9 ms·

How much do things really cost?

87 points by hhs 5y ago

matsemann 5y ago
In a similar vein, drivers don't realize just how much their car usage is subsidized. They feel they pay more than enough for their use, given petrol taxes and other fees, but it's not even remotely close to cover the cost impacted on society.
- hhs 5y ago
  In the U.S., there is the Monroney sticker that provides some information about petrol/fuel economy and society impact (e.g., the environment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker
- rtlfe 5y ago
  The link with the actual data is long dead, but the numbers in this image seem plausible. https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/801641590380851200 https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/801641590380851200
  - gruez 5y ago
    What numbers? It just asserts that society pays $9.20 for every $1 you spent driving. I don't see how that alone is plausible. A quick google says the annual TCO for a car (ie. how much "driving costs you") is $9,561[1]. If that figure is correct, then each car is costing society a whopping $87,961/year. Keep in mind, the US GDP per capita is only around $60-70k/year. Yes I know each person doesn't necessarily own a car, but it seems implausible that cars are actually costing a significant fraction of the GDP. [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
    - amelius 5y ago
      Yes, if you take negative externalities into account, the GDP is actually negative :) ... :(
- WildGreenLeave 5y ago
  Given the article talks about a company in The Netherlands, and that The Netherlands is the most expensive country to own a car within Europe [0], I truly wonder how far off we are. Not saying that we are (or should be) close, but genuinely interested how far off we are. [0]: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/features/netherlands-most-expensive-eu-country-own-and-use-car https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu... Edit: added source
  - thazework 5y ago
    This article suggests about 5k euros in social costs per year for Germany https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
- PopAlongKid 5y ago
  > drivers don't realize just how much their car usage is subsidized.[...]it's not even remotely close to cover the cost impacted on society. Aren't car drivers, and their passengers, a very large portion of "society"? And even for those who never use a vehicle, don't they depend heavily on many other members of society who do, such as doctors, teachers, fire and police, food providers, and almost every other class of worker? Are you saying that somehow the vast legions of car drivers/passengers out there are not part of society and therefore are not paying the true cost?
  - rtlfe 5y ago
    Driving a car is not a requirement for any of those professions.
    - PopAlongKid 5y ago
      My comment had nothing to do with requirements. If I drive a car, and it causes pollution where I live, then aren't I, as part of society, paying the "true" cost? I say "where I live" because every car trip I take starts and ends at my front door. I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming.
      - rtlfe 5y ago
        > I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming. The point is that everybody pays the costs whether they drive or not. If the costs were more directly tied to how much each person drives, there would be a lot less driving overall.
      - AlotOfReading 5y ago
        What they mean is that the vehicle-specific costs they incur aren't sufficient to cover the true costs to society, from pollution cleanup to road maintenance. Instead, those funds must be drawn from general sources like income taxes. Once you account for social ills like pollution, the costs end up falling disproportionately on the people who can least afford them and contribute the least to the problem.
- cgb223 5y ago
  You could make the economic argument that the “subsidization” of car usage has economic benefits that outweighs the cost of subsidization. If more people can afford to get to work because of the subsidies then the net output of work done could be greater than the cost of the subsidy itself.
  - ivanech 5y ago
    sure but this frames it as if cars are the only way to get people to work. There are more efficient means that would require less subsidy and cause less waste (heavy rail transit, building places to live that don't require a car, bike roads, etc)
    - anamax 5y ago
      You're assuming that people live to work when most people work to live. The difference is that the latter would happily NOT work, or at least not work at what they do, if they could support their life. The former will happily change their life to make work easier.
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        I don't understand how building nice bicycle infrastructure instead of smokey stroads implies living to work rather than working to live.
        anamax 5y ago
        Note that you don't mention anything about living, just transportation. And, you couldn't resist throwing in pejoratives. It's okay that you like bikes, that you design your life around bikes. You're offended that other people don't or that bikes don't work for what they want to do. FWIW, my wife and I worked >50 miles apart for over a decade. I know, we shouldn't have done that.
        matsemann 5y ago
- ta8645 5y ago
  Another way to express what you're saying is: only the rich should drive. IMHO, we should things the way they are, and spread the true costs of driving across all of society. The rich should pay higher taxes so that they pay more than the true cost of their car usage, to subsidize the driving of the less well off.
  - rtlfe 5y ago
    > only the rich should drive. Alternate ways of saying the same thing include "make driving optional" or "driving should be considered a luxury." I.e. we should structure our cities and towns so that most people are able to conveniently do most of their activities without driving.
    - ivanech 5y ago
