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One Man Gathers What Another Man Spills

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THE THEORY OF EXTERNALITIES

A.C. Pigou was instrumental in developing the theory of externalities. The theory examines
cases where some of the costs or benefits of activities
spill over onto third parties. When it is a cost that is imposed
on third parties, it is called a negative externality. When third
parties benefit from an activity in which they are not directly
involved, the benefit is called a positive externality. The study
of externalities, a part of welfare economics, has been an
active area of research since Pigous efforts early in the twentieth century.
RITISH ECONOMIST

There are standard examples that illustrate each type of

externality. Pollution is a typical case of negative externality.
Lets say I operate a factory along a river, making foozle dolls.
As a by-product of my manufacturing, I dump lots of foozle
waste into the river. That imposes a terrible cost on the people downriver, because, as everyone knows, foozle waste
stinks to high heaven. If neither my customers nor I have to
pay that cost, our choice as to how many foozle dolls should
be made will be, in a sense, incorrect. If I had to pay those
costs, I would have chosen a smaller number of dolls. Instead,
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I chose to produce too many dolls while the people downriver are forced to foot the bill for part of my activity.
Pigou recommended taxing activities that produce negative
externalities. Emission taxes on factories are an example of his
approach. Another common policy adopted has been to regulate the amount of the activity legally permitted, for example,
laws that forbid loud parties after a particular time of night.
A positive externality will arise when some of the benefits
of an activity are reaped by those not directly involved. A typical example would be improving the appearance of ones
property. If I paint my house, not only do I benefit, but so as
well do all of my neighbors, who now have a nicer view.
When such a positive externality exists, it can be contended
that I will produce too little of the activity in question, since
I dont take into account the benefits to my neighbors.
The traditional policy responses to positive externalities
have been for the state to subsidize or require the activities in
question. For example, the U.S. government subsidizes
research into alternate energy sources. Primary education,
often said to have positive externalities such as producing
informed citizens, is mandatory (as well as subsidized) in most
countries.
Lionel Robbins challenged Pigous analysis in the 1930s.
Robbins pointed out that, since utility is not measurable, it is
invalid to compare levels of utility between different people,
as Pigous theory required. Robbins recommended using the
criterion of Pareto improvement, which we met in Chapter 11,
as the basis of welfare economics. A policy had to make at least
one person better off (in that persons own estimation) and
none worse off before economists could say it was unambiguously better. But Robbins held that if we just assume people

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have an equal capacity for satisfaction, economists still can

recommend certain state interventions.
The notion of justifying economic intervention on the basis
of welfare analysis was dealt a severe blow in 1956, with the
publication of Murray Rothbards paper, Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics. Rothbard showed
that it is only through preference demonstrated in action that
we can gauge what actors really value, and that to try to
deduce values from mathematical formulas, without the evidence of action, is a hopeless cause. Only when people
demonstrate their preferences by exchanging can we say with
any certainty that both parties felt that they would be better
off in the subsequent state than in the prior one. Since Pigous
solution involves imposing taxes and subsidies by fiat, without voluntary exchange, the numbers it relies on are mere
guesswork.
Nobel Prize-winner Ronald Coase further undermined
interventionist welfare analysis with the publication of his
paper, The Problem of Social Cost, in 1960. Coase demonstrated that as long as property rights are clearly defined and
transaction costs are low, the individuals involved in a situation can always negotiate a solution that internalizes any
externality. Consider the case of river pollution from the foozle factory, which we noted above. If the people downriver
from the factory have a property right in the river, the factory
will have to negotiate with them in order to legally discharge
waste through their property. We cant say what solution the
participants might arrive atthe factory might shut down, the
people downriver might be paid to move, the factory might
install pollution control devices, or it might simply compensate those affected for suffering the pollution. What we can
say is that, within a system of voluntary exchange, each party
has demonstrated that it prefers the solution arrived at to the

