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Food is an interesting case. People are, in a way, turning industrialism backwards - making a conscious choice to support economic 'inefficiency', in part becau

Food is an interesting case. People are, in a way, turning industrialism backwards - making a conscious choice to support economic 'inefficiency', in part because of the social problems we feel it has brought about. I'll have to think more about that kind of 'slow capitalism'. I was of course playing devil's advocate to an extent. I agree with you that there's still plenty of important things to be done. I note, though, that most of the problems you list aren't going to be solved by cutting back and hoping to stimulate for-profit corporations. Market forces aren't going to fix the environment, for example. Some people have proposed a 'green new deal', a major increase in government spending to tackle those kinds of problems and provide jobs. I'm not qualified to say whether that would work, and at the moment it seems to be politically impossible to even discuss.

wpietri 14y ago
Fab. I agree with you that many problems aren't currently fixable by existing markets, which is often why the problems are still problems. But a lot of environmental problems go away when you stop allowing negative externalities and treat them as market problems. Overfishing, for example, has a bunch of great examples of improvement. The same is true for pollution markets. Positive externalities are harder to fix with markets. Improving society's level of education, for example, benefits everybody; it's not clear who to charge. But I certainly agree that existing politics in the US makes it hard to solve any of these things. Or even admit that there are problems. I look forward to the pendulum swinging back toward sanity.