Human Well‐Being and the Natural Environment by Partha Dasgupta

Environmental economics has its limits. The estimate of the economists who valued the world-wide flow of environmental services at 33 trillion dollars was, as Partha Dasgupta says, meaningless, since without these services there would be no life (human or nonhuman), and no recipients for this sum in exchange for the life-supporting services foregone (p. 138). Perhaps he should have said ‘no life on Earth’. But even if terrestrial lifeforms escaped to another planet, they would have little use for the dollars unless they found a destination which had so evolved that matching lifesupport systems were already in place (just about as likely an outcome as having your planet and eating it). Rather, it is with environmental changes that environmental valuation and evaluation begin to make sense, or so Dasgupta maintains. (But is not a recognition of pricelessness itself a case of environmental valuation?) His main aims in this book are to relate issues concerning the natural environment to the reasoning of economics and to explain these matters to students and to professionals of other disciplines. His success in the latter regard is uneven. Considerable tracts of the book are accessible and illuminating, and numerous further passages become intelligible through (for example) the one-line footnote explaining the summation sign (p. 91); besides, certain ‘technical’ chapters are starred so that the discerning reader can skip them. Yet the ‘proof’ of the impossibility of Paretian liberalism, admittedly within a starred chapter, equips symbols with no less than three kinds of hats without explanation, as if the intended readership has been forgotten, and one of the main aims of the book therewith. More generally, conscientious readers should not spend too long decoding formulae and equations, many of which are thrown in playfully and later retracted, rather in the manner of Alvin Plantinga setting out misleadingly nonviable versions of the ontological argument as an exercise for graduate researchers. Much more memorable is Dasgupta’s remark made during a discussion of basic needs: ‘To regard the medical and teaching professions as suppliers of marketable commodities to ‘consumers’ is to practise bad economics’ (p. 49). Here, however, I focus on intergenerational issues, Third World matters, contingent valuation, sustainable development, and population ethics. When discussing intergenerational well-being, Dasgupta eventually comes down in favour of discounting future costs and benefits. Initially (p.