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situation that existed before their negotiations. (After all, either

party can maintain the status quo by refusing to negotiate.)
Furthermore, we should note that negotiating between the
parties affected allows them to use the particular circumstances of time and place, with which they alone are familiar, to arrive at a solution. The factory owner may be aware of
an alternative foozle input that does not pollute the river. The
people downriver might know that the river is stinky anyway,
and its best to move. Regulators generally cannot take such
specific knowledge into account in their drafting of edicts.
If transactions costs are high, it may be difficult to negotiate a solution. In those cases, the best solution again is to have
clear property rights. For instance, it is hard for a factory creating air pollution that spreads over a wide area to negotiate
with each person affected. In such a case, we might want to
define property rights so that each person has a right to be
free of airborne pollutants that exceed a certain level on his
property.
Case studies have illustrated the resourcefulness of voluntary exchange in accounting for potential externalities. A
common example of a positive externality in economics was
the production of fruit trees and beekeeping. The growers of
fruit trees provide a benefit to beekeepers: flowers. And beekeepers provide a benefit to the growers: pollination. However, the standard analysis contended that neither party had
an incentive to take account of the benefit to the other. Thus,
there would be too few orchards and beekeepers. However,
economist Steven Cheung studied those markets and found
that the parties involved had accounted for the externalities
quite well, through contracting with each other to raise production to preferable levels. As Cheung pointed out, previous economists had only to look in the Yellow Pages to find

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pollination services, rather than simply assuming that the

market had failed.
Social pressure also plays a role in handling potential externalities. If I dont paint my house, my neighbors will start to
grouse. I may not get invited to the next block party. Hayek
contends that those who value liberty should prefer social
pressure directed against deviant behavior to outright bans.
(Deviant, in our case, meaning simply behavior of which
many people disapprove, but which does not violate anyone
elses right to life or property.) If I highly value having a house
painted mauve, I can ignore my neighbors mocking glances
and jeers. But if the government regulates house colors, Im
stuck.
Loyola University economist Walter Block has continued
work on externalities in the tradition of Rothbard. Block has
challenged the traditional distinction between public goods,
which must be produced collectively because of the positive
externalities they create, and private goods, the production of
which may be left to the market. The proposed list of public
goods has included such items as postal delivery, roads,
schools, garbage pickup, parks, airports, libraries, museums,
and so onjust think of the activities your city government
undertakes. The consensus has run that unless such goods are
provided through government action, people will attempt to
become free riders, enjoying some of the benefits of such
goods while letting other people pay for them.
Block points out that the flaw in such analysis is that almost
any good might be viewed as providing some benefit to third
parties. What about socks? Doesnt the fact that other people
wear socks, and I dont have to smell sweaty feet all day,
provide me with a benefit for which Im not paying? Must
socks, therefore, be considered a public good, that only the

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government can supply in adequate quantities? Such logic,

followed to its conclusion, would lead to a centrally planned
economy, as the price and quantity supplied of all goods
would be set based on the states cost-benefit analysis, not on
consumer evaluation.

WHO COOKED THE JAM?

KRUGMAN ADDRESSED energy policy and traffic problems in his 2001 New York Times article, Nation in a
Jam, saying:
AUL

But you dont have to be an elitist to think that the

nation has been making some bad choices about
energy use, and about lifestyles more generally.
Why? Because the choices we make dont reflect the
true costs of our actions.

Well let his contention that the nation makes choices

slide. Krugman contends that the nation does too much driving, since each additional driver produces negative externalities for other drivers. Well also set aside the question of how
Krugman can tell what the cost of those externalities is, apart
from market prices. Well grant him his estimate that the cost
of traffic congestion in Atlanta was $2.6 billion in 1999. Each
additional persons decision to drive cost other people $14 in
lost time.
Krugman fails to ask why those costs are not borne by the
drivers in question. We dont go to the opera expecting to find
several other people vying for our seat. We never encounter
two-hour delays in the checkout line at the supermarket.
Those resources are privately owned, and, in the interest of

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making a profit, the owners have a strong incentive to ensure

that their customers have a pleasant experience. While it is
true that private businesses usually desire more customers and
sometimes fail to plan adequate capacity for those who show
up, such situations are most often corrected quickly. No one
wants to own the business thats so crowded that no one
goes there anymore. If a private road owner found that his
road was overcrowded, he would simply raise the price of
using the road.
Recall the last time you met unexpected highway construction on the way to work. In my area, encountering such
a project can easily add an hour to ones commute. Multiply
that hour by the number of people stuck in the jam, and you
can see that a whole heap of costs have been imposed on
drivers by the road operator: the government.
Why is the government free to impose those costs? Both
because we pay for government roads whether or not we use
them and because the government has made it very difficult
for private companies to build roads, the government has a
near monopoly on routes for car travel. With the market
process for evaluating the relative importance of roads, travel
speeds, established property uses, pollution, and so on
severely crippled, the government cannot rationally allocate
scarce means among desired ends. Political pressure comes to
dominate the allocation of resources.
For example, John Rowland, the governor of Connecticut
as I write this, commented on the states branch rail lines in
1997: Given the ridership on these lines, it is by no means
outrageous to say it would be cheaper for the state to purchase cars each year for most of the riders. On some lines
each passenger was being subsidized more than $18 per trip.
But when his plan to eliminate those lines was faced with

