I'm heterodox, but not too heterodox

There is a nice article in today's NYTimes on heterodoxy in economics. Anyone who has ever used the contingent valauation method (CVM) to value non-market environmental amenities has delved into behavioral economics, heterodoxy, whether they knew it or not. In order to understand the CVM you must reject the notion that hypothetical environmental value statements are real behavior, call them behavioral intentions, and consider the attitudes-behavioral intentions-behavior linkage from the Fishbein and Ajzen model. You end up using attitudinal and other non-economic variables to explain environmental values and then trying to tie these statements to real behavior.

Check out the Fall 1994 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives for a sample of the orthodox pushback to environmental valuation. As far as I know, no one doing the CVM is in a top 5 or 10 economics department. You see them in the best agricultural economics departments and next tier of economics departments. So, if you do CVM, admit that you are a bit heterodox. Yet, we're not too heterodox. While I see some of the value in ecological economics, I don't embrace the rejection of the neoclassical model like many ecological economists. Here is a collection of my, er, quibbles.

That's enough self-absorbed introspection and confession for one day.

Comments

[Tim Haab]

"In order to understand the CVM you must reject the notion that hypothetical environmental value statements are real behavior, call them behavioral intentions, and consider the attitudes-behavioral intentions-behavior linkage from the Fishbein and Ajzen model."

Have you been reading them smart books again?

[Whit Stevens]

That article really disapointed me. First, once commenter at MR noted that the economists supposedly fighting the good fight against the mainstream are tenured at Harvard, Princeton and UC-Berkley. One is a former vice-chairman at the Fed. Those don't sound like people that are shut-out of the profession to me.

Further, it describes mainstream econ as believing that free markets are "always" superior to government regulation. I learned about the concept of market failure in Econ 101. Even the quite libertarian economists seem to concede that there are at least some cases in which government regulation may provide an optimal solution.