Mike Albert has a nice piece in the current issue of Magazine that criticizes the Mother Jones piece. The mainstream line on externalities has long been: "Serious economists have always known that external effects produce inefficiencies -- and have never claimed otherwise." But then, the infuriating thing is that mainstream economists who offer policy advice implicitly assume these external effects are minimal in both quantity and pervasiveness by ignoring them in their actual policy prescriptions. AND the self-styled "serious" mainstream theoreticians are totally silent voicing no criticisms of the presumed misuse of their theoretical models. See E,K. Hunt and Ralph D'Arge on this subject in the 1970s. They coined the phrase "invisible foot" and talked of externalities as the "Achilles Heel" of Neoclassical economics. Michael Albert and I follow their lead on this subject in "Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics" (Princeton, 1990). Michael Jacobs uses the phrase "invisble elbow" in his excellent book "Green Economics" (Pluto, 1992).