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strong opposition, mostly from wealthy individuals who relied

on the lines for access to New York City, the plan was
dropped. We are entitled to wonder if the campaign contributions of the individuals in question didnt play a role in calculating the cost of closing those lines.
As Sanford Ikeda points out, such interventions also have
the effect of making political action increasingly attractive,
when compared to voluntary exchange. The more my economic well-being is determined by the political process, the
more likely it is that Ill increase profits by lobbying than that
Ill increase profits by producing. Further, the more my neighbors are using political pressure, the less resistant I will be to
the idea of doing so. If no one else is using politics to achieve
his personal ends, then I may be very reluctant to become the
first to do so. But if many other people are pursuing that
avenue, my resistance to joining them is likely to decline dramaticallyafter all, I can tell myself, Im only trying to even
the score.
The state has repeatedly intervened in the transportation
market. Roads are often provided at no extra cost to the users.
The property on which the roads were built was often seized
by eminent domain, so that the supposed construction cost
did not reflect the true cost of acquiring the needed land. The
supply of taxis and jitneys, which can to some extent substitute for having ones own car, has been artificially limited. Of
course, other modes of transportation have had their own history of interventions. We have no idea of what a transportation market that had developed unhampered for the last several centuries would look like.
But it might strike us as odd that the very process that created the externalities in the first placeinterventionismis
usually what is offered as the solution to them. Instead of

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seeking ways to allow the market in transportation to do its job,

most recommendations call for further interventions intended to
clean up the unwanted effects of past interventions.
For instance, Thomas Sowell, in his book Basic Economics,
suggests that a law requiring mud flaps on cars is justified,
because:
Even if everyone agrees that the benefits of mud
flaps greatly exceed their costs, there is no feasible
way of buying those benefits in a free market, since
you receive no benefits from the mud flaps you buy
. . . but only from mud flaps that other people buy.

But Sowells problem arises only because roads are publicly owned. The owner of a private road could internalize the
benefit by requiring mud flaps and advertising the fact. Those
who preferred that they pay for mud flaps as long as everyone else does, as well, can make use of roads requiring them.
Krugman does not explicitly call for a particular policy in
his column. But when he says that the government should
place a high priority on getting those incentives right, we are
to understand that he means imposing new taxes on fossil
fuels, on car ownership, and other interventions into the transportation market.
But there is no way for the government to get incentives
right without market prices, the very thing eliminated by
intervention. It is simply not possible for the government to
guess the prices that might have arisen on an unhampered
market. Each subsequent intervention intended to fix an earlier one will add new distortions and generate new unintended consequences.
Regulations that require a certain average miles-per-gallon
figure for a manufacturers sold cars led directly to the explosion

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of sport utility vehicle (SUV) sales. Since SUVs are considered

to be trucks, not cars, they are held to less stringent fuel-efficiency standards. Government efforts to increase overall gas
mileage steered consumers into buying less efficient trucks,
instead of station wagons, which were subject to the regulations. The general response has been, predictably, a call for
new regulations on SUVs. Ford, for one, has tried to head off
new legislation by increasing the fuel efficiency of its SUV
fleet.
Often, some proponent of new regulation will contend that
following the regulation will actually increase profits, and is
the right thing to do for purely business reasons. For example, Steve Gregerson of the Automotive Consulting Group said
of Fords decision in the Houston Chronicle: Its a smart business decision. Theyre creating a vehicle that is going to be
accepted in the marketplace and has better fuel economy but
offers some of the utilitarian functions of the SUVs.
But if it really is a smart business decisionand perhaps it
is!then surely some entrepreneur will do it without legislative pressure. Only if one believes that our best entrepreneurs
just happen to be legislators does the argument make sense.
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old
age, it wont make babies poop smell good, and it wont
guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is
fully capable of awful screwups. But both theory and practice
indicate that its screwups are less pervasive and more easily
corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.