Accounting for Nature: The Economics of Biodiversity
In this episode with Sir Partha Dasgupta, we are taken on a journey of how the current growth-based economic models came to be, and why their Nature-destructive policies have turned our planet into a house of cards. We unpack Sir Partha’s most recent publication The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review from 2021, a 600-page study that was commissioned by the UK Government, which examines the economic benefits of biodiversity and the cost of losing it.
He also explains how he arrived at his approximation of 3.2 billion as a sustainable human population at a decent standard of living, and how using a behavioral economics approach, we can achieve such a goal. Dasgupta ends off by appealing to social scientists to embrace an integrative approach to academic thinking that is not encumbered by political correctness, which has led to such widespread denialism of the population factor and, as a result, a perilous situation for us and the rest of the planet.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Partha Dasgupta 0:00
The reason I do speak a lot on population is first of all, I like to think as an economist. I'm persuaded that reproductive behavior can be analyzed and understood in the same way as consumption behavior is or dress behavior and so forth. And that the idea that when it comes to consumption, tradition doesn't matter, but when it comes to reproduction, tradition matters and overrides it, and therefore you say it can't be discussed. That seems to me to be completely at variance with the data that I have, the evidence I've acquired.
Alan Ware 0:30
Those insightful words are from Sir Partha Dasgupta, a world renowned economist who is challenging the infinite economic growth model and putting economics in its rightful place as a subset of nature and all life on Earth. We'll get to hear more from him on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 0:56
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:18
And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, a nonprofit organization that works hard to educate and raise awareness about the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 1:34
We are proud to be the first and only organization globally that draws the connections between pronatal ism, anthropocentrism, and overpopulation and their combined devastating impacts on social reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.
Alan Ware 1:52
And before we move on to today's guest, we've got some listener feedback from Dennis in South Africa. He says, I have belatedly listened to Episode 80, Bill Ryerson, soap operas for social justice. I have generally had a contemptuous attitude to soap operas and the viewers. Most soap operas are superficial, promote ostentatious and consumerist lifestyles and have a negative effect on society. But Bill's strategy of turning them to good use has given me a new perspective regarding the potential good in this market. His strategy seems to have had enormous effect and he is targeting and influencing people who otherwise would not be interested in or even resistant to topics such as family planning. Thanks again for your good work.
Nandita Bajaj 2:36
Well, thank you for the wonderful feedback. Dennis, we agree that PMC's unique strategy has the potential to create massive positive shifts and cultural norms, as they have already shown in the countries they've worked in. If you have feedback or guest recommendations, you can email us at podcast@population balance.org. And thanks to all of our wonderful listeners, we are excited to announce that we now rank in the top 2% of all of the podcasts globally. In addition to this podcast, we also run educational programs around ecological overshoot, pronatalism, and animal rights. We go into schools and conferences and talk to young people with a goal of empowering them to make liberated and responsible reproductive and consumptive choices. And we do all of this with a really small staff and a tiny budget. And we count on you to keep doing this important work. Just a small donation goes a long way to keep our podcast on the air. And to keep us expanding our outreach programs. Please support our work by clicking on the donate button in our show notes and to learn about the different ways you can give which include one time or monthly donations as well as legacy gifts.
Alan Ware 3:52
Yes, legacy gifts are a really great way to support us you can give to Population Balance through your will or trust or by naming Population Balance as a beneficiary of your life insurance policy, retirement plan or royalties. You can learn more about this on our website populationbalance.org
Alan Ware 4:10
And now on to today's guest Sir Partha Dasgupta, whose bio easily spans across two pages and for the sake of brevity, we're only highlighting some of his accomplishments. You can see the full bio link in our show notes. Sir Partha Dasgupta is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. He has also taught at the London School of Economics and Stanford University. In 1996, he helped to establish the journal Environment and Development Economics whose purpose has been not only to publish original research at the interface of poverty and the environmental resource base, but also to provide an opportunity to scholars in developing countries to publish their findings in an international journal. Dasgupta was named Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2002 for services to economics. Dasgupta's research interests have covered welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, the economics of undernutrition, and the economics of social capital. His publications include over a dozen articles and several books including Time and the Generations: Population Ethics for a Diminishing Planet in 2019 and the Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review from 2021, a 600 page study that was commissioned by the UK Government and examines the economic benefits of biodiversity and the cost of losing it.
Nandita Bajaj 5:49
Professor Sir Partha, it is such an honor to be with you today. It's a rare privilege to have someone with your distinguished accomplishments, and also someone in the field of economics who cares so deeply about both social and ecological justice.
Partha Dasgupta 6:05
Pleasure to be with you.
Nandita Bajaj 6:07
So we'll start with our first question, which is, you are one of the relatively few economists who are promoting a greater understanding in the field of economics and the world at large that the economy is a subset of nature, and that we must conserve and protect nature, if we hope to have a sustainable human future. You mention three categories of ecosystem services that contribute directly or indirectly to human well being. Could you start by giving us an overview of these categories?
Partha Dasgupta 6:42
Yes, of course, these categories were not my creation. It's the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, which started this classification scheme. So the three that I pointed out to are, first of all provisioning goods, and they include food, water, timber, fibers, pharmaceuticals. In other words, bear in mind, these are the goods which with human labor and ingenuity produce the final outputs, which are measured by GDP. So as these are provisioning goods, this distinction is really critical. So that's one.
Partha Dasgupta 7:16
And the second -there are services that mother nature provides, and they are often invisible, and also silent. So think of what's going on under your feet in the soils and in the deep oceans. They're called maintenance and regulating services. So that would be carbon capture, decomposition of waste, that's extremely important we forget, all the stuff that we throw out eventually gets recycled, pollination, circulation of the oceans, leading to transfer of nutrients, and so forth. These are absolutely fundamental in the sense that without them, we would have no provisioning goods.
Partha Dasgupta 7:49
And the third is I have been not taking too much notice of it, because they're quite obvious, which are cultural services, leisure activities, for example, enabling social capital to be created and to flourish.
