Pricing the Priceless
A History of Environmental Economics

This book tells how economics shifted from developing resources to valuing and incentivizing the preservation of natural environments.

H. Spencer Banzhaf (Author)

9781108491006, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 November 2023

298 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

'This is the book that many researchers, teachers and students have been waiting for … it will be immensely valuable to researchers, teachers and students wishing to know more about the role the economics discipline, and of economists, in understanding and possibly offering solutions to the ecological crisis.' Antoine Missemer, History of Economic Ideas

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]