The Weekend Economists Run For The Roses.

[bread_and_roses]

43. "Environmental Ignorance Is Economic Bliss"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/05-4

Published on Sunday, May 5, 2013 by The Daly News
Environmental Ignorance Is Economic Bliss
by Philip Barnes

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” This single line succinctly describes a recently conceptualized psychological phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two researchers from Cornell University, have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between a person’s knowledge and skill level in a particular area and the person’s self-rated ability to perform in the area...

... Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that economic activity is exceeding environmental limits and destabilizing both global and local ecosystems, demonstrably flawed pro-growth economic theory continues to be touted as the cure to our ailments. Could the collective of practicing economists, policy-makers, economics professors, and economics students all be suffering from something akin to the Dunning-Kruger Effect? As a community, are these individuals so unknowledgeable about the environmental consequences of pro-growth economic activity that they tend to systematically overestimate the discipline’s environmental performance?

... For the 2012-2013 academic year in all ten of these departments, only one single course presented alternative economic theories through alternative learning methods. The one-off course entitled “Buddhist Economics” was a seven-week-long sophomore seminar at UC Berkeley taught by Dr. Clair Brown. Eight students enrolled. They read and discussed works by E.F. Schumacher, Richard Norgaard, and Amartya Sen in order to reconceptualize economics from a Buddhist perspective. Students kept weekly journals detailing instances where neoclassical economics transgressed Buddhist economic principles in their lives, and they even had the opportunity to practice meditation with Anam Thubten, founder of a local Buddhist temple.

Yet Dr. Brown’s course was the exception rather than the rule. For all the other economics departments surveyed, no other course focused solely on the environmental consequences of economic activity or the limits-to-growth critique. Most departments offer a course called “Environmental Economics,” but the content centers on traditional cost-benefit and public policy approaches to resolving natural resource problems such as negative externalities, public goods underinvestment, and other market failures. Moreover, in introductory courses for micro and macroeconomics, ecologically-minded economic theory and knowledge is woefully absent. This claim is supported by a recently published paper in which the author, Tom Green, reviewed the most popular introductory level economics textbooks and found that the causal relationship between economic activity and environmental consequence was either systematically ignored or underrepresented.

At least as far as I know, horse-racing is not destroying the environment .... though the fortunes of those who support it at the highest level are based on activities that are .... so it goes. Once again, Capitalism and its excesses are the problem. The rich against the rest of us are the problem.