BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND ECOLOGY: SOME HISTORICAL AND

PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR MODELERS OF NATURAL

CAPITAL

JAY FOSTER
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada
(e-mail: jfoster@chass.utoronto.ca)

Abstract. Natural capital models attempt to remediate the relationship between economics and
ecology either by conjoining models and theories from each discipline or by finding a type of phenomena that can be meaningfully measured by both fields. The development of a widely accepted
model that integrates economics and ecology has eluded researchers since the early 1970s. This paper
offers an historical and philosophical perspective on some of the conceptual problems or obstacles
that hinder the development of natural capital models. In particular, the disciplinary assumptions
of economic science and ecological science are examined and it is argued that these assumptions
are antithetical. Hence, the development of an effective and accepted natural capital model will
require that economics and ecology reconsider their self-conceptions as sciences. For the purposes
of theoretical research and practical policy, the paper cautions against confusing the issue of whether
or not economic models accord with ecological models with the issue of whether or not economic
activities accord with ecological realities.
Keywords: ecology, economics, history, human science, natural capital, natural science, philosophy

1. Introduction: Three Questions

In general, natural capital models attempt to remediate the relationship between
economics and ecology either by conjoining models and theories from each discipline or by finding a type of phenomena that can be meaningfully measured by
both fields. If the present objective is to contribute to the construction of a natural
capital model, then before undertaking this project in any great detail, perhaps
three questions should be considered. First, what is natural capital? Second, how is
natural capital to be modeled or represented? Third, what should a natural capital
model be able to accomplish? Answers to the first question help clarify the scope or

This paper is the product of a presentation given at the Joint World Bank University of Toronto
Natural Capital Workshop held at the University of Toronto on 23 April 1999. Thanks to Roger
Hansell, Kirk Hamilton and Adam Fenech for co-ordinating a rewarding day of discussion. Thanks
to the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and also to Bryan Boddy, Bob Foster and Leonore
Foster. Thanks for help from Niko Fleming, Daryn Lehoux and Gordon McOuot. Communication
may be addressed to Jay Foster, University of Toronto, Old Victoria College, 91 Charles St. W.,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 86: 6374, 2003.

2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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domain of the idea of natural capital, while answers to the second question consider
how natural capital is to be measured or tracked. Answers to the third question help
provide a means of evaluating the relative effectiveness of proposed natural capital
models.
Of course, these may be considered fairly simple questions, which in a general
form should be answered in any research proposal in order to clarify the scope and
content of the research. However, the apparent simplicity of these questions belies
their complexity at two levels. First, these three questions are intimately related.
It would seem difficult if not impossible to begin developing a model of natural
capital without some clear understanding of what natural capital is and the purposes
for which natural capital is being modeled. Second, answers to any one question
tend to limit potential answers to the other questions. That is, the application of
a particular set of modeling techniques or methods will have implications for the
definition of natural capital as well as its potential usefulness. Similarly, if natural
capital models are to be used in particular contexts, then this will limit and constrict the modeling techniques available and this in turn will affect the definition.
Answers to basic or simple questions posed at the beginning of research carry long
term repercussions for both the structure of research and the end results or products
of research. In the long run, it seems likely that there will be several interpretations
of the idea of natural capital which will accord with several different models of
natural capital each of which may be effective in a different context. What will
ultimately distinguish different approaches to understanding natural capital is not
necessarily different research findings, but different answers to the basic questions
established at the outset of research.
The objective of this paper is not to advocate particular answers to any of these
basic questions, for each question probably has many reasonable and cogent answers. Nor will this paper advocate any single definition of natural capital or any
single approach to modeling natural capital, for what constitutes a good definition
and model is as intimated very much dependent on research objectives. The intention of this paper is to help contribute to the formation of natural capital models by
clarifying some of the conceptual difficulties that obstruct the formation of such a
model. The first part of the paper will offer a brief survey of some of the historical
sympathies and antipathies between ecological science and economic science and
explore the implications of these for the idea of natural capital. The second part of
the paper will inspect some of the basic assumptions and definitions that underwrite
economics and ecology in order to assess exactly what a natural capital model will
need to undertake in order to successfully mediate between ecological science and
economic science. On these foundations, the conclusion will assess what might
and might not be reasonably expected from natural capital models. The hope of
the paper is that a clearer understanding of the relationship between nature and
capital, and between economic science and ecological science, will contribute to
the development of more robust and more clearly defined models.

