Bylund's book is based on the premise proposed by Bastiat, the seen and the unseen. A brief synopsis of this concept is that the basic difference between a good and bad economist is that one takes into account the visible effect, and the other takes into account both the effects which are and those that are necessary to prepare for. Planning for the immediate positive consequence often leads to future negative repercussions, while looking forward to future successes causes fairly few issues in the present. Thus the unseen is the positive economic flipside of any negative problem that may arise. Although war or pandemics may be destructive both physically and mentally for a society, eventually, it will begin to rebuild itself. The formation of new infrastructure and technology requires the import of goods and resources while existing supply chains will continue to be strengthened. The economic growth is not instantaneous after a disaster, but it is greater than it would have been without the suffering and destruction incurred. So that's the seen and the unseen, but the unrealized is something else. The unrealized is the possibilities that never come to light because of societal regulations. When the government regulates the economy, there is a whole world of possibilities that will never come to fruition. This causes entrepreneurs to not be able to make the most highly valued investment; there are fewer options for consumers, lower-paying jobs for workers, and the production structure is not aligned with consumer values. And Bylund says that regulations have a large distortive effect on the economy.
So allow me to rebut the concept, that good economists overlook present issues in the preparation for future economic successes. What if regulations might have current struggles associated with them, all for the future good? Take, for example, COVID-19 rules and regulations, all put in place to restrict our contact with others in order to allow the world to go back to normal as quickly as possible. Although in the present, it shut down the economy, the end goal was to shut down the virus so that we could continue living our lives and keep the world from imminent damage. Coronavirus is a very sensitive topic for many people these days, so let's move on to something else.
How about regulations on environmental conservation? Natural wonders and animal excursions make up a large part of the travel and tourism industry in the United States and internationally. The amount of money that we would lose if species go extinct, or attractions disappear due to a climate disaster is rather frightening. The small present negative consequence to sustain the large future economic growth is regulation of daily life. For example, there are several campaigns to save turtles by banning plastic straw usage. What about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area around the size of Texas, littered with 3.5 million tons of non-biodegradable plastics. From Darrel Hess’s book, “about 100,000 whales, seals, turtles, birds, and dolphins are killed each year by plastic induced asphyxiation, strangulation, contamination, or entanglement” (Hess & McKnight, 2017). The extinction of those species would be to the detriment of multitudes of tourism operators. And for the fishing industry, an imbalance of the marine food chain causes quite the ripple effect. How do we avoid this economic failure? Regulations on the production and disposal of single-use plastics. Another issue affecting the future economic success of the travel and tourism industry is greenhouse gas emissions and how the excess could lead to environmental attraction failure. The uncontrolled emission of these gases causes intense warming and would create issues for the already hot tourist destinations. People will trend towards visiting higher altitude and latitude attractions, resulting in a loss of business in the tropics. And the ice caps are melting, so even the cooler attractions are beginning to disintegrate. We can combat this through regulation of CO2 emissions, instituting carbon taxes, and an emissions cap for each industry.
Hess, Darrel, and Tom L. McKnight. “Chapter 9: The Hydrosphere.” McKnight's Physical Geography: A Landscape Appreciation, Pearson, Hoboken, NJ, 2017.