Ignoring true cost including externalities will vitiate any market-based solutions that are propounded based on current theory and accounting practices. Probably most know this deep down but also know that addressing this issue effectively would be extremely painful and highly unpopular absent a presently pressing existential threat that gets wide attention and motivates large numbers of people to act. While this has not happened yet, at least sufficiently to motivate the changes that need to be made to the system, the pressure is rising.
Monday, March 20, 2023
William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure? — Book review by Elna Tulus
It should be obvious to just about anyone by now that transnational capitalism cannot survive in its present form if humanity is to survive. The amount of negative externality that is not priced in is too great. Markets are not a mechanism that delivers accurate economic calculation, contrary to what Hayek argued in his Nobel Prize Lecture (1974), and is now widely accepted as received wisdom. Valuation is biased by failing to consider true cost and reliance on this is leading to more erroneous assumptions about addressing emergent challenges.
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Wrong question, I think: "Global Capitalism" (note the quotation marks) can endure until we are all dead.
The whole TNC framing misses the point. The TNCs are shells for particular power-brokers and interests, and have no existence other than that. We are not talking about an object oriented ontology, pace Graham Harman's Immaterialism, with the TNCs having independent will (unlike the Dutch East India Company, as referenced by Harman). We are talking about state actors, entirely "captured" by special interests.
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