On Harnessing Natural Resources for Sustainable Development

Is the Present Pace of Economic Development Sustainable? The mainstream economics has characteristically been myopic in visualizing the relationship between human beings and the ecosphere, the surrounding in which they live, work and prosper. Man thought that everything, whether animate or inanimate, exists for him and he exists only for himself. Nature is bountiful to him; moreover, nature is immutable and invulnerable. The triumph of science in the sixteenth century onwards reinforced his belief in his power and centrality. However, he always has only a scant understanding of nature. This is evident in the statement made by David Ricardo – a leading classical economist of the nineteenth century – that the powers of the soil (read natural endowments/resources) are original and indestructible. It is evident from the fact that the neoclassical production function P=f(K,L) considers production (except in agriculture) dependent only on man (labour) and man-made resources (capital) and, in addition to confusing between the stock and the flow (Georgescu-Roegen 1971; 1986), implicitly ignores the possible implications of productive activities to the natural resources. It is evident from the fact that the neoclassical economists conceptualized economics as a science that is preoccupied with satisfying the human wants and allocating resources for meeting that end. The methodology of allocation, which is largely substitutive, incremental and local, provides no scope to incorporate long run, inter-generational implications of the allocation decisions. The economic man thinks only for himself, not even for his fellow beings; not to mention those who are not around or not yet born. Furthermore, when economics is considered as an exercise in optimization, and multi-objective optimization is fraught with methodological problems, the myopia is reinforced due to technical reasons. The myopia is also reinforced by the anthropocentric nature of the mainstream economics.