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Nature, Environment and Political

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Guido Erreygers Department of , University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; Centre for Health Policy, University of Melbourne, Melbourne,

Abstract have perceived the natural environment not only as a source of wealth but also as a factor which could limit . The diversity in viewpoints partly reflects profound changes in the economic fabric of society, such as the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Contributions by economists from the pre-classical, classical and neoclassical periods illustrate the major insights gained with regard to the role of nature and the environment.

From nature as the ultimate source of wealth to the environment as a limit to economic growth: significant shifts have occurred in the way economists have treated nature and the environment in their theories. In pre-industrial times it was not unusual for economists to express the view that nature, and especially land, contributed just as much to the creation of material wealth as man. , arguably the first school in the history of economic thought, even claimed that only labour in agriculture was productive because it was supported for free by nature. With the development of industry, however, came to be seen as a more important factor of production than nature. This does not mean that economists completely neglected nature and the environment. The use of natural resources was frequently linked to and to limitations to economic growth. Moreover, many economists tried to understand and explain how the incomes earned by owners of natural resources were determined and what influence this had on the rest of society. This highlights a few selected contributions made by well-known economists over a large period of time. For broader, richer and more detailed accounts of the place of nature and the environment in the history of economic thought one should consult the work of Juan Martinez-Alier (1987), Erhun Kula (1998) and Nathaniel Wolloch (2017). As far as classical political economy is concerned, the historical notes in the books by Heinz Kurz and Neri Salvadori (1995) and by Christian Bidard (2004) offer informative insights; with respect to this school of thought, the essay is partly based on Erreygers (1998). Nicholas Georgescu- Roegen (1971) and Philip Mirowski (1994) explored the connections between economics and

the natural sciences. Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded and : labour and land William Petty famously stated ‘That Labour is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother’ (Petty 1899 [1667]: 68). Elsewhere, he talked about ‘Hands being the Father, as Lands are the Mother and Womb of Wealth’ (Petty 1899 [1676]: 377). These striking metaphors indicate that Petty saw nature as playing an essential role in the 2 Nature, Environment and Political Economy

economic process. Hardly surprising, of course, as he was living in a society dominated by agriculture. Interestingly, he extended his view about the crucial importance of labour and land to his conception of and argued that the intrinsic value of depended on the amount of labour and the amount of land that went into their production. This labour-cum- land theory of value, however, could be of use only if a ‘natural Par between Labour and Land’ (Petty 1899 [1667]: 44–5) was established, allowing the conversion of one factor into the other. More than half a century later, echoes of Petty’s insights abound in Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général. He opened the book with the statement that ‘The Land is the Source or Matter from whence all Wealth is produced. The Labour of man is the Form which produces it’ (Cantillon 1931 [1755]: 3). Reflecting this view, Cantillon chose to discuss the role of land before that of labour, and as a result land figures prominently in the first chapters of his work, which deal with the emergence of villages, towns and cities. The influence of Petty also shows up in Cantillon’s value theory. Just like Petty, Cantillon maintained that the intrinsic value of goods was determined by the amounts of land and labour required for their production. However, he was not convinced by Petty’s ‘fanciful’ approach to the problem of the determination of the par (ibid.: 43), and therefore decided to devote a whole chapter to the issue. His solution consisted of attempting to convert all forms of labour into land, which means that he ended up with what might be called a land theory of value rather than a labour theory of value.

