Chapter 9 Flashcards
What were Malthus’ assumptions? What did he argue?
Assumed:
1. Food supply grows arithmetically.
2. Healthy population grows geometrically.
Malthus argued, population growth would outstrip the food supply, leading to increasing human misery, famine, disease, or war.
What are the challenges to Malthus’ assumptions?
- Agricultural output has not grown arithmetically.
- from about 1950 through the 1980s, the Green Revolution in agriculture resulted in greatly increased yelled s for major crops around the world. - Population does not always increase geometrically.
- excluding immigration, developed countries have very low population growth rates- often below zero.
What is the ecological economist’s reply to Malthus?
There are other resource constraints than just arable land.
Agriculture requires massive quantities of fresh water, energy, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Just because food production has increased faster than population in the past is no guarantee that it will continue to do so in the future.
Rising affluence has resulted in a massive increase in the demand for meat, which os resource intensive.
What are ecosystem services?
The benefits that people receive from nature.
How can the majority of ecosystem services be declining at the same time as there are big gains in human well-being?
- It may be that the really important services, like food production, are increasing and this more than makes up for declines in other services.
- Technological advances have made well-being less dependent on natural capital.
- There may be time lags between declines in natural capital and declines in standard of living.
What is the IPAT equation?
Environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology
What is ecological footprint?
The ecological footprint of a community (or nation) calculates how much land and water area is needed to provide the resources for production and for assimilation of wastes for that community.
What is the Human Development Index (HDI)?
Measures of per capita income, education levels, and life expectancy. Varies between 0 and 1.
What is Net National Welfare (NNW)?
Attempts to measure, on an annual basis, the “real” well-being of society’s members.
It can be defined as the total annual output of both market and nonmarket goods and services minus the total externality and clean up costs associated with these products, minus the depreciation of capital, both natural and human-made, used-up in production.
What are the failures of GDP in measuring sustainability?
- Fails to include the value of nonmarket goods and services.
- Includes costs incurred in reducing harmful activities.
- Fails to account for the depreciation of the capital used up in production , especially natural capital.
- Reflects the experience of the “average person” but does not account for distribution or equity concerns.
What is Inclusive Wealth (IW)?
IW is defined as the value of all capital stocks including human capital, manufactured capital, natural capital, and social capital.
The idea behind IW is that if we leave future generations with greater overall wealth, then they will have the means to be better off. However, if we deplete wealth, future generations will be unable to match current standards of living.
What is the depreciation rule for natural capital?
Depreciation equals the measured value of the resource rent.
The resource rent, not the full market value of the resource, is what future generations are losing by our exploitation of natural capital.
Why could high market discount rates explain why many of our decisions today might be unsustainable?
Due to high discount rates, we fail to make many long-lived investments that could benefit our descendants.
Why are required profit rates so high, when there are many long term investments for the future that can’t be funded at these rates?
High required returns reflect only the private benefits of investment and fail to account for the external costs to society as a whole of growth.
Some of these profits are coming from resource rents, and do not reflect any depreciation of natural capital.
High returns are required to induce people to save and invest their income.
How do ecological economists measure sustainability?
- IPAT
- HDI + ecological footprint
