"One of the major properties of markets – if you take a good economics course you learn this in the first term – is that they under price social effects. So if you sell me a car, we can make a good deal for ourselves. We both gain from it, but [buyer] is paying a cost. So there’s more pollution, more congestion, the price of oil goes up, and these effects are spread through the population, the count of all can be quite large. It’s called externalities. Economists put them in a footnote, but they’re not so small."
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)
(Source: allisonkilkenny.wordpress.com, via jayaprada)
