On 8/2/06, Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Collapse by Jarred Diamond
Part One: Modern Montana
Chapter One: Under Montana's Big Sky
Diamond picks Montana for his first chapter because he can gage the
attitudes of the people that live there, because it provides a contrast to
the more fragile societies discussed in later chapters and because it
illustrates the five main themes of the book: human impacts on the
environment; climate change; a society's relations with neighboring
friendly societies; a society's exposure to acts of other potential
hostile societies; and the importance of a society's responses to it's
problems. He uses Montana as a reference for the reader. A familiar
situation with which we can relate to the more severe problems he
discusses later on.
A similarity to my home town of Morgan Hill, Ca. to the Bitterroot Valley
is the contrast in attitudes of the old timers; farmers and ranchers with
sizeable land holdings and upper-middle class to upper class professionals
with a fondness for the small town atmosphere in close proximity to a
major metropolitan area. Morgan Hill has a slow-growth policy that allows
a limited number of new housing units per year. This is frustrating to
landowners because there is a huge demand for housing in the area.
Montana's environmental problems include toxic wastes, forests, soils,
water, climate change, biodiversity losses and introduced pests and while
Diamond classifies Montana as probably the least damaged of the lower 48
states, the problems he describes seem severe.
One interesting conundrum he discusses is the conflict between businesses
that exist to make money and "moral obligations" to clean up after
themselves. Is this a good argument against the preeminence of a free
market economy or can we have both a strong economy and a clean
environment?
....
Fascinating! Read on.
--
Doug
Me and the pygmy pony over by the dental floss bush, maru
This is a long-standing and fascinating (IMO) objection to market economies.
After all, economic activities driven by market economics seem to
inevitably fall into tragedies of the commons, which is exactly what
one sees here: the penalties fall on (other people's) descendants in
the far future, or even if they manifest soon enough to be on a
company's radar (remember that there is discounting of possible future
liabilities going on here; I dunno what the discount rate is, but it's
probably pretty high when you consider examples like the tobacco
companies), they are often negative externalities for which the
company can get off scot-free. What makes Montana such a good example
is that because of the light long-term population of Indians, we can
see pretty well just how our birds done come home to roost.
Unsurprisingly, I think this is very much a matter of tradeoffs.
Clearly a market economy can find effective ways to minimize long-term
impacts if the market is sufficiently distorted (say, by government
regulations), but almost by definition, such a distorted market is not
The Efficient Market, and so there's a real cost there.
~maru
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