Question: If we were to collinise another planet what mistakes should we avoid that we made on earth?

Eleanor Sherwen answered on 15 Mar 2016:

Oooh, this brings in a side interest of mine, behavioural economics. My change would be: internalise all costs.

If you look at a big mistake we made on Earth – causing a lot of pollution, which affects our climate and our air quality – a big reason we don’t do the best thing for the environment is because it looks on a price tag like it costs more. But if you think about it, doesn’t it cost us if crops fail because of unpredictable weather, or if people die early because of respiratory disease? So it isn’t that the environmental option costs more necessarily, it is that the non-environmental option is hiding some of the costs away from you. They get paid by governments, or in lost labour, or in problems that the next generation of people have to deal with.

This is called “externalised costs” and it happens when you haven’t worked through all the consequences of your actions properly. If we could have a new planet, I would say we would have to always consider all the consequences and all the costs, both in money and in people’s happiness, before we did things, and then it’d be a really great planet which we would look after and take care of, because we would understand that was the most sensible thing to do.

A good example of internalised costs is your education. When you are a student, you’ve never made any money for anyone. But adults you’ve never met work and pay taxes for you to go to school. Why do they do that? They could keep that money and buy stuff for themselves. The reason is because if we teach you good stuff, you make loads more money as an adult, and overall it costs less to support you because you’re less likely to need unemployment benefits. Plus you are happier because you can read and write and do interesting things with your life. And when you are older your taxes will pay for kids you’ve never met to go to school too. Overall, we all end up benefiting by all helping to pay for school. So when the costs are internalised, school is a good idea.