>Don't get me wrong. I'm not against theory--only its un-self-critical fantasies of omniscience, as they appear in litcritter grad school syllabi. People in other parts of academe and outside it do much more interesting stuff with what goes as theory--as this project you describe shows. Is there a <10,000 synopsis of the argument available?
>Christian
Sure - in fact there is a comment from me on Rob Schaap's blog that sort is a very short summary - but it omits almost all the evidence and logic, and which leaves a series of unsupported assertions, backed by one example. But hell, less useful things have been posted on this list.
http://blogorrhoea.blogspot.com/
I've modified some infelicities of phrasing before posting on this list:
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Wallerstein
> There are really only two things Governments could do. One is that they could tax. You see the bill at this point for true clean up, and ... [i]t's an astronomical bill in point of fact. So where is that money going to come from? It can come from two places. We could increase the taxes absolutely significantly and collectively pay that bill and then the industries would yell correctly that they were being taxed out of existence, or we could say to companies you have to internalize all costs. There are no costs that can be externalized. Every cost involved in production has to be taken into account by the enterprise and put into its bill and then they'll say we can't make any profit on this basis. They are correct."
Now externalities are a gigantic problem - and if not tackled are likely to lead to a scenario somewhere on the spectrum from Mordor to the Book of Revelations. But, it is not the case that these externalities would be so expensive to remedy that business would no longer make a profit.
Here is one small example:
A lot of industrial energy is spent on pumping. Virtually all pumping energy overcomes friction. If you make the pipes 50% fatter, you reduce friction by 85%. If you pay attention to the layout and lower the number of bends and twists and turns the pipe needs to go through - you cut that 15% by around another two thirds. It varies from case to case - but you can save at least 90% of power in most new pumping applications.
Why was this ignored? Most engineers will tell you that making the pipes fatter and eliminating the bends costs more than the energy saving is worth. Only it turns out that pumps are more expensive than pipes. And if you reduce pumping energy by 90% you also reduce the size of the pumps - which saves you more than the cost of the additional piping expense. So if you are building a new factory - using fatter better laid-out pipes and smaller pumps will save you money before the first BTU of energy is saved.
And then you save 90% of your pumping energy besides.
This was only noticed in the early 90s. Powered pumping applications have been in place since at least shortly after the invention of the commercial steam engine.
And after it was discovered and publicized, most new factories still don't take advantage of it.
If you add up the costs of various ways of saving energy and materials (not including lifestyle changes) - you will find the world could sustainably have a per capita GDP equal to that of the United States. This would be true after population growth up to pretty much the maximum world population will reach; we could save the energy and materials at a cost less than we pay for using them now. This does not take external costs into account, but only technology we can buy at current market prices. Thatis the good news.
The bad news is that various structural flaws in both capitalism and markets suppress many of these potential savings.
Capitalism is (among other things) about bargaining power. Given equal potential dollar savings in materials or labor, owners gain greater bargaining power by saving labor. (Suppliers tend to suffer less from the loss of a single customer than workers do from the loss of a single employer.) See Marx on "Dead Labor" vs. "Live Labor". Then look at standard cost accounting methods for materials, and payback periods required for "operational" savings vs. investments that save direct labor or increase sales.
Also structural flaws in markets, exaggerated by capitalism, tend to prevent people from doing the whole systems analysis that would let them see these savings. Markets encourage atomization, the reduction of humans to "black boxes" seen only in terms of inputs and outputs. To workers, especially skilled workers, being a black box increases bargaining power. If your employer or manager only knows your inputs and outputs, then the process you use to transform them is your domain; this makes you a bit less easy to replace than if your employer knew everything. From the managers or owners point of view, this still is preferable to the alternative. While they would love to measure every detail of every process performed by every worker, it is not yet possible. So focusing on inputs and outputs at least preserves measurability, and prevents excessive novel reading, Internet surfing and such at employers expense. See Marx on capitalists buying labor power and needing to extract labor from it.
Atomization does not only apply to capitalism though. In a market socialism that included a labor market, workers would still want to maximize bargaining power vs. other workers.
So you end up with two ways for this stuff to get missed - the system tends to hide some of the savings, and then blinds people so they have trouble seeing the savings even when they are not hidden.
Then externalities and conflicts of interest with specific capitalists come in. But they are secondary to the structural causes.