True Cost Economics

Adbusters You may have picked up the hints invarious blogs that a big chunk of my political thinking is heavily influenced by this idea of true cost economics. What this is is the simple idea that what we buy should reflect the true costs of producing it. This means including in the price all those things that truly belong to it but are at present, through the political system or other means are not represented in the price. Huh? Well, take that kiwi fruit you bought the other day. It's price does not reflect the true costs of transport because they did not reflect the proportional costs to the environment [and how we clean up or mitigate the efects of global warming] or the on-costs of rehoming 100 million people adversely affected by climate change and dealing with huge migrations or the health costs of my children and grandchildren from the same. If we can find mechanisms to include those costs in the price then you and I as consumers can make better choices, simplified into prices, about how we deal with the planet and our own material enhancement.


This AdBusters site has a number of pages exploring the implications and possible ways forward. Related is a site which explores the growing idea of 'Post Autistic Economics'. Autistic economics being what we've been taught over the last 50 years or more [I certainly was at A level]: narrowly focused on rather unreal exercises. Economics is arguably flawed as a guide to real world economics since most of the prognostications are based on flawed prinicple: perfect competition [in reality we have oligopolies etc]; perfect information [in reality most consumers have little idea of what the choices are or inclination to research them or go to where the best bargains are]; maximised utility [in reality most of us make do and even act altruistically at times]. Also classical economics tends to ignore reflexivity and the effects that systems analysis would bring to the debate.

And we let these people run our banks and economies....

Anti capitalism isn't about socialisim [necessarily] but about truthful economics and not letting people get away with making themselves rich by robbing future generations of their climate and livelihoods. but we need to find decentralised mechanisms to do that. True cost, post-autistic, economics aims to do that.