John Perkins and others assert that externalities not factored into the economic equations relating to the economy of food production make possible the current system of corporations controlling the food supply. The county I live in had over 100 dairy farms before WWII. It now has zero. This situation is everywhere. In Iowa, numerous farmhouses are empty, downtowns vacant, and WalMarts selling Chinese goods are the foundation of the local economies.
The externalities such as environmental damage and energy cost are merely ignored. Washington, DC just keeps on printing money. But some day the chicken will come home to roost, and the externalities will become manifest.
The same situation with energy. We spend billions propping up the consumption of fossil fuels, claiming illogically that renewables simply aren't practical. Once again, we ignore the externalities. Global warming's bite becomes ever more severe. But we prefer to ignore the externalities.
Without the externalities, so much of life is unreal and artificial. I learned from my piano teacher that rests or the absence of sound are just as important as the sound itself. You don't play Chopin well if you ignore the rests. Subtle changes in the lengths of rests make all the difference in musical interpretation.
With the visual arts, shadow and darkness are as important as light. Ground is just as important as figure.
With biology, junk DNA, still very much misunderstood, is important to the concepts of heredity. You can't predict phenotype based merely on chromosomes.
With astronomy, dark matter rules the universe. We know that. But we still don't know what it is.
Will we humans some day comprehend the significance of the externalities?
