According to a U. S. Forest Service resource economist quoted in Science Findings, PNW Research Station, U.S. Forest Service, October 2005:
If something isn’t bought or sold – if it doesn’t have an explicit price – then its value is effectively assumed to be zero or some fixed amount.
Jupiter, not ever bought or sold, apparently has little value. Yet take Jupiter out of the solar system and comets will bombard Earth.
The quoted economist practices what is called nonmarket valuation. As part of his research, 3,000 willingness-to-pay survey packets were sent to Oregonians. He explains:
The survey examined the public’s willingness to pay for alternative biodiversity conservation policies and compared this to their willingness to pay for traditional social policies, like roads and schools.
Is asking 3,000 people their opinions, which they give half-heartedly between breaks in TV shows and the like, a responsible way to gather information that could result in wilderness being developed and lost forever?
Opposing the willingness-to-pay method are John Muir naturalists - people with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.158:
John Muir naturalists protest that the economist’s willingness-to-pay method is an improper gauge of the worth of nature. Using this method, economists find that the public spends more for tickets to football games than for preserving wilderness and species. And in canvassing people, asking how much they would consider contributing to a program to protect so many wild acres, most say they would give little or nothing.
Very well. Who puts van Gogh’s The Starry Night up for auction before a roomful of people blind from birth, and concludes that the winning two-dollar bid represents its value? Who reasons that because wilderness and species whisper unassertively, enticing few to open their pocketbooks to save them from eradication, such things are inconsiderable? How much a person will pay is, John Muir knew, a measure of what feels good, not usually of what is good. Most everyone will pay to appease their hunger for immediate entertainment. Goodness, especially of the long run, doesn’t sell on merit.
Materialists . . . liking what they know, longtime followers of the primrose path, are asked how much they would pay regarding a spiritual future whose rightness for them and posterity they have yet to put themselves in position to know, and cannot until they school their hearts and minds in nature and the arts, and deepen into genuinely rational man.
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