The iceberg and the titanic: Human economic behavior in ecological models

Abstract

In the long run the planet has the upper hand, in the short run humans act as if they do and as if this will continue to be the case. This aspect of human behavior is manifested in economic institutions and policies, and in individual responses to economic signals. The implications for how human economic behavior can be incorporated in ecosystem research are founded in the nature of economic models and how they are used to formulate policy. The title of this chapter reflects the author's perception that the body politic often founds decisions on the seemingly-precise prognostications of economic models, finding comfort in estimates carried out to the third (or greater) decimal. Reliance on guidance from these models in turn generates policies (and consequently affects human behavior and choice) based on the assumptions of the models that produce the estimates. The assumptions, therefore, become embedded in the behavior they are used to predict?in short, a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. This sort of collective social choice suggests a nation that regards itself as being as impregnable as was the iceberg, blithely assuming that any large clouds on the horizon are really only on the scale of the Titanic and that, in any event, ordinary economic decisions will correct the steering before any solid object is encountered. Examples of this behavior abound. From the recent cover of Time asking whether we can do without nuclear power to the on-going debate over the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), we see a willing view of the growth economy as an iceberg, when it ultimately is not even in the scale of the Titanic, but more like a lifeboat, fragile and adrift among the complex biological and geochemical systems that typical economic assumptions and models treat so cavalierly. Given this not altogether optimistic view of how economic understanding drives some basic policies which in turn introduce the human factor in ecosystems in new ways (for example, construction of a new highway opens up undeveloped land to housing in ways and on a scale that the choice of a rail system would not), how can an understanding of economics enable scientists to better incorporate the human factor in basic ecosystem studies? The answer rests on the most basic concepts and assumptions of general economics, observations from the fields of natural resource and environmental economics, and the degree to which these merely reflect dominant social values. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.