[perlgeek]

One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs.

Examples:

* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change

* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste

... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run.

Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.

[yojo]

I’d love to see that software too, but most of the issues you describe (plastics, greenhouse gasses) had impacts that were non-obvious at the outset. Then they were controversial, then no longer controversial but heavily lobbied.

At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming. Then the science came out but was lobbied against. Now the science is (mostly) accepted, but we still don’t know concretely how expensive global warming is per ton of CO2.

I think these are scientific, social, and legislative problems. There may be a role for software around the edges, but the core is going to require research, public acceptance of research, and ultimately legislation.

[Beltalowda]

> At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming.

This is true, but it's been known since at least medieval times that that air pollution was pretty unhealthy; arguably a better reason to actually do something about things than climate change.

The same can be said about the usage of lead in fuel and paint; people have known it was harmful well before leaded fuel was invented.

The elephant in the room seems to me more that we, as a society, are pretty inept at long-term and "big picture" thinking and have a strong and deep bias that progress is both good and inevitable.

[teknopaul]

Progress (noun) : gradual betterment.

By that definition progress is always good.

[sn9]

Except sometimes things are called "progress" to sell them as ideas, but then it turns out the negative costs outweigh the proposed benefits.

Or maybe there's progress in the short-term but not in the long-term.

For example, the globalization of our supply chains was probably viewed as progress by some, but that very efficiency also involved a trade-off in resiliency that resulted in how brittle we now know them to be from the events of the last two years.

[Beltalowda]

"Better" for who? And many "betterments" come with downsides and trade-offs, too.

It's rarely that simple.

[teknopaul]

My point was just about the ambiguity of the word progess.

I agree that development/forward movement is not always good (or inevitable, and a deep rooted bias)

And that "good" needs context or is a simplification.

I'nt language fun: it's both logically correct and incorrect to say that progress is always progress. ;)

[duped]

I don't know how software can be used to fix any of the "big" problems other than as an avenue for information and manipulation through social media.

Like for example we know that if we want to do anything about climate change we probably need to change our diets. I don't know how we can convince anyone to do that except through questionable means like social media campaigns.

[teknopaul]

Software is good at one thing processing information. Anything you can do to improve information about environmental damage of products helps. For example CO2 emissions of vehicles are published. But not the CO2 cost of making the vehicle. People buying new cars don't know what the CO2 impact of a new car is, at the point of sale. If you can use software to get that information in front of consumers, it helps people make the right choices. If people don't make the right choices with good information, use the information gathered to proportionally tax the products because even selfish consumers can read the price tag.

[tcmart14]

Software may not cause a change in diet, but machine learning and software stacks are being employed to help boast yields on agricultural output. It may not change peoples diets, but if it helps farmers who grow cops know when is best to water, fertilize or know the weather to plan their activities and results in better quality and quantity yields, it is going to have an impact.

[8note]

Plastics at least pretty clearly had waste issues at design time.

Eg. Coke removed it's bottle pickups when they switched from glass to plastic bottles

[Nicholas_C]

Many companies are very interested in measuring, managing, and reporting their fossil fuel/carbon usage. A few software companies that provide this off the top of my head:

https://iconicair.io/ https://www.sinaitechnologies.com/ https://www.persefoni.com/

[Rastonbury]

The problem you speak of called "tragedy of the commons", even if you could track costs perfectly there needs to be a mechanism to enforce actors to pay for these costs, this is the hard part. There needs to be political will and global coordination. Look at the state of carbon taxes to see why, it's not so much that companies are not being tracked, but there is no will to levy a high country wide tax while other countries sit idle.

[teknopaul]

It's pretty easy to track the lifetime of some equipment. (not yogurt cartons, but Internet conneted equipment is trivial) You can empower users to make the right decisions, by collecting and publishing lifetime information at the point of sale.

This enables consumers to see that one phone is, for example, 50% more expensive but if its reusable (right to repair comes in here) and has a life time twice that of the comparable device. Consumers can make the right decision. Its really important to log the miles and age of cars as they get sold so that consumers don't buy cars that end up being replaced too early. Second hand markets will reflect that knowledge once its collated and published and market forces do the rest. You ought to regulate to ensure that facts once known are presented to consumers by suppliers. In theory, with perfect knowledge, and consumers that care, the market regulates itself. Anything you do to improve consumer knowledge and encourage responsibility helps.

