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“Green Economics”: Turning Mainstream Thinking on Its Head
A few years ago, a homeowner in Las Vegas — a place that gets maybe five inches of rainfall a year — was confronted by a water district inspector for running an illegal sprinkler in the middle of the day. The man became very angry. He said, “You people and all your stupid rules — you’re trying to turn this place into a desert!”
Ideas about how the world works that don’t accord with reality can be unhelpful. That’s especially true about mainstream economics, which is based in part on ideas that made a lot of sense at some point in the last 250 years but that have outlived their time and usefulness. These ideas — such as the reliance on GDP as the key index of general well being — still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.
But in recent decades, economics theoreticians and researchers have suggested a variety of reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. My colleague Gary Gardner and I describe seven of these in Chapter 1 of the Worldwatch Institute’s latest report, State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy:
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(contd)
Ideas about how the world works that don’t accord with reality can be unhelpful. That’s especially true about mainstream economics, which is based in part on ideas that made a lot of sense at some point in the last 250 years but that have outlived their time and usefulness. These ideas — such as the reliance on GDP as the key index of general well being — still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.
But in recent decades, economics theoreticians and researchers have suggested a variety of reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. My colleague Gary Gardner and I describe seven of these in Chapter 1 of the Worldwatch Institute’s latest report, State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy:
.
.
(contd)
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