An Intellectual History of Environmental Economics Review

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From this article, we can realize that this is a relatively young field in comparison to other areas of economics, which was emerged due to the increasing economic activity following the industrial revolution and World War II and the realization of the responsibility we have in preserving the environment for the next generations. However, due to the short age of this field, there are still many debates in the direction environmental policy analysis should take (and if there is a standard path, to begin with), and the optimal approach to measuring and quantify the effect of a certain policy or legislation, even that reasonable efforts had been dedicated to finding the optimal direction in the past 40 years, but it seems that there are still lots of work to be done and many unexplored areas in this field, which makes it an exciting time for us to witness how it will go, where it will end up, and the effect it will play when it comes to making economic decisions.

In my point of view, this paper serves as an excellent starting point to get familiar with the field of environmental economics for someone who never got exposed to such topic, because it challenges the concepts I studied during my economics and industrial engineering courses in the past few years that are concerned mainly with maximizing social utility and welfare benefits at the current time with no consideration given whatsoever to the effect on our environment and the well-being of the next generations, and it will be interesting to see how during the next classes we will explore various topics, models, and policy evaluation techniques that will definitely play a role in how I start viewing economics in general and some theories (e.g., production theory) from now on.