You Have to Admit It's Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to Environmental Quality [Paperback]

Terry L. Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Series: HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION | Publication Date: May 24, 2004

To the doomsayers who maintain that natural resources are being depleted and the environment is getting worse, Terry Anderson and his fellow contributors offer a bold retort: it's getting better all the time. They present a powerful argument that, through such established institutions as property rights, the rules of law, and limited government, economic growth and environmental quality will both flourish.

You Have to Admit It's Getting Better shows how, by focusing our energies on developing and protecting the institutions of freedom, rather than on regulating human use of natural resources through political processes, we can in fact have our environmental cake and eat it, too. The book offers a number of often-surprising revelations that debunk many commonly held beliefs about the future of our environment. It shows, for example, how liberalization of international trade is more likely to improve environmental quality than reduce it. It also explains how the prosperity and improved human well-being that we enjoy today are not leaving future generations worse off, but leaving them with more capital and larger stocks of natural resources. Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly show that economic growth is not the antithesis of environmental quality: rather, the two go hand in hand if the incentives are right.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

To the doomsayers who maintain that natural resources are being depleted and the environment is getting worse, Terry Anderson and his fellow contributors offer a bold retort: it’s getting better all the time. They present a powerful argument that, through such established institutions as property rights, the rules of law, and limited government, economic growth and environmental quality will both flourish. You Have to Admit It’s Getting Better shows how, by focusing our energies on developing and protecting the institutions of freedom, rather than on regulating human use of natural resources through political processes, we can in fact have our environmental cake and eat it, too. The book offers a number of often-surprising revelations that debunk many commonly held beliefs about the future of our environment. It shows, for example, how liberalization of international trade is more likely to improve environmental quality than reduce it. It also explains how the prosperity and improved human well-being that we enjoy today are not leaving future generations worse off but leaving them with more capital and larger stocks of natural resources. Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly show that economic growth is not the antithesis of environmental quality; rather, the two go hand in hand if the incentives are right.

Terry L. Anderson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the executive director of PERC—the Property and Environment Research Center, in Bozeman, Montana.

Contributors: Terry L. Anderson, Madhusudan Bhattarai, B. Delworth Gardner, Indur M. Goklany, Bjorn Lomborg, Robert E. McCormick, Seth W. Norton, Maya Vijayaraghavan, Bruce Yandle

Product Details

• Paperback: 212 pages
• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press; First edition (May 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0817944826
• ISBN-13: 978-0817944827
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #839,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Frustrating bait-and-switch, November 27, 2007

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Have to Admit It's Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to Environmental Quality (Paperback)

This book's title suggests that it will show that the environment is getting better. Instead, most of the chapters demonstrate that the quality of human life is getting better. Those are not the same thing.

The authors would respond that the "environmental Kuznets curve" (EKC) shows that environmental protection gets worse at moderate levels of income and then increases with wealth. Thus, as the world gets wealthier, more and more countries will work harder and harder to protect the environment. Two of the authors present some evidence that this EKC logic works in individual countries, but the other authors ignore environmental quality and simply demonstrate that incomes and quality of human life are improving.

The overall claim rests on a fallacy of composition. Let's grant that high-income countries protect their environments increasingly well, and that middle-income countries do the same once they reach some level of income. At the same time, pollution in poor countries increases with development. If every country lives in a vacuum, the authors' optimism is justified - - with development, everyone will pollute less. But in the real world these countries interact. It's entirely possible that increasing pollution in lower-income and lower-middle-income countries reflects the translocation of some higher-pollution industries as high-income countries regulate pollution more strictly. In this case, lower-income countries have a comparative advantage in high-pollution industries because they are more willing to accept a given level of pollution for each dollar of GDP. This would remain true even if every country in the world successfully develops, and even if every country eliminated poverty.

The contributors to this book don't consider this possibility at all. As it turns out, there's a significant controversy about whether rich countries "export" high-pollution industries. For a variety of reasons, coal and steel production have tended to migrate to developing countries while chemicals production has not. With the exception of one chapter, however, none of the contributors to this book want to consider mixed results - - optimism and faith in the market is the watchword of the volume.

The contributors - - again, with one exception - - also tend to use the wrong measure of environmental degradation. They show that countries emit less pollution per unit of GDP as they grow wealthier, so that higher incomes are accompanied by decreasing environmental destruction at the margin. However, pollution still increases with GDP, so higher incomes lead to more pollution in the aggregate. These distinctions between aggregate, average, and marginal values are central to economics, and the contributors are associated with an economics research foundation (PERC), so one can only conclude that ideology has trumped analysis in this book. That's frustrating, because we need a fair-minded assessment of the environmental costs of human development. This book, alas, does not provide that assessment.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Getting Better, March 19, 2009

By 

Gregory Blinn (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Have to Admit It's Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to Environmental Quality (Paperback)

Typical non-science approach to examining the environment. If you don't think evolution exists, this book gets you closer to the rapture.