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The Wealth of Nature : How Mainstream Economics Has Failed the Environment by Robert L. Nadeau is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Wealth of Nature : How Mainstream Economics Has Failed the Environment about?

Virtually all large-scale damage to the global environment is caused by economic activities, and the vast majority of economic planners in both business and government coordinate these activities on the basis of guidelines and prescriptions from neoclassical economic theory. In this hard-hitting book, Robert Nadeau demonstrates that the claim that neoclassical economics is a science comparable to the physical sciences is totally bogus and that our failure to recognize and deal with this fact constitutes the greatest single barrier to the timely resolution of the crisis in the global environment. Neoclassical economic theory is premised on the belief that the "invisible hand" Adam Smith's metaphor for forces associated with the operation of the "natural laws of economics"regulates the workings of market economies. Nadeau reveals that Smith's understanding of these laws was predicated on assumptions from eighteenth-century metaphysics and that the creators of neoclassical economics incorporated this view of the "lawful" mechanisms of free-market systems into a mathematical formalism borrowed wholesale from mid-nineteenth-century physics. The strategy used by these economists, all of

Author

Robert L. Nadeau

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published

2003

Language

EN

ISBN

9780231507769

Subjects

Economics, Management, Business