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Until Kapp’s book, however, these negative externalities had been considered as a peripheral problem, a minor aberration in economic theory. He showed on the contrary that the discharge of social costs was a general phenomenon, consubstantial with a mode of decision with ‘a built-in tendency to disregard those negative effects (e.g., air and water pollution) which are “external” to the decision-making unit’. This had radical theoretical implications, because __as neither company accounting nor prices in general are really able to record the ‘destructive off-market effects’ shifted onto the social and natural environment, ‘the price indicators are not only imperfect and incomplete; they are misleading’.__
The Ungovernable Society
Grégoire Chamayou
Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.
Economics assumes a division between different spheres of human behavior that, among people like the Gunwinngu and the Nambikwara, simply does not exist. These divisions in turn are made possible by very specific institutional arrangements: the existence of lawyers, prisons, and police, to ensure that even people who don’t like each other very much, who have no interest in developing any kind of ongoing relationship, but are simply interested in getting their hands on as much of the others’ possessions as possible, will nonetheless refrain from the most obvious expedient (theft).
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