By nobody’s explicit design, the socio-economic system most people live under today is ‘externality-denying capitalism’. When people defend today’s capitalism, that is the system they are – almost always unknowingly – reinforcing.
Of course, we don’t call it ‘externality-denying capitalism’ because acceptance comes slow. While we long ago identified the market’s favourable Invisible Hand, we have resisted recognizing the market’s Unmentionable Foot until circumstances have given us no choice.
Because incomplete markets must generate non-market social and ecological consequences, a culture of market primacy is a ‘fix that fails’. The market certainly produces a great many ‘fixes’ but, with a delay, the social and ecological ‘fails’ mount.
We are only about two centuries into the experiment, so we can’t know whether the ‘fixing’ can forever compensate for the ‘failing’, but the latest readings are troubling. With the climate crisis, the Great Acceleration, and persistent social inequalities, it is starting to appear as if capitalism’s fail loops are overpowering its fix loops. The real concern is that the Foot may have the power to cause damages that are irreversible in nature, such that no amount of subsequent fixing by the Hand can repair them.
To anticipate the obvious riposte, ‘externality-denying socialism’ may be no panacea either, if it denies ecological consequences. It is almost as if our default ‘capitalism versus socialism’ discourse is a false binary that has distracted us from some greater awareness.
Wherever we are headed, and whatever we decide to call it, a sustainable human culture will be much more alive to – and respectful of – its feedback loops than we seem to be today.
Fabulous analysis