Physiocracy: the rule of nature Land, and nature in general, became of central importance to François Quesnay and his followers, the French Enlightenment economists of the second half of the eighteenth century who were part of the physiocracy movement. The name of the school means ‘rule of nature’, by which the physiocrats referred both to their belief in the existence of a natural order and to their conviction that agriculture was the only truly productive sector of the economy. The manufacturing and trading sectors transformed material goods into other forms (e.g. the production of luxury products by means of raw materials) or moved them from one place to another, but these activities were not capable of generating a surplus. Only in agriculture, where nature labours alongside man, a surplus (or product, in physiocratic terminology) can be created. The goal of was to increase the size of the net product, for instance by encouraging a shift from petite culture (oxen-based agriculture) to grande culture (horse-based agriculture) (see Walter Eltis 1984: chapter 1). The Tableau Œconomique was conceived to visualize how the different sectors of the economy were interrelated, to show how the net product was produced and consumed and how goods and circulated in an . Originally developed by Quesnay around 1758, it was the object of various presentations and analyses in the years thereafter (see e.g. Quesnay 2005 [1766]), and eventually inspired Wassily Leontief’s input- theory. In their writings the physiocrats repeatedly emphasized that economic prosperity depended upon agriculture being in good shape. They criticized the mercantilist policies adopted in France, which favoured the production and trade of luxury goods in towns and neglected the

agricultural sector. As a result, fields and vineyards were abandoned and people were moving

Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded out of the rural areas into the cities (see e.g. Quesnay’s entry on ‘Grains’ in the Encyclopédie; Quesnay 2005 [1757]). They went to great lengths to estimate the value of the net product of France and subsequently compared it to that of England, which in their view had a more developed agriculture (Quesnay 2005 [1763]). Nature, Environment and Political Economy 3

Adam Smith: rent and natural Even though he appreciated many aspects of physiocracy, especially its emphasis on , distanced himself from the notion of the exclusive of agriculture. That being said, he did pay a lot of attention to land, and to other natural resources as well, in (1776). The main issue was the determination of the for the use of land, i.e. rent. It is safe to say that Smith’s explanation of rent is perhaps one of the least convincing elements of his economic analysis. His treatment of rent is not always easy to follow, lacks profundity and contains contradictory statements. For instance, it seems hard to reconcile the notion that rent is one of the constituent components of the natural price (Smith 1976 [1776]: I.vii.33) with the idea that rent is a residual, what is left for landowners after and profits have been paid (ibid.: I.xi.a.8). In fairness to Smith it must be observed that he distinguished different types of land, such as uncultivated and cultivated land, and different kinds of agricultural product, with corn receiving special attention. In this way, Smith allowed rent to enter into the price of agricultural commodities in various ways, and as a result ended up proposing different explanations of rent. Interestingly, Smith extended the notion of rent to mines, such as mines and silver mines (ibid.: I.xi.c). He focused on fertility and location as the main factors to explain the amount of rent their owners could earn. Thus he foreshadowed the idea that some rents are due to variations in productivity of natural resources. One of Smith’s contemporaries, James Anderson, elaborated the idea more rigorously than Smith had done, and in the process developed one of the first formulations of the theory of differential rent (Anderson 1968 [1777]: 376). Anderson applied the principle to the production of corn rather than to the production of minerals and ores. It must also be noted that a very early formulation focusing on differences in location can already be found in the work of William Petty (see Kurz and Salvadori 1995: 306).

David Ricardo: diminishing returns Anderson’s contribution remained by and large unknown. The same happened to other and even earlier statements of the principle by two French authors, Claude-François-Joseph d’Auxiron and an unknown writer in a physiocratic journal (see Van Den Berg 2000). The theory of differential rent resurfaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, when it was discussed in a number of pamphlets and papers published by Edward West, , and Robert Torrens in 1815. Its best-known formulation was provided by Ricardo, who developed it further in the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (1817), where it occupied a central place in his theory of distribution. When the demand for corn grows, for example because of a rising population, more corn must be produced. If the increase of corn production entails the cultivation of lands of lower and lower fertility, the owners of the more fertile lands are able to pocket the difference between the high cost of production on the least fertile land in use (often designated as ‘marginal’ land) and the lower cost of production on their lands. According to Ricardo, the most fertile lands are all fully cultivated and generate rents for their owners, while the least fertile land in use is typically not

fully cultivated, yields no rent, and determines the price of corn. If there are no technical Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded improvements and the importation of foreign corn is prohibited, a growing population will therefore raise the price of corn and lead to higher nominal wages, given real wages. This will have a negative effect on the rate of profits, and eventually will come to a stop. Ricardian rent theory applies both to the case of ‘extensive’ rent, characterized by the fact that the increased agricultural output comes from the cultivation of less and less fertile lands, 4 Nature, Environment and Political Economy