      Yes, my ideal terminal state would be for driving to be predominantly done by professionals (like delivery drivers) or for leisure. Nobody in major metro would need to drive
  - elil17 5y ago
    Or to subsidize the construction of public transit infrastructure - long term, society will be wealthier
    - asiachick 5y ago
      It was disappointing to hear this debate https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-past-their-prime https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-pas... where the people saying "Big Cities are past their prime" were extremely down on public transportation. It's possible they are correct that we could really never have good public transportation in the USA because our cities aren't designed around it. But, I did want to reach through the podcast and shake them, "Go visit the largest city on the plant, Tokyo!" and see if you can't imagine public transit working for a city of 34 million people. Of course it's possible the reality is it just can't happen in the USA. See the fiasco of SF's Central Line. I'd argue the best place to try is Los Angeles. It used to have the best in the public transit in the world in say 1920-1950 but it was all torn down. In any case, it looks like it has maybe enough people that a truly good public transit with nice stations as destinations and express lines etc would work but you'd have to magically make about 80 lines appear. A few lines at a time will never get to the MVP of actually making the system useful for the average person that wants to get from A to B because it would require 80 lines to get from every A to every B. Also, people seem to forget that Japan's system is privatized and the incentives seem to align. The train companies create/fund/own buildings at and around their stations so they have every incentive to make people want to ride the trains as use their stations and all the buildings and businesses around them. Some of them even build housing. And, if they don't like the big city version then they can go to Amsterdam (pop 800k), Antwerp (500k), Barcelona (1600k), Copenhagen (600k), Helsinki (630k), Koln (1000k), etc... that all have pretty great public transportation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  It's also hard to untangle from other things. For example, car drivers are subsidised heavily by road infrastructure being paid for by general taxation. However, those same roads also allow rapid and fine-grained transport of almost everything physical that anyone in society uses: food, clothes, furniture, building materials, most industrial materials, machinery and components all probably were moved on a truck at some point. Probably the only thing that likely didn't is water, and even then the treatment chemicals did. Even if goods moved from ports to regional hubs by train (which they probably should), you still need to move them by road from the hubs (and again if they are used to produce other goods). Much as I love trains, they're no good for delivering 1000kg to a specific urban building, and much as I love bicycles, neither are they. So, much of that road that counts for the cost of the car drivers would still exist even if the cars didn't. Even in the suburbs you will still need houses to be visited by vehicles sometimes, even if only for construction or emergency purposes. Moreover, because the vehicles that would be left are physically large and heavy (heavy goods vehicles, emergency vehicles, public transport and construction equipment), the cost of roads would not substantially decrease even if you deleted every car, since it's those vehicles that dictate minimum road strength and that wear roads most in the first place.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Inclined to agree, but those giant noisy consumer trucks with multiple tires or the mini-monster truck tires seem likely to be heavy enough to matter. It would also be a generally good idea to break this "go to the office" mentality unless there is work that can only be done there. That's some low-hanging fruit to reduce our energy use.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      Well yes, but that's not quite the point: some externalities that might be priced into cars (or anything) might actually exist anyway. The truck thing is easy: treat them as commercial vehicles and see if people still think they're cool with a speed limiter, tachograph, mandatory maximum driving times and a more rigorous driving test[1]! And, yes, I do know about that thing with the seats in Ford vans, but there might be a billion in fines for that. [1] Which begs the question: would doing that for all vehicles reduce externalities with less usage, lower speeds and safer driving?
- ascar 5y ago
  I would really like to see a reference for that. Just to state one potential counter argument: as far as I know most road damage is caused by trucks (I don't remember exactly but IIRC there is a quadratic or even cubic relation between weight per wheel and applied force to the asphalt), so most road maintenance cost is not related to personal car usage.
  - SECProto 5y ago
    The depth of a road (thickness of asphalt and granular layers) is determined largely by the loading (i.e. how many big trucks will be travelling on it). The width of a road (# of lanes) is determined mostly by how many vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means mostly cars. The width of a lane is determined by how many large vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means buses and trucks. The grade of a road (how steep it is) is generally determined by the lowest weight-to-power ratio, i.e. fully loaded transports The grade of asphalt used is determined by annual average maximum and minimum temperatures, how many heavy vehicles will be using it, and how many vehicles total will be using it (lower grades of asphalt can be used on smaller streets, lower quality binder can used in areas with less temperature variation, and asphalt with higher quantity of coarse aggregate and larger compactive effort has to be used if it's a truck/bus route) The frequency a road is resurfaced is governed by a few things, frequency of heavy road users is a big one (but at least in my local area, the number of freeze-thaw cycles is more important) All that is to say: road damage is largely caused by trucks and freeze-thaw cycles, but cost of the road is largely governed by how many lanes of traffic there are, which is caused by cars. Remove all the cars from your street and a two lane non-divided highway with a passing lane every couple KM would suffice in most places.