Partha Dasgupta 8:02
But it's the first two that I want to concentrate on because the third is really rather obvious, it will be part of the, if you like, the use value of nature. First is basic needs. But second, maintenance and regulation are like basic industries without them there's nothing. And if you disturb that, destroy it, we as a species will be out. I suppose I think I ought to make mention of one further thing about this two way distinction between provisioning goods and maintenance and regulating services because they're at the heart of much controversy between economists and ecologists. Economists essentially spend much of their time when discussing resources of the environment on the first -provisioning goods, and also the cultural services. So that nature is an ammenity. A good example will be climate change economics concentrated entirely on finding ways to substitute one pattern of energy production by another. So moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy production. And that's very subtle, because it's saying that you can substitute your way out of environmental problems by finding new ways of producing provisioning goods. Right. The substitution possibilities is at the heart of much of the discussion in economics. And it suggests that you can have GDP growth by investing in ways of substituting one kind of resource or another, or one pattern of doing things for another. Now, maintenance and regulating services, in contrast, are on the whole complementary to one another. So suppose for example, you mess around with the climate system - too much carbon in the atmosphere is going to affect and be affected by the rainforest, and circulation patterns. So it's not quite like a house of cards. Nature is not a house of cards, she's resilient. But of course, we are now so powerful that we can turn it into a house of cards if we want. My review is really about maintenance and regulating services not about provisioning goods.
Alan Ware 9:54
Those will be elements that can't be easily substituted by price signals and more market mechanisms?
Partha Dasgupta 10:01
Well, they can't be substituted, that's for sure. Because they are complementary. These are processes that have evolved over 4.3 billion years. But the substitution occurs at the provisioning goods side of things. But of course, they are being produced with the help of this undercurrent of maintenance.
Alan Ware 10:20
Well, this kind of gets to the idea of assets. You've emphasized in your writings the critical difference between income and wealth. And as you've made clear, the standard measure of a nation's income, or gross domestic product is a measure of the flow of provisioning services, and tells us nothing about the destruction of the nation's natural wealth that helped to make that income possible. And you've emphasized that human well being now and in the future derives from the total wealth, or what you're calling the inclusive wealth. What do you mean by that term? Inclusive wealth out a measure of inclusive wealth differ from how we're measuring wealth today?
Partha Dasgupta 10:59
Well, you're asking two questions. And both are very good. So let me try out the first one, the distinction between income and wealth, then we can talk about different ways of thinking about wealth. There are two problems with GDP, gross domestic product. One is that it's a flow. And I'll come back to that in a minute. But the critical weakness of it is that it's gross, the rogue word is gross, gross means - I don't mean ugly - in the sense that it doesn't take into account the depreciation of assets that accompanies the production of goods and services. So think of a household which, and you ask them, you know, what is their wealth on that household, and they will have a reasonable answer to it, they'll talk about the house they own, the property they own and the shares they have, and so forth. And probably expressed in dollar values. They'll include their graduating son or daughter, because he or she will have a flow of income in the past. And so there's human capital, and call it income, and so forth. So something like a wealth is. Now suppose the household consumes in excess of the income that is generated by that wealth, then what will happen is that that wealth will start declining. That's what you mean by saying the person who is living or household is living beyond its means, at some stage, something will give, they'll go bankrupt. I can't borrow indefinitely. Okay, so GDP has this singular weakness, and not measuring, taking note of the fact of what's happening to the biosphere, or the natural wealth that the economy has access to, okay? If it depreciates, it degrades, it's not recorded in GDP, because you're looking at only final output, right? So that's one weakness. And that's a major weakness.
Partha Dasgupta 12:37
So you might say, Well, why not measure the depreciation and deduct it and call it net domestic product, that's not a bad idea. That's the first move. But then, of course, you could consume even more than your net domestic product. And if you do, then your wealth will go down. So you need two changes to be made on gross domestic product, first of all, take into account the depreciation of capital. But the reason we have to emphasize depreciation is because we're looking at Mother Nature. And she's extremely easy to depreciate, as we know from experience, okay, look at the carbon we emit, which leads to the depreciation of the atmosphere and the biosphere. And its capacity to recycle. That's what the problem is, right? We're messing around with the major maintenance and regulating service, which is climate regulation, and that unravels many other processes because its acidifying the oceans, for example. So that changes many of the oceans characteristics, and thereby the services the oceans are providing, and so forth and so on. I mean, the chain reactions are just enormous, okay. So that's why suddenly depreciation becomes important. If you didn't take nature into account. Just imagine there was no nature. It's the mythical world that only the physical capital produced - capital roads and buildings and human capital, you might say, Well, look, there is depreciation there as well, because after all buildings depreciate, roads depreciate, but those are manageable once you can observe it. And firms actually have depreciation allowances. So they take that depreciation into account because nothing untoward can happen, you will know something about the structure of these objects, maybe there'll be 3% depreciation each year, which means they'll keep 3% aside for repairs and maintenance.
Partha Dasgupta 14:19
Nature is very different. Mostly, it's not priced to come back to a point that you made earlier on. And one reason it's not priced is property rights are very hard to define on an ocean which is very often invisible, its silent. And its mobile. Mobility, of course, makes it extremely difficult to create private property. We have a problem here because we have an asset, a great chunk of which is unpriced. When we make use of it, we have no incentive to either measure it because what does it mean to measure it since it's unpriced? It's here today gone tomorrow. So I may as well use it as much as I can. So we excessively depend on Mother Nature, we allow her to depreciate and that depreciation is not picked up in the economics differences, and we need to do that.
Alan Ware 15:02
I've heard you mentioned a 2018 UN-sponsored study that looked at the depreciation per person of natural capital estimated at 40% since 1992. There's been an increase in produced capital, the roads and buildings and cars of 100% since 1992. How confident are you in that measure of the decrease in national capital?
Partha Dasgupta 15:25
That's exactly the right kind of study to bake. But that 40% decline is an extreme underestimate, because they could only measure those on which they could put some prices.
Alan Ware 15:36
Alright.
Partha Dasgupta 15:36
So there's a lot more than that which was measured out there.
Alan Ware 16:44
Wow.
Partha Dasgupta 15:40
There's no need for an apology for any economist who does this kind of work to say that it's inaccurate, we're just beginning to do this kind of work. And the authors deserve all the praise that I've actually given them. Because without that kind of number, I'm a theorist, I tend to arrive at conclusions on the basis of analytical reasoning, that's fine, because it's theorizing which enables applied people to know what to apply ideas to, without that just randomly looking at the world. But you do need numbers. Without that there is something dry and bloodless in pure theory. So I've really been very keen on encouraging my applied colleagues to try and do no matter how dirty the applied work is. By definition, it's got to be dirty. But this one is really dirty, because there's no history on which they can depend. I mean, if you're estimating GDP, you've got about 70 years of trial. Each year, millions and millions of dollars have been spent in refining ways of estimating it by different countries, different sectors, and so forth. So and even then, so many things get missed in GDP.
