Side effects may include...

Interesting article today from Nicolas Rohatyn, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, CEO of a major financial firm, and a trustee of New York's Citizen Budget Commission. I'd never heard of the CBC before, but its mission as a "nonpartisan, nonprofit civic think tank and watchdog whose mission is to achieve constructive change in the finances, services, and policies of New York City and New York State government" is hard to argue with.

It's also hard to argue with his central premise: that we need a way to protect society and its citizens from social costs caused by extremely large scale companies and industries, but which for some reason cannot be prevented by existing legislation or regulation. In other words, the private sector reaps the upside benefits of some private undertaking, but society in general pays the downside costs. Examples of this are easy to find and hard to fix, but because of the massive and unprecedent scale of modern corporations and industries (and thus of their social impacts), we no longer have the luxury to stick with "business as usual". I'll talk soon about the details of some of the ones that concern me the most.