The Invisible Hand is proving no match for the Unmentionable Foot.

Externality-denying capitalism – or ‘consequence-denying capitalism’ – is what systems thinkers term a ‘fix that fails’. That is, it seems like a ‘fix’ at first, but ultimately proves to be a fail as the unaccounted consequences accumulate and become apparent.

Economic orthodoxy assumes that the Hand can continue to ‘fix’ faster than the failures of the Foot accumulate. Ecologically, the ‘wealth’ created by growing the economy will help us restore or remediate the environmental damage incurred along the way. Socially, wealth will ‘trickle down’ soon enough to make temporary inequality just a necessary phase of development. That’s the theory, anyway.

However, the continuing and persistent deterioration in many ecological and social justice metrics indicate that the Hand simply cannot ‘fix’ fast enough to keep up. The Foot is proving the more muscular force. The system overall is dysregulating and generating more net harm than good, now threatening to breach ecological thresholds and levels of social tolerance.

The basic shape of the remedy is extra-market fixes (regulations, laws, new cultural norms) that make visible the externalities or consequences that the market system we defer to simply cannot see. In other words, to cure our system of the market myopia to which we have succumbed.