Alan Ware 16:45
Yeah, measuring soil quality and water quality and peatlands and coral reefs...
Partha Dasgupta 16:50
Right, it's very hard but they've done it, they've tried hard, and done really on of those that they can get some notion of nominal prices.
Alan Ware 16:58
And so much more of it, to be measuring it.
Partha Dasgupta 17:02
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Alan Ware 17:03
And how do you think capitalism as it's currently practice should be changed in light of this idea of natural and inclusive wealth?
Partha Dasgupta 17:11
So I should say one thing, I've never in my writings attacked capitalism, because if I do that, I'd have to attack pretty much everything else that's going on. I mean, the communist regimes used to be horrible. I mean, what Soviet Union did to natural capital is beneath contempt, okay. So this is not any particular system, I may dislike one more than the other, but from this plane of discussion, they're all pretty nasty. And it's nasty, because we don't have the incentive. It's more to do with the human nature. In the modern world, we have moved more and more away from nature, which has made it even less possible to provide the incentives people need and to be able to pay some price to these. Now, let me try and explain what I mean. Suppose you go to a coastal fishery in, say, Tanzania, and I'm giving you that example, because I was there some 20 years ago, that village on the coast in Zanzibar, and I saw local, not even villages, these are hamlets actually, they come out in the low tide with the harpoons and fish. Now, such people most valuable asset is the fishery is the coast, the coast before is extremely important. That's where they live. But I'm not talking about what they do in the on the oceans and they husband it and how do they husband it, they don't actually put a price on the fish? Of course not. So I discussed it. Listen, what what's going on? How do you handle it? They say, well, they have norms of behavior that have been built up over centuries, maybe 1000s of years, which is, you know, fish so much, not from this part of the coast, at this time of the day, this type of month, they know something about spawning times, they know something about the growth process fishery. So they are husbanding collectively through not through a price system, although by the way, anthropologists have found many cases where the price system is used in the case of, in South India, water regulation within villages, those are allocation of water is based on a price system in the following sense that you are fined if you take more than you are.
Nandita Bajaj 17:14
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 17:27
So it's not as though they are not priced system. But there are ways of managing a resource where there's an implicit price system. And that's, of course, for a very industrial economy, large scale economy, the world economy, that's not going to happen. I mean, these community based rules and regulations for managing the local ecosystems is a very different problem than for a global economy or international. So we don't have the institutional structure, nevermind whether it's the law or whether the norms that we just don't have that. We haven't created it to manage our most important asset - ourselves, if you like, and we are part of that, that's nature. We manage it over the things we produce, over provisioning goods. Obviously, the desk I'm sitting at is my desk and if somebody tries to take it away, I can call the police and so forth. There is a structure, institutional structure which provides me with the incentives to manage this desk, not mismanage it, so to speak,
Nandita Bajaj 20:04
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 20:05
And I don't have that with so much of nature. Yeah, I'm not suggesting it's easy. But we haven't even tried to see how to manage this intricate, interconnected set of assets.
Alan Ware 20:16
You've done work on the common property resources of like that fishing village where indigenous small scale, local people have found ways to manage their commons, effectively, where the market and the state have less of a role. And I think you've heard a lot of times, we should just leave things alone, either let nature alone to be able to rehabilitate, replenish its regulatory and maintenance services, or leave small communities alone, let have the state let them alone, because they've figured things out of how to manage resources cooperatively. So that is something we can learn from indigenous people. But but like you say, with things like the atmosphere, these larger elements that do have more of a tragedy of the commons.
Partha Dasgupta 21:01
That's exactly right. Consider the open oceans beyond the 200 mile. EEZ (exclusive economic zone). The oceans are significant. And they're a huge global public good, that's a public good, because it's mobile circulation pattern, everybody is affected in different ways. But we are all affected by the oceans. And yet, of course, it's a open access resource. So we don't have to go very far, deep into economic theory, the tragedy of the commons stares at us in the face. And yet we have no institutional mechanism to date to regulate the use of the nation's oceans. And by the use, I mean, of course, the trillions of dollars of merchandise that is shipped across the oceans, all that stuff, these container ships. And on top of that there is deep sea fishing, which is destroying the oceans. Notice nobody is charged for the use of the ocean, you're not paying for it. Now, that's one of the aspects of the fact that it's a open access resource. And we should be doing that. We don't have an institution to be able to regulate the use of the ocean, or the discharge of waste. Now, I'm not suggesting it's easy, the waste disposal is hard, because it's coming from all parts of the coasts of the oceans, because that thing, but surely the traffic is monitored, we don't do anything about that. So that's one class of problems arising out of the fact that we have these global public goods, which are doing natural capital. And yet we don't have an institution to limit our use of it. We have no incentive to practice restraint.
Partha Dasgupta 22:25
The second class is these tropical rainforests. They're also global public goods, for reasons we all understand now. They seem to have 50 percent of biodiversity, if nothing else, and plus, on top of that God knows how many things they're doing for us, but they're not open access resources, at least not globally, because they're within national jurisdiction, Brazilian, Colombian, Congo and so forth. So we have a problem there, because you have the nations claiming that this their property and the old fashioned way they treat these assets on the basis of their notion of what their people need. And there's truth in that, there is truth in the fact that an individual country, which houses a great deal of rain forest is small relative to the global economy. So they could say, "Well, why are we a small economy responsible for the whole world?" If you don't like us deforesting? Why don't you compensate us for not deforesting? So that's called payment for ecosystem services, which is a practice which is becoming more and more common within nations, within countries like the government subsidizing farmers to replant and so forth. Okay, that's becoming now more and more common, even private individuals compensating one another for services that their natural capital is offering the other. So again, this would be one where the global community should be negotiating through the UN, maybe with individual countries, say Brazil, say "you're transforming the Amazon into plantations and cattle ranches. And so let's negotiate." You say that you need this, because you're exporting the beef to us after all, at the end of the day, a lot of this is being consumed by us.
