A good way to understand price theory in economics is by reading The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. Although this book won’t give you facility for economic calculations, it will give you an intuitive idea about how prices work.
I first read this book years ago as a PhD student in math at McGill University, and it was enlightening.
But, price theory is only the first layer of this book. Its second layer is also a good demonstration of how our modern society is incredibly sick. This work by Steven Landsburg is steeped in human supremacy and an attitude that has lead to widespread environmental destruction.
The “religion” of environmentalism
It is hard to find a book that does not contain the author’s own moral leanings, and The Armchair Economist is no exception. There is no chapter that is more clear in showing this than his twenty-fourth chapter entitled ‘Why I Am Not An Environmentalist’.
Landsburg states that environmentalism is becoming like a religion. Of course, this is true in some cases. There will always be movements that are adopted by some as religions. However, to state that all environmentalism is a religion is a straw man.
In his Chapter 24, he talks about the environmentalism that is being taught at his daughter’s school. His ideology can be easily seen from the following paragraph:
Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking.
It is exactly the adoption of a ‘science of competing preferences’ that has led humanity to disregard other lifeforms. We believe ourselves to be the highest form of life, with other forms being resources. He goes on to clarify:
Economics forces us to confront a fundamental symmetry. The conflict arises because each side wants to allocate the same resource in a different way. Jack wants his woodland at the expense of Jill’s parking space and Jill wants her parking space at the expense of Jack’s woodland. That formulation is morally neutral and should serve as a warning against assigning exalted moral status to either Jack or Jill.
Absolutely wrong! We should not look at woodland as a resource, just as we should not look at human beings as a resource.
Instead, we should assign moral status to both Jack and Jill because it is absolutely asinine to work only within the realm of economics without any higher moral guidelines.
According to Landsburg, everyone’s preferences should be taken into account in a neutral way, measured by economic means, and our actions should be one that provides the greatest economic enrichment for all.
It is exactly the weak, neutral ground that we should not take. Instead, human desires need to be regulated because we make decisions based on instincts that are maladaptive in modern society. We only take into account short-term gains and we have an intellectual blind spot for long-term consequences.
Landsburg’s approach is human supremacist because they only consider human preferences. That’s my problem with his entire book: his logical reasoning within his axioms is sound, but his axioms themselves only concern economic efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Although ‘good’ can be measured with a variety of economic metrics as he discusses in earlier chapters, he only ever applies them to human beings, without any regard for higher life.
A different set of axioms
We need to follow a different moral guideline: that nonhuman life is equally important, and that we should not use mere economic efficiency to decide on the best policies.
With mere economic efficiency as a guideline, people make choices based on short-term economic enrichment. I reject that we should even have the right to make such choices without restriction.
Landburg clearly does not agree:
One lesson of economics is that the less we know, the more useful it is to experiment. If we are completely ignorant about the effects of extinction, we can pick up a lot of valuable knowledge by wiping out a few species to see what happens.
Perhaps we should include humans as one of these species? His saying this is exactly like saying we can gain a lot of valuable knowledge by forced human medical experimentation and genocide. He goes on to say,
I would be sorry to see lions disappear, to the point where I might be willing to pay up to about $50 a year to preserve them. I don’t think I’d pay much more than that. If lions mean less to you than they do to me, I accept our difference and will not condemn you as a sinner. If they mean more to you than to me, I hope you will extend the same courtesy.
His ideology takes lions as mere tokens to be affected by whether there are enough people willing to pay for their continued survival. According to him, if the world of human beings unanimously agreed that it wasn’t worth it to preserve lions, then letting them go extinct would be fine.
His attitude is disgusting and deplorable. We should take as unalterable law that lions have the right to exist independent of human preferences, at least insofar in that we should leave them be in the wild without destroying their habitat, even if destroying their habitat would be the best course of action in an economic-preference sense.
The only moral standpoint that makes sense is that because we are so intelligent, we should be stewards of our planet, taking care of those life forms as best as we can, just as we take care of human life. This principle should exist outside of our economic system, and any economic system must work within this framework.
Landsburg says,
With the diversity of human interests as its subject matter, the discipline of economics is fertile ground for the growth of values like tolerance and pluralism.
Tolerance and pluralism sound good, but when restricted to just the preferences of human beings, tolerance and pluralism is another way of saying that people should be able to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t violate the preferences of others as expressed through our economic system.
Therefore, I reject tolerance and pluralism as Landsburg defines it. He says,
We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights.
Of course, I am suspicious of recycling strategies as well. Although it can do some good, in other cases recycling is a sham. I won’t deny that. But I do believe it is correct to “intrude upon the rights” of others, if the rights of others intrude upon the right of non-human organisms to live.
He finishes his chapter with,
Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their “responsibilities” are almost always up to no good.
Steven Landsburg in short is one of the very best of examples of people that are a disaster for this world. I have no contention with his mathematics, but only with his human supremacist thinking.
Moreover, the apparent civility that arises from Landsburg’s beliefs is merely offset as extreme violence against the ecosystem and against nonhuman species. According to him, we should save a rare species if only someone is willing to pay for it. I believe it is our duty to preserve rare species, and we must pay for it.
He says,
In October 1992 an entirely new species of monkey was discovered in the Amazon rain forest and touted in the news media as a case study in why the rain forests must be preserved. My own response was rather in the opposite direction. I lived a long time without knowing about this monkey and never missed it. Its discovery didn’t enrich my life, and if it had gone extinct without ever being discovered, I doubt that I would have missed very much.
Actually, this monkey species has just as much right to exist as Steven Landsburg does.
Furthermore, even if we aren’t aware of every species that goes extinct, we have the obligation to minimize our ecosystem damage to prevent such extinctions, because it is wrong to cause extinctions whether or not they are life-enriching.
That we should respect all life must be a principle that transcends any economic framework.
Conclusion
Saying that environmentalism is a religion ignores the environmentalism that is based upon sound ethical thinking. This latter sort of environmentalism is simply incompatible with the human supremacist views of Steven Landsburg in his book.
Yes, The Armchair Economist clearly and logically explains price theory. But, it also reflects the very core of what is wrong with modern human society. Thus, it is also one of the very best books that illustrate the underlying sickness that has caused us to err so badly in our treatment of our biosphere.