Despite his usual rudeness (“Because he’s Salemicus”? Really?), the link gwern provides goes some way to explaining my views on the subject. On many margins we recycle too much. Unfortunately, where I live this is made worse by the government, because the local council charges you more for rubbish collection if you don’t recycle as much as they deem proper. However, because I care about the environment and future generations, I am willing to incur that cost in order to help society on the margin.
Note incidentally that this is typical of government intervention; in the textbooks they adjust prices to correct market failures based on some miraculous, a priori knowledge of the”true social costs.” In reality, they intervene in purely private transactions and break functioning markets based not on any considered measurement of alleged externalities, but just the free-standing moralising of self important do-gooders, no doubt aided by cynical rent-seekers.
Which brings me back nicely that saying you want to save the world sets off my alarm bells.
By what mechanism do you expect recycling less to help society on the margin?
(Are you thinking of instances where in order to recycle more you would have to do things that harm the environment more than sending the stuff to landfill would have, or that cost more than recycling would have saved—e.g., where you’d have to wash stuff thoroughly before recycling it? Or is this about message-sending, and if so how does the causal chain go?)
In this instance—though of course I don’t know where you live and in any case haven’t investigated deeply—it seems to me that the claims on both sides are rather dubious. On the one hand we have the excessively moralized Recycle All The Things drive; on the other we have, e.g., your statement that “[government interventions] break functioning markets” without, so far as I can see, any evidence that there was or would have been a well functioning market without the government intervention. It seems fairly clear to me that the optimal amount of recycling is greater than zero, and so far as I know it’s generally only been in response to government intervention that that’s happened. (Not necessarily coercive intervention; e.g., where I live, local government provides recycling services and makes them easy to use but doesn’t punish you for not using them—though if that means you send a lot more stuff to landfill then you might have to pay more for extra collection.)
(It also seems plausible to me—but I have only weak, indirect evidence—that there is a local optimum, better than where most of the US and UK currently sits, where more stuff gets recycled using facilities that cost money to set up but once in place make recycling more effective, and which isn’t easily accessible to the free market untouched by government intervention because the benefits are spread out but some individual or corporation would need to make the facilities actually get built.)
Despite his usual rudeness (“Because he’s Salemicus”? Really?), the link gwern provides goes some way to explaining my views on the subject. On many margins we recycle too much. Unfortunately, where I live this is made worse by the government, because the local council charges you more for rubbish collection if you don’t recycle as much as they deem proper. However, because I care about the environment and future generations, I am willing to incur that cost in order to help society on the margin.
Note incidentally that this is typical of government intervention; in the textbooks they adjust prices to correct market failures based on some miraculous, a priori knowledge of the”true social costs.” In reality, they intervene in purely private transactions and break functioning markets based not on any considered measurement of alleged externalities, but just the free-standing moralising of self important do-gooders, no doubt aided by cynical rent-seekers.
Which brings me back nicely that saying you want to save the world sets off my alarm bells.
By what mechanism do you expect recycling less to help society on the margin?
(Are you thinking of instances where in order to recycle more you would have to do things that harm the environment more than sending the stuff to landfill would have, or that cost more than recycling would have saved—e.g., where you’d have to wash stuff thoroughly before recycling it? Or is this about message-sending, and if so how does the causal chain go?)
In this instance—though of course I don’t know where you live and in any case haven’t investigated deeply—it seems to me that the claims on both sides are rather dubious. On the one hand we have the excessively moralized Recycle All The Things drive; on the other we have, e.g., your statement that “[government interventions] break functioning markets” without, so far as I can see, any evidence that there was or would have been a well functioning market without the government intervention. It seems fairly clear to me that the optimal amount of recycling is greater than zero, and so far as I know it’s generally only been in response to government intervention that that’s happened. (Not necessarily coercive intervention; e.g., where I live, local government provides recycling services and makes them easy to use but doesn’t punish you for not using them—though if that means you send a lot more stuff to landfill then you might have to pay more for extra collection.)
(It also seems plausible to me—but I have only weak, indirect evidence—that there is a local optimum, better than where most of the US and UK currently sits, where more stuff gets recycled using facilities that cost money to set up but once in place make recycling more effective, and which isn’t easily accessible to the free market untouched by government intervention because the benefits are spread out but some individual or corporation would need to make the facilities actually get built.)