When I was in middle school, a friend and I were eating at a mall food court (of course) when he threw some trash on the ground. “What was that for?” I asked. “I felt like it,” my friend replied, “Besides someone is paid to clean the floors, so I’m contributing to job creation.”
It was a very long time before I could come up with a sound and convincing moral argument against him.
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2 Comments
This seems to be related to Bastiat’s parable of the broken window.
Wow. Indeed it does. Wish I had known about that at the time.
Thinking of things in terms of the amount of total “value” in the world and how actions either contribute to that value or diminish it I find hugely transformative and worth meditating on every once in a while. I frequently wonder what the world would be like if we talked about “value creation”, which the parable seems to be emphasizing as the point of an economy, in the same way that we talk about “job creation”, which is just another method of redistributing value.
In fact, one argument in support of the littering/window-breaking that I don’t think is discussed in the wikipedia article is redistribution/class-based one. Perhaps it is worth destroying some total value in order to force a transfer of wealth from the mall owners and patrons to the presumably less-wealthy person who would be hired to clean up the trash.
It is amazing, though, that you have to take such a broad perspective when trying to argue against such a simple thing as littering.