Partha Dasgupta 23:58
So there's this entire class or issues which are crying out for an institutional solution. And Alan was suggesting that we should fill these holes. So I wanted to give you this example, the suggestion that I made in my review, and I've been writing quite a lot on it is not anything new, but I just repeating myself, but I'm told that you have to keep on repeating to be listened to, is that we really need a new institution like the institutions that were created after the Second World War to fill up gaps in the institutions that will supply global public goods. The World Bank, IMF, along with a whole lot of these un institutions are supplying public goods. Why did we do that? We needed institutions like that. So we need one like that for these and if you collect the revenue, if you start charging for the use of the oceans, you could collect billions each year, literally billions. I mean, very, there are trillions of dollars of merchandise being sold. So you could use some of that for paying countries to protect their rainforest. Of course, there'll be hard bargaining involved you know, all that mess will be there. But not to think about it seems to me to be really irresponsible.
Alan Ware 25:04
And as I have heard you mention, IMF, World Bank, that whole apparatus was put in place in post World War Two for war-ravaged economies, for growth for building developed societies and getting people out of poverty. And now, as the great acceleration is preceded, and we see all the ecological crises coming, we need a new international structure, like you're talking about,
Partha Dasgupta 25:27
Nobody's giving much thought to it. It's just the outliers like ourselves who are doing this. And we really need heavy hitters, I guess, in the international arena. and I'm surprised that leaders of the United Nations aren't broaching these issues.
Nandita Bajaj 25:41
And you've noted appropriately that the demand that we're making on nature currently exceeds by about 70% its ability to provide all of its gifts and services to us on a sustainable basis. And on that front, you very openly talk about limits to growth, both in terms of consumption and how quickly we are turning nature into capital, you've also talked about limiting the human numbers, our human population, and you've estimated that Earth might be able to sustainably support a population of about 3.3 billion people living at about 20,000 US dollars per person per year. And that's far below the 8 billion people we have now with a per capita consumption of about 17,000 US dollars per person per year. But of course, that's not equally distributed across the globe. Can you briefly explain how you came up with those figures? And, and then, you know, what kind of response have you had to that proposal?
Partha Dasgupta 26:50
Right? Well, let me take steps to why I've been so involved in thinking about population, it goes back to my graduate student days. So one of the problems we social scientists have is that we are extremely prone to political correctness, right? We feel some things can't be discussed, because people feel offended. I come from India from parts of the Indian culture, which didn't feel there is a limit to what you can discuss. There's a Brahmanic tradition, which is of that sort; I think there are traditions in every culture with that sort, I think my Jewish friends are known to be pretty much are willing to discuss anything.
Partha Dasgupta 27:26
Okay, so what's this got to do with population? Well, the point is that you are making that the total demand we're making on Mother Nature's maintenance and regulating services, because I think that's the way to think about it. But of course, it manifests itself in the demand we make on provisioning goods, because that's what we're... food, water, timber, and so forth. Okay. And we transform the landscape in order to be able to generate those goods. And in the process of doing that we are perturbing in a big way maintenance and regulating services. So the idea is to ask, what is the total demand we make on these services, and then compare it with nature's ability to supply them on a sustainable basis? Right? Because, of course, you couldn't demand more than she can supply. And we're doing that, but you can do that by nature becoming weaker and weaker. It's becoming unhealthier, degrading more, okay, so the 70% excess is an estimate coming from a group of scholars who have been working on this field for quite some time, they call it the ecological footprint. And that's about 1.7 and that too is an underestimate for the same reason, as I suggested earlier, as to why the 40% reduction in per capita natural capital globally over a 20 year period was an underestimate.
Nandita Bajaj 28:38
Sure.
Partha Dasgupta 28:38
But that never mind, it's to give you a sense of how much there's an imbalance. Now, then natural question is, what are the factors giving rise to the demand? Well, the natural thing to do is to say, well, it's our activity. So then you ask, what are human activities? How do you measure it? So what I did was to say, well, it's in fact, I borrowed an idea from Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, in the paper in 1971. It's a great paper, by the way, I mean, I've given them a huge amount of publicity, but you see, I keep on teasing them that they should have contacted me so that they could have made the paper more, if you'd like, structured. So what is this activity? So the simple way of measuring activity would be to say GDP. And then GDP, of course, would be an underestimate of activity, because there are many activities which are not priced. And so that's the first cut, but we have data on GDP, and GDP is tautologically total numbers multiplied by per capita GDP. That's a tautology.
Nandita Bajaj 29:32
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 29:32
So you have now two factors. The reason you want to do it this far is that you can say well, there's obviously a trade off between numbers and standard of living. If you want to measure the standard of living in terms of GDP, but now you need also a way of translating GDP is of course activities, but the activities are using up Mother Nature services. So you need a efficiency parameter. How efficient are we in transforming Mother Nature services into final output? Now you have three factors: population, standard of living and the way in which we transform.
Nandita Bajaj 30:04
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 30:05
Now, the economics of climate change has only looked at that efficiency parameter. The presumption is that you can keep on increasing per capita GDP. Nevermind what the human numbers, what you can do is to become more and more efficient in using the nature stuff. And life will be fine. Clean energy as an example, you've moved more and more away from polluting production processes to unpolluting ones. And unpolluting here is defined exclusively in terms of whether it's carbon emitting.
Nandita Bajaj 30:32
Yeah.
