Frack-a-delic

"Externalities" is an economics term that is often forgotten by worshipers of the market god. An externality is a kind of market failure, an example of a situation in which markets aren't efficient. The most troubling kind is a negative externality, which occurs when the costs of a particular kind of business aren't borne by either the buyer or seller and don't show up on the bottom line. Instead, they are passed on to someone else, often the public, which typically has to clean up the mess if it is going to be cleaned up at all.

I kept thinking about negative externalities while driving around Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in northern WV. One example are the roads that are chewed up by heaving trucks hauling equipment in and out. Then there is the carbon emitted from the wells and drilling and transport process. Then there are all the nasty chemicals that show up in air, water, and solid waste. Then there is the noise pollution and diminished quality of life for people who live near the operations. Then, what kind of health effects are going to show up down the road? Etc.

People--lots of people--who didn't benefit from the market transaction are going to be paying for this for a long time to come. I know this drilling is going to be done, but I don't think we've gone far enough in regulating it and I don't think anyone yet has any idea what the long term consequences are going to be.


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all time low.


A PARADIGM SHIFT in global economic thinking? Maybe, but it hasn't hit here yet.

IN POLITICS, who needs facts?

WHAT ABOUT GOLIATH? An archaeological dig in Israel may shed like on biblical King David's time.

I WANT ONE. Scientists have discovered fossils of a "mini-mammoth" that stood about three feet high.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

States of mind

Random picture.

El Cabrero has been giving a shout out this week to Laurence Gonzales' book, Deep Survival: Who Live, Who Dies, and Why, which looks at how people do (or don't) make it through extreme situations.

It seems to me that some of what he has to say applies to ordinary situations as well. Here's today's sample:

Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) "does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best...mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body."

The map really doesn't necessarily correspond to the territory.

IF IT'S ANY CONSOLATION, IT AIN'T JUST US. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the economies of the world's major developed countries will shrink in 2009.

THE UNION PREMIUM. Unions provide better wages and conditions for workers in every state. Check out your own state data here.

FORECLOSURES. Here's a first look at President Obama's proposal to deal with the housing crisis.

PENTAGON CUTS? Maybe.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A DIFFERENT FACE

Poster courtesy of moviewallpapers.net.

Welcome to Goat Rope's official Frankenstein Week. That story of hubris and of a creature destroying its creator is a lasting theme. Good thing it never happens in real life, huh?

If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post. Today's is about both current events and the creator of the story of the creator-destroying creature. We proceed...

Some kids are born with a pretty much zero chance of having a normal life. Whether that's good or bad is a different question.

Mary Shelley, wife and widow of the poet Percy Shelley and author of Frankenstein (see yesterday's post), was a case in point.

She was the daughter of rebel and pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical philosophical anarchist William Godwin. Her mother was said to be the inspiration of William Blake's poem "Mary" of which here is a stanza:

'O, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?...

Her mother died of the complications of childbirth. Her relationship with her father was complex and that with her stepmother was pretty much right out of the story books. She fell in love with the poet Shelley, who was a fixture in her father's home. Godwin, although a philosophical supporter of the idea of free love, disapproved. The couple eloped but did not immediately wed due Shelley's inconvenient marriage to his first wife Harriet.

Far be it from El Cabrero to over-generalize, but marriages between revolutionary intellectual women and high-strung, indebted, and self-destructive romantic poets are not always the smoothest, although they are seldom the dullest. Their own marriage didn't happen until after Harriet drowned herself and it, like most of her life, could have been the subject of a melodrama.

Speaking of drowning, Percy himself did the same in 1822, leaving Mary a rough road to travel as she struggled to raise their children, promote Percy's legacy as a poet, and continue to write. None of her other works (or Percy's for that matter) came close to the eventual popularity of Frankenstein, which was completed in 1817.

SPEAKING OF CREATURES ON THE LOOSE, economic globalization is having a lot of unanticipated consequences. A recent article from Business Week finds the costs to the US of offshoring jobs is higher than previously believed:

...new evidence suggests that shifting production overseas has inflicted worse damage on the U.S. economy than the numbers show. BusinessWeek has learned of a gaping flaw in the way statistics treat offshoring, with serious economic and political implications. Top government statisticians now acknowledge that the problem exists, and say it could prove to be significant.

The argument is almost as complicated as Mary's life, so I suggest reading the whole thing.

WORTH CHECKING. Inequality, poverty and other economic issues are the focus of this week's NY Times Magazine.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED