Managing Sustainability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Managing Sustainability - Essay Example And the human economy is a subsystem of this biosphere. From the session I came to know that according to the neo-classical concept, the market system is considered to be the preferred institution for allocating scarce resources. The market system accomplishes this wonderful feat using prices as a means of gauging resource scarcity. In sharp contrast to the Malthusians, neoclassicists believe that economic growth, through increases in per capita income and improvements in technology, provides solutions for both environmental and population problems. In other words, the solution to environmental and population problems is more, not less, economic growth. It was quiet evident to me that according to Malthusian doctrine of resource scarcity and economic growth, technology is not the ultimate escape from the problem of resource scarcity from which I agree to some extent but it doesn’t means that we should stop economic growth. Human beings have a natural propensity for self-destru ction while critics consider that the Malthusian predictions of economic collapse are unwarranted and moreover not helpful politically. In the neoclassical economics I came to know that resources are generally considered to be fungible. On that point I agree to the criticism that the link between the flow of matter–energy in the economic system and the natural environment is very much ignored. From my point of view, economic growth and technological advances should be viewed not as problems in themselves – the way Malthusians tend to view them, but as cures for stresses involving population, resources, pollution, and other environmental damages which were rectified to some extent in ecological economics. According to ecological economics, systems are complex, adaptive, living systems that need to be studied as integrated, co-evolving systems in order to be adequately understood (Costanza et al. 1993). Here, the human economy is viewed as a subsystem of the natural ecos ystem. The nature of the exchanges of matter and energy between the ecosystem and economic subsystem is the primary focus of ecological economics (Ayres 1978; Pearce 1987). Except for information, the natural ecosystem is the ultimate source of all material inputs for the economic subsystem. In this sense, then, nature can rightly be regarded as the ultimate source of wealth. In Sustainable development economics we studied three different conceptions of sustainability, namely Hartwick–Solow sustainability, ecological economics sustainability and the safe minimum standards (SMS) sustainability. Ecological economics presumes that the sustainability of ecological systems is a prerequisite to sustainable human economic development, and it views human and natural capital as complements. Market failures can happen when the benefits of natural or social capital depletion are privatized and the costs are often externalized. When natural capital is undervalued by society since we are not fully aware of the real cost of the depletion of natural capital then also market failures happen. Information asymmetry can also result in market failure when the link between cause and effect is obscured, making it difficult to make informed choices. From the session I agree to the view of Boulding (1966) â€Å"