by From Duncan Austin . . . it is an empirical matter whether the Hand is stronger than the Foot, or vice-versa. Unfortunately, various environmental and social trajectories indicate that the Foot is now overpowering the Hand in important ways. Note that the situation is not that markets are outright ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – as polarizing capitalism-versus-socialism debates so often quickly descend to – but rather how helpful or harmful current markets are based on how well they reflect known reality. A critical factor in evaluating the relative strength of the Hand and the Foot is how broadly one chooses to look. If the world becomes ‘smaller’ because population grows and communications technologies connect everyone so that we become more aware of inequalities, and if the world becomes
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from Duncan Austin
. . . it is an empirical matter whether the Hand is stronger than the Foot, or vice-versa. Unfortunately, various environmental and social trajectories indicate that the Foot is now overpowering the Hand in important ways. Note that the situation is not that markets are outright ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – as polarizing capitalism-versus-socialism debates so often quickly descend to – but rather how helpful or harmful current markets are based on how well they reflect known reality.
A critical factor in evaluating the relative strength of the Hand and the Foot is how broadly one chooses to look. If the world becomes ‘smaller’ because population grows and communications technologies connect everyone so that we become more aware of inequalities, and if the world becomes ‘smarter’ so that we identify hard-to-discern trends of climate change and biodiversity decline, the damages of the Foot become more visible than they were, and ever harder to unsee.
The Towering Problem of Externality-Denying Capitalism