"Negative Goods" Threaten Everything You Know

What they are, and why they are a bigger problem than ever

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good, and for this reason, the good has been declared to be that at which all things aim" - Aristotle

A negative good is a man-made product or byproduct that society wants less of, rather than more. Some examples of negative goods are pollution, racism, debt and gambling. Capitalism produces things, lots of things. We call these things goods and we want more of them because they make us happy or satisfy some need. Therefore a negative good is a thing that is produced, that rather than causing us to want more of it, causes us to want less of it because of its consequences.

Now, the tricky part is that negative goods, unlike positive ones, are not typically advertised with glossy commercials. You’ve never seen a thirty-second Super Bowl spot that says: “Buy more racism! Only $9.99 this weekend!” And yet racism, pollution, and gambling proliferate all the same, piggybacking on other allegedly positive goods. Cars, for instance, are marketed as sleek chariots of freedom. No one mentions that they are also planet warming machines, kill thousands every day and depreciate rapidly in value. The car itself is good; the air-poison, depreciation and car accidents are the negative goods.

Negative goods are, in a sense, the parasites of production: always along for the ride, never paying their share, and usually making the party worse. Pollution follows industry like an uninvited drunk uncle who crashes weddings. Racism trails behind institutions like a foul odor you can’t quite scrub out. Gambling, while sometimes sold as “entertainment,” manages to reliably produce the sort of financial hangover that makes all-night of tequila look merciful.

The philosophical difficulty, however, is that negative goods are still goods in the strict economic sense: they are produced, exchanged, and circulated. Entire industries exist to manufacture and distribute them, even when we loudly insist we’d prefer less of them. Consider slot machines. These are expensive, sophisticated contraptions. Engineered with the same care as MRI scanners—except instead of saving lives, they siphon pension checks. They are, technically, goods. They just happen to be goods that, once consumed, make society collectively regret its life choices.

This puts us in the paradoxical position of living in a system where both the aspirin and the headache are considered products. We celebrate the former, we denounce the latter, but both keep showing up in the marketplace, often bundled together. Capitalism, like a compulsive overachiever, insists on producing not just the things we want, but also an entire shadow catalog of things we don’t. It’s as if an overzealous chef proudly brings out your steak dinner—along with a side of food poisoning, free of charge.

So perhaps the real measure of progress is not whether we can generate more goods, but whether we can learn to distinguish between the ones worth multiplying and the ones we’d rather send back to the nether-realm. Because if Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” taught us anything, it’s that bullshit thrives precisely where people stop caring about distinctions. And a negative good is, in the end, just industrial-strength bullshit made tangible—the stuff nobody wanted, but everyone keeps making anyway.

The Age of Negative Goods

The problem with negative goods isn’t simply that they exist—as pollution and gambling dens have been with us longer than television remotes. The problem is that in the twenty-first century, they seem to be proliferating at industrial scale, metastasizing like a deep wound that won’t heal. And unlike a cracked sewer pipe, these negative goods don’t merely stink—they replicate, amplify, and feed on themselves.

Take the example of social media algorithms. In theory, they’re meant to connect us with friends, sprinkle in some cat videos, and let us know which of our high school classmates is now trying to sell us essential oils. In practice, they behave like digital arsonists—fanning outrage, radicalizing twelve year-old’s, and making every conversation feel like an awkward table of strangers listening in on your family gathering. The negative good here isn’t just “bad posts” or “fake news.” It’s the entire machinery.

This is the compounding nature of negative goods—left unchecked, they don’t simply accumulate, they accelerate. Pollution is no longer just smog on a Tuesday—it’s climate change altering entire coastlines. Gambling is no longer just a smoke-filled casino—it’s a billion-dollar app in your pocket that lets you lose money faster and faster. And racism, once politely hidden under the rug, is now a fully monetizable spectacle on cable news and social media, packaged and distributed like snack chips for mass consumption.

The irony is that capitalism, which prides itself on efficiency, is astonishingly efficient at producing inefficiency. Each new good spawns its negative twin: cars spawn smog, phones spawn distraction, gambling spawns addiction, and industries spawn PR departments to tell us that none of this is really so bad, provided we just keep buying.

Worse still, negative goods compound in the same way debt does. And in fact, debt is also a negative good. A single loan is manageable, but stack a few dozen and suddenly you’re dodging phone calls from creditors. Likewise, a little pollution is tolerable, but dump a million metric kilo-tons of methane, Co2 and greenhouse gases every waking moment and you’ve got a civilization wondering why everything feels vaguely apocalyptic before breakfast.

The trouble is that while positive goods satiate desire (you eat the ice cream, you’re done), negative goods amplify it. Social media outrage, for example, doesn’t make you feel full—it makes you hungry for more outrage. The supply doesn’t run out, because the act of consuming it generates more demand for itself. It’s like being trapped in a casino where every time you lose a bet, the slot machine spits out a voucher for another round of disappointment.

So here we are: a society drowning not in scarcity, but in surplus—the surplus of things we actively don’t want. Frankfurt diagnosed bullshit as speech indifferent to truth; negative goods are their material cousins, products indifferent to well-being. Both are dangerous because both grow where distinctions collapse. If we cannot separate the steak from the food poisoning, the good from its negative shadow, then we’ll continue swallowing both and wondering why we feel sick.

Living in the Bullshit Economy

We’ve reached the point where the greatest threat to prosperity isn’t too little production, but too much of the wrong kind. A civilization that can mass-produce Teslas, ChatGPTs, and oat milk lattes can also mass-produce burnout, misinformation, and oceans of plastic. Negative goods are no longer side effects; they’re becoming the main event.

If bullshit is, as Frankfurt argued, is the enemy of truth, then negative goods are the enemy of value. And if we don’t get better at telling the difference, we may find ourselves in the unenviable position of living in a society where the most efficiently produced product is our own misery.