OPINION/COMMENTARY

Can Selfishness Save the Environment?

At the center of all environmentalism lies a problem: whether to appeal to the heart or to the head--whether to urge people to make sacrifices in behalf of the planet or to accept that they will not, and instead rig the economic choices so that they find it rational to be environmentalist. It is a problem that most activists in the environmental movement barely pause to recognize. Good environmental practice is compatible with growth, they insist, so it is rational as well as moral. Yet if this were so, good environmental practice would pay for itself, and there would be no need to pass laws to deter polluters or regulate emissions. A country or a firm that cut corners on pollution control would have no cost advantage over its rivals. Those who do recognize this problem often conclude that their appeals should not be made to self-interest but rather should be couched in terms of sacrifice, selflessness, or, increasingly, moral shame. We believe they are wrong. Our evidence comes from a surprising convergence of ideas in two disciplines that are normally on very different tracks: economics and biology. It is a convergence of which most economists and biologists are still ignorant, but a few have begun to notice. "I can talk to evolutionary biologists," says Paul Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, in Toronto, "because, like me, they think individuals are important. Sociologists still talk more of the action of classes rather than individuals." Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year, has been reading biological treatises for years; Paul Samuelson, who won it more than twenty years ago, has published several papers recently applying economic principles to biological problems. And biologists such as John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton have been raiding economics for an equally long time. Not that all economists and biologists agree--that would be impossible. But there are emerging orthodoxies in both disciplines that are strikingly parallel....

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