Weekly Shaarli

All links of one week in a single page.

Week 38 (September 18, 2023)

The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential | Union of International Associations

Sounds interesting, but unfortunately the Encyclopedia website appears to be broken.

I sent a question to their webmaster through their contact form.

Lifetime cost of car ownership

For the individual owning the car, It is very high. When we take the societal costs into consideration, it is even higher.

  • A paper from Gössling et al., 2019, "The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union", 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.016, via CityNerd (youtube video).
  • Another paper by Gössling et al. in Ecological Economics, 2022 was really eye-opening. Over 50 years, the total lifetime cost of ownership of a "cheap" car will reach 600,000 EUR, out of which almost a third is effectively a subsidy from society to the car's owner. If you are considering owning your own car, I strongly recommend to at least skim this paper (CC license, HTML and PDF freely available).
  • Another paper (Mattioli et al., Energy Research & Social Science, 2020), this is one is a review that considers our car dependence from a systems of provision approach. Quite interesting if you want to learn more about the of the political-economic underpinnings of car dependence (CC license, HTML and PDF freely available).
  • A 2023 paper that tells how the car industry has deliberately pushed motorists into greater debt in order to save itself: The financialisation of car consumption. Nice summary in this Mastodon thread.

The Gössling paper generated some news items across the web, for example

I also remember a Youtuber doing a nice video on the Gössling paper, but I cannot recall enough about it to find it at the moment. Maybe I will find it later.