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2 results

  • 6 - Pricing Pollution

  • H. Spencer Banzhaf, North Carolina State University
  • Book:
    Pricing the Priceless
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023, pp 120-146

  • Summary

    The standard history of modern environmental economics often views it as an application of A.C. Pigous theory of externalities, refined over the decades and applied to environmental problems in the 1960s, when the first detailed proposals for pricing pollution were outlined by Allen Kneese, Thomas Crocker, John Dales, and others. However, the historical literature has noted problems with this narrative, including a 30-year gap in discussions of such applications and few actual citations to Pigou. This chapter offers a simple explanation for this puzzle: Namely, pollution pricing is not (necessarily) Pigouvian. It shows how the early applied literature on the topic was rooted more in questions about common property resources and increasing returns from developing natural resources. Both topics were treated by broad literatures by the 1960s, including distinctly American traditions.

Pricing the Priceless
  • A History of Environmental Economics
  • H. Spencer Banzhaf
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • 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.