Partha Dasgupta 30:32
I'm giving that as an example, not because I want to criticize the economics of climate change. But it gives me a nice platform to explain why that's wrong. Because when it comes to these maintenance and regulating services, climate change is only one such service and all the others are these complimentary ones, which we're ignoring, one of them being decomposition of waste,
Nandita Bajaj 30:52
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 30:53
And there, you can't have 100% efficiency by definition of decomposition of waste, because 100% efficiency would mean that you would find a way to convert that without any use of Mother Nature's activities, that's of course, rubbish. So upper bound to the efficiency. So if the numerator, total GDP keeps on going up and up, your demand is in the long run will continue to be high. Okay. So next is, well then, have a trade off between numbers and standard of living. I mean, I keep on using the climate change examples simply because I wanted to show that you can't simply talk about improving the efficiency with which you use Mother Nature's goods and services, we need now to talk about the standard of living that we're willing to consider as well as total numbers. If you think total numbers should not be discussed, then you better stop focusing attention exclusively on the standard of living. Nobody's doing that. Because the presumption is that it has to go up. Yes. All right, let's come to the second part of your question about this particular number that I constructed. So I asked the following question, suppose we're in a world in which everybody receives the same amount of income. And we choose a comfortable standard of living and ask ourselves what number and given the efficiency that we currently have transforming Mother Nature's goods and services into final product, what number of human numbers would bring down the demand to the point where the ratio between demand and supply is one, not 1.7? Okay, now, how do I do that calculation? I used standard model. So global production possibilities. There, I was completely orthodox, I used a model, which is routinely use it data onto that calibrated the model using that data and ask the question, what would be the number with $20,000 PPP as the average? And the answer that came up was about 3.2 billion. And I took into account the fact that not everybody who is alive actually works. So you have data on the proportion of people who work in today's world, I know, you just use those now, this completely illustrative example. Okay, I mean, we should be suspicious, right from the start that the population figure out what to get for 20,000 would be much lower than 8 billion for the simple reason, the moment we are way above in our demand and sustainable supply. So something has to give. And I'm asking for an average, which is higher than the one that you actually have. 20,000 is higher than the per capita income of today's so we shouldn't be surprised. But the other thing we shouldn't be surprised is that 3.2 billion or whatever the exact number is not of interest at all, this is all very crude calculation, simply saying that it's much lower than it is currently. But we shouldn't be particularly worried about that fact, because 3.2 billion was the number by 1960 1960 65. So we're not talking about an outlandish thing. It's just that we have had a extraordinarily good ride in the last 70 years. If you think that this last 70 years was the new normal, it's rubbish, it's for sure it's new, but it's not normal. It's a blip, a wink in economic history.
Nandita Bajaj 33:51
Right, yeah.
Partha Dasgupta 33:52
And the last 70 years is where we really hit the big time as a global community. Okay, final point Nandita since you asked about there's inequality. Suppose I were to introduce inequality, I'm afraid the answer is worse. In my review, I asked the following question, we know that the richer people are, the bigger their footprint, other things equal, say carbon emission or whatever. But from that you shouldn't imagine that equality of distribution will reduce our footprint, because what matters is the marginal impact to an increase in footprint to a marginal increase in income. And if that declines, then at the margin, a rich person has a footprint lower than a poorer, at the margin, because his footprint is bigger. But if you give a dollar extra to a rich person, the additional footprint will be smaller than if you give a dollar to a poor person. That turns out to be the case, by the way. So that means that if you introduce inequality, the population number would be even lower than 3.2 billion. Now this is a cruel result, of course, cruel in the sense that I wish it weren't like that, but that's how it is.
Nandita Bajaj 34:56
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 34:57
So it just shows that you really have to be careful, It's not a political statement, we're doing some calculations using what data we have. And using our common sense theorizing on these matters, I think something has to give. My own sense is that we have to worry obviously about the efficiency with which we translate Mother Nature's goods and services into final goods that can only be repaired by doing the kinds of things that we've been discussing previously about putting prices charging for the use of the oceans and all the institutional errors, which are making us misuse Nature that have to be corrected. So this is not an argument for saying, put all your money on population, I'm just simply saying that these factors are all related to one another. Simply concentrate on one or two, and pretend the others on there. So that's why I've been very concerned about it, the less people talk about something, the more I tend to talk about it, because it seems to me the only thing where to put some balance to it. So if I speak a lot on population, it's not because I think that the thing to worry about, but it is something we can do something about. The other is, I think we just have to really take into account the fact that we need to reduce our footprint. And if that requires reduced consumption, we would reduce our consumption, of course, if we're pricing natural capital. I mean, first of all, if we didn't spend $5-6 trillion a year subsidizing agriculture, and we'd be paying more for food, and so we would feel poorer. But it's the analogy I like to make today. Because it's sort of I think it's more telling is that imagine a chain of supermarkets, which do not have an efficient sales counter so that you and I could go and lift stuff from it and take it home without paying, let's say, 90% of what we take, we don't pay for because they have such an imperfect monitoring system. Well, we'll feel pretty rich, because we're getting this stuff free. But of course, they will go bankrupt in due course, the chain, and that's effectively what happens. Then they say, "no, we have got this system, which allows us to charge you fully for what you are taking." Then, of course, we no longer as rich as we thought we were because we're not stealing, we're not pilfering. But the analogy is exactly the same - Mother Nature doesn't have a checkout counter, so.
Nandita Bajaj 37:07
Yeah, and like you said that just now is instead of pricing or fining for use of the service or overuse of these services, we're actually subsidizing nature destructive services, the fossil fuel industry or the agriculture industry. So it's the other way, you know, in terms of where the money's going.
Partha Dasgupta 37:28
It's not even free, it's negative, right.
Nandita Bajaj 37:30
Exactly and yeah, to your point, we're definitely very familiar with the troubling pattern on the progressive left, you know, represented by elites as well as international environmental conservation community to dismiss population concerns as valid. And it's really troubling because it's actually saddling people who already are deeply marginalized, with more pressures that come from population related issues. So it's not really helping anybody.
Partha Dasgupta 38:02
So let me share some thoughts on this, because it's something that has really bothered me quite a bit. I've had about 300+ events, like the one here, organized by my team; I got some sense of the distribution of ideas and distribution of concerns across a very wide range of people, I mean, financiers, clerics, academics, NGOs, international organizations, and so forth. So what I've found is something to me is extremely sad, as an academic, I guess, which is, if I look at the elite, and I mean, now the elites and the elite could be from anywhere, okay, so it's we're looking at an international elite who are in governments, international organizations, NGOs, and they could be national, international banks. And it could be from anywhere, it could be from Africa, North America, Asia, or wherever. So they're not homogeneous in terms of origin. Or, for that matter, gender, it could be women or men, but they speak uncannily the same language, the same grammar. And one of the things that are missing in the grammar is demography. Demographic issues are not on the table, as you were pointing out, and I've asked myself, How could such homogeneity of purpose, I mean language, of course, it occurred to me they won't look at the same school, they know each other, go to for postgraduate work. They've been to, you know, Kennedy School, maybe Masters there or, or a PhD at the London Business School or so. And they meet at meetings. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a professor in India or whether in England or you meet at conferences, and you have a similar outlook of deliberation, and in several of them, I've raised this issue and I didn't feel there was any willingness to discuss it. I sort of felt that look, it's the poor in society. the women, the girls who do not have access to the means to exercise their basic rights, because at the moment, everything is in terms of education. Now it's too amorphous. It's too abstract kind of thing, because it's easy to talk, but it's very hard to deliver. And as in education, it goes without saying, I like the idea of education. But it's very difficult. It's not a question of simply putting up there a schoolhouse, you need teachers who can teach. And there are wonderful examples of teachers who have no qualifications, hardly read and write, and then you need equipment, and you need children to attend, and you need the teachers to attend. So there's a whole lot of things that come together. But in any case, this one is much more direct Bangladesh is a very good example of a very, what we would have called 60 years ago, a traditional society, conservative society, Islamic society and look at where she is gone.