and to that of ‘intensive’ rent, where the increased demand is met by intensifying agriculture on the area already taken into cultivation. The explanation of intensive rent comes from a combination of two principles. First, there is the principle that ‘rent is always the difference between the produce obtained by the of two equal quantities of capital and labour’ (Ricardo 1955 [1817]: 71). Second, there is what is now known as the ‘law’ of diminishing returns: when more and more doses of capital and labour are invested on a given plot of land, the additional output per dose of capital and labour gradually decreases. This law had already been stated half a century before Ricardo by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1914 [1767]: 645), who observed that a more intensive utilization of the soil, by employing more and more people on a given plot of land, would be subject to a process of decreasing returns. Turgot thereby anticipated an important aspect of the neoclassical theory of marginal productivity.

Johann Heinrich Von Thünen: rent and location Interesting but long-neglected contributions to rent and marginal productivity theory were made by Johann Heinrich von Thünen. In the first volume of his book Der Isolirte Staat (1826) he analyzed in detail how the value of corn and other agricultural products was determined. He modified Smith’s framework where wages, profits and rents were seen as the constituent components of price into one where prices of agricultural goods were split into production costs, transportation costs and land rent. The inclusion of transportation costs is indicative for von Thünen’s preoccupation with location issues. He is widely considered to be the founder of , and his model of concentric rings of agricultural activity around a central city has rightly become famous.

Thomas Robert Malthus: population and resources Agricultural production was also of central importance to the population theory of Ricardo’s colleague and friend Malthus. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published (anonymously) in 1798 and gradually expanded in subsequent editions, Malthus drew attention to the tensions between the growth of population and the growth of agriculture. According to Malthus, population tended to increase at a constant growth rate, say 2 per cent per year or 100 per cent per generation, which means that the growth of population can be represented by a geometric series. Agricultural production, by contrast, would in the best of circumstances only increase by a fixed absolute amount per year or per generation, leading to a growth process akin to an arithmetic series. Inevitably, the exponential growth of population will outpace the linear growth of agriculture, which will entail strong pressures on natural resources and misery for the poorest. Malthus identified two types of mechanisms which could restore the balance between population and resources: positive checks, such as and , which would raise mortality rates, and preventive checks, such as abortion and moral restraint, which would lower birth rates. Malthus was pessimistic about the future of mankind,

and throughout the nineteenth century his views were the object of intensive discussion. Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded : the stationary state Whether they shared the pessimism of Malthus with regard to the tension between population and resources or were concerned about the lethal combination of diminishing returns in agriculture, decreasing rates of profit and vanishing incentives that would bring about a stationary state, many classical economists were worried about the long-term future of Nature, Environment and Political Economy 5

the capitalist system. John Stuart Mill was well aware of diminishing returns in agriculture and argued that the limited availability of (some) natural resources, especially land, put ultimate constraints on productive possibilities:

Land differs from the other elements of production, labour and capital, in not being susceptible of indefinite increase. Its extent is limited, and the extent of the more productive kinds of it more limited still. It is also evident that the quantity of produce capable of being raised on any given piece of land is not indefinite. This limited quantity of land, and limited productiveness of it, are the real limits to the increase of production. (Mill 1965 [1848]: I.12.1)

In contrast to other classical economists, however, Mill did not see the advent of the stationary state as a prospect that had to be avoided at all cost. In his view, the stationary state would only come about at a time when society would be capable of producing large amounts of material wealth, enough to give everyone a decent standard of living. At that point, the focus should shift from the increase of material goods to other, non-material forms of .