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2. From the Economy of Nature to Natural Capital

On the face of things, human economic activity would seem to be the enemy of
environmental well-being. Almost all economic activities need natural resources.
The acquisition of natural resources disturbs the existing environment, and human
disturbances in the environment sometimes precipitate environmental problems.
In addition, there is the larger question of the extent to which the rate at which
humans use natural resources exceeds the ability of the natural environment to
produce or maintain these resources. Further, economic science and ecological science seem to be disciplines that are incommensurable; they are disciplines with no
common measure. Economists generally like to measure costs and benefits in terms
of utility; they measure the marginal propensity of individuals to do some things
but not others, and often but reluctantly, they use money to measure economic
variables. Ecology relies on a variety of factors and measures from biomass to
population size and even borrowed thermodynamic concepts to model and represent various aspects of ecological systems. Even in terms of the normative language
that accompanies each discipline, economics and ecology would seem to be deeply
divided. Economics tends to regard pollution and resource degradation as undesirable but inevitable side-effects of production, whereas an ecology typically regards
these things as disruptive and potentially dangerous factors being introduced into a
complex system of little understood natural relationships.
Historically, ecology and economics have a less acrimonious relationship, which
to some degree, is reflected in their common etymology. The words ecology and
economics are both derived from the Greek word oikos meaning household. A
modern reader would probably understand a household as consisting of the holdings of a house or family, but in its original sense, the word oikos also connotes
the administration or stewardship of wealth. The term conomy was used by
Thomas Hobbes in the late seventeenth century to describe the administration of
common wealth. By the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, Adam
Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and others were describing their study
of the production and distribution of social wealth as political economy. In the
late nineteenth century the name political economy gave way to economics. The
word cology emerged much later than the word conomy in the work of the
nineteenth-century German natural philosopher Ernst Haeckel. In 1879, Haeckel
wrote: By cology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the conomy
of nature the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment.1 The modern Oxford English Dictionary
echoes Haeckel by defining ecology as: The science of the economy of animals
and plants; that branch of biology which deals with the relations of living organisms
to their surroundings, their habits and modes of life, etc.
Just as nineteenth-century economics emerged from eighteenth-century political economy, nineteenth-century ecology emerged from an eighteenth-century idea,
namely, the economy of nature. In 1749, the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linn,

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popularly known as Linnaeus, published The conomy of Nature. Like many of

his contemporaries, Linnaeus believed that the specific capabilities of particular
species and the balance between different species together comprised a fixed and
ordered natural economy. At the center of the economy was a continuous cycle
of water flowing upward from the earth through the exhalations of rivers and
oceans and returning to the earth as rain and snow. Plant and animal species were
organized so that every species had a fixed place, number and function within
the natural order. In exchange for performing its function satisfactorily, nature
provided a species with the necessaries of life. Man was the only species that could
attempt to violate the order of nature, because unlike plants and brutes, mankind
possessed free will. Linnaeus On the Polity of Nature published in 1760 in part
argued that nature compelled men to wage wars in order to reduce their population
and restore the balance of the ordained order.2 This idea would later be subsumed
into Thomas Malthus well known population principle which would hold that
the rate of potential population increase exceeded that of food production.
In the 1798 first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus expressed the population principle as a contrast between the geometric rate at which
population was capable of increasing and the arithmetic rate at which subsistence
could be expanded. The contrast between an arithmetic rate of subsistence growth
and a geometric rate of population growth would influence subsequent economic
and biological science respectively. The identification of an arithmetic rate of subsistence growth would be used by later political economists, like David Ricardo
and John Stuart Mill, to contribute to the development of the classical theory of
rent and the law of diminishing returns.3 In his Autobiography, Charles Darwin
acknowledged that a re-reading of Malthus Essay in 1838 was formative in the
development of the Origin of the Species. Malthus identification of the pressures or
checks resulting from a constant competition for food and space brought about by
geometric population growth was an essential component in Darwins formation of
the process of natural selection.4 Even in the twentieth century, when economic and
biological sciences have largely disentangled themselves, Malthus ideas continue
to directly influence both disciplines in the guise of neo-Malthusianism.
Although the idea that human activities are potentially at odds with the order
of nature is not new, in the second half of the twentieth century, this idea has been
expanded to suggest that national and global economic activities are at odds with
global ecological realities. This reformulation of an old idea is itself as least as old
as Rachael Carsons work the Silent Spring. In that work published in 1962, Carson
warned that the widespread use of DDT and other long lasting herbicides and pesticides was causing the wholesale destruction of wildlife and also clearly endangered
human life. As well as identifying a burgeoning environmental problem, Carsons
work placed environmental problems in general within the political and economic
context of the post-Second World War and post-Bretton Woods world.5 The salient political features of the DDT problem were that it was a global issue that
defied national borders and that the initial cause of the problem was an excessive

