Continuing the series of revisiting some of my older published work. Since I first wrote this piece in probably 2011 or so, I think we have generally become more aware of “externalities”… even when we don’t use that word. Climate change is making that realization a little less avoidable than in might have been back then.
But our ability to anticipate, and manage, and mitigate, those impacts before they hit our faces like a typhoon…that’s still a work in progress. And it’s not getting easier.
And as far as I know the chemicals are still leaching into the creek. But the creek now drains into a National Recreation Area.
This piece is from The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived: What’s Changed and How You Can Help. Learn more about how to get your own copy here, here or here.
A wise person doesn’t only think ahead, he or she also anticipates and prepares to deal proactively with the unintended consequences of a decision.
That sounds like an oxymoron – how do you anticipate your unintended consequences?
This is why thinking ahead becomes so important -- if we think rigorously and systematically about the things we decide to do, we can often anticipate that there are possible consequences to our decisions that we didn’t intend.
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The easiest unintended consequences to figure out are those that will impact me directly – the ones that will come back to bite me in the butt. If I am thinking about putting an addition on my house that I really can’t afford, and doing so will put me at risk of being unable to pay all my other bills, then the potential unintended consequences of my choice to add onto my house are pretty obvious. Since I will have to deal personally with those unintended consequences, they are part of my system. That means that these consequences should be relatively easy to see, if I am honest with myself about what all might happen. I might delude myself into thinking I can have it all, but that’s not failing to think ahead. That’s just being a dumbass.
The hardest, and potentially most troubling, types of unintended consequences fall into a group that traditional invisible-hand economics call “externalities.” Externalities are the impacts of a decision that accrue to someone or something else -- the impacts are external to the person or organization that made the decision.
Traditional economic theory placed externalities outside of the economy – the externality was experienced by someone other than the economic actors, so it was not part of the economic activity. Terming something an “externality” was a way to exclude it from the equation.
Of course, it’s not that simple.
As I mentioned, my father and grandfather ran a small paint company in the 1960s and 1970s. In those days, there were few rules regulating hazardous materials, and most of the compounds in paint hadn’t been officially recognized as hazardous anyways. Like most paint factories, theirs generated lots of garbage – batches of paint that didn’t come out right, test pots, empty containers, broken equipment, etc.
The company was located on the edge of a steep gorge that ran through town … and standard operating procedure at the factory was to toss the cans, pots and other garbage over the hillside. This wasn’t uncommon – people used to use that gorge to discard a lot of types of refuse. I remember 1950s-era car fenders and mattresses in the brush along the hillside farther downriver.
The company closed in the early 1980s, and as far as I know all of the officers and stockholders are dead. But the old paint cans on the side of the gorge are probably still leaking – my brothers, who still live in the area, have heard friends talk about seeing rainbow-colored scum on the creek surface downstream from the factory site.
When the day comes when that property gets cleaned up, it won’t be my dad’s company doing it. Instead, it will probably be the state Environmental Protection Agency. Which means that, even though I didn’t do the polluting, as a taxpayer, I and all of my neighbors across the state will pick up the tab.
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The problem with most externalities, from a local economy point of view, is that those impacts aren’t really external to us at all. One way or another, they end up affecting us as individuals, and us as a community. Most of the time it falls to a public agency, like the EPA, to go on the front line of dealing with externalities, whether it’s environmental cleanup or sheltering people who cannot survive in the modern economy on their own. And if no one deals with the externality, it will create its own set of consequences and impacts to us or to others, who will in turn impact us. And as we continuously challenge our local governments and state agencies to deal with more and more externalities with less and less resources, our capacity to manage unexpected consequences continues to erode.
At the end of the day, all of this means that the externality isn’t external to us as a community at all. There really are no externalities, because none of us live in isolation, entirely separated from the impacts created by others. There is actually little or nothing that can be excluded from the economic equation – we live in a complex, interdependent system, not Adam Smith’s series of simple, separate transactions.
There isn’t an easy answer, or a magic hat consultant, or a download-from-the-app-store solution. Our only choice: use the best thinking and decision-making tools we can come up with to try to systematically avoid or manage externalities. We can work to identify the potential unintended consequences of decisions, we can use the tools available to prevent or manage externalities, and we can keep a close eye out for new unanticipated consequences that we will have to address.
Because we will have to address them. It’s just a matter of time.