[teknopaul]

One not very good but simple approach is to tax.

If you tax power consumption you let market forces prioritise low power solutions. US is against that for gas, but it works.

As for plàstics you can do the same, tax plastic users presuming it end ups in the ocean and give tax breaks to those that find ways to prevent it and prove they have done so. Again this uses market forces to let individual enterprises find solutions for their own use of plastics. If consumers are price conscious they will chose greener alternatives due to their own cost.

Taxing corps profits is too easy for them to avoid.

Another advantage of using taxation to regulate green issues is that you get a load of money to spend on clean up operations.

There is no need for Software, you need a majority of voters who care enough to be willing to pay for their environmental damage.

[opportune]

This is a great idea. I think you could call something like this “metering.” I don’t think technology can solve externalization but it could at least measure externalized costs, and let the government/other organizations decide what to do with it.

The problem is the business model. If it’s paid for by businesses due to regulation it’s incentivized to undercount and be shitty. If it’s paid for by government then it’s going to be somewhat winner-take-all and you have to go through their procurement. Either way it could be very innovative and cool but due to the business requirements it’d likely end up very enterprisey and crappy

[shafyy]

I guess projects like Our World in Data and Carbonplan track negative externalities. I mean, other organizations track them, but they make them visible and readily understandable. And I agree, their impact is extremely outsized. For example, there only work a dozen+ people at Our World in Data, but what they do has an outsized impact.

https://ourworldindata.org/

https://carbonplan.org/

[gearhart]

This is what Route2 is building.

It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves.

However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring

[tau5210]

I am rather skeptical it is a matter of software or any tool for that matter with problems like this.

Similar to Paul Grahma's design paradox: " I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer?" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

As long as people (including the business owners, customers, the rest of society, the rest of the world, etc) don't recognize the cost or don't care sufficiently even if they do recognize it, the best tool still won't have any effect nevermind solve. Usually, that's the critical problem, not the tools. And of course, tools won't fix people either. Software is useful only if used by the right people in the right way, which is usually much later.

[contingencies]

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

Agreed. Supply chain in general is actually a substantial area requiring innovation (see shipageddon/chipageddon/every sales or purchasing department ever). I generalised some thoughts about an actor-transaction-oriented protocol model with features such as risk modeling, arbitrary assets (eg. physical trade) and settlement paths, arbitrary precision, fee/tax/discounts and redundant and multi-hop paths over here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... - since then I've moved in to manufacturing and it absolutely would be a godsend. Happy to help someone else pick up a similar line of development.

[simonmic]

This sounds like a recurring dream of mine: ubiquitous eco accounting (energy, resources, pollution, future impact, ...) , becoming a normal mainstream thing everybody does as a matter of course.

As a plain text accounting fan, I usually think of this as the way. Then I think we could do it more easily in spreadsheets, if we wanted to. Then I think spreadsheets don't induce collaboration, education, auditability and persistence the way PTA can.

Then I think more software is rather far from being our biggest need. Building relationship with nature and ourselves is far more impactful. Still, we are complex creatures, capable of doing many things at once..

OP, that's a great question; I see the Cardano project, I think it's one you should take a look at.

[jedharris]

Changing the laws or enforcement will take a while and software won't help directly. But extensive crowd-sourced measurement of externalities would be a big deal and software should help with that.

Actual measurement (and definition) of externalities will be very diverse, so the tracking will have to evolve and expand. Crowd-sourcing can handle that.

Once externalities can be clearly documented, public opinion will shift and companies will start to change their behavior in response. Then enforcement and laws will follow.

[edgefield]

There are many cradle to grace analyses that include calculations of costs for externalities. In terms of software for this, the big question is who would pay for it?

[VoodooJuJu]

>during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state

Externalized to individual taxpaying citizens*. The state chose to transfer the perpetrators' would-be loss to unincorporated taxpayers.

[newbamboo]

Or hire an economist. That doesn’t scale the same as software, but if you get your econ students from poorer countries that might be one solution.