There were elements of moral hazard in The Blob's recent voyages round the world of shipping. Shipping companies are profitable because they employ desperate non-union sailors, register the ships in-foreign and power them with bunker fuel [mmm sulphur, love the smell of phenolics in the morning]. We the people and we the planet tolerate these shenanigans because we like cheap Stuff. Ships are complex machines. Hard as it is to assemble these engineering marvels, deconstruction is also difficult. If MegaCorp had to build safe and clean ship-breaking & disposal into their business plan, shipping goods would be more expensive.
End of life issues are also central to Wasteland The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters (2024) by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. which I just raced through on Borrowbox. At the turn of the century, Fruit of the Loom [remember them?] stopped making apparel in Donegal when government a) imposed a structure of minimum wages and maximum working week b) stopped supporting foreign direct investors by building them sheds c) [mainly] corporate HQ stretched their debt to breaking point. I can now buy cheap shirts in Penneys or expensive shirts in M&S but they are still made by sweated labour in Asia. I haven't actually bought a new shirt this century. My father died in 2001 and I snagged all his blue corporate shirts. When they had worn to rags, my FiL Pat the Salt kindly died to restock my wardrobe. I have the fashion sense of a brick, so dontgiveadamn how many buttons are on my cuffs.
For others, it matters, and/or their Penney's blouse was in rags after three washes; so new kit must be bought. Guess it keeps the economy rolling. But shame prevents sending last year's shirt to landfill, so some people feel better by donating their cast-offs to Oxfam. Oxfam cherry-picks the designer brands, prices and hangs them. They get bought by bougie students. They rest is sent to Oxfam Centraal where it is scooped into heaps with a fromt-loader and compressed into bales. These are shipped to, say, Accra, Ghana where they are auctioned off to fabric re-cyclers. But here's the thing: if the waste stream is top-sliced by Oxfam and its dogoodnik customers, there is only trash left and Ghanaian rag-pickers can't make a living so the whole shipment goes direct to Kantamanto dump. The unintended consequence of your conscientious re-cycling makes life worse for the dispossessed in West Africa. Oliver F-W's book is full of these counter-intuitive factlets. And so many acronyms PET PFAS POP PCB PAH - and that's just Ps.
I thought I was on top of waste and pollution - I used to teach water chemistry after all. But, blimey, I didn't know the half of it. Wasteland will open your eyes . . . and not in a good way.
In a strange way, in my 'mind', ruminations on Moral Hazard reminded me of a recent interview of Alvin Roth by philosopher-physicist Sean Carroll. Roth has made a career out of looking a 'questionable' markets; and has written a book Moral Economics. One useful definition of 'questionable' in this context is cases where such-a-thing is illegal in some jurisdictions but accepted in others. You can't sell your blood plasma in Ireland or in much of Western Europe; you may only donate it. There would be a shortage of blood and blood-products in European Clinics and Hospitals except for the fact that billions of units are sold into our health systems from the USA . . . where folk can sell their own blood. Maybe we shd think about incentivizing donors here rather than begging them. The Mindscape podcasts all come with added [searchable] transcript so you don't need to listen to the whole thing. Roth was a driver in establishing Kidney transplant rings [whc bloboprev] to maximize the match among donors and dialysees.
