So for the time being let's just assume cost to be a certain amount of energy or resource required to keep a living arrangement sustained.
Social costs often mount up in hidden and unexpected ways. Take the costs that are incurred through the interaction of long and short term thinking. At the moment we'll have to skip how long and short term thinking arise, and what elements influence their interplay; for now I want to focus on a brief analysis of costs.
It takes a whole collection of expansionary projects, furthered by short term thinking and minuscule private actions which reduce cost and increase efficiency, which then contribute to a sort of economic and political amassing of infrastructure and population, which then contains a vast array of constituents and dependents, and which must now be maintained at high cost.
The maintenance of any kind of large and complex material mass must be managed with intricate long term thinking which accounts for and minimizes costs, so as to sustain that mass into the vague future without those costs overrunning the energy it takes to maintain it. And this abundant and powerful mass provides all the means needed for something like short term business thinking to burn up the surplus and transfer costs, such as by providing an inferior product at greater cost.
This sort of process increases costs overall. It takes a sort of baseline cost to maintain a complex social system as it is, with careful maintenance and economy. But as known most explicitly in the medical and construction industries, failures tend to incur greater cost to repair than regular maintenance. Upon finding a vast social system producing abundance and profit, short term business has found that it can harness that abundance without giving back in return, passing the costs to someone else, and ultimately increasing those costs by encouraging failures and ruptures in the continuity of planning and management, as most commonly found in the neoliberalization process.
Another dynamic to consider is the proliferation of myriad increased costs opened up by processes of privatization and political austerity. With privatization, there are the familiar phenomena of looting and monopoly pricing that occur which drive up these costs, and with austerity, the flow of currency emanating from the state is strangled off, and so private banking must pick up the slack with costly credit in its various forms - really another form of looting and monopoly pricing.
But there are other less visible costs that take place with changes in the interconnecting social relations, and the changing behaviors that those changes encourage. Austerity and privatization reduce economic security, and they disintegrate the social floor which is to hold up the whole of society.
When something like this happens, there is a fear and insecurity that spreads throughout the whole body politic, and what little trust remained over the violent course of civilization is smothered into ember once again. With an environment that is ruled by fear and distrust, the predominating business instinct is not to deliver products and services at cost, but to take as many resources as one can get away with to compensate for that loss in security, or in other words, to provide a buffer and cushion with which to maintain oneself and one's community. And this behavior universalized is a mass driver of costs.
This cost then, lies in a universal proliferation of the desire for a sort of security cushion, an amassing of resources far above what it takes to subsist, a desire which is only satisfied with the power to amass such resources, leaving less and less for a growing pool of powerless. Of course, such a process has been going on since at least the dawn of capitalism, and really well before that milestone as well, and it is a process that oscillates in intensity and concentration across time.