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emphasis on limiting economic expenses. Since 1962, whenever environmental

concerns have figured in the global political agenda the same basic message has
been repeated and accompanied with increasingly dire warnings from Dennis
Meadows et al.s Limits to Growth published in 1972, to the World Commission
on Environment and Development report Our Common Future published in 1987,
and most recently, Agenda 21 adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992. Since the late 1980s, the term sustainable development
has become the popular leitmotif of a new international political environmental
awareness which acknowledges that there are strong inter-relationships between
economic and ecological well-being. Hence, sustainable development, as defined
in Our Common Future, not only requires that those who are more affluent adopt
life-styles within the planets ecological means, but also that a world in which
poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes.6
Of course, saying that human economic activity is at odds with environmental
well-being is different than saying that economic science is at odds with environmental well-being or that economic science is at odds with ecological science.
The idea of sustainable development contends that present economic practices
and activities can be reformed so that they will better reflect environmental or
ecological realities. As such, sustainable development implicitly holds that past
economic activities have been environmentally deleterious and explicitly holds that
economic activities can be reformed so that they will not be similarly destructive in
the future. Unlike the idea of sustainable development, the idea of natural capital by
itself makes no claims about the extent to which economic practices and ecological
needs may be reconciled, but only proposes to provide a measure or indicator of
the effects of economic activity on the environment. A natural capital model may
serve as the basis for a blue print or strategy for sustainable development, but by no
means could it guarantee or ensure that economic activities are sustainable. Rather
it attempts to find some common ground or alignment between economic science
and ecological science, so that economic effects may be evaluated in ecological
terms and that ecological effects may be evaluated in economic terms. At the end
of the day, the question of whether or not economic activities are in accord with
ecological realities is very different than the question of whether or not economic
models are in accord with ecological models.
Even though ecology and economics shared an early history, they are sciences
that have grown apart, and finding a measure or indicator that might meaningfully
span both disciplines has eluded researchers since the early 1970s. The Meadows Model, on which Limits to Growth was based, extrapolated existing trends
in population growth, consumption of natural resources, food production, and industrial pollution, and it predicted that the modern world would shortly encounter
severe Malthusian checks unless international development policies were radically
revised. The Meadows Model was the object of sharp criticism, notably by W.
Beckerman, for its inclusion of economic indicators as deterministic variables and
for its inclusion of assumptions about human delays in response to identified

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problems. In the early 1970s, Howard Odum began offering an energy circuit
model for understanding relationships between the social and the ecological and
proposed an energy unit as a common measure. Later efforts by Odum, and elsewhere B. Hannon, R. Costanza and R. A. Herendeen, to refine the original work has
been met with interest, but without widespread adoption. Through the 1980s and
1990s, these early efforts to develop an integrated model have been continued by
many others, among them Robert Constanza, Herman E. Daly, William Nordhaus
and David Pearce. But as yet there exists no model or group of models that serve
to integrate the concerns of economics with the concerns of ecology. The absence
of any significant consensus after some three decades of time, effort and expertise
leads to the question: what is it about economic science and ecological science that
makes them so difficult to integrate?

3. Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

Economists call the various pre-requisites for the production of a commodity or service the factors of production. An introductory economics textbook often given
to university undergraduates gives the following general taxonomy of the factors of
production: all products can be accounted for by the services of only three kinds
of inputs, which are often called the basic factors of production. All the gifts of
nature, such as land and raw materials, the economists call land. All physical and
mental efforts provided by people are called labour services. All machines and
other production equipment are grouped in a category called capital, defined as
man-made aids to further production.7 The same textbook groups land, forests
and minerals among the free gifts of nature.8 Elsewhere, the textbook clarifies
what it means for something to be natural and free by stating: When a good is
naturally free, the amount supplied by nature is so plentiful that every household
can consume it ... without exhausting the available supply.9 The textbook also
provides an economic definition of free, namely, that for which no price needs
to be paid.10
A human resource simply is the mental and physical labour of a person, while
capital, such as tools and machinery, aids production but required human labour
to create it in the first place. Most economists regard natural resources as being
different from human resources and capital, because no human effort was expended in the development of natural resources. In economic terms, coal, lumber,
water and other natural resources when plentiful only command a price insofar
as human effort, like digging, felling and bottling, is expended in changing the
natural resource into a marketable commodity. The emphasis on human interests
and human efforts in mainstream economics may seem narrow or unpardonably
anthropocentric. However, economic science is primarily concerned with the efficient allocation of scarce resources to satisfy apparently unlimited human wants,
and because of this, rightly or wrongly, its focus is on humans and things useful

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to humans. As a consequence of this focus, economics is a human science not a

natural science.
To an ecologist, environmentalist or naturalist, the economic view of the natural
world may be unrealistic or even surrealistic. From these perspectives, it makes no
sense to describe the endowments of nature as being free, and very little sense to
describe a component of nature as being a resource. Ecology is a natural science
which in general is concerned with the interactions of organisms with their physical
environment and with each other.11 Many natural entities, like flora, fauna, soil,
water and air, may be regarded as resources from the perspective of the human
economy, but they are not resources from the perspective of the ecological systems
of which they are part. An ecologist may recognise that many components of the
natural world are economically useful and be concerned with the effects of human
economic activity on ecological systems, because after all, humans are organisms
and economics is one of the ways in which humans describe their relationship with
their physical environment. While the ecologist may be interested in the implications of human economic activity, the description of the productive activities of
humans is not within the immediate purview of the natural science of ecology.
Of course, economists are not simply environmental brutes, for they also like
clean rivers, healthy forests and a benign climate for the present and for the future,
even though the growth based economy advocated by mainstream Keynsian and
neo-classical economists is often criticised as being fundamentally irreconcilable
with a stable ecology. All economists recognise that the allocation or use of the
factors of production to benefit some individuals can often incur unintended costs
to other individuals. This recognition is built into economics by the identification
of two types of costs: private cost which assesses costs incurred from the perspective of private individuals and social cost which assesses costs incurred from the
perspective of the whole society. Discrepancies between private costs and social
costs are recognised as producing ill effects, notably, pollution, the degradation of
common-property resources like forests and oceans, and the neglect of the future
consequences of present actions. Unfortunately, economists commonly describe
these discrepancies with the unintentionally pejorative term externalities, or less
commonly and somewhat less pejoratively third-party effects. Again, this has
much to do with the economic way of seeing. Third-party effects are described
as externalities, not to diminish their significance, but because they are the social
side-effects external to the largely private process of allocating resources. Indeed,
there are beneficial externalities as well as harmful externalities, but there tend to
be fewer of these because the person producing a beneficial externality bears all of
the costs while others reap a portion of the benefits.

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4. Not Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

