Jim,

With all due respect, please read my comments to John Foster. If you
agree with his earlier statements, then as shocking as it may seem, you
are also agreeing with the authors.

Here is the problem. You do have a closed mind. Sorry, that maybe rude,
but hey at least I am being honest (feel free to call me an asshole if you
want or flip of your monitor and I will feel suitably insulted right
back).

Here is the primary argument of the paper. The authors argue that another
constraint for the environment should be added to the optimization process
that say a social planner would optimize. Yeah I know that is cryptic as
hell and you are probably tempted to hit the delete key...but wait, I'll
attempt a translation.

Think of it this way a decentralized market economy can also be depicted
as an optimizaiton problem for a social planner who has access to all the
appropriate information. So, not only would you have constraints on how
much labor you have, your production technology, etc. But you'd add in a
constraint for environmental degredation. That is only a specific amount
of degredation is allowed (I assume the idea here is that ecosystems can
recover from a certain level of damage, but too much damage destroys the
system or renders it incapable of recovering to pre-damage levels).
Hence, there is not growth at any cost.

Now, the authors also point out that using a market economy would be
helpful. The reason is, that markets are essentially a whole bunch of
people coordinating their decision making in a decentralized manner.
Hence, what needs to be done is institutions need to be put in place that
would give the various actors in the economy (consumers, firms, even
governments) incentives to take sustainable policies.

Jim Lewis wrote:
> Sustainable growth simply can't happen. If one region or economic
> sector
> continues to grow without control, rest assured that it is being
> subsidized,
> and quite heavily too, by another region(s) or part of the economy.

And I respond with this bit of advice (which you can ignore if you
want...and heck you can even flip off your monitor again if you want):

Don't make pronouncements about another person(s) position without first
inverstigating it as you may be wildly off the mark.

And in your comment above you are off basd. Your statement about economic
growth without control is false. The paper does not advocate that
position at all. In fact, even a market economy with no public sector is
not 'uncontrolled'. Each actor is making rational decisions based on
their narrowly defined self interest. To such a process what needs to be
added for the process to be sustainable, in the view of the authors, are
incentive mechanisms that will induce people to make decisions that are
sustainable.


 
> I have worked in this area of study for a LONG time; long enough to
> learn to
> distrust the discussions that tend to rage around current environmental
> fads. I suspect that this world will never attain a voluntarily

Soooo, this justifies ignoring something that might bring a different
perspective on a 'fad' issue?


Steve

=====
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a 'Satan', but this man is as close to 'the real McCoy' as they come."
--Jamey Lee West

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