David Bohm and the multidimensional costs of production

David Bohm said that everything in the universe is connected. He described an implicate order and an explicate order. An experiment illustrates the distinction: Place a clear plastic cylinder inside a slightly larger clear plastic cylinder, then fill the space between them with glycerin. Inject a line of ink into that glycerin, then slowly turn the inner cylinder so that the ink is smeared. Three turns will cause the ink to completely disappear. But the ink is not mixed up randomly in the glycerin. There is still an implicate order. There is still order in the relationship of the molecules to one another in space, but the order is not visible. Turn the cylinder back three turns, the line of ink re-appears. The order is made explicate again.

When we buy a product that has resource user-fees (pollution fees; extraction fees) incorporated in the price, and if the fees are set high enough to bring impacts to levels that most people would say are acceptable (as revealed by a system of random polls), implicate in the price of the product is the expressed wishes of all the world's people (or of the wishes of those in the representative sample) about what limits should be placed on the use of natural resources. Explicit in the price is the economic value of all the natural resources and the human effort that went into the production of that product.

When we survey people to see what their views are regarding appropriate levels of resource use, implicate in their responses will be relative prices for various goods and services in the market. If most people who are polled say explicitly that carbon dioxide emissions ought to decrease, implicit in these expressions of opinion will be higher prices for fuel, a decreased prevalence of high-powered cars and single-occupant cars, fewer long commutes, and less airline travel generally, but especially less airline travel across short distances, etc.

The information explicate in the price of a particular product or service is the economic value of the labor, capital and natural resources that went into its production. Implicate in the price of that same product or service is the expressed wishes of a representative sample of the population about acceptable rates of resource extraction for all the raw materials that went into its production. Information about the people's preferences regarding environmental impacts is embedded in price information, when we adopt this proposed paradigm of equal ownership of natural resources, where random surveys of the human population would be our instrument to discern the wishes of the people on various questions.

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