Price, Principle, and the Environment

"Price, Principle, and the Environment is provocative and wide-ranging. It points to serious misunderstandings of the value of the environment on the part of economists and to serious unresolved questions concerning how to respect and to trade off environmental values."
-Daniel Hausman, University of Wisconsin, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Libertarians would do well to read Price, Principle, and the Environment. It is an argument for a 'libertarian environmentalism' that breaks new ground."
-Robert Nelson, University of Maryland, Liberty

"Sagoff deftly combines elements of history, ecconomics, philosophy, ethics, and political science to evaluate critically some of the strongest claims made in environmental studies.... a necessity for anyone working seriously in the field."
-Agricultural History

"This book's careful exposition and clear writing make it an engrossing read for card-carrying environmentalists and hard-headed economists alike."
-Harvard Law Review

"Price, Principle, and the Environment is not only a work that environmentalists should think long and hard about; it is a book that anyone worried about promoting the democratic formulation of public policy would do well to wrestle with as well."
-Bob Pepperman Taylor, University of Vermont, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics

"As always, Sagoff has done his homework...There is much to learn from Sagoff's contribution."
-David Schmidtz, University of Arizona, Conservation Biology

"The book involves many rich themes, and a great deal of careful argumentation...Read this book."
-Bryan G. Norton, Georgia Institute of Technology, Environmental Ethics

"This is an exceptional piece of writing that will have readers thinking about the environment long after they put down the book. Summing up: Highly recommended."
-B.J. Peterson, Central College, Choice

“Viewed as a whole, Price, Principle, and the Environment makes a fresh and original contribution to the debate over the role of cost-benefit analysis in the design and evaluation of environmental policies...Sagoff provides a thorough-going critique of central aspects of environmental economics..."
-Richard B. Howarth, Dartmouth College, Land Economics

“Price, Principle, and the Environment is well written and a valuable contribution to further discussions in economics for environmental policy use.”
-Environment

“To put it briefly, it is a book that may be used as food for thought in several study areas, and also a book that can be read -- which is not always the case in the academic realm.”
-Tatiana Coutto, European University Institute, Environment and Planning

"Should the value of the environment be measured by how much people are willing to pay for it, or by public discussion and negotiation among citizens and stakeholders? In Price, Principle, and the Environment, Mark Sagoff presents a comprehensive, devastating, and often surprising critique of economists' attempts to measure environmental goods in terms of willingness to pay. It deserves to be the definitive work on this subject, with implications far beyond environmental valuation. It offers a positive, democratic alternative to economic values of valuation, and wisely shows that the way toward the real contributions that economists can make to environmental policy. This lively and accessible book is a must-read for environmental activists, policy makers, and economists."
- Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"Sagoff elaborates this general idea, and he spells out just how flawed standard economistic calculations about nature can be. Sagoff reminds us once again that human choice is not about welfarist calculations and willingness to pay. Rather, human choice is about the meanings we attach to plausible outcomes in the future. Reading Sagoff is a good reminder that if one wants to learn about human choice, the best place to start us by reading a good philosopher."
- Daniel W. Bromley, University of Wisconsin - Madison

"If it is the job of philosophers to keep everyone else intellectually honest, Mark Sagoff is doing his job for environmental economists with pervasive logic and graceful writing. There are very few members of our profession who will be able to read this boo without feelings of embarrassment over how easily that have fallen into the traps and fallacies revealed in Sagoff's analysis."
- Clifford Russell, Vanderbilt University