Economists have a reputation not for asking simple questions but for giving simple answers–for knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Supposedly they spend their professional lives trying to fit the human variety into a handful of preconceived notions. Don Coursey, of the University of Chicago’s Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, says he got over that early.
Since then Coursey has focused on collecting basic information and asking questions that people assume they know the answers to. In the year and a half he’s been at U. of C. this academic grunt work has gotten him into the headlines twice: first with a study of what we spend to save different endangered species, and then, last fall, with a study looking for historical evidence of environmental racism in Chicago.
Coursey’s most famous–or infamous–simple question to date resulted in a 17-page paper with the unpromising title “The Revealed Demand for a Public Good: Evidence From Endangered and Threatened Species,” which he presented at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 1994. “How much are endangered species worth to us?” he asked, and his answer caused the media to flood his office with more than 200 calls that he had to respond to. “For three weeks I couldn’t do anything else.”
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But Coursey’s point about endangered species is that however passionate we are about them, the time and money we have to save them are limited. Philosophizing about their possible infinite value “will do nothing to save one species or protect one habitat. Only economic initiatives will accomplish these goals. But economic resources are finite. At a practical level of analysis the country must decide how much to spend on protecting endangered species and how to distribute this amount among each endangered plant and animal.” What made Coursey’s dry study briefly famous was that he caught us in the act of doing the thing we all do but pretend we don’t–putting a price on life itself.
Setting prices on things gets harder when you don’t buy or sell them very often–a strawberry pureeing machine, say. Seeing one for the first time, you may have no idea whether it’s worth the asking price. And it gets really hard when you’re dealing with something that can’t be sold to an individual–what Coursey would call a “public good,” like the existence of the last 300 whooping cranes. The individual cranes could in theory be auctioned off, but the species’ continued existence–unlike the continued existence of your pint of strawberries–is worth something to everyone.
Coursey used the personal and governmental measures as checks on each other. As it turns out, the two match up fairly well. The public tends overall to prefer large animals (aka “charismatic megavertebrates”), and the government tends to spend more money on them. Given a choice, say, between the bald eagle and the Kretschmarr cave mold beetle, the larger carrion eater wins almost every time.
Yet one of Chicago’s most accomplished environmentalists–the Nature Conservancy’s Steve Packard–describes Coursey’s study as “the kind of sensible, practical, down-to-earth thinking we need a lot more of. I think we can’t save everything, and I think we have to choose. We don’t save all the genetic alleles [variations]. We can’t even study them. What are the genes of our rare local spider populations? Well, forget it. And they’re easier to study than nematodes or bacteria.