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    Here's a source for Norway. The article links to a 300+ page pdf done by the Norwegian "transport economics Institute". https://www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/kommentar/2022/02/15/enorme-vei-investeringer-og-klimapolitikk-er-blitt-en-gullgruve-for-bilister/ https://www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/kommentar/2022/02/15/enorm... Basically, a car in Norway is subsidized with on average 10000nok / 1200usd per year, so not even close to paying for its own use. This also doesn't include the fact that electric cars don't pay any taxes when bought, so society is losing out a lot there as well given that 90% of all new cars now are electric. Here's a German paper saying that the society bears 40% of the costs associated with owning a car: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
- listenallyall 5y ago
  Users of public transportation likely don't realize just how much their usage of public transportation is subsidized, either. Most public transportation networks in American cities get funding from a mix of city, county, state and federal taxes. A $2.50 subway ride costs a lot more than $2.50.
  - jfim 5y ago
    Some cities do have subway systems that are running a profit. For example, Tokyo's private companies running the various subway systems are profitable, with high farebox recovery ratios and additional revenue from station leases for commercial vendors (vending machines and convenience stores).
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20220402193358/https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-much-do-things-really-cost http://web.archive.org/web/20220402193358/https://www.newyor... https://archive.ph/5qZDc https://archive.ph/5qZDc
Gunax 5y ago
I think it's good as a lesson or exercise, but I think a lot of this tallying must end up being dubious. How does one account for underpayment of labour or the inconvenience of roads?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  For underplayment of labor, you determine what a living wage would be in the area where the underpayment takes place, subtract the actual amount paid, and the difference is the "cost" of underpayment (which shows up only as a net positive in any actual balance sheets, but imposes net cost on society as a result of having more people who struggle to survive). You could go further and quantify the effective costs of that struggle, but I don't think you need to. If something you buy contains 2 hours of labor that should have been paid $8/hr but was paid $4/hr, then there's a component to the "true cost" of at least $8.
fortran77 5y ago
The "true cost" of food is made even more complex in countries like the U.S. where 66% of people are obese or overweight. The cost of obesity is tremendous, affecting everything from health care costs, to clothing costs (for every extra inch you are around the waist, you need several square feet of fabric), to transportation fuel costs (it costs more to move obese people around). So perhaps charging much more for food over 2,000 kCal/day per person makes a lot of sense. There are externalities that we all end up paying for.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  > So perhaps charging much more for food over 2,000 kCal/day per person makes a lot of sense. Why financially penalize exercise? Even physical activity aside, why do you think everybody needs exactly 2,000 kCal/day to maintain their weight? What about tall people or people with abnormal metabolisms? I require more than 2,000 kCal/day to maintain a normal weight, even when completely sedentary. Why should I suddenly have to start paying more per calorie past 2,000 kCal?
  - fortran77 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you. This wouldn't be fair to tall or active people.
    - throwaway684936 5y ago
      It kind of sounded like it was a good idea your opinion, or some kind of proposal. Incentivizing physical activity is what we want for a healthy society, no? There are better ways to discourage getting fat than engraving a 2,000 kCal/day threshold into stone.
shrubble 5y ago
So what would happen to the water in the tomato, if the tomato was never grown? This whole concept seems prone to "imaginary dollars" being considered as real.
- toper-centage 5y ago
  What is your point? Tomatoes are grown in sunny locations and usually watered artificially. So ungrown tomatoes are unwatered tomatoes.
  - forum_ghost 5y ago
    imaginary accounting isn't bounded by the consensus reality. you could really paint the picture either way you like, given enough effort.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    Tomatoes grow really nicely in New Jersey with much less artificial irrigation. But New Jersey real estate is much more expensive than the California desert.
- 6510 5y ago
  A better question is to wonder how we can at least visualize externalities. On the one hand it is impossibly hard, on the other it is easy to improve over the current lets not talk about them approach. I had pondered itemized bills so that we may at least make that data available but it wouldn't be very useful compared to what it costs to gather the data. It just wouldn't fit in our attention span. The shooting from the hip approach taken by De Aanzet is good enough to expand the attention all the way up to HN and beyond.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  There is no such thing as non-imaginary dollars.