Karl Marx: absolute rent dealt with natural resources in the context of his reflections on Ricardo’s theory of rent, which he believed was not entirely correct. At the end of his long struggle with Ricardo’s writings and his attempts to correct Ricardo’s explanation, he came up with a new concept, ‘absolute rent’, and developed his solution to the transformation of labour values into production prices. According to Marx, the new type of rent was not connected to any differences in productivity, but was paid because of the monopoly power of the natural resource owners. Their power was so great that they were able to counteract the mechanism behind the transformation of values into prices. The general principle of Marx’s transformation process is that production prices are the outcome of a transfer of from sectors where the organic composition of capital is low, to sectors where the organic composition is high. As a result, there should be a transfer of surplus value from the labour-intensive agricultural sectors to the machine-intensive industrial sectors. As Marx (1964 [1894]: chapter 45) maintained in Volume III of , however, the exclusive ownership of the natural resources, being an indispensable , constituted an effective obstacle to the mechanism that would normally force the natural resource owners to ‘hand over’ part of the surplus value created in the agricultural sectors. Marx illustrated his theory by means of multiple numerical examples and cases, but it can be doubted whether he succeeded in showing the plausibility of his rent theory.

Henry George: common ownership of land Land and land rent were the main focus of ’s reform proposals, which were immensely influential in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In his book Progress and Poverty (1879) he wondered why so many people were still destitute in spite of an enormous

increase in society’s productive capabilities. For him, the cause was clear: ‘Poverty deepens as

Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded Downloaded By: At: 10:00 5 Nov 2017 From: 172.31.31.212 For: 10.4324/9781138201521-HET15-1 For: 172.31.31.212 From: 2017 Nov 5 10:00 At: By: Downloaded wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized’ (George 1912 [1879]: 326). George believed that those who owned the land exerted full control over all the wealth that was created by means of the land. In a system of unequally distributed, privately owned land, the landowners kept as much as they could for themselves and paid labourers just 6 Nature, Environment and Political Economy

enough to keep them alive. According to George, the only effective remedy was to turn the system of private landownership into one of collective ownership: ‘To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership’ (ibid.). Yet, George did not go as far as to suggest that all privately owned land should immediately be purchased or confiscated by the state; that would be unnecessarily disruptive. Instead of confiscating the land, he thought it would be sufficient to confiscate the rent (ibid.: 403). The appropriation of rent could be accomplished by taxation of the land. In fact, George was convinced that this form of taxation would make all other forms of taxation obsolete. His single-tax proposal became the core of the Georgist movement. Similar ideas can be found in many other writings of the nineteenth century. A lot of social reformers started from the premise that natural resources are a common heritage of mankind and that the incomes derived from these resources should be shared by all. Thomas Paine’s pamphlets The Rights of Man (1791/2) and Agrarian Justice (1796) served as a point of reference for many of these writers, just as the work of William Ogilvie, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Spence (for a selection of historical sources on this topic, see Vallentyne and Steiner 2000). In economics, the influence is visible throughout the nineteenth century in the land reform plans of Auguste Walras, Antoine-Élisée Cherbuliez, , Léon Walras and many others. There is also a clear link to early proposals of basic income and basic capital (see Cunliffe and Erreygers 2004).

William Stanley Jevons: the coal question Until the middle of the nineteenth century, land was the main natural resource economists had been concerned about. Great Britain’s rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century prompted reflection about the natural resource that was widely seen as the source of energy fuelling the engines of industry: coal. The of coal increased rapidly. Since coal, in contrast to land, is an exhaustible resource, questions were raised about the long-term availability of (cheap) coal and hence about the of an economy based on industrial production. This was the topic of ’s The Coal Question (1865). Gathering as much empirical evidence as he could and assuming that the trends observed in the past would continue in the future, he made projections about the future use of coal. His conclusion was sobering: ‘we cannot long continue our present rate of progress’ (Jevons 1965 [1865]: 11). He pointed out that a more efficient use of coal increased rather than decreased the demand for coal (the so-called ‘’), and he believed that there was little chance for a substitute for coal to be found. Jevons’s early work can be looked at as a pioneering study of the economics of exhaustible resources. The theoretical foundations of the economics of exhaustible resources were developed only half a century later, by Harold Hotelling (1931). It could also be said that Jevons’s study is an early example of research on the long-term sustainability of the economic system, anticipating work by the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1971) and the Brundtland

Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987).

