This section will list readings that may be especially useful to teachers of undergraduate economics, as well as other articles that are of broader cultural interest. In general, with occasional exceptions, the articles chosen will be expository or integrative and not focus on original research. If you write or read an appropriate article, please send a copy of the article (and possibly a few sentences describing it) to Timothy Taylor, preferably by e-mail at taylort@macalester.edu, or c/o Journal of Economic Perspectives, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., Saint Paul, MN 55105.The UK government has published a 600-page report of an independent commission led by Partha Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. "Not so long ago, when the world was very different from what it is now, the economic questions that needed urgent response could be studied most productively by excluding Nature from economic models. At the end of the Second World War, absolute poverty was endemic in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and Europe needed reconstruction. It was natural to focus on the accumulation of produced capital (roads, machines, buildings, factories, and ports) and what we today call human capital (health and education). To introduce Nature, or natural capital, into economic models would have been to add unnecessary luggage to the exercise. Nature entered macroeconomic models of growth and development in the 1970s, but in an inessential form. . . . We may have increasingly queried the absence of Nature from official conceptions of economic possibilities, but the worry has been left for Sundays. On week-days, our thinking has remained as usual. ... [I]n recent decades eroding natural capital has been precisely the means the world economy has deployed for enjoying what is routinely celebrated as 'economic growth' . . . If, as is nearly certain, our global demand continues to increase for several decades, the biosphere is likely to be damaged sufficiently to make future economic prospects a lot dimmer than we like to imagine today. What intellectuals have interpreted as economic success over the past 70 years may thus have been a down payment for future failure. It would look as though we are living at the best of times and the worst of times."
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