Editorial Introduction

While it may seem churlish for an editor to dispute a title of his own choosing, there is no such thing as the economic approach to natural resource depletion. Apart from being naturally disputatious, perhaps a characteristic of any professional discipline, economists do disagree about the ‘proper’ way to look at resource depletion problems. For example, there are widely divergent viewpoints about the optimal rate of depletion, centring on the extent to which the standard neo-classical approach based on the maximisation of some present value of future flows of consumers’ surplus adequately allows for future generations’ well-being. Similarly, attitudes to the varied estimates of resource availability frequently depend on the same issue, and on (a) the subjective attitude of the economist in question to selecting policy options from a matrix of highly uncertain outcomes, and (b) the extent to which the observer places faith in the workings of a mixed price system to secure some smooth pattern of individual resource substitutability over time. As far as (a) is concerned, for example, an optimistic attitude might be based on extrapolation of past experience of ‘muddling through’ and on personal beliefs about the future existence of technologies that are not currently feasible.