Nandita Bajaj 40:40
Yeah, compared to Pakistan, for example.
Partha Dasgupta 40:42
It's just extremely interesting. And she's doing very well economically actually, relatively speaking. And it's an extremely fragile topography with, sort of, floods and typhoons for the name of the day. So how did that happen? There were lots of NGOs involved. And they engaged in participatory programs involving the males, the village heads and communities of women, groups of women
Nandita Bajaj 41:07
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 41:08
And the idea that people may be emboldened to say things do things their neighbors say it and do it; that'a rather alien to the western concept of selfhood, which is much more atomistic. We don't like to think that we're influenced by others. But of course we are, I mean, look at our clothes that we wear, the food we eat, those are bananas to say that we are not social. But if you think that we are social, then we should take advantage of that, to make people's lives better. So there's a whole host of issues that are connected not just with reproductive behavior, but with consumption patterns, investment patterns, lifestyle, the whole lot, which come together in one go. The reason I do speak a lot on population is, first of all, I like to think as an economist, I'm persuaded that reproductive behavior can be analyzed and understood in the same way as consumption behavior is all dress behavior, and so forth. And that the idea that when it comes to consumption, tradition doesn't matter. But when it comes to reproduction, tradition matters and overrides it, and therefore you say it can't be discussed, that seems to me to be completely at variance with the data that I have the evidence required. So I give a little more time to talking about it as a reaction to the fact that nobody wants to talk about it. But it's not the case that I think it's the only thing to talk about, we need a structured way of thinking about our place in the biosphere, where we reside, we need to think in a constructive way, about the ways in which collective decisions could be reached. And we are nowhere near doing that.
Nandita Bajaj 42:42
And if I may just make a quick comment. We are of the same belief, we need to be talking about everything, all of our patterns, consumption and population and how we treat one another and how we treat nature. And yet our podcast is called the Overpopulation Podcast, not because we think this is the only thing we need to be talking about, but like you, we feel this is the one area that is so taboo in culture to talk about that we almost need to make an overcorrection to that.
Partha Dasgupta 43:14
Yes, there's that. And I could be more forceful on this. Because I think it's not for me to persuade anybody, it's for them to be persuaded if they wish to be or feel they are. But consider the following situation, my consumption pattern can be shown definitely as causing harm to somebody else. It would seem our societies are so constructed now that something will be done about it. And we see that, for example, we have prohibited smoking in public. So mutual harm, of course, I realized that it's a reciprocal and external damage. But if I smoke, you're harmed not me only and if you smoke, you harm yourself and me. And so what so that's probably why it's been easier to, and many other things. So now, if we have this overshoot in our demand for Mother Nature's goods and services, then at the margin, an additional birth is going to contribute to that.
Nandita Bajaj 44:04
That's right.
Partha Dasgupta 44:05
And that's going to affect future people. There will be inheriting a worse biosphere than otherwise would at the margin, of course. Although why should we think that a couple's reproductive right today trumps the right of somebody in the future to inherit a less polluted Earth or a less damaged biosphere? It's not clear to me.
Nandita Bajaj 44:26
Yeah.
Partha Dasgupta 44:27
When it comes to consumption pattern, general behavior, we feel that we should take externalities into account and our law is so constructed as to reduce that externality?
Nandita Bajaj 44:36
Yes
Partha Dasgupta 44:36
Right. But we don't do that here. And so again, it's not for me to say what society should do. As an economist, all I can do is to produce evidence and a grammar with which to sift the evidence to see where it lands, how to see the world around us. That's my job. And I've tried to do it, dare I say, honestly than many others. That's all I'm doing. It's not for me to say what policies are countries should take, that's their business or society. But there's a lot of shibboleths around.
Nandita Bajaj 45:05
Yes.
Partha Dasgupta 45:06
And I can only look at parallel cases. My daughter and I produced a series of papers, she pointed out that where you elicit the desire for the number of children, when you have questionnaires - how many children would you like to have or would you have wanted to have when you were 15, or something like that. And to me, it's sort of fascinating, because they relate to the fact that we have a preconception of the human person. And these questions suggest that we are isolated, we are atomistic, we are solipsistic, persons,
Nandita Bajaj 45:34
Exactly.
Partha Dasgupta 45:34
So instead we should be asking, How many would you have liked to have had, if all your neighbors had two? How many would you have liked to have if all your neighbors had three, and so forth? It's difficult to answer these questions, it goes without saying, absolutely. But then on the other hand, we have to treat people with respect. So allow them to have, see what they can reason through. So, it's interesting, I'm giving you these illustrations to see how far away from what I think a good integrated social science should be from where it is today. And as I say, if I have been in these similar meetings, and in my writings, spending more time on some aspects of our behavior than others, it's to counterbalance. It's not that I'm obsessed with it, okay.
Nandita Bajaj 46:20
We don't think that at all.
Alan Ware 46:21
Thank you. Yeah, we appreciate it. So you've been one of only a small number of economists that we know of to say that the pursuit of growth is going to be self defeating. And you've also noted that formal economic models drive the policymaking of the future. Do you see any signs of greater acceptance in the economics profession as a whole for questioning the value of continuous economic growth?