87 points by hhs 5y ago

In a similar vein, drivers don't realize just how much their car usage is subsidized. They feel they pay more than enough for their use, given petrol taxes and other fees, but it's not even remotely close to cover the cost impacted on society.

hhs 5y ago
In the U.S., there is the Monroney sticker that provides some information about petrol/fuel economy and society impact (e.g., the environment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker
rtlfe 5y ago
The link with the actual data is long dead, but the numbers in this image seem plausible. https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/801641590380851200 https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/801641590380851200
- gruez 5y ago
  What numbers? It just asserts that society pays $9.20 for every $1 you spent driving. I don't see how that alone is plausible. A quick google says the annual TCO for a car (ie. how much "driving costs you") is $9,561[1]. If that figure is correct, then each car is costing society a whopping $87,961/year. Keep in mind, the US GDP per capita is only around $60-70k/year. Yes I know each person doesn't necessarily own a car, but it seems implausible that cars are actually costing a significant fraction of the GDP. [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
  - amelius 5y ago
    Yes, if you take negative externalities into account, the GDP is actually negative :) ... :(
WildGreenLeave 5y ago
Given the article talks about a company in The Netherlands, and that The Netherlands is the most expensive country to own a car within Europe [0], I truly wonder how far off we are. Not saying that we are (or should be) close, but genuinely interested how far off we are. [0]: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/features/netherlands-most-expensive-eu-country-own-and-use-car https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu... Edit: added source
- thazework 5y ago
  This article suggests about 5k euros in social costs per year for Germany https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
PopAlongKid 5y ago
> drivers don't realize just how much their car usage is subsidized.[...]it's not even remotely close to cover the cost impacted on society. Aren't car drivers, and their passengers, a very large portion of "society"? And even for those who never use a vehicle, don't they depend heavily on many other members of society who do, such as doctors, teachers, fire and police, food providers, and almost every other class of worker? Are you saying that somehow the vast legions of car drivers/passengers out there are not part of society and therefore are not paying the true cost?
- rtlfe 5y ago
  Driving a car is not a requirement for any of those professions.
  - PopAlongKid 5y ago
    My comment had nothing to do with requirements. If I drive a car, and it causes pollution where I live, then aren't I, as part of society, paying the "true" cost? I say "where I live" because every car trip I take starts and ends at my front door. I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming.
    - rtlfe 5y ago
      > I simply can't understand how car users impose "true costs" on everyone else, but not themselves, which is what the GP was claiming. The point is that everybody pays the costs whether they drive or not. If the costs were more directly tied to how much each person drives, there would be a lot less driving overall.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      What they mean is that the vehicle-specific costs they incur aren't sufficient to cover the true costs to society, from pollution cleanup to road maintenance. Instead, those funds must be drawn from general sources like income taxes. Once you account for social ills like pollution, the costs end up falling disproportionately on the people who can least afford them and contribute the least to the problem.
cgb223 5y ago
You could make the economic argument that the “subsidization” of car usage has economic benefits that outweighs the cost of subsidization. If more people can afford to get to work because of the subsidies then the net output of work done could be greater than the cost of the subsidy itself.
- ivanech 5y ago
  sure but this frames it as if cars are the only way to get people to work. There are more efficient means that would require less subsidy and cause less waste (heavy rail transit, building places to live that don't require a car, bike roads, etc)
  - anamax 5y ago
    You're assuming that people live to work when most people work to live. The difference is that the latter would happily NOT work, or at least not work at what they do, if they could support their life. The former will happily change their life to make work easier.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      I don't understand how building nice bicycle infrastructure instead of smokey stroads implies living to work rather than working to live.
