Well, the EPA -- by minimally protecting air quality -- has shown once again that having regulatory oversight for a first-approximation level economic system just doesn't work well.
From the Washington Post article:
The EPA estimated that it will cost polluting industries $7.6 billion to $8.8 billion a year to meet the 75-ppb standard, but that rule will yield $2 billion to $19 billion in health benefits.
So, once again, we have this issue that we are accounting in a way that the right hand has no impact on what the left hand is doing, so even though we can see the connections -- and by "health benefits" just imagine how much innovation and productivity isn't happening to think about the magnitude of secondary effects -- we have no true "market mechanism" at work here.
When I was in MBA-land, we had a case in Cost Accounting regarding two Division heads having at it as they lobbied for their own interests. This is the same issue: the health people want one thing, and the industry lobbyists want another thing. As a society, we have no CEO, no ultimate arbiter of whether we're following the mission of the organization, because as a society, we don't have a single mission. This is where a "market" ends up being a helpful proxy for "wisdom of the crowds".
The good news is that we're on it, as a society; there are many people developing new ways to manage risk and evaluate sustainability in industry so as to enable us to reward those who "do good."
Underlying "doing good," though, is acting in concert with our own long-term self-interests. We all know that sometimes we don't sleep enough because there's something else more important (work? sick kid?...). As a society, sometimes we don't act sustainably because we're caught up in something else (economy? feeling self-protective?). Sometimes, it's the right decision, sometimes it's not.
Version 2.0 of the economy will be to have a global model that can account for all facets of humans' lives, not simply the accumulation of financial currency. Further, it will be robustly sustainable. Our current market system has many components that push us towards accumulating money; that's how the score is kept, after all. A sustainable system will have many components that push us towards a sustainable equilibrium, incenting us to "do good" simply by following those rules of the system that are now relegated to "morality" or "ethics," but which can (with effort) be part of the main measurement systems.
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