On his book Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity
Cover Interview of May 03, 2017
The wide angle
I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t
support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by
straightforward institutional or policy reforms.
In fact, there are many ways of solving the problem of
external costs. We can levy a charge on a harmful activity to reflect the costs
it imposes on bystanders: this is sometimes referred to as “green taxation.”
Alternatively we can give damaged parties the right to sue the originator of
the damages, as happened with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico. Another solution would be to regulate activities that affect innocent
third parties. We do this with vehicle emissions in the US and in Europe.
Consumer and investor activism can play a role here too: if consumers boycott
companies responsible for environmental damage, the corporate world has an
incentive to take external effects into account. The same is true of capital
markets – if investors stay away from environmentally harmful companies, there
is again an incentive to take environmental issues into account. These are
possible responses to harmful environmental impacts. We can’t afford to
continue to ignore this failure in our economic institutions.
We can also solve the problem of weak property rights that
provide no incentive to conserve. In fact, in the case of fisheries, we are
beginning to fix this problem through systems of tradable quotas that were
recently introduced in many fisheries and are proving effective. These quotas
give fishermen a stake in their fishing ground and an incentive to think about
its future. They work: fisheries where they have been introduced are now much
healthier than before, whereas the others continue to deteriorate. There are
other alternatives, some of which are being successfully applied to manage the
depletion of ground water reserves, another important area where property
rights are not well defined.
Our accounting systems fail us by not recognizing the value
of natural capital. Accountants should warn you when you are running down your
capital, but ours don’t. We don’t have any accounting indicator that warns us
that fisheries or other natural resources are being depleted. Valuable natural
assets are being run down without warning. We have to change this and now is
the time. In fact, the United Nations, which sets the framework for the
accounts of nations, has already proposed a framework for accounting for our
natural assets, which several countries (Australia, Canada, Norway) are already
implementing. The US has declined to follow suit.
I noted the shortcomings of our normal performance measure,
GDP. Better measures of economic performance are under development. These
measures reflect the sustainability of our activities and our impacts on
natural capital. We need to implement them and evaluate our performance by the
results to have a reality check on institutions that govern our lives.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
The wide angle
I’ve identified four reasons why our economic system doesn’t support the natural world. All four of these problems can be fixed by straightforward institutional or policy reforms.
In fact, there are many ways of solving the problem of external costs. We can levy a charge on a harmful activity to reflect the costs it imposes on bystanders: this is sometimes referred to as “green taxation.” Alternatively we can give damaged parties the right to sue the originator of the damages, as happened with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Another solution would be to regulate activities that affect innocent third parties. We do this with vehicle emissions in the US and in Europe. Consumer and investor activism can play a role here too: if consumers boycott companies responsible for environmental damage, the corporate world has an incentive to take external effects into account. The same is true of capital markets – if investors stay away from environmentally harmful companies, there is again an incentive to take environmental issues into account. These are possible responses to harmful environmental impacts. We can’t afford to continue to ignore this failure in our economic institutions.
We can also solve the problem of weak property rights that provide no incentive to conserve. In fact, in the case of fisheries, we are beginning to fix this problem through systems of tradable quotas that were recently introduced in many fisheries and are proving effective. These quotas give fishermen a stake in their fishing ground and an incentive to think about its future. They work: fisheries where they have been introduced are now much healthier than before, whereas the others continue to deteriorate. There are other alternatives, some of which are being successfully applied to manage the depletion of ground water reserves, another important area where property rights are not well defined.
Our accounting systems fail us by not recognizing the value of natural capital. Accountants should warn you when you are running down your capital, but ours don’t. We don’t have any accounting indicator that warns us that fisheries or other natural resources are being depleted. Valuable natural assets are being run down without warning. We have to change this and now is the time. In fact, the United Nations, which sets the framework for the accounts of nations, has already proposed a framework for accounting for our natural assets, which several countries (Australia, Canada, Norway) are already implementing. The US has declined to follow suit.
I noted the shortcomings of our normal performance measure, GDP. Better measures of economic performance are under development. These measures reflect the sustainability of our activities and our impacts on natural capital. We need to implement them and evaluate our performance by the results to have a reality check on institutions that govern our lives.