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Cantillon, Richard (1931 [1755] Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (edited with an English translation and other material by Henry Higgs), London: Macmillan for the . Cunliffe, John and GuidoErreygers (eds) (2004) The Origins of Universal Grants. An Anthology of Historical Writings on Basic Capital and Basic Income, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Eltis, Walter (1984) The Classical Theory of Economic Growth, London: Macmillan. Erreygers, Guido (1998) ‘Natural resources’, in: The Elgar Companion to (edited by Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori), Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, vols L–Z, pp. 149–156. George, Henry (1912 [1879]) Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. The Remedy, Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Hotelling, Harold (1931) ‘The economics of exhaustible resources’, Journal of Political Economy, 39(2): 137–175. Jevons, William Stanley (1965 [1865]) The Coal Question, Reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Kula, Erhun (1998) History of Environmental Economic Thought, London and New York: Routledge. Kurz, Heinz D. and NeriSalvadori (1995) Theory of Production. A Long-Period Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malthus, Thomas Robert (1986 [1798]) An Essay on the Principle of Population, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (edited by E.A. Wrigley and D. Souden), London: Pickering, vol. 1. Martinez-Alier, Juan (with Klaus Schlüpmann) (1987) : Energy, Environment and Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Marx, Karl (1964 [1894]) Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Dritter Band, in Karl Marx – Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, vol. 25. Meadows, Donella, Dennis L.Meadows, JørgenRanders and William W.Behrens III (1972) : A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe. Mill, John Stuart (1965 [1848]) Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (edited by F.E.L. Priestley and J.M. Robson), Toronto: University of Toronto Press & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, vols 2 and 3. Mirowski, Philip (ed.) (1994) Natural Images in Economic Thought: Markets Read in Tooth and Claw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petty, William (1899 [1667]) A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (edited by ), Cambridge: University Press, vol. 1, pp. 1–97. Petty, William (1899 [1667]) Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. By Capt. . The Fifth Edition [Graunt’s Observations], in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (edited by Charles Henry Hull), Cambridge: University Press, vol. 2, pp. 314–435. Quesnay, François (2005 [1757]) ‘Grains’, in Œuvres Économiques Complètes et Autres Textes (edited by Christine Théré, Loïc Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot), Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, vol. 1, pp. 161–212. Quesnay, François (2005 [1763]) ‘Philosophie rurale. Chapitre VII’, in Œuvres Économiques Complètes et Autres Textes (edited by Christine Théré, Loïc Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot), Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, vol. 1, pp. 647–687. Quesnay, François (2005 [1766]) ‘Analyse de la formule arithmétique du Tableau Économique de la distribution des dépenses annuelles d’une nation agricole’, in Œuvres Économiques Complètes et Autres Textes (edited by Christine Théré, Loïc Charles and Jean-Claude Perrot), Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, vol. 1, pp. 527–563. Ricardo, David (1951 [1817]) On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (edited by P. Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1. Smith, Adam (1976 [1776]) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (general editors R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd), Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 2. Turgot, Anne RobertJacques (1914 [1767]) ‘Observations sur le mémoire de M. de Saint Péravy en faveur de l’impôt indirect’, in Œuvres de Turgot et Documents le Concernant (edited by G. Schelle), Paris: Alcan, vol. 2, pp. 641–658. Vallentyne, Peter and HillelSteiner (eds) (2000) The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Van Den Berg, Richard (2000) ‘Differential rent in the : Two neglected French contributions’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 7(2): 181–207. Von Thünen, Johann Heinrich (1826) Der Isolirte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirthschaft und Nationalökonomie, Hamburg: Perthes.

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Author/s: Erreygers, G

Title: Nature, Environment and Political Economy

Date: 2017

Citation: Erreygers, G. (2017). Nature, Environment and Political Economy. History of Economic Thought, (1), pp.1-7. Routledge.

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