According to textbooks on economics, capital is fundamentally different than natural resources, even though they are both required for the production of commodities and they are both to a greater or lesser degree consumed in the course of
production. Two features of capital make it special: first, making capital tends to
require considerable human effort which tends to make it expensive to produce;
and second, increasing the amount of capital available usually entails a sacrifice at
the present time for a gain at a future time. Because of the special status of capital,
it is generally believed that the existing stock of capital should be conserved by
prudent allocation and the minimisation of depreciation, so that there will be the
greatest possible return from the stock of capital. The introduction of the concept
of natural capital would immediately move land, forests, minerals and other natural
entities from the domain of resources to the domain of capital. As a consequence
of this shift, natural entities would cease to be free gifts which have no cost or
price for their use and start being capital which carries a cost or price for its use.
Like other forms of capital, natural capital would need to be preserved by prudent
allocation and the minimisation of depreciation, so that there would be the greatest
possible return from the stock of capital. From the perspective of environmental
conservation, the introduction of the concept of natural capital would seem to have
immediate beneficial effects, just as the idea of capital has beneficial effects in
terms of conserving productive human labour. However, the successful introduction of the concept would involve a fundamental restructuring of the outlook of
both economic science and ecological science.
For economic science, the adoption of the natural capital concept requires a
shift in the intellectual structure of the discipline at two levels. First and obviously,
a necessary or required concomitant of endorsing the idea of natural capital is that
economic science would need to redefine its understanding of the basic factors of
production, so that natural resources cease to be resources and become capital. In
the long term, production requires a stock of natural capital as well as human labour
and conventional capital. From a natural capital perspective, there are no free gifts
of nature, but only an endowment of natural capital which, like more conventional
forms of capital, must be conserved and protected from depreciation in order to
guarantee long term productivity. Second and perhaps more fundamentally, economic science must re-evaluate its understanding of itself as a scientific enterprise.
Hitherto, economics has been the study of human production and as such has been
a human science. This focus on the interests of humans and human activities has
meant that the natural world has a secondary or subsidiary role in economic science. If natural capital were to supplant the concept of a natural resource, then this
would represent a fundamental shift in the status of the natural world in economic
science, and with it would shift the status of economic science as a human science.
Economics would no longer exclusively consider human productive activities, for
the effects of those activities on the natural or non-human world would be an
explicit economic concern.

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The successful introduction of a concept of natural capital will also require a

re-tooling of ecological science. Ecology is a natural science not a human science,
and as a natural science, ecology attempts to wrestle with the natural world on its
own terms. Of course, all scientific activity is ultimately a human activity and to
some extent is marked by human perspectives and scales, but the natural sciences
at least attempt to leave behind the trappings and entrapments of a human centered
world. For the idea of natural capital to be successful, ecology may have to abandon
this aspiration of natural science. There is no capital in the natural world and the
very idea of natural capital, whatever its measure, will reflect human interests in the
natural world. Ecology would no longer exclusively consider the inter-relationships
between organisms and the physical environment, for the way in which the human
organism appropriates and uses other organisms and the physical environment
would be an explicit ecological concern. Inasmuch as the natural component
of natural capital requires economics to become a natural science, the capital
part of natural capital requires ecology to become a human or social science. In
other words, the natural capital concept requires ecology and economics to reconsider their self-conceptions as sciences because it erases or very much blurs the
distinction between the human world and the natural world.12

5. Summary and Conclusion: When Driven to Abstraction

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, that economics and ecology
have a common early history might be taken as a matter of irony rather than
of interest. In the period following the Second World War, there was increasing
awareness that human economic practices and activities do not reflect environmental or ecological realities. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment
and Development report Our Common Future popularized the idea of sustainable
development as the expression of a commitment to a better balance between the
need for economic growth or development and the need for a stable and benign
environment. Although the ecological repercussions of economic activity had been
recognized for some time, from a policy perspective, there was no means of evaluating and measuring the ecological effects of economic activities as well as the
economic effects of ecological activities. In the 1970s, several different models and
measures were proposed which included ecological and environmental factors, but
none received wide acceptance. More recent attempts to develop a so-called natural
capital model in order to integrate the divergent concerns of economic science and
ecological science have been promising, but again no particular approach has met
with wide support. That the development of a natural capital model is proving
difficult is perhaps not surprising given that the disciplinary assumptions of modern
economic and ecological sciences are antithetical, even though they may share a
common past.