      - anamax 5y ago
        Note that you don't mention anything about living, just transportation. And, you couldn't resist throwing in pejoratives. It's okay that you like bikes, that you design your life around bikes. You're offended that other people don't or that bikes don't work for what they want to do. FWIW, my wife and I worked >50 miles apart for over a decade. I know, we shouldn't have done that.
        matsemann 5y ago
ta8645 5y ago
Another way to express what you're saying is: only the rich should drive. IMHO, we should things the way they are, and spread the true costs of driving across all of society. The rich should pay higher taxes so that they pay more than the true cost of their car usage, to subsidize the driving of the less well off.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  > only the rich should drive. Alternate ways of saying the same thing include "make driving optional" or "driving should be considered a luxury." I.e. we should structure our cities and towns so that most people are able to conveniently do most of their activities without driving.
  - ivanech 5y ago
    Yes, my ideal terminal state would be for driving to be predominantly done by professionals (like delivery drivers) or for leisure. Nobody in major metro would need to drive
- elil17 5y ago
  Or to subsidize the construction of public transit infrastructure - long term, society will be wealthier
  - asiachick 5y ago
    It was disappointing to hear this debate https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-past-their-prime https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/big-cities-are-pas... where the people saying "Big Cities are past their prime" were extremely down on public transportation. It's possible they are correct that we could really never have good public transportation in the USA because our cities aren't designed around it. But, I did want to reach through the podcast and shake them, "Go visit the largest city on the plant, Tokyo!" and see if you can't imagine public transit working for a city of 34 million people. Of course it's possible the reality is it just can't happen in the USA. See the fiasco of SF's Central Line. I'd argue the best place to try is Los Angeles. It used to have the best in the public transit in the world in say 1920-1950 but it was all torn down. In any case, it looks like it has maybe enough people that a truly good public transit with nice stations as destinations and express lines etc would work but you'd have to magically make about 80 lines appear. A few lines at a time will never get to the MVP of actually making the system useful for the average person that wants to get from A to B because it would require 80 lines to get from every A to every B. Also, people seem to forget that Japan's system is privatized and the incentives seem to align. The train companies create/fund/own buildings at and around their stations so they have every incentive to make people want to ride the trains as use their stations and all the buildings and businesses around them. Some of them even build housing. And, if they don't like the big city version then they can go to Amsterdam (pop 800k), Antwerp (500k), Barcelona (1600k), Copenhagen (600k), Helsinki (630k), Koln (1000k), etc... that all have pretty great public transportation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
It's also hard to untangle from other things. For example, car drivers are subsidised heavily by road infrastructure being paid for by general taxation. However, those same roads also allow rapid and fine-grained transport of almost everything physical that anyone in society uses: food, clothes, furniture, building materials, most industrial materials, machinery and components all probably were moved on a truck at some point. Probably the only thing that likely didn't is water, and even then the treatment chemicals did. Even if goods moved from ports to regional hubs by train (which they probably should), you still need to move them by road from the hubs (and again if they are used to produce other goods). Much as I love trains, they're no good for delivering 1000kg to a specific urban building, and much as I love bicycles, neither are they. So, much of that road that counts for the cost of the car drivers would still exist even if the cars didn't. Even in the suburbs you will still need houses to be visited by vehicles sometimes, even if only for construction or emergency purposes. Moreover, because the vehicles that would be left are physically large and heavy (heavy goods vehicles, emergency vehicles, public transport and construction equipment), the cost of roads would not substantially decrease even if you deleted every car, since it's those vehicles that dictate minimum road strength and that wear roads most in the first place.