"Bad-for-the-world-ipedia?"

There's strong reason to believe sweatshop labor is a positive thing, actually- both conditions and pay tend to be superior to other options available in that location, and sweatshop owners expand the middle class. Similarly, the push to exclude child labor in sweatshops hurts children (and their families) in developing countries, because the choice is rarely "work or go to school" but instead "work at a good job vs. work at a bad job."

Which is one of the reasons why something like this would very quickly devolve into a political battleground: there are legitimate differences in opinion (even if there aren't illegitimate ones will get presented) and who comes out on top has real-world implications.

A good's market price is usually the best estimate of the social cost of consuming the good because absent government subsidies it usually tells you the cost of the resources used to make the good. In competitive efficient markets:

Price = social marginal cost

When price doesn't provide useful information about social costs so many factors come into play that you are extremely unlikely to come anywhere close to figuring out the social marginal cost of consuming a good.

Characterizing Health, Environment and Social Impacts | GoodGuide

Find healthy, green, ethical products according to scientific research and ratings.

More here:

We conduct research on what matters most in each product category, assessing the health impacts of ingredients, the environmental impacts of a company's production processes and the social impacts of a company's operations on workers and communities.

Also see this NYTimes article on the above service: On Web and iPhone, a Tool to Aid Careful Shopping

I've been thinking about something like this.

A lot of people, for one reason or another, want to cut down on their fossil fuel consumption. Let's reduce the question to fossil fuels because that gives you a single metric: gallons of crude used to bring this product to you. Let's also put to one side those who say that there's no good reason to cut down on fossil fuels; at least some of the developed world's population does want to use less oil.

But given a vast array of products, some of which advertise being "green" in one way or another, you don't actually have a good way to know what's the least oil-consuming shopping cart to bring home from the grocery store. Without knowledge, you can't "shop green," any more than you can save money without seeing any price tags. Using labels, news, and PR to inform you how to "shop green" may well be counterproductive. In an ideal world, you could actually get data about the energy expenditure of every consumer product, from bananas to boomboxes. Of course, to do that somebody would need to enforce disclosure requirements on manufacturers and that's not going to happen (and maybe shouldn't happen.)

At the very least, though, it would be a good project someday to make an incomplete estimate, based on what energy consumption data is available from manufacturers. And you might be able to get industry averages or back-of-the-envelope estimates for product categories ("Cabbage is better than lettuce by X gallons of oil per pound")

But this is what frustrates me sometimes. I see people and institutions trying to change their buying habits altruistically (to use less oil or less sweatshop labor or something else) but they have no way to measure numerically how they're doing at their goals, and they often don't seem to care one bit. Why?!?! (Ok, signaling, but grrrrrr.)

I saw a customer comment on a piano website recently thanking the proprietor for being green by having a digital manual instead of shipping a paper one.

An electronic manual for the electronic piano they just bought with a mechanism made in Germany, processors from Japan, soundboard from France, assembled in China, sold in England and delivered to Wales.

"It's not easy being green" - Mork.

I like this idea, but measuring the magnitude of negative effects is hard. You can't trust companies to report how many hours of sweatshop labor they use per unit, and in many cases that information is scattered between the manufacturers of many different parts and no one really knows. Similarly for energy used, types and amounts of toxins released, politicians bribed, small guys sued, and so on. It might also be a lawsuit magnet.

I think this would be a good idea. It kind of reminds me of this page, but with a much greater scope.

You could start this site with wikia or someone could privately host it. There are probably other options too, but I can't find any.

It sounds as though you want a product reputation system.

Interdependence makes societies MORE resilient, not less. Trust is difficult, even painful - but it helps those around you and those to come. Poor subsistence farmers have a shitty situation cause their evolutionary lineage decided not to go and dependent on one another.

''peasants generally live so close to the subsistence line that it takes little to destroy their livelihoods. From this, he infers a set of economic principles that it would be rational for them to live by. It is important to emphasize that this book was not based on fieldwork, and itself proposed a cross-cultural universalistic model of peasant economic behaviour based upon a set of fixed theoretical principles, not a reading of peasant culture. Firstly, he argued that peasants were “risk averse”, or, put differently, followed a “safety first” principle. They would not adopt risky new seeds or technologies, no matter how promising, because tried and true traditional methods had demonstrated, not promised, effectiveness. This gives peasants an unfair reputation as “traditionalist” when in fact they are just risk averse. Secondly, Scott argues that peasant society provides “subsistence insurance” for its members to tide them over those occasions when natural or man-made disaster strikes. ''