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At political and policy levels, recurring interest in natural capital and other
similar ideas is probably a consequence of problems inherent in the process of
building political consensus on environmental issues as well as the difficulties
inherent in evaluating the effectiveness of existing environmental programs. Not
unsurprisingly, there are enormous difficulties in creating consensus among political participants with different interests and aspirations. And so, in the political
arena, there is little agreement about the extent of environmental problems, the
ecologically most sound policies for ameliorating environmental degradation, and
the most effective and efficient means of implementing these policies. A natural
capital model, mandated by both economic science and ecological science, could
be a powerful force assisting the creation of political consensus so that corrective
policy could be implemented. In every respect, an accepted and robust natural capital model would seem to be a panacea for the problems of modern environmental
politics.
From this perspective, the principal barrier to political agreement and action
would appear to be the lack of an agreed upon common measure or indicator. A
useful natural capital model would provide a measure or indicator which could
describe or give a snap shot of the present state of affairs in both the economy
and ecology. A refined version of this model might be able to provide a framework
for monitoring the effectiveness of policy initiatives, or might provide a means of
anticipating or evaluating the consequences of proposed policies. However useful
this model, it would be a mistake to believe that even the best model could promise
that future economic activities will be ecologically sustainable. A natural capital
model only makes economic models accord with ecological models it makes
descriptions of economic activity line up with descriptions of natural relationships.
The issue of whether or not economic models are in accord with ecological models
is very different than the issue of whether or not economic activities are in accord
with ecological realities. Making economic activities accord with ecological realities will probably be the work of politicians and policy makers rather than model
builders. Insofar as a natural capital model is to be useful rather than merely interesting, the primary objective of the model is to provide a groundwork of scientific
consensus between economics and ecology so that consensus about political and
policy actions and objectives might follow.
On these terms, a natural capital model would be a scientifically mandated
means of establishing which environmental issues need to be addressed and a
means of evaluating how adequately they are addressed. But the further belief that
a natural capital model might be able to compel political consensus is based on a
confusion. Scientific models describe the way the world is while political agendas
and policy are descriptions of the way the world ought to be. In logic, the inability
to derive claims about what ought or should be the case directly from statements
about what is the case is often called the is-ought dichotomy. One implication of
the dichotomy is that scientific models which describe states of affairs, and might
even predict future states of affairs, are not by themselves imperatives for action. In

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other words, it is not possible to leverage prescriptions for action off descriptions of
states of affairs, because there is no necessary or required connection between the
two different kinds of claims or statements. This is not to deny that people often act
on the basis of scientific models and evidence, but they do this only when a belief
about interests, needs, wants or desires has been added to the scientific description.
In the case of a natural capital model, an ideal model might encapsulate much of
the descriptive content of ecology and economics and provide a robust measure of
the present state of the ecology and the economy. But, from that description alone
no political or policy action necessarily follows.
This may seem to pose no problem because a natural capital model is intended
to provide an objective or value-neutral measure or indicator of economic and environmental well-being. The apparent objectivity or value-neutrality of the model
is what would make it persuasive in a world of political disagreement. But, this is a
problem because a natural capital model will only compel action if there is already
agreement that economic activities are at odds with ecological realities, because
a pure description by itself will not and cannot compel action. Thus, deploying
natural capital models at the political and policy level shall require consensus
that environmental problems are beyond the reach of conventional economic and
ecological sciences. Paradoxically, it is this very consensus that the idea of natural
capital is supposed to create in the first place. Perhaps then, the problems that
continue to beset the formation a practical natural capital model may have less to
do with the scientific issues inherent in developing the model and more to do with
the problems of creating a moral and political consensus about the nature and extent
of environmental problems. In short, scientific expertise cannot act as a surrogate
for political will and moral commitment.

Notes
1
2
3
4
5

Haeckel quoted in Brewer, 1979: 1.

Bramwell, 1989: 46; Spary, 1996: 178; Worster, 1992: 3139.
Hollander, 1989.
Barlow, 1958: 120.
The signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement on 27 July 1944 implicitly acknowledged that the
Great Depression and the Second World War marked the emergence of political and economic problems that could not be effectively addressed by individual nation states and required the intervention
of new international economic and political organizations. The Bretton Woods agreement led to the
formation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to augment the activities of the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank).
6 World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: 89.
7 Lipsey et al., 1982: 197.
8 Lipsey et al., 1982: 6.
9 Lipsey et al., 1982: 162. With apologies to readers who are economists for not including a discussion of utility.
10 Lipsey et al., 1982: 162.
11 Curtis, 1983: 951.

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12 This may not be a new or unique problem. The French philosopher Bruno Latour has suggested

that from the inception of modern science, science practitioners promised a demarcation between the
natural world and the human world within the scientific enterprise. Latour suggests that science has
always failed to maintain this demarcation. See Latour, 1991.

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