Intro
Slides [link]Lecture 1
Required
- Chapter 1 of Endangered Economies, by Geoffrey Heal, “Environment and Economy - No Conflict”. Available through BC JSTOR here
- Fullerton and Stavins, Nature 1998 - “How economists see the environment”
Key Points
- Econ is the study of how to efficiently use scarce resources. Scarcity implies that we must make tradeoffs.
- Markets are capable of of efficiently allocating private resources in incredibly complex systems. But when it comes to the environment, free markets are not efficient.