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I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” Non-pecuniary externalities, in the Pigouv

by junofan 2mo ago

I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” Non-pecuniary externalities, in the Pigouvian sense, are really something you analyze to achieve efficiency. In this case, following a 5-year permitting process and plopping the industrial activity on industrial land is basically a form of bargaining and is probably acceptable from a social efficiency standpoint. Amazon’s hardly mining cobalt next to a daycare here.

InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
> I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” But that's pretty much the definition of the term. It's a negative impact on a third party. If I'm living next to a data center, and it's noisy, or my electricity costs more, those are negative externalities. There are real reasons not to want data centers next door, unlike 5G towers.
- Apocryphon 2mo ago
  In the South Valley, the pre-data center nemesis were distribution hubs, lambasted for the traffic they caused. Ironically also a key component of Amazon’s physical infrastructure.
mindslight 2mo ago
I'd say you're trying to define some ambiguous criteria to keep harms illegible to the analysis and thus deny that they exist. Noise pollution is very much pollution, certainly causes real problems, and falls right into the externality paradigm wherein a party unilaterally causes harm while making others suffer it. That the effects of noise pollution are hard to formally describe (and extra hard to quantify in monetary terms) does not mean we can just throw up our hands and pretend they don't exist. In fact, I'd say this is exactly why we stake out lofty non-economic ideals like human rights etc - markets have friction (ie are not efficient), and this combined with your reasoning means we could justify anything that produces negative outcomes for humans by simply writing it off as non-economically-legible. But the entire human-value justification for letting markets do their thing rests on the positive benefits they bring to us humans, so that is absurd. And so we always need to look at the larger picture and judge the real-world effects on humans.

by junofan 2mo ago

InsideOutSanta 2mo ago

> I think we should refrain extending “negative externality” to mean “things people don’t like that might affect them.” But that's pretty much the definition of the term. It's a negative impact on a third party. If I'm living next to a data center, and it's noisy, or my electricity costs more, those are negative externalities. There are real reasons not to want data centers next door, unlike 5G towers.

Apocryphon 2mo ago
In the South Valley, the pre-data center nemesis were distribution hubs, lambasted for the traffic they caused. Ironically also a key component of Amazon’s physical infrastructure.

mindslight 2mo ago

I'd say you're trying to define some ambiguous criteria to keep harms illegible to the analysis and thus deny that they exist. Noise pollution is very much pollution, certainly causes real problems, and falls right into the externality paradigm wherein a party unilaterally causes harm while making others suffer it. That the effects of noise pollution are hard to formally describe (and extra hard to quantify in monetary terms) does not mean we can just throw up our hands and pretend they don't exist. In fact, I'd say this is exactly why we stake out lofty non-economic ideals like human rights etc - markets have friction (ie are not efficient), and this combined with your reasoning means we could justify anything that produces negative outcomes for humans by simply writing it off as non-economically-legible. But the entire human-value justification for letting markets do their thing rests on the positive benefits they bring to us humans, so that is absurd. And so we always need to look at the larger picture and judge the real-world effects on humans.