[silentplummet]

Who cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view.

Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?

Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide.

We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism.

Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.

[jedberg]

> Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up?

The cost of cleanup typically falls upon the person who builds there next.

If that new Walmart is built on a property that already had a strip mall, first they tear down the strip mall and bear that cost.

The new Apple campus is a great example. They tore down a bunch of old HP buildings and had to bear that cost. They reduced the cost by grinding up the old buildings to make concrete for the new building. Also, they probably discounted the purchase price of the land to account for the cleanup, so in some respect, HP bore that cost too.

[gutnor]

> The cost of cleanup typically falls upon the person who builds there next.

Yes and that cause issue of abandoned sites, if the desirability of the site is lower than the price of cleaning up. Worse, there is not necessarily negative consequences that would push the market to avoid such situation. For heavily polluted sites like gas station, chemical plant, ... the owner of the land has generally made a profit, so disposable land is a viable business model. Not even counting that after enough years, the site could look clean enough to be resold.

At some point, it was discussed in Europe to impose a viable (i.e. funded upfront) reconversion plan for land used for stuff like gas station or landfill. The trigger in this case was some incident about some block of flat built on some forgotten nastiness by an unscrupulous builder. Not quite sure if anything actually happened.

[krastanov]

While I agree with the sentiment, your "entropy" metaphor is quite wrong. Cleanup efforts lower the overall entropy of the Earth, they do not "kick it down the road" (which is perfectly fine for an open system with an external source of power like the Sun).

If you are worried about the Sun dying in a few billion years, then yeah, you are technically right.

[Retra]

Cleaning up may lower the entropy of the thing being cleaned, but there's no way it lowers the entropy of the Earth.

[wickawic]

Could the energy we get from the sun make it so that we did in fact reduce entropy in some cases?

[hguant]

I think you're misunderstanding entropy; it only really applies in a closed system. By using energy from the sun to "decrease" entropy on earth, what you've don't is just expand the system to include energy from the sun. You've converted solar energy into kinetic and potential energy (moving things around, ordering them, building walls etc). That transformation isn't perfectly efficient - friction, electrical resistance, etc. create waste heat, which disappeared and can no longer be used. You've cleaned up one area of the system (decreasing entropy) but the means you used to do so used more than you gained. Entropy ALWAYS increases.

[krastanov]

Entropy always increases in a closed system. Entropy of a part of a system (i.e. an open subsystem, e.g. the Earth) is a well defined quantity (it is even a thermodynamical potential, hence completely independent of the history of the system, only dependent on the current state) and can be decreasing (and even the most basic thermodynamics textbook has plenty of examples).

And yes, the entropy of Earth is decreased by cleanup efforts. Only when including the Sun you get a system in which the total entropy increases. But this would be quite useless thing to do, given that the Sun is an infinite source of energy for practical purposes.

[adrianN]

As the sun's energy keeps us warm and entropy increases a lot when the temperature rises, getting rid of the sun would reduce Earth's entropy.

[mkaziz]

What do you propose is the alternative to capitalism? It's the only system that seems to have reasonably worked.

[paulojreis]

Slightly off topic, but I don't think that the argument "capitalism is the system which worked better) is valid. It's not that it's wrong, per se, but I think it's an implication of mankind evolution and not the capitalist system itself.

In more concrete terms: if you pick any given point in time, you'd probably be able to say the same without being wrong. At date X, the social system in practice is/was the one which worked better up until that X point; it's because we've been evolving somewhat continuously, not because the system per se.

[wonderlust]

Depends, what is your definition of "worked". Mercantalism was actually successful in many ways.

[taejo]

A thousand years earlier: What do you propose as the alternative to feudalism?