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Inclined to agree, but those giant noisy consumer trucks with multiple tires or the mini-monster truck tires seem likely to be heavy enough to matter. It would also be a generally good idea to break this "go to the office" mentality unless there is work that can only be done there. That's some low-hanging fruit to reduce our energy use.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    Well yes, but that's not quite the point: some externalities that might be priced into cars (or anything) might actually exist anyway. The truck thing is easy: treat them as commercial vehicles and see if people still think they're cool with a speed limiter, tachograph, mandatory maximum driving times and a more rigorous driving test[1]! And, yes, I do know about that thing with the seats in Ford vans, but there might be a billion in fines for that. [1] Which begs the question: would doing that for all vehicles reduce externalities with less usage, lower speeds and safer driving?
ascar 5y ago
I would really like to see a reference for that. Just to state one potential counter argument: as far as I know most road damage is caused by trucks (I don't remember exactly but IIRC there is a quadratic or even cubic relation between weight per wheel and applied force to the asphalt), so most road maintenance cost is not related to personal car usage.
- SECProto 5y ago
  The depth of a road (thickness of asphalt and granular layers) is determined largely by the loading (i.e. how many big trucks will be travelling on it). The width of a road (# of lanes) is determined mostly by how many vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means mostly cars. The width of a lane is determined by how many large vehicles per hour are travelling on it, which means buses and trucks. The grade of a road (how steep it is) is generally determined by the lowest weight-to-power ratio, i.e. fully loaded transports The grade of asphalt used is determined by annual average maximum and minimum temperatures, how many heavy vehicles will be using it, and how many vehicles total will be using it (lower grades of asphalt can be used on smaller streets, lower quality binder can used in areas with less temperature variation, and asphalt with higher quantity of coarse aggregate and larger compactive effort has to be used if it's a truck/bus route) The frequency a road is resurfaced is governed by a few things, frequency of heavy road users is a big one (but at least in my local area, the number of freeze-thaw cycles is more important) All that is to say: road damage is largely caused by trucks and freeze-thaw cycles, but cost of the road is largely governed by how many lanes of traffic there are, which is caused by cars. Remove all the cars from your street and a two lane non-divided highway with a passing lane every couple KM would suffice in most places.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Here's a source for Norway. The article links to a 300+ page pdf done by the Norwegian "transport economics Institute". https://www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/kommentar/2022/02/15/enorme-vei-investeringer-og-klimapolitikk-er-blitt-en-gullgruve-for-bilister/ https://www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/kommentar/2022/02/15/enorm... Basically, a car in Norway is subsidized with on average 10000nok / 1200usd per year, so not even close to paying for its own use. This also doesn't include the fact that electric cars don't pay any taxes when bought, so society is losing out a lot there as well given that 90% of all new cars now are electric. Here's a German paper saying that the society bears 40% of the costs associated with owning a car: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...
listenallyall 5y ago
Users of public transportation likely don't realize just how much their usage of public transportation is subsidized, either. Most public transportation networks in American cities get funding from a mix of city, county, state and federal taxes. A $2.50 subway ride costs a lot more than $2.50.
- jfim 5y ago
  Some cities do have subway systems that are running a profit. For example, Tokyo's private companies running the various subway systems are profitable, with high farebox recovery ratios and additional revenue from station leases for commercial vendors (vending machines and convenience stores).

