this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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It's possible for the stock market only to grow because it externalizes costs (environmental damage, health of workers, etc.), and if that's the case, we need to see if society is actually proceeding in a positive direction as a whole (I generally believe this to be the case), but consider for a moment that the economic windfall experienced by many western nations was (and still is in many ways, think banana plantations) largely made possible by the subjugation of imperialized nations. In this case, was the economic windfall experienced by the imperial powers and their trade partners actually a good for society as a tide that rose all boats, or not?
If we fail to consider the biggest losers of the stock market, those that cannot even necessarily participate, it becomes much closer to gambling at the very least. I'm not here to have an argument about whether or not capitalism and the stock market and such things are actually good or bad for society as a whole, just that it's easy to ignore the biggest losers of the system by virtue of the fact that they don't necessarily even invest in the first place. In this case, the universe is the casino, and humanity are the gamblers, as compared to just the stock market being the casino and the investors the gamblers.
Not that your comment is wrong necessarily just that there's more ways of thinking about it.
Sure, and ideally governments step in to return those costs to companies. For example, I think we've done an absolutely terrible job of managing climate change, and we've largely allowed companies to push those costs onto the people at large. That said, just because they are pushing off costs onto society at large doesn't mean they're a net negative, it just complicates the math a bit.
I'm a huge fan of Pigouvian taxes, and in the case of carbon emissions, that means carbon taxes (not credits or caps, but direct taxes based on carbon emissions). Those taxes should ideally equal the negative externalities of those companies, so if a competitor can reverse those externalities for less than it would cost the company to eliminate them, everyone wins (i.e. we now have two profitable companies). This has a two-fold impact:
If we can put such a system in place, it makes it a lot easier to assess which companies are actually net positives for society.