Economic Aspects of Environmental Pollution

Abstract

should for reasons of the legitimate or real values involved-values as real and as valid as those of tomatoes and potatoes. Examples of the concerns include the increasing use of pesticides, abandoned automobiles, the proliferation of trash and refuse, utility poles, abandoned farmsteads, and various types of abandoned and new tourist developments. While we focus much rhetoric on a few more dramatic cases, there are many important, and in a number of ways similar, instances of deterioration of the rural and agricultural environment and of the total environment in which we live. The concern here is not with an enumeration of the various forms of pollution, nor with allegations of the extent of deterioration. We seem to be getting quite a bit of that. The relative deficiency seems to be the growth of an appreciation for the causes of better or worse environments as we have come to think of them. The reasons, particularly the economic reasons, for environmental degradation are not being taken into account and thereby hinder effective and efficient approaches to the alleged loss of values. Solution or at least betterment would seem far easier when the economic rationale is more fully understood.' The chief, and most useful, focus of social science questions is not that of having enough resources for our needs or asking when we shall run out of them. Instead, it is with investigating and improving the social and institutional arrangements by which we mobilize them. This concern centers on the assessment of relative values of resource uses and the analysis of ways in which we utilize the products of these resources. These are the questions involved in environmental quality concerns. As our dissatisfactions with the present resource arrangements increase, we are finding that our studies and plans have not always provided the needed guidance for dealing with environmental problems. In many instances they have been highly descriptive when the need is increasingly for more analytical efforts and more insightful and imaginative approaches. Parallel to this, the concern has largely been on specific problems in individual resource uses. Such a commodity approach has distracted attention from the common causes of many of our environmental concerns 'Orris C. Herfindahl and Allen V. Kneese, Quality of the Environment, Resources for the Future, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1965. JACK L. KNETSCH is an economist with Resources for the Future, Inc. 1256