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220402193358/https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-much-do-things-really-cost http://web.archive.org/web/20220402193358/https://www.newyor... https://archive.ph/5qZDc https://archive.ph/5qZDc

Gunax 5y ago

I think it's good as a lesson or exercise, but I think a lot of this tallying must end up being dubious. How does one account for underpayment of labour or the inconvenience of roads?

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
For underplayment of labor, you determine what a living wage would be in the area where the underpayment takes place, subtract the actual amount paid, and the difference is the "cost" of underpayment (which shows up only as a net positive in any actual balance sheets, but imposes net cost on society as a result of having more people who struggle to survive). You could go further and quantify the effective costs of that struggle, but I don't think you need to. If something you buy contains 2 hours of labor that should have been paid $8/hr but was paid $4/hr, then there's a component to the "true cost" of at least $8.

fortran77 5y ago

The "true cost" of food is made even more complex in countries like the U.S. where 66% of people are obese or overweight. The cost of obesity is tremendous, affecting everything from health care costs, to clothing costs (for every extra inch you are around the waist, you need several square feet of fabric), to transportation fuel costs (it costs more to move obese people around). So perhaps charging much more for food over 2,000 kCal/day per person makes a lot of sense. There are externalities that we all end up paying for.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway684936 5y ago
> So perhaps charging much more for food over 2,000 kCal/day per person makes a lot of sense. Why financially penalize exercise? Even physical activity aside, why do you think everybody needs exactly 2,000 kCal/day to maintain their weight? What about tall people or people with abnormal metabolisms? I require more than 2,000 kCal/day to maintain a normal weight, even when completely sedentary. Why should I suddenly have to start paying more per calorie past 2,000 kCal?
- fortran77 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you. This wouldn't be fair to tall or active people.
  - throwaway684936 5y ago
    It kind of sounded like it was a good idea your opinion, or some kind of proposal. Incentivizing physical activity is what we want for a healthy society, no? There are better ways to discourage getting fat than engraving a 2,000 kCal/day threshold into stone.

shrubble 5y ago

So what would happen to the water in the tomato, if the tomato was never grown? This whole concept seems prone to "imaginary dollars" being considered as real.

toper-centage 5y ago
What is your point? Tomatoes are grown in sunny locations and usually watered artificially. So ungrown tomatoes are unwatered tomatoes.
- forum_ghost 5y ago
  imaginary accounting isn't bounded by the consensus reality. you could really paint the picture either way you like, given enough effort.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Tomatoes grow really nicely in New Jersey with much less artificial irrigation. But New Jersey real estate is much more expensive than the California desert.
6510 5y ago
A better question is to wonder how we can at least visualize externalities. On the one hand it is impossibly hard, on the other it is easy to improve over the current lets not talk about them approach. I had pondered itemized bills so that we may at least make that data available but it wouldn't be very useful compared to what it costs to gather the data. It just wouldn't fit in our attention span. The shooting from the hip approach taken by De Aanzet is good enough to expand the attention all the way up to HN and beyond.
thanatos519 5y ago
There is no such thing as non-imaginary dollars.