[jadenPete]

Why does building a successful business necessitate generating economic externalities? Many do, and that should be prevented, but many also don’t. And to say that those externalities are responsible for a majority of the business’s growth in all cases is just false.

[Loughla]

I'm genuinely struggling to think of a sector of billion dollar business that doesn't rely heavily on externalized costs. I'm not trying to be difficult, but I can't come up with any.

[kasey_junk]

Externalities exist in every transaction, it just means the value created or lost outside of the transaction.

So the reason you can’t think of any is because no economic activity exists with out them.

But externalities can both be positive or negative.

[runarberg]

Externalities are positive if you benefit from them, and they are negative if you are paying for them.

In my circles we actually never use this word because it is basically just a fancy way to say exploitation that makes capitalists feel good about them selves.

[kasey_junk]

The positive and negative aspects can be different for different participants for the same externality. Externality literally just means impacts not captured in the transaction.

Exploitation is orthogonal. You can have internal or external value exchange that is exploitative. You can even have positive sum transactions that are exploitative.

It must be exhausting having conversations in your circles if you change the definition of all the words…

[runarberg]

Some words are just useless pandering, and conversations become a lot easier when you omit them. Some theories as well like to invent stuff like epicycles rather then question the underling assumptions (e.g. of circular orbits with the earth in its center), when you start to question the need for such epicycles you may just discover that your underlying assumptions were just wrong this whole time.

[kasey_junk]

It also allows you to just smugly run roughshod over any interesting conversation. If you _de facto_ declare that a word doesn’t have the established definition, then you can simply redefine it to mean something else to back up a vacuous point. Like saying that all externalities are examples of exploitation for instance. That can only be true if you quite literally declare it to be so.

As opposed to something like heliocentric solar system theory, where you don’t need to play word games to prove the counter. You just need to observe and collect data and use the same words to come to the correct conclusion.

[AdamN]

If I had said 'exploitation' there would not have been engagement. At some point certain words and phrases become too much of a lightning rod to constructively use any more (Marxism, critical race theory, exploitation, etc...)

[dartharva]

Education.

[edelbitter]

Do you have any company in mind (within the subset the argument refers to, so one that achieved >=15% monthly growth with sufficient consistency) without one or more worrying externalities?