Measuring the Cost of Pollution
Economic Life, Economic Theory, and the Origins of Environmental Economics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4276775 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Kumekawa (0000-0003-4370-7172, Harvard University Press, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 332-361 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/730038 |
| OpenAlex | W4399939329 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
Environmental economists trace their discipline’s roots to A. C. Pigou, a Cambridge economist working in the early twentieth century. Although for millions of people in Britain and around the world smoke was an environmental and economic hazard, for Pigou pollution was a theoretical academic problem. He offered one of the earliest and most influential frameworks for understanding pollution as an economic phenomenon. But Pigou’s work depended on an existing network of economic thinkers, albeit thinkers who did not understand themselves as economists. The history of environmental economics extends far beyond the history of academic theory. It is equally a story of administrative practice, political advocacy, and local economic life. Contextualizing Pigou helps reveal that economic thinking about the environment was a creature of the state and a political project, one that depended on the work of long-overlooked or forgotten figures: municipal administrators, reformers, and scientists, many of whom were women. These figures have largely been written out of the history of the discipline’s origin. This article writes them back in. By doing so, it explores how pollution itself was coded as feminine by reformers and how Pigou recoded pollution as masculine, with striking implications for his proposed remedy for it. Returning to a key moment in the received history of environmental economics, this article exposes the dangers of abstract economic thinking insufficiently tethered to local lived economic realities and insufficiently attentive to the constraints of politics, popular belief, and physical infrastructure
Economic cost · Economics · Environmental pollution · Environmental protection · Natural resource economics · Neoclassical economics · Climate Change Policy and Economics · Ecology · Environmental Science · Pollution
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
Lancashire and the New Liberalism
Up in Smoke
An Intellectual History of Environmental Economics
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
Long run trends in energy-related external costs
The Smoke of Great Cities
Putting the City Back into Citizenship
The Age of Smoke
Garden cities and town planning
Presidential Address
Atlantic Crossings
Urban Transformation in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939
The cost of living in America
How the Suburbs Were Segregated
Infinite Power to Change the World
The Movement for Smoke Abatement in 19th-Century Britain
The Climate Emergency Demands a New Kind of History
Economies of Scale and a Featherbedding Cartel
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |