEL, ethanol is hydrophilic, which makes gasoline blended with it more apt to be contaminated with water, and other water containing contaminants, this is particularly relevant for aviation uses and also reducing incidences of vapor lock. TEL is also (more) rubber and seal friendly, other than the (very) high risk of lead toxicity, TEL blended gasoline is easier to work with and process than Ethanol blended gasoline. TEL also acts as a natural lubricant of its own, the lead acting as lubricant, particularly on valve and other top end engine components. This isn't really a defense of TEL - particularly not in road gas, while it was understood that exposure to large quantities of lead was toxic, toxicity of low dose exposure to environmental lead wasn't really fully understood until the 50's/60's, we also didn't really understood how long environmental lead lingered around until the 60's. Modern technologies have overcome much of the issues from ethanol in road gas, but there are reasons TEL is still used in AvGas. TEL in AvGas was vital in reaching higher octane, and Ethanol is contraindicated in AvGas (at the last I looked into the topic) because of its hydrophilic nature - our ability (the allies) to produce high octane AvGas is one of the factors that won WW2, and use of TEL was a deciding factor in that.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Those problems were solved for cars, they can be solved for planes. We shouldn't use it. Bioaccumulation of heavy metals was understood very early. Everything has a cost, spraying lead everywhere should be higher than what we are willing to pay. I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby. I was astounded to find TEL was still allowed in aviation fuels. Rates of cancers etc are higher near military bases due to fuel handling incidents.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Military planes just kerosene/JP-8 which contains no lead as far as I know.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      The fuel itself is toxic to the environment and animals. The fuels can have really harsh things in them like benzene, iirc.
Biologist123 5y ago
There are a few organisations campaigning for directors and shareholders to take unlimited liability.
wpietri 5y ago
To me this is an example of 3 negative features of free markets, exacerbated by a kyriarchic system, but I think it's fixable with work. The three issues I see: One, the short-term market incentive was for them to have something patentable and controllable. Two, the money accrued to them but the harms fell to others, creating a huge negative externality. And three, free markets in goods tend to create markets in political power. This is all exacerbated in a kyriarchic [1] system, one where domination hierarchies are normalized. Negative environmental externalities tend to fall on disfavored groups. The workers getting poisoned with lead were lower class; especially in that era, their deaths were seen as acceptable. Toxic spills don't happen on the Harvard campus or in wealthy suburbs, because however "safe" that stuff is in the official view, it's not so safe that elites will live next to it. Etc, etc. We could eliminate a lot of this with just by preventing any money flow from business to politics. No donations, no gifts, no ads, no PACs. Perhaps no lobbyists. Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds, and they are restricted after public service in what they can earn. The finances of politicians and former politicians are entirely public. The finances of executives and companies are also entirely public. We have well-funded, independent ethics watchdogs. Then on top of that we have well-funded public science systems with empowered public health authorities. That definitely exists in the US at least in patches, so I think we could make rapid progress here. And then I'd want to see strong laws where people making and profiting from harm are always held accountable. If we look at the 2008 financial crisis, nobody went to jail. A lot of people got rich doing dodgy things, and a few of them had to give a fraction of the money back. That did not teach a lot of lessons. One could argue that's ok in finance (although I wouldn't). But when it results in physical harm and death, I think the money and power should not be separable from the consequences. Currently CEOs and execs take paydays and walk away from things where I think negligent homicide charges are merited. Instead of "Gosh, I didn't know" being an acceptable excuse, I think the standard of "knew or should have known" and "could have acted differently" should be sufficient for execs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds I like where you are going with all this, but I'll nitpick here that while tying politicians' wealth to the overall stock market in general reduces their incentive to legislate in favor of particular companies, it does provide them incentive to legislate in favor of corporate America in general. We don't need laws that help stock market participants. ~50% of Americans don't hold stock in any form, even through mutual funds or retirement accounts. I don't know what the solution is. As long as rule making can disproportionately affect the rule maker's own personal wealth and wellbeing, you have a conflict of interest.
HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
... Regulation? Just ban lead in gas and let the free market find the next best solution.
- hbogert 5y ago
  That's what happened it took decades.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  It was banned and has been banned for almost 40 years? Obviously not in plane engines, which were a much smaller % of the pollution. You can't just ban it which in turn bans avgas. That's just dumb, it has to be phased out and alternatives developed. Sounds like those exist currently but aren't being pushed.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    "Phasing it out" is the same as banning it some time in the future. Why should alternatives be developed if you can just keep using it indefinitely? R&D is not free.
dexen 5y ago
>I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change I'm with you here - especially including the observation that it was the non-free market force ("It couldn’t be patented") that skewed the choice in favor of the inferior, poisonous option. Side note, besides its anti-knock properties, the lead also had protective effect on the valves - with early metallurgy, the high temperature gasses wore out valves, in particular the exhaust ones; lead partly ameliorated that. It is a concern with older vehicles (aircraft and cars) and they may require leaded gasoline for that particular reason - or at least replacement of relevant engine parts.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  > It is a concern with older vehicles This hasn't been true since about 1970, and even then, it was dubious.
  - dexen 5y ago
    That only applies to car engines; aviation piston engines evolve much slower and commonly required leaded gasoline til recently - specifically for the lead content, beyond the anti-knock properties. Most common avgas is 100LL, with significant (if reduced) lead content. Cf. >Lycoming provides a list of engines and fuels that are compatible with them. According to their August 2017 chart, a number of their engines are compatible with unleaded fuel. >However, all of their engines require that an oil additive be used when unleaded fuel is used: "When using the unleaded fuels identified in Table 1, Lycoming oil additive P/N LW-16702, or an equivalent finished product such as Aeroshell 15W-50, must be used."* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas
    - nate_meurer 5y ago
      Aircraft piston engine makers like Lycoming and TCM have never provided any actual evidence that unleaded avgas increases engine wear. Their assertions that leaded gas provides lubrication are anecdotal and borderline superstitious. TCM pretty much admits this in its literature: "Field experience has determined the use of unleaded automotive gasoline to be the cause of premature cylinder replacement due primarily to rapid and severe valve seat recession." [1] They don't ever present evidence from controlled testing that backs up their "field experience". And controlled testing of automotive engines has shown that leaded fuels don't provide any significant protection. [2] Twenty years ago, aviation writer John Deakin issued a challenge for anyone to provide good evidence that leaded avgas prevents engine wear [3]. As far as I know that challenge was never met . 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20171004135916/https://pceonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TCMEngineCareX30548Rev3.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20171004135916/https://pceonline... 2 - https://archive.epa.gov/international/air/web/pdf/vsr-finaldraft.pdf https://archive.epa.gov/international/air/web/pdf/vsr-finald... 3 - https://www.avweb.com/features/pelicans-perch-55lead-in-the-hogwash/ https://www.avweb.com/features/pelicans-perch-55lead-in-the-...
CapitalistCartr 5y ago
All we needed was strong environmental protection at the time. It's a natural commons, ripe for protection and regulation. But "The Environment" wasn't a common concept at the time.
refurb 5y ago
How much money did GM make off of cars versus leaded gasoline. That seems like a silly theory. Sometimes giving away an invention for free (or finding a non-patentable alternative) makes you more money because it’s not a barrier to adoption.
cjfd 5y ago
I am not sure it should be formulated as market vs. government. The general public can be quite short sighted too. Also, marketing can be used on the general public. What I think would be improvements are protections to free speech. More specifically, removal of any obstacle to free speech. The next thing, and in line with this is very generous protections to whistle blowing. There could be a yearly award with elections by the public that chooses the whistle blower of the year. The price money should be enough to live on for some tens of years at the least, perhaps even for life. Also, winning the price should make a person immune to lawsuits related to the issue that the whistle blowing was about.
agumonkey 5y ago
If I get you right you're disappointed that free markets didn't lead to 100% efficiency. IMO the simple truth is that nothing will be perfect and there's always strange patterns emerging from the chaos. It's almost like entropy to me.
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thriftwy 5y ago
USSR had the same leaded gas which has eventually lead to a torrent of random street crime known as e.g. "Kazan phenomenon". So it's not just free markets.
krisgee 5y ago
>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business? Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times. Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it. People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I think this is an overly simplistic (and I've seen this argument on the internet a lot) argument. It's true that there are a lot of people, especially in Anglo countries, who oppose any policy that could allow the State to be enriched. But it's also true that there are many crappy state-owned enterprises. My family came from a developing country that used to have _most_ things run by the state, and there was widespread corruption in the government which kept service bad and prices high. I do think it would be useful for economists to analyze the conditions under which state-run entities create good outcomes, but in the currently charged political climate, it probably won't happen.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Provision of services is usually corrupt and high cost in less developed countries regardless of who’s providing it: public or private sector. That is my personal experience.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > People just hate seeing the government make money. No, this is too generic - name the correct groups: Conservatives, neo-liberals and the rich elites hate see "the government" or government-owned/ran entities make money. Everyone else sees that government-run services usually provide decent service at affordable prices, and that after privatization, service quality goes downhill and the cost keeps rising.
gumby 5y ago
> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. There are many such examples. Here’s one from my life: when I was in the pharmaceutical business one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease. He and a couple of others tried it on themselves. We could have patented it and run it through clinical trials, but it was something any compounding pharmacist could have whipped up so such a patent would have been worthless. We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program. Instead there are marketed, less effective products on the market.
- jzebedee 5y ago
  Have you written about this anywhere? I'm curious what common disease could be cured in the manner you described. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is already picked clean in the pharma industry.
  - gumby 5y ago
    It was using urea to fight topical fungal infections (anti fungal drugs are typically quite toxic). The mechanism of action has been well known for decades; what the folks came us with was a formulation that got the dosage high enough without causing damage. It was easily whipped up in the lab but I don’t remember the details. Any notes from this would be long gone as this was over a decade ago and the company has been sold and surely any paper lab notebooks are buried and forgotten.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  So the chemist and his friend had the exact same disease and it was successfully treated and they wouldn't release it because it could be made by someone else? Uh a recipe can be patented and that protects it from being sold. Compounding pharmacies can't magically ignore those patents if they don't want to get sued into oblivion or lose their license. I'm kind of skeptical of your story, sorry.
  - gumby 5y ago
fighterpilot 5y ago
No, just tax or outlaw this behavior, don't nationalize industries. There is an intellectual framework in place for making sense of leaded petrol in the context of markets, and that's externalities. It is no different in concept to noise pollution, carbon pollution, or other types of externalities, it is just one that's significantly worse. Leaded petrol is at best a negative externality which should be taxed, and probably should just be considered physical assault similar to punching someone in the face (the user of the petrol is giving others literal brain damage) and totally banned and criminalized.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  So we should just stop using airplanes because their fuel has lead in it? What?
  - roamerz 5y ago
    Yes - brought to you by the same people that would stop you from eating beef because cows fart. From a tech perspective tetraethyl lead also has lubricative properties that add to exhaust valve longevity under high temperature conditions which may be one of the reasons it took so long to disappear.
    - nate_meurer 5y ago
      No, this is a myth. In reality, lead fouling decreases engine performance and longevity. From https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/knowledge-centre/technical-talk/techart-18-30071600.html https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/...: "The temperature for Lead deposits to form tend to be favourable around the spark plugs (as the whole mixture is quite cool before the flame starts to propagate) and on the exhaust valve stem (as the mixture cools after combustion). The problem is that the deposits are electrically conductive, which shorts out the spark plug - and corrosive, which can start to attack the metal of the valve stems."
wombatmobile 5y ago
> I'm generally an avid beliver (sic) in free markets as an agent for positive change That form of belief gets fixed in your mind via a very different method to beliefs such as "what goes up must come down". It's not a result of distilling evidence. It's a result of persuasion.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Free markets work as long as there's competition. When companies become so big they can kill any nascent competitor on a whim, that's when it becomes an issue. That's why trust busting and regulations and governments are necessary.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I've had this argument many times with my friends who are libertarian leaning and they start hand waving when you bring up a 100 different examples of companies being downright evil when they became too large.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I usually go back to the East Indian Tea company and work my way forward. I love my Libertarian friends as far as social and individual rights are concerned (something Republicans seem to have given up on, except for the 2nd amendment) but have lively debates on limits on capitalism, even though I am a capitalist with asterisk marks and think Communism is a terrible form of government.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Free markets need not only competition, but also regulation to price in externalities like poisoning the air or causing climate change.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I will agree with this, to me this falls under "regulation from the government"
- acuozzo 5y ago
  How does competition fix this? https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/how-dupont-may-avoid-paying-clean-toxic-forever-chemical-n1138766 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/how-dupont-may-avoid-p...
nawgz 5y ago
> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening > What are the solutions to this? Not believing in propagandist fairy tales? The "free" market is clearly a lie, it's a false front around capitalists seeking to maximize profit based in the regulatory framework(s) that government(s) have stood up. These frameworks aren't respected for their actual spirit either, instead exploited to their literal letter at every moment. To see someone on a logical forum like HN espouse a childish idea like "the free market will make an efficient solution", with none of the subtext that the solution is exclusively to the problem of making money, just shows how effective that propaganda is. Instead, acknowledge reality: incentives control actions, and capitalist incentives exclusively are to make money and control markets. Captive markets make more money, so they will work towards aspects of the regulatory frameworks that they can use to keep others out. There is no goodwill from corporations. There is no environmental concern from corporations. There is no concern on social impact from corporations. There are no morals in corporations. There is profit maximization techniques and nothing else. The free market has seen capitalists destroy our world with barely an impressive invention along the way.
mcguire 5y ago
A strong regulatory environment.
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pyrale 5y ago
> Perhaps the government should open companies [...] that are good for the people but bad for business? Perhaps the government should close companies that are good for business but bad for the people instead. In France after WW2, the companies that had participated in the German war effort, or to collaborate were simply confistated. When I see this kind of revelation, which show a complete breakage of corporate oversight and an evaporation of personal responsibility, I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared.
- garavanting 5y ago
  >I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared. That's precisely what Norway did in its own financial crisis: >In the last years of the 1980s, there was a major financial crisis in Norway and by 1991 the bank had used up all capital. To save the bank, the Government of Norway took over the bank and gave it new capital, rescuing it from bankruptcy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiania_Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiania_Bank It's a good idea: the shareholders, who boast that their returns come from the risk they're taking, should bear that risk. If the business is too big to fail, well, then it should just be brought under government control when it would otherwise fail.
HPsquared 5y ago
Removal of the patent system would be the "free market purist" answer to this one. Though ethanol already wasn't patented, hmm.... I can only assume the leaded fuel was cheaper.
Jiro 5y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to a free market. Patents are a government-granted monopoly, violation of which can get you fined or jailed. If a company hurts people because hurting people allows them to make money from a patent, that's not a failure of the free market, it's a failure of government control. Unless you mean that you're disheartened that the government doesn't allow a free market here, and you wish they would?
eternalban 5y ago
The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact. A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme. Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital. Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.
nostrademons 5y ago
Public opinion is the weak point in many systems that are supposed to converge to an optimal socially-beneficial equilibrium. The way competition and free markets are supposed to work, someone else would've introduced ethanol as an anti-knock additive, sold gasoline cheaper (and healthier!), and everyone would've benefitted. But Kettering & Midgley went on an extensive PR campaign after their invention to convince the public leaded gasoline was safe, and they had GM and Dupont's full advertising budgets at their disposal. The public wouldn't know any better, so they believe what they're told and leaded gasoline becomes the standard. You can hear echoes of that with many Facebook advertising & misinformation campaigns today. This also causes stock market bubbles & crashes. People are supposed to independently value securities, and then their errors cancel out and you get a very good statistical approximation of true value. Instead, they invest in what everyone else invests in in, until prices have been bid up to insane levels, then run out of gullible buyers and the price crashes. And brand-based monopoly. Instead of judging product quality for themselves, they buy products that all their friends are buying, "trusted brands", and this creates a barrier to entry that new entrants have a very hard time surmounting. Democracy is affected too. In theory, the best candidate should win. In practice, the candidate with the most money to buy ads wins. People's opinions are mutable; they don't rationally seek out information independently and make an informed, self-interested choice. They tend to trust what they hear a lot, which creates a market for influencing people's opinions. I can't think of a way to solve this, though. The "solution" would be to go from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, where everybody basically assumes that whatever they're told is a lie and ignores it. Societies like this have much higher transaction costs, much lower rates of innovation, and much higher rates of violence, which is not an improvement.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I've always argued that modern (late-stage?) capitalism and state socialism have similar failure modes. In state socialism, the Politburo controlled economic distribution and used their power to enrich themselves and their buddies. In many modern capitalist systems politicians are captured by economic interests and so large corporations play the same role that the Politburo played in state socialist systems. The failure modes always center around the capture of popular opinion, whether through explicit buy-in from the state or through aggressive PR campaigns.
azlev 5y ago
Well, those kind of revelations are kind of frequent :-). I think the gov just should rule out lead and let top players decide what to do. But there was an economic incentive to use TEL, so the free market prioritized profits.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine Absolutely. In my country, the engines of nearly all cars run on any mix of gasoline and ethanol. I always have the option to choose. I've even seen cars running on natural gas, seems to be the only thing keeping things profitable for Uber drivers these days. Corporations should have no control over anything to begin with. Monopolists ruin everything. The damage they've done to the western world cannot be calculated. > What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players? My country did that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
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josho 5y ago
> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money Canada used to have crown corporations (until conservative governments sold them off to do a one time balancing of the budget). When done well the crown Corp. serves a valuable purpose. The government no longer needs to rely on industry to tell them what is needed. Eg. In this scenario the crown Corp. refinery would have their own scientists doing research to stop the engine knock and those scientists would have the expertise to know of safer alternatives and would use those as additives. Creating a more competitive environment. The government can also use those industry experts to get honest answers on what the industry needs. Eg. “Mr. lobbyist, If these safety standards increase your industry’s costs too much then how come our own government plant is seeing net cost savings due to lower worker injuries?” It’s a crime that in short term interests crown corps have largely stopped being a thing.
- slavik81 5y ago
  There are nearly 50 Canadian crown corporations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC), and the Bank of Canada. There was even a new one created recently. The government created the Trans Mountain Corporation when they nationalized the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
Sharlin 5y ago
Free markets have zero incentive to correct for negative externalities by themselves. Free markets also want to become non-free through monopolization. These are the two classic cases of market failure, and the reason no actual economist (or, really, anyone who has read and understood an Econ 101 textbook) believes in unregulated free markets.
sangnoir 5y ago
> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business? These will be derided as loss-makers by a surprisingly large contingent, and they'll defeat the whole purpose (when they can) by changing the approach so it either turns a profit, or fails entirely (see the US Postal Service, which always delivers, including on unprofitable routes)

by air7 5y ago

zionic 5y ago

We could call it hybrid capitalism, mix the free market vs government run non profit.

shucksley 5y ago
Or we could just call it what it is - fascism.

foob 5y ago

Intellectual property reform could be a solution. It sounds like they might have gone with ethanol if they weren't motivated by patents so that they could prevent free market competition. We see the same thing with pharmaceuticals and in many other industries. I'm not particularly convinced that intellectual property laws are anywhere close to a net positive for consumers or society at large.

laurent92 5y ago
Patents, but also copyright on software. We gain nothing by rewriting the software every time, OSS should be the default. Same for music. It’s more controversial but Spotify is monetizing convenience, not music, which itself is available for free on P2P.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  It's not controversial, it's the whole point of capitalism.
- kube-system 5y ago
  I hear this frequently, but I don’t think it will do what many people think it would. Part of the power of FOSS is that it often leans on copyright to compel sharing. But, in the absence of copyright, why wouldn’t capitalistic powers simply stop sharing their code?
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    I think the gp post was not suggesting “get rid of copyright and leave oss unprotected” - by “OSS should be the default” i read that it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses
    - kube-system 5y ago
      > it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses Those things are logical opposites. If someone has a right to place any conditions at all on the way people copy their software, that is a copyright. Maybe they meant to suggest copyright reform. I make this point because people often like that GPL forces republishing of derivative works. This is an exercise of copyright, not a lack of it.
      - kennywinker 5y ago
        They're only opposite goals in as much as you see copyright and open source licenses as synonymous. I'm not a lawyer, but there are other forms of IP protections that are not copyright (patents, trademarks, etc). Seems like a new form of IP protection could be created to protect open source - i.e. "if someone says you can only modify this code if you re-share it, it is illegal to modify the code without re-sharing".
kube-system 5y ago
I’m not sure that removing IP from the equation would have wholly changed the situation. There are other ways to control markets and they likely would have leaned on them instead.
- bmitc 5y ago
  Do you have any examples?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    The obvious example in my mind is a control of the means of production. For instance, if they used [x] instead and also happened to own all the [x] mines. Or using anticompetitive practices to prevent competitors from joining the market. Or by gaining regulatory capture.

G3rn0ti 5y ago

If ethanol was so effective as an anti-knocking agent why didn’t gas stations just mix ethanol with petrol and sold that fuel with profit? Ethanol is cheaper and much safer to manufacture then tetraethyllead. But they didn’t… I am not an expert on combustion engines but the biggest problem with ethanol in the early days was it polluted the engine with water that it absorbed as a water soluble organic compound. Those days engines were not made from Aluminium but iron so it destroyed motors over time due to the formation of rust. Furthermore, production of tetraethyllead got much cheaper once its synthesis was automated. Knocking itself is bad for motors so people actually wanted to use anti-knocking additives to improve the longevity of their cars (aside of better fuel economy). So in the end tetraethyllead prevailed as an anti-knocking agent because of its technical and economical advantages and not because of a conspiracy of oil companies as the article suggests.

AmVess 5y ago
Read more on how hard and long GM tried to suppress opposition to leaded gas, it was no conspiracy.
- smolder 5y ago
  It was a conspiracy... by GM. Conspiracy: n. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act. The word conspiracy doesn't mean the same as "conspiracy theory" and even that doesn't necessarily imply something wacky like reptilian aliens secretly controlling the government.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Actually mixing ethanol with petrol is a pretty common thing... The main issue stations won't do it unless compelled is that it will reduce gas mileage slightly. You don't want to be the company selling gas that has a lower mileage. If they could sell it at a lower price that would be something. The thing is that you need a lot more ethanol than tetraethyllead, so it actually does end up being more expensive, for the same energy. And actually cast iron blocks are still being used nowadays.

Aloha 5y ago

TEL (tetraethyl lead) had and has other advantages over ethanol beyond patentability - Unlike TEL, ethanol is hydrophilic, which makes gasoline blended with it more apt to be contaminated with water, and other water containing contaminants, this is particularly relevant for aviation uses and also reducing incidences of vapor lock. TEL is also (more) rubber and seal friendly, other than the (very) high risk of lead toxicity, TEL blended gasoline is easier to work with and process than Ethanol blended gasoline. TEL also acts as a natural lubricant of its own, the lead acting as lubricant, particularly on valve and other top end engine components. This isn't really a defense of TEL - particularly not in road gas, while it was understood that exposure to large quantities of lead was toxic, toxicity of low dose exposure to environmental lead wasn't really fully understood until the 50's/60's, we also didn't really understood how long environmental lead lingered around until the 60's. Modern technologies have overcome much of the issues from ethanol in road gas, but there are reasons TEL is still used in AvGas. TEL in AvGas was vital in reaching higher octane, and Ethanol is contraindicated in AvGas (at the last I looked into the topic) because of its hydrophilic nature - our ability (the allies) to produce high octane AvGas is one of the factors that won WW2, and use of TEL was a deciding factor in that.

R0b0t1 5y ago
Those problems were solved for cars, they can be solved for planes. We shouldn't use it. Bioaccumulation of heavy metals was understood very early. Everything has a cost, spraying lead everywhere should be higher than what we are willing to pay. I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby. I was astounded to find TEL was still allowed in aviation fuels. Rates of cancers etc are higher near military bases due to fuel handling incidents.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Military planes just kerosene/JP-8 which contains no lead as far as I know.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    The fuel itself is toxic to the environment and animals. The fuels can have really harsh things in them like benzene, iirc.

Biologist123 5y ago

There are a few organisations campaigning for directors and shareholders to take unlimited liability.

wpietri 5y ago

To me this is an example of 3 negative features of free markets, exacerbated by a kyriarchic system, but I think it's fixable with work. The three issues I see: One, the short-term market incentive was for them to have something patentable and controllable. Two, the money accrued to them but the harms fell to others, creating a huge negative externality. And three, free markets in goods tend to create markets in political power. This is all exacerbated in a kyriarchic [1] system, one where domination hierarchies are normalized. Negative environmental externalities tend to fall on disfavored groups. The workers getting poisoned with lead were lower class; especially in that era, their deaths were seen as acceptable. Toxic spills don't happen on the Harvard campus or in wealthy suburbs, because however "safe" that stuff is in the official view, it's not so safe that elites will live next to it. Etc, etc. We could eliminate a lot of this with just by preventing any money flow from business to politics. No donations, no gifts, no ads, no PACs. Perhaps no lobbyists. Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds, and they are restricted after public service in what they can earn. The finances of politicians and former politicians are entirely public. The finances of executives and companies are also entirely public. We have well-funded, independent ethics watchdogs. Then on top of that we have well-funded public science systems with empowered public health authorities. That definitely exists in the US at least in patches, so I think we could make rapid progress here. And then I'd want to see strong laws where people making and profiting from harm are always held accountable. If we look at the 2008 financial crisis, nobody went to jail. A lot of people got rich doing dodgy things, and a few of them had to give a fraction of the money back. That did not teach a lot of lessons. One could argue that's ok in finance (although I wouldn't). But when it results in physical harm and death, I think the money and power should not be separable from the consequences. Currently CEOs and execs take paydays and walk away from things where I think negligent homicide charges are merited. Instead of "Gosh, I didn't know" being an acceptable excuse, I think the standard of "knew or should have known" and "could have acted differently" should be sufficient for execs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy

ryandrake 5y ago
> Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds I like where you are going with all this, but I'll nitpick here that while tying politicians' wealth to the overall stock market in general reduces their incentive to legislate in favor of particular companies, it does provide them incentive to legislate in favor of corporate America in general. We don't need laws that help stock market participants. ~50% of Americans don't hold stock in any form, even through mutual funds or retirement accounts. I don't know what the solution is. As long as rule making can disproportionately affect the rule maker's own personal wealth and wellbeing, you have a conflict of interest.

HomeDeLaPot 5y ago

... Regulation? Just ban lead in gas and let the free market find the next best solution.

hbogert 5y ago
That's what happened it took decades.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It was banned and has been banned for almost 40 years? Obviously not in plane engines, which were a much smaller % of the pollution. You can't just ban it which in turn bans avgas. That's just dumb, it has to be phased out and alternatives developed. Sounds like those exist currently but aren't being pushed.
- adrianN 5y ago
  "Phasing it out" is the same as banning it some time in the future. Why should alternatives be developed if you can just keep using it indefinitely? R&D is not free.

dexen 5y ago

>I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change I'm with you here - especially including the observation that it was the non-free market force ("It couldn’t be patented") that skewed the choice in favor of the inferior, poisonous option. Side note, besides its anti-knock properties, the lead also had protective effect on the valves - with early metallurgy, the high temperature gasses wore out valves, in particular the exhaust ones; lead partly ameliorated that. It is a concern with older vehicles (aircraft and cars) and they may require leaded gasoline for that particular reason - or at least replacement of relevant engine parts.

arbitrage 5y ago
> It is a concern with older vehicles This hasn't been true since about 1970, and even then, it was dubious.
- dexen 5y ago
  That only applies to car engines; aviation piston engines evolve much slower and commonly required leaded gasoline til recently - specifically for the lead content, beyond the anti-knock properties. Most common avgas is 100LL, with significant (if reduced) lead content. Cf. >Lycoming provides a list of engines and fuels that are compatible with them. According to their August 2017 chart, a number of their engines are compatible with unleaded fuel. >However, all of their engines require that an oil additive be used when unleaded fuel is used: "When using the unleaded fuels identified in Table 1, Lycoming oil additive P/N LW-16702, or an equivalent finished product such as Aeroshell 15W-50, must be used."* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    Aircraft piston engine makers like Lycoming and TCM have never provided any actual evidence that unleaded avgas increases engine wear. Their assertions that leaded gas provides lubrication are anecdotal and borderline superstitious. TCM pretty much admits this in its literature: "Field experience has determined the use of unleaded automotive gasoline to be the cause of premature cylinder replacement due primarily to rapid and severe valve seat recession." [1] They don't ever present evidence from controlled testing that backs up their "field experience". And controlled testing of automotive engines has shown that leaded fuels don't provide any significant protection. [2] Twenty years ago, aviation writer John Deakin issued a challenge for anyone to provide good evidence that leaded avgas prevents engine wear [3]. As far as I know that challenge was never met . 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20171004135916/https://pceonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TCMEngineCareX30548Rev3.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20171004135916/https://pceonline... 2 - https://archive.epa.gov/international/air/web/pdf/vsr-finaldraft.pdf https://archive.epa.gov/international/air/web/pdf/vsr-finald... 3 - https://www.avweb.com/features/pelicans-perch-55lead-in-the-hogwash/ https://www.avweb.com/features/pelicans-perch-55lead-in-the-...

CapitalistCartr 5y ago

All we needed was strong environmental protection at the time. It's a natural commons, ripe for protection and regulation. But "The Environment" wasn't a common concept at the time.

refurb 5y ago

How much money did GM make off of cars versus leaded gasoline. That seems like a silly theory. Sometimes giving away an invention for free (or finding a non-patentable alternative) makes you more money because it’s not a barrier to adoption.

cjfd 5y ago

I am not sure it should be formulated as market vs. government. The general public can be quite short sighted too. Also, marketing can be used on the general public. What I think would be improvements are protections to free speech. More specifically, removal of any obstacle to free speech. The next thing, and in line with this is very generous protections to whistle blowing. There could be a yearly award with elections by the public that chooses the whistle blower of the year. The price money should be enough to live on for some tens of years at the least, perhaps even for life. Also, winning the price should make a person immune to lawsuits related to the issue that the whistle blowing was about.

agumonkey 5y ago

If I get you right you're disappointed that free markets didn't lead to 100% efficiency. IMO the simple truth is that nothing will be perfect and there's always strange patterns emerging from the chaos. It's almost like entropy to me.

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thriftwy 5y ago

USSR had the same leaded gas which has eventually lead to a torrent of random street crime known as e.g. "Kazan phenomenon". So it's not just free markets.

krisgee 5y ago

>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business? Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times. Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it. People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I think this is an overly simplistic (and I've seen this argument on the internet a lot) argument. It's true that there are a lot of people, especially in Anglo countries, who oppose any policy that could allow the State to be enriched. But it's also true that there are many crappy state-owned enterprises. My family came from a developing country that used to have _most_ things run by the state, and there was widespread corruption in the government which kept service bad and prices high. I do think it would be useful for economists to analyze the conditions under which state-run entities create good outcomes, but in the currently charged political climate, it probably won't happen.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Provision of services is usually corrupt and high cost in less developed countries regardless of who’s providing it: public or private sector. That is my personal experience.
mschuster91 5y ago
> People just hate seeing the government make money. No, this is too generic - name the correct groups: Conservatives, neo-liberals and the rich elites hate see "the government" or government-owned/ran entities make money. Everyone else sees that government-run services usually provide decent service at affordable prices, and that after privatization, service quality goes downhill and the cost keeps rising.

gumby 5y ago

> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. There are many such examples. Here’s one from my life: when I was in the pharmaceutical business one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease. He and a couple of others tried it on themselves. We could have patented it and run it through clinical trials, but it was something any compounding pharmacist could have whipped up so such a patent would have been worthless. We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program. Instead there are marketed, less effective products on the market.

jzebedee 5y ago
Have you written about this anywhere? I'm curious what common disease could be cured in the manner you described. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is already picked clean in the pharma industry.
- gumby 5y ago
  It was using urea to fight topical fungal infections (anti fungal drugs are typically quite toxic). The mechanism of action has been well known for decades; what the folks came us with was a formulation that got the dosage high enough without causing damage. It was easily whipped up in the lab but I don’t remember the details. Any notes from this would be long gone as this was over a decade ago and the company has been sold and surely any paper lab notebooks are buried and forgotten.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
So the chemist and his friend had the exact same disease and it was successfully treated and they wouldn't release it because it could be made by someone else? Uh a recipe can be patented and that protects it from being sold. Compounding pharmacies can't magically ignore those patents if they don't want to get sued into oblivion or lose their license. I'm kind of skeptical of your story, sorry.
- gumby 5y ago

fighterpilot 5y ago

No, just tax or outlaw this behavior, don't nationalize industries. There is an intellectual framework in place for making sense of leaded petrol in the context of markets, and that's externalities. It is no different in concept to noise pollution, carbon pollution, or other types of externalities, it is just one that's significantly worse. Leaded petrol is at best a negative externality which should be taxed, and probably should just be considered physical assault similar to punching someone in the face (the user of the petrol is giving others literal brain damage) and totally banned and criminalized.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
So we should just stop using airplanes because their fuel has lead in it? What?
- roamerz 5y ago
  Yes - brought to you by the same people that would stop you from eating beef because cows fart. From a tech perspective tetraethyl lead also has lubricative properties that add to exhaust valve longevity under high temperature conditions which may be one of the reasons it took so long to disappear.
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    No, this is a myth. In reality, lead fouling decreases engine performance and longevity. From https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/knowledge-centre/technical-talk/techart-18-30071600.html https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/...: "The temperature for Lead deposits to form tend to be favourable around the spark plugs (as the whole mixture is quite cool before the flame starts to propagate) and on the exhaust valve stem (as the mixture cools after combustion). The problem is that the deposits are electrically conductive, which shorts out the spark plug - and corrosive, which can start to attack the metal of the valve stems."

wombatmobile 5y ago

> I'm generally an avid beliver (sic) in free markets as an agent for positive change That form of belief gets fixed in your mind via a very different method to beliefs such as "what goes up must come down". It's not a result of distilling evidence. It's a result of persuasion.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Free markets work as long as there's competition. When companies become so big they can kill any nascent competitor on a whim, that's when it becomes an issue. That's why trust busting and regulations and governments are necessary.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I've had this argument many times with my friends who are libertarian leaning and they start hand waving when you bring up a 100 different examples of companies being downright evil when they became too large.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I usually go back to the East Indian Tea company and work my way forward. I love my Libertarian friends as far as social and individual rights are concerned (something Republicans seem to have given up on, except for the 2nd amendment) but have lively debates on limits on capitalism, even though I am a capitalist with asterisk marks and think Communism is a terrible form of government.
adrianN 5y ago
Free markets need not only competition, but also regulation to price in externalities like poisoning the air or causing climate change.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I will agree with this, to me this falls under "regulation from the government"
acuozzo 5y ago
How does competition fix this? https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/how-dupont-may-avoid-paying-clean-toxic-forever-chemical-n1138766 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/how-dupont-may-avoid-p...

nawgz 5y ago

> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening > What are the solutions to this? Not believing in propagandist fairy tales? The "free" market is clearly a lie, it's a false front around capitalists seeking to maximize profit based in the regulatory framework(s) that government(s) have stood up. These frameworks aren't respected for their actual spirit either, instead exploited to their literal letter at every moment. To see someone on a logical forum like HN espouse a childish idea like "the free market will make an efficient solution", with none of the subtext that the solution is exclusively to the problem of making money, just shows how effective that propaganda is. Instead, acknowledge reality: incentives control actions, and capitalist incentives exclusively are to make money and control markets. Captive markets make more money, so they will work towards aspects of the regulatory frameworks that they can use to keep others out. There is no goodwill from corporations. There is no environmental concern from corporations. There is no concern on social impact from corporations. There are no morals in corporations. There is profit maximization techniques and nothing else. The free market has seen capitalists destroy our world with barely an impressive invention along the way.

mcguire 5y ago

A strong regulatory environment.

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pyrale 5y ago

> Perhaps the government should open companies [...] that are good for the people but bad for business? Perhaps the government should close companies that are good for business but bad for the people instead. In France after WW2, the companies that had participated in the German war effort, or to collaborate were simply confistated. When I see this kind of revelation, which show a complete breakage of corporate oversight and an evaporation of personal responsibility, I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared.

garavanting 5y ago
>I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared. That's precisely what Norway did in its own financial crisis: >In the last years of the 1980s, there was a major financial crisis in Norway and by 1991 the bank had used up all capital. To save the bank, the Government of Norway took over the bank and gave it new capital, rescuing it from bankruptcy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiania_Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiania_Bank It's a good idea: the shareholders, who boast that their returns come from the risk they're taking, should bear that risk. If the business is too big to fail, well, then it should just be brought under government control when it would otherwise fail.

HPsquared 5y ago

Removal of the patent system would be the "free market purist" answer to this one. Though ethanol already wasn't patented, hmm.... I can only assume the leaded fuel was cheaper.

Jiro 5y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to a free market. Patents are a government-granted monopoly, violation of which can get you fined or jailed. If a company hurts people because hurting people allows them to make money from a patent, that's not a failure of the free market, it's a failure of government control. Unless you mean that you're disheartened that the government doesn't allow a free market here, and you wish they would?

eternalban 5y ago

The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact. A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme. Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital. Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.

nostrademons 5y ago

Public opinion is the weak point in many systems that are supposed to converge to an optimal socially-beneficial equilibrium. The way competition and free markets are supposed to work, someone else would've introduced ethanol as an anti-knock additive, sold gasoline cheaper (and healthier!), and everyone would've benefitted. But Kettering & Midgley went on an extensive PR campaign after their invention to convince the public leaded gasoline was safe, and they had GM and Dupont's full advertising budgets at their disposal. The public wouldn't know any better, so they believe what they're told and leaded gasoline becomes the standard. You can hear echoes of that with many Facebook advertising & misinformation campaigns today. This also causes stock market bubbles & crashes. People are supposed to independently value securities, and then their errors cancel out and you get a very good statistical approximation of true value. Instead, they invest in what everyone else invests in in, until prices have been bid up to insane levels, then run out of gullible buyers and the price crashes. And brand-based monopoly. Instead of judging product quality for themselves, they buy products that all their friends are buying, "trusted brands", and this creates a barrier to entry that new entrants have a very hard time surmounting. Democracy is affected too. In theory, the best candidate should win. In practice, the candidate with the most money to buy ads wins. People's opinions are mutable; they don't rationally seek out information independently and make an informed, self-interested choice. They tend to trust what they hear a lot, which creates a market for influencing people's opinions. I can't think of a way to solve this, though. The "solution" would be to go from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, where everybody basically assumes that whatever they're told is a lie and ignores it. Societies like this have much higher transaction costs, much lower rates of innovation, and much higher rates of violence, which is not an improvement.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I've always argued that modern (late-stage?) capitalism and state socialism have similar failure modes. In state socialism, the Politburo controlled economic distribution and used their power to enrich themselves and their buddies. In many modern capitalist systems politicians are captured by economic interests and so large corporations play the same role that the Politburo played in state socialist systems. The failure modes always center around the capture of popular opinion, whether through explicit buy-in from the state or through aggressive PR campaigns.

azlev 5y ago

Well, those kind of revelations are kind of frequent :-). I think the gov just should rule out lead and let top players decide what to do. But there was an economic incentive to use TEL, so the free market prioritized profits.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine Absolutely. In my country, the engines of nearly all cars run on any mix of gasoline and ethanol. I always have the option to choose. I've even seen cars running on natural gas, seems to be the only thing keeping things profitable for Uber drivers these days. Corporations should have no control over anything to begin with. Monopolists ruin everything. The damage they've done to the western world cannot be calculated. > What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players? My country did that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

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josho 5y ago

> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money Canada used to have crown corporations (until conservative governments sold them off to do a one time balancing of the budget). When done well the crown Corp. serves a valuable purpose. The government no longer needs to rely on industry to tell them what is needed. Eg. In this scenario the crown Corp. refinery would have their own scientists doing research to stop the engine knock and those scientists would have the expertise to know of safer alternatives and would use those as additives. Creating a more competitive environment. The government can also use those industry experts to get honest answers on what the industry needs. Eg. “Mr. lobbyist, If these safety standards increase your industry’s costs too much then how come our own government plant is seeing net cost savings due to lower worker injuries?” It’s a crime that in short term interests crown corps have largely stopped being a thing.

slavik81 5y ago
There are nearly 50 Canadian crown corporations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC), and the Bank of Canada. There was even a new one created recently. The government created the Trans Mountain Corporation when they nationalized the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Sharlin 5y ago

Free markets have zero incentive to correct for negative externalities by themselves. Free markets also want to become non-free through monopolization. These are the two classic cases of market failure, and the reason no actual economist (or, really, anyone who has read and understood an Econ 101 textbook) believes in unregulated free markets.

sangnoir 5y ago

> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business? These will be derided as loss-makers by a surprisingly large contingent, and they'll defeat the whole purpose (when they can) by changing the approach so it either turns a profit, or fails entirely (see the US Postal Service, which always delivers, including on unprofitable routes)