ABSTRACT

The Dasgupta Review is the latest attempt at justifying financialisation of Nature, but also much more. It represents a high point in applying concepts of capital and wealth accumulation comprehensively to all aspects of human and non-human existence. Unravelling the flaws in the arguments, contradictions and underlying motives requires both understand of and cutting through the specialist language, neoclassical economic models, mathematics and rhetoric. We offer a critical guide to and deconstruction of Dasgupta’s biodiversity economics and reveal its real aim. Framing critical biodiversity loss as an issue of asset management and population size is a blind to avoid questioning economic growth, which remains unchallenged and depoliticized