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Re: Bionomics
Fox — (archived)

Went to that site after posting the "Old saw", and found this in the intro:

For example, the machine mentality, says we should use top-down regulation to force a clean up of the environment. And today we use state planning and a vast bureaucracy to get results. Bionomics says we should use markets instead. Organizations, like organisms, respond to feedback signals in their environments. In the economic environment those signals are called prices. Because the law says air and water are free, with a price set at $0, organizations overuse those resources. They resist regulations that close off access to those free resources.



But if the law said you had to own a permit to emit a ton of carbon dioxide, dumping CO2 would no longer be free, and companies would quickly find a new techniques to cut CO2 output and avoid the cost of buying CO2 permits. Pollution markets would harness the creative power of high-tech capitalism.



Remarkably close to the economy Robinson's Martians develop, in large part through a consideration of "full-world" economic scenarios (see Green Mars, p. 72, the last paragraph).

But that's science fiction - no possibility of application to the real world.

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