Partha Dasgupta 46:46
No, I don't see it. Not yet. Anyway, I don't see at all because there's a huge momentum there. I'm a card carrying economist. I'm very much an orthodox economist. There's nothing unorthodox about it at all, the tools I use are standard ones, so I've never had any problem. So I'm not isolated by any stretch of imagination. I'm very much part of the, if you'd like, the elites of my profession, I guess in some sense. Good contrast would be one of the great minds of our, in the social sciences, is Robert Solow, you know, he's one of my gurus, or people I admire most, and also a personal friend, but he's 96, I think now. And it was his model, which has triggered such a huge industry called Growth Economics 1956, very famous paper, and he didn't have nature in it yet. Capital, physical capital, produce capital and labor producing output, so forth, it's a great piece of work. Absolutely. But I've never criticized that paper, because he was writing in the 50s. At that time, the global economies was relatively small, it was a good first approximation not to have nature in it, because that will be another additional thing. And then it'll be shown to be a second order problem. So why not concentrate on this. And again, as I say, 1956, not far off from the end of the war, you needed to reconstruct, so the focus was on building up infrastructure and factories, and so forth and so on, perfectly okay. Now, if I talk to Robert Solow, all through my life is always backed me up with all the moves I've made over my career today, even though I wouldn't be correspond, he's actually written a very lovely piece to go with the published version of my review, the Dasgupta Review it's coming out from Cambridge University Press, because he's moving with the data, he is an empirically oriented economist, he's seen that now is no longer second order. Now, first order problem. And it ought to be included, but he's not going to do it himself. But if you ask him, to read Dasgupta, he did read one of the chapters of it. And that's how I see social science at its best that you move with the evidence, and then try and modify the models. But you know, with the same rigor, and in my review, I have tried to construct such a model, it's very early days yet, because I haven't estimated, but the idea was to use ecology very carefully.
Partha Dasgupta 48:54
And all the things that Nandita and you have been mentioning about our embeddedness, when we say that we are embedded in nature. And so for them, it looks like sort of a metaphor. It's sort of cozy, it's nice, warm feeling, and it's all that. But of course, it has a hard edge to it, you have to model that formally into the production structure. And I've tried to do that, maybe people will find better ways of doing it. But you have to kick off by not simply using that as a metaphor and then ignoring it when you actually write down a formal model on the basis of which you discuss growth possibilities. You were asking me, Has it happened? And I said, No. And why hasn't it happened? I think the reason is that economists don't read ecology, that's as simple as that. Our intellectual background is from math, stats, physics may be but not ecology, which is surprising because ecology is very similar to economics in the way studies because they are looking at populations of organisms and the systems that are constructed out of their behavior. The system, the architecture of ecosystems is constructed out of these interactions of various populations of organisms, as well as of course the inorganic material that's around minerals and so forth. So I think if they did, it does require some investment, it goes without saying, you aren't going to wake up next morning and say, Well, I now know ecology , I've now got this sensitivity. But we don't have that kind of training at all. And the more environmental and resource economists have isolated themselves or got isolated from mainstream economics, the more this different divergence has taken, there's plenty of people who understand what my view is about what we've been discussing, but they are not in economics departments, they are in Ag Econ departments in the United States, schools of the environment, there are plenty of very good people there School of Forestry at Yale, School of Environmental at Duke, the Ag Econ department at Berkeley have first rate people, but none of them is actually in the economics department of there. And that's, I think, very unfortunate, because it's really unfortunate because there is a sense in which Environmental and Resource Economics is a sort of an outlier. Until very recently, environmental and resource economists deserve to be outliers, because they were looking at a very small piece, they saw Mother Nature as being a source of resources, provisioning goods, okay, so fossil fuel industry study of that, that class of issue, exhaustible resources, something I myself was involved in, in the 70s, with some colleagues and but we were concentrating on provisioning goods. And as I said, the, what I've learned from ecology is to transfer my attention to maintenance and regulating services, because that's where the action is, because that's the mother of all things.
Nandita Bajaj 51:27
And we've been dancing around this, we haven't actually come out and said it, but you wrote the biodiversity review. And it essentially in carries your name. It's called the Dasgupta review. And it was commissioned by the UK Treasury, and it reflects really well on your ability, as I've said already, to make two seemingly incongruent pathways, the economy and nature to come together in such a high level document. And it's clearly starting to enter policy discussions from what we've looked at in your other interviews. First of all, how did you manage to get such an impressive high level government sponsorship for this work?
Partha Dasgupta 52:07
I have no idea. I was just called up by the principal Secretary of the Treasury one day, sometime in 2019, and asked whether I'd be willing to do this. And I almost immediately I said, Yes, sure. That's gonna be I kind of stuff. And the finance minister announced that same afternoon in parliament, that I think they suspected, I would say, yes, then they give me a wonderful team to work with, so.You're right. There is a puzzle there. It is a puzzle, at least it's an interesting that it's the finance ministry,
Nandita Bajaj 52:33
Right.
Partha Dasgupta 52:34
The Treasury, which commission such a non Treasury subject, so to speak, but they sponsored the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006, I guess it came out in 2007. So they have a tradition of doing this, although two is a tradition. But it is true, the Economics of Climate Change produced for the Treasury was very much in line with Treasury's view of the economy in the sense that you're looking at a technological solution to a problem, which is manifests itself as an environmental problem. And the technological solution is to move towards clean energy, bringing about industrial change to solar, wind, and so forth. Okay. But otherwise, you're gonna have GDP growth. And Alan was asking previously, can you have indefinitely and what my review, I like to think, pretty convincingly shows is that no, you can't, you can't have indefinite growth in final output, because it's a bounded biosphere we happen to inhabit and there is no way in which we can eventually become an external to the biosphere. If somebody says you can have indefinite growth, and you're taking the position that we can escape the biosphere, I don't mean physically, but working within the biosphere, we can detach ourselves because we've become so much cleverer in finding ways of transforming Mother Nature's goods and services and to our lifestyle. That is not possible. That simply is not possible. We literally cannot escape the biosphere, we are part of nature. That means we can't have indefinite growth. And we have to come to that terms and then see how to maneuver ourselves in such a way that we can comfortably exist where we are. And all what we've been discussing is a way of talking about and more than that we've got quantitative models and policies that we need to put in place, whether the local level, regional level, national level, global level, depending on the problem at hand, but they're all related to one another in a way that can be quantified, in a way that can be articulated precisely or as precisely as is possible in the social and ecological sciences. But we're nowhere near to doing that. So although the Treasury sponsored it, and they have been extremely generous with their attention, because the review was submitted in early February 2021. And then a small part of my team remained for another 10 months for dissemination purposes. Now that cost money the Treasury also came up with the response to the the review within two months, I think and it's on their website, it's very substantial, responsible, 20 pages long. And it's all very favorable, including a passage on population, by the way. So yes, they have been very, very good. And other departments of the government have been very interested in it, and I'm having meetings with them DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs), for example, which is the environmental department of the government, they want to relate to the Treasury and the foreign office, because the foreign office now includes the Commonwealth and development. So it's an integrated office, I'm having quite a bit to do with them as well. Now it doesn't mean that they're carrying out things, largely because the only thing they can't carry out - you know it's just one country. But there's some things that we can do measuring, for example, introducing biodiversity as a criterion in the decision making process. My wife told me that she thought that was the most important thing they've done, because they said, Well, look, we're in a democratic society. If it's there that somebody can say you made this decision, how does it affect biodiversity? Because you're mandated to take biodiversity your account when you make decisions, but she's right. And they did do that biodiversity is not part of the language. And that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be doing much with it, by the way. In fact, the most recent announcement of the government has been that they would relax the environmental laws in order to generate growth. So we'll see.
