In March of 1947, police were called to a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem. Someone had called in a tip that there was a dead body in the house.

This wasn’t the first time the police had been called to the premises. Five years earlier, the bank that held the note on the brownstone began foreclosure on the house for delinquent payment. After a confrontation with the police, the owner paid the remaining balance of the mortgage and vanished back into his house.

This was no ordinary house. The people who resided within were called The Ghosty Men by neighbors. By the time they died in 1947, the Collyer Brothers were a local legend.

When the police were finally able to enter the house, by dislodging several tons of collected effluvia, they discovered Homer, the older of the two brothers, dead. The younger brother, Langley, was missing.

Over the next few months, the police removed tons and tons of newspapers, baby carriages, fourteen grand pianos — and even a Model T — from the residence. In all, over 100 TONS of well, crap, was removed from the house. A month into the process, Langley’s rat-eaten corpse was unearthed.
Read More »

Here’s the thing. Capitalism is really, really good at generating wealth. What it’s not so good at (read: sucks) is at handling externalities.

So what the heck, you may ask, is an externality? In short, it’s the hidden costs of a transaction — costs that are not directly borne by the beneficiaries of that transaction.

Back when I was in college, we visited a copper refinery. I will never forget those big, swinging vats of molten metal, how the glowing stream poured down, how the dark, dirty slag was skimmed off of those beautiful, cherry-hot bricks. The sweat on our brows, in that hot building; the acrid tang in our nostrils. Big, industrial tech is impressive stuff. Think about it. We dig rocks up out of the ground, we heat it up and purify it, and next thing you know, we’re using it to build computers, rockets, and radiators. Holy satellite array, Batfans.

Copper in particular is extremely important. It’s in our coins; it’s the wires and brass fixtures in our homes; the radiators in our cars; it’s in the computer you are using to read this post.

So, let’s say you have a home improvement project. You have decided to convert your garage to interior space. You swing by Home Depot to buy a lot of stuff, including, say, copper wiring to add some power outlets out there, a new air conditioning unit, and your stereo set and your computer; whatever. Well, Home Depot probably bought that copper wiring from an electrical parts manufacturer, who in turn bought the raw copper from a metal smelting company. The metal smelter either bought raw copper ore from a metals extraction company, which dug it out of the ground, or dug it up themselves.

At each step of this process, money changed hands. The smelter paid the mining company, the electrical parts manufacturer paid the smelter, Home Depot paid the parts manufacturer, and you paid Home Depot. Game room complete. Go, you! (Seriously; go you. Finding time to make your space more amenable, when the demands of the workday and making sure your family is taken care of exact such a price, is no small feat.)

Read More »