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"... A country can lose $100 billion-worth of pastureland, gain $100 billion-worth of skills and be no worse off than before. The framework turns economic polic
by bootload 14y ago
"... A country can lose $100 billion-worth of pastureland, gain $100 billion-worth of skills and be no worse off than before. The framework turns economic policymaking into an “asset-management problem”, says Sir Partha. ..."
Only in economics can you get away with statements like this.
- patdennis 14y agoThe author says "no worse off than before", as if the human suffering created by such a massive transition has no impact on the overall wellbeing of the nation. It'd be funny if the implications didn't make me so sad.
- canttestthis 14y agoHow do you quantify human suffering?
- patdennis 14y agoYou can't. What you should do is acknowledge that fact.
- rayiner 14y agoHowever you quantify it, you can't ignore it because then you implicitly quantify it as 0.
- Clotho 14y agoMeaning that it can't be done to it has no value. I can think of lots of ways to capture it's essence quantitatively. Life expectancy, social mobility, marriages. savings rate....
- msellout 14y agoThe EPA and many other agencies try to quantify the value of life (cost of death). Without that estimate, they would be unable to decide the appropriate level of pollution to allow.
- rdl 14y agoAnd I think the number they use usually ends up pretty low -- something like $2-10mm.
- obtu 14y agoThe report used 6.3 million USD for a US life (the EPA's VSL, value of a statistical life, p. 287). They want to learn more about the feedback between natural resources and health, so that they can price natural resources that economists are normally unable to value.
- msellout 14y agoWhat's wrong with that statement? To compare policies that affect natural assets and human assets, we need to be able to measure those assets with the same index. If not dollars, then what? "Utils"? Once you pick the units, then we can argue about the methodology for measuring.
- bootload 14y ago"... What's wrong with that statement? ..." It depends what you mean by loss. I consider loss as inability to use an asset, in this case the use of pasture. The pasture might have a value of $1B but is that it's true worth? Could you re-build that particular non-renewable pasture again to it's previous worth at this cost? Lets use a concrete example. It's quite possible pasture in Fukushima, Japan has sustained a $1B loss. How would a $1B gain in skills ever replace lost pasture in this case? This is a real loss. No asset management shuffling can replace that loss of pasture. The dollar value given to some assets, in this case natural assets do not reflect the true value, just what the market finds valuable at that time.
- anewguy 14y agoHow do you know the "true value" of natural assets in your non-economic framework? Is it automatically infinite? That would seem impractical - we would never want to exploit any natural asset.