Let’s stipulate that I need to get a life right off the bat. It is after midnight and I found a very interesting article while randomly going through blogs. Via Virginia Postrel I found this very good article on the evalution of different species under the Endangered Species Act.
Fellow environmentalists hate me when I bring up these subjects because, generally, they don’t have much of a grounding in economics. Ultimately though we do place values on all life. I actually think that if we force a valuation to be stated, most folks would be appalled by the amount we spend protecting children or endangered species. Opposition is very strong often for the reasons that Coursey ably mentions. Many refuse to put a dollar amount explicitly on life. The problem is we do put a value on it by how much we spend to protect it and explicitly stating that cost is essential in a society of scarce resources (for those less economically inclinded–all societies have scarce resources).
I’ll stop on the points because Coursey has obviously taken more time to develop the argument and you might as well read him.
There is anotehr interesting point in the article. In discussing his research, the reporter’s efforts to get a good story got in the way of reporting the findings. From Coursey’s description she kept trying to draw a conclusion that wasn’t necessarily warranted regarding the value of the Florida Panther. Even despite his best efforts she couldnt’ grasp the work was preliminary and it wasn’t necessarily normative. Certainly, we want to use social science to draw normative conclusions, but a positivist paper in itself is not adequate to make such conclusions.
Much of what we read in the press is dumbed down and interpreted far beyond what the work says. Often, this leads to Limbaugh and others ridiculing real research because, not only do they not understand it, it was even presented in context of the question.