Description
While large literatures have separately examined the history of the environmental movement, government planning, and modern economics, Pricing the Priceless triangulates on all three. Offering the first book-length study of the history of modern environmental economics, it uncovers the unlikely role economists played in developing tools and instruments in support of environmental preservation. While economists were, and still are, seen as scientists who argue in favour of extracting natural resources, H. Spencer Banzhaf shows how some economists by the 1960s turned tools and theories used in defense of development into arguments in defense of the environment. Engaging with widely recognized names, such as John Muir, and major environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, he offers a detailed examination of the environment, and explains how economics came to enter the field in a new way that made it possible to be “on the side” of the environment.
Table of Contents
Prologue; 1. Introduction: Environmental Economics in Context; 2. Conservation and Preservation; 3. Do Economists Know About Lupines? Economics vs the Environment; 4. Consumer Surplus with Apology; 5. John Krutilla and the Environmental Turn in Natural Resource Economics; 6. Pricing Pollution; 7. Lives, Damned Lives, and Statistics; 8. Benefit-Cost Analysis: Objective or Multi-objective? Non-Market Valuation and Incommensurability; 9. Constructing Markets: The Contingent Valuation Controversy; Epilogue: The Future History of Pricing the Environment; References; Index.
