Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Environmental Politics – the New and the Old
- 1 From Conservation to Environment
- 2 Variation and Pattern in the Environmental Impulse
- 3 The Urban Environment
- 4 The Nation's Wildlands
- 5 The Countryside: A Land Rediscovered, yet Threatened
- 6 The Toxic Environment
- 7 Population, Resources, and the Limits to Growth
- 8 Environmental Inquiry and Ideas
- 9 The Environmental Opposition
- 10 The Politics of Science
- 11 The Politics of Economic Analysis and Planning
- 12 The Middle Ground: Management of Environmental Restraint
- 13 Environmental Politics in the States
- 14 The Politics of Legislation, Administration, and Litigation
- 15 The Reagan Antienvironmental Revolution
- 16 Environmental Society and Environmental Politics
- Notes
- Index
11 - The Politics of Economic Analysis and Planning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Environmental Politics – the New and the Old
- 1 From Conservation to Environment
- 2 Variation and Pattern in the Environmental Impulse
- 3 The Urban Environment
- 4 The Nation's Wildlands
- 5 The Countryside: A Land Rediscovered, yet Threatened
- 6 The Toxic Environment
- 7 Population, Resources, and the Limits to Growth
- 8 Environmental Inquiry and Ideas
- 9 The Environmental Opposition
- 10 The Politics of Science
- 11 The Politics of Economic Analysis and Planning
- 12 The Middle Ground: Management of Environmental Restraint
- 13 Environmental Politics in the States
- 14 The Politics of Legislation, Administration, and Litigation
- 15 The Reagan Antienvironmental Revolution
- 16 Environmental Society and Environmental Politics
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the debates over the importance of environmental values amid many competing social and political objectives, decision makers insisted that some device be found by which one set of proposals could be balanced against another. Over the years two strategies were devised to do this, one in economics and the other in planning. Economics sought to weigh values as current costs and benefits in an accounting arrangement; planning attempted to identify future needs and the resources required to fill them.
There was a persistent temptation to believe that both economic analysis and planning were more objective and rational than the give-and-take of “politics.” Each discipline was assumed to deal with a world “out there” independent of the vagaries of personal and institutional choices. Quantitative data tended to cloak their activities in a mantle of objectivity. Since they were value-free, they were associated with a larger public purpose than the objectives of more limited interests. Hence both economists and planners shared the reputation for disinterestedness that was enjoyed by scientists. Many looked on them as advisers who could play a major role in bringing order out of a political world of myriad contending objectives.
Yet economic analysis and planning were prone to reflect personal, professional, and institutional value commitments much as science was. The overlay of quantitative data often obscured those value choices. In environmental debate both economists and planners aligned themselves with one position or another and thereby brought their values to the fore.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Beauty, Health, and PermanenceEnvironmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985, pp. 363 - 391Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987