If we’d always been accounting for all the actual costs of cars, including externalities, most people would have never been able to afford them, we’d recognize them as the very costly luxeries they actually are, and not have completely dismantled our ability to live without them in every city except NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and San Francisco.
You could say that about everything. If you would account for all actual cost no one would fly, eat steaks, own 2 TVs or change phones every 2 years either. We would buy things that last 10-20 years and replace them only when they are broken. As we used to…
Slippery slope aside, I think reducing unnecessary consumerism would be beneficial for our most vuneral populations. There would be a lower barrier of entry into the economy and more resources would be available at a lower cost for people who cannot afford them
Oh, I wasn’t making a slippery slope argument. I meant that this is what should happen. We exported most of the devastating impact on the environment and the terrible working conditions to developing countries so that we can enjoy tons of crap we don’t really need. If things we buy would reflect the actual costs we would have to limit how much we consume. Of course no one would like it.
Well, it’s a mixed bag. There have been absolutely incredible advances in efficiency that do enable a lot of things to genuinely be much cheaper and accessible than they used to be, but some of that is also just the ability to throw external costs on other people (climate change, for instance). This is why things like carbon taxes are so strongly supported by economists.
Steak, for instance, is hugely subsidized by how little farmers have to pay for water, along with other government benefits. Flying has environmental costs, but those are reasonably quantifiable and, per flight and per passenger, not that insane as far as I understand.
I do think consumer electronics are a bit of a different story though. Yes, cheap labor plays a huge role there, but those labor costs aren’t completely divorced from reality; the fact of the matter is that east Asian labor is actually chap. Ocean shipping and modern production plants are insanely efficient, though again climate costs need to be captured.
But east Asian labour is cheap because of bad working conditions, weak workers’ rights and no environmental protections.