Nandita Bajaj 56:20
Yeah, no, that's very heartening, actually, I mean, who knows how long it will take before these kinds of policies are implemented. But even normalizing talking about biodiversity as a subset of economics and bringing population to the conversation is a really big step.
Alan Ware 56:38
And we spent so much of resources, probably measuring GDP more and more accurately, but we've spent so little attention and resources, I think I've heard you mentioned on the podcast, even general qualitative statements like this peatland is unhealthy or would be much better than what we're doing now.
Partha Dasgupta 56:58
That's exactly right. And I think we should stop pretending that we can quantify everything. Qualitative statements are extremely important to the medical professional lives on qualitative statements. I know they tried to back it, you know, blood count, and so forth. But on the whole, they'll start by saying, Look, you look a bit unhealthy. The fear of the Lord.
Partha Dasgupta 57:15
So the government's latest two, three days ago, the idea of relaxing some of the environmental laws to promote growth has created to of course, huge worries amongst environmental NGOs. And there's a good deal of writings going on about how without sound ecology, I mean, environment, you know it affects growth, there's truth in all that, but it's not the one which I would use partly because in a way, it's already defensive. You're saying, Well, of course, we all love growth, but growth of GDP that is, and you're wrong in thinking that we don't need nature for that. I think I wouldn't use that. Firstly, not for England. And here's why. I think we can destroy quite a bit more of nature in England without affecting our GDP. We can do that because we've been trashing nature for millennia. In fact, the world's been trashing nature for millennia. So what has happened with England in particular, the advanced countries is that they have outsourced their biodiversity needs. That's what we've been doing.
Nandita Bajaj 57:16
Yes.
Partha Dasgupta 57:16
It's not our diversity, which creates our high income is that we're using somebody else's biodiversity. And we're trashing that we're outsourcing it, For example, the newspaper. The Economist had a very interesting but really rather wrongheaded headline, the main story was there the picture on the cover of a bulldozer which had been shackled, you know, strung out so that the bulldozer can't operate. And the lead article was "Unshackle the Bulldozer" because the environmental laws are so pernicious now that people can't build the factory at a particular place, or in this case, 290 apartments, because there is a community of bats in that particular location. Now, when I read that, I realized, of course, that there is a sense in which, at the margin, it is ridiculous, it sounds very ridiculous, because there's 290 apartments that could be constructed. And of course, there are other bat populations. But then the right way to think about it in my judgment is that, of course, that's the argument that's been used over and over again for millennia, leading to where we are today. And so it's not the preservation of the bats are necessary for our well being at the margin here with the 290 apartments, but we have been actually trashing the bat populations elsewhere. I'm using bat as a metaphor for nature. So that's where the difficulties arise. That is, we shouldn't always be on the defensive, NGO's should not be on the defensive and pretend that all hell will break loose if another 1000 acres of land in a reasonably pristine sort of area in England is trashed and made it into shopping malls and so forth. It'll continue, but we need to see where we can do that at the expense of what elsewhere in the world and we're not paying for it because if we had paid for the biodiversity we are trashing elsewhere, then, of course, we wouldn't be in the problem. We're not paying. That's why we're over using the biodiversity of Africa, when we import cocoa or coffee beans, so forth.
Partha Dasgupta 1:00:12
As I say, I'm giving these illustrations of how it is not difficult to integrate spatially, temporarily, and across communities, our activities and the implications they have, we need to lift ourselves above our self interest when we discuss these things. Of course, when we go to the supermarket, it shouldn't be self interest, you go there, you need to know what you'd like to have, and you've got your money, take for it. But in these issues where there's so much of institutional failure, that we can't be thinking only in self interest, because at the end of the day, we collectively ruin ourselves, like the Tragedy of the Commons is a metaphor for our acting in our self interest. And all hell breaks loose, right, we solve many collective action problems, traffic signals, and airline routes, and so forth. I mean, the whole world depends on these collective actions. But we haven't managed it when it comes to these regulating and maintenance services. So I keep on banging on about them, because they're the ones which get overlooked. We keep on thinking about vanishing forests or water supply and so forth. But they're the epiphenomena, the phenomenon is down under, as it were. And I think the thing on the nature, at least in an urban society, we really need to operate at the local level, we can do a lot to improve our lives. And it seems to me that the more you get engaged in local issues, environmental issues, then your mind gives attention to these problems. And they lift these problems away from the local to the regional, and global. And the work of people like Robert Putnam, on social capital has made it abundantly clear how valuable local engagement is for many other things, not just local ones, but you get to know people you discuss, you get ideas, you then get exercised about something which is beyond your community, you do something about it, and you get in touch with somebody else in another community, and so forth. So it seems to me that may be one way we can be operationally engaged, as opposed to simply thinking about and talking about it.
Partha Dasgupta 57:29
Right and building up greater trust, that would help and we certainly have a lack of that, and a lot of countries, including the US. And then I've heard some research, cooperation begets cooperation. It's like a muscle that you need to use. And then using it at the local level, community level would build up but I think a lot of us have lost when we rely on the impersonal market and the impersonal state, all those intermediate institutions and organizations and networks. Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:43
Yeah, that was very helpful. Great illustrations there. Thank you so much for such a wonderful interview. I definitely felt like I was sitting in a classroom, so much to learn. It was a very good chat with you today. Thank you so much, Sir Partha, for joining us.
Alan Ware 1:02:58
Thank you.
Partha Dasgupta 1:02:58
Well, that's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. And to share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast@ populationbalance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also, to help expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:28
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all of your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
