Beyond Economics and Econometrics: Some Psychological and Political Aspects of the Internalization of External Costs

Efforts to describe external costs still have not fully succeeded. Current studies in the United States and Europe are characterized by a blatant underrating of the external costs (Ottinger: “a fraction of a cent”). This is no coincidence. Rather, we must assume that errors of perception and/or comprehension (as the result of using incomplete or wrong search systems and even owing to viruses that have been planted) are responsible for this phenomenon. They are apparently distorting the results even of exhaustive studies aimed at systematically determining the external costs of energy supply.