Externalities - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 85

it normally becomes a matter of ownership of property rights. This is the
only way our courts can operate and is a fundamentally important area of
interface between our economy, citizens' birthrights, and our legal system.
Another reality is that many of us wear more than one hat in these issues.
Owners of the firm might also like fishing and can afford to do so in some
clean, exotic place. Workers at the plant could suffer from airborne pollution.
We all breathe air, drink water in one form or another, and use paper. I may
enjoy water sports and yet have real concern for my neighbor, who works at
the paper mill. In this confusing array of constituencies, economics has tended,
in the interests of growth, material gain, and supporting an ever-growing
population, to support pushing ahead with industrialization, despite the fact
that many of the impacts remain unknown. The ethic has been as follows: “If
you have no conclusive proof that we're doing damage, you must allow us to
continue.”
Drawing Some Conclusions
Unfortunately, there is a multitude of situations, perhaps not quite as graphic
as a paper mill, which display these characteristics. The result is often con-
tinued social and cultural strife, frequently within communities, even after
scientific evidence has uncovered substantial negative impacts. The forces of
the status quo even sponsor countervailing scientific efforts, either to prove
the contrary or merely to cloud the issue by deeming the existing data as
flawed and thus “bad science,” thereby hoping to continue business as usual
amid the confusion.
The overall point is that economics, as a body of analytical method that
supposedly supports public and private policy, almost universally comes
down on the side of a progrowth, business-as-usual status quo. In doing
so, it rarely concedes the validity of either biological or physical science—
even when the data are clearly irrefutable, such as the measurable melting
of glaciers around the world. Sometimes this will be through its analyti-
cal methodology and other times merely through jargon. Some hypothetical
statements that exemplify this point include the following:
• The market has failed. We must fix—jump-start—the market,
because, above all, we must not give up the notion that markets are
the absolute best way to organize our society and allocate resources.
• Economic activity supports workers and delivers the products we all
need. We must either ignore some incidental externalities or some-
how compensate the few losers, because society would be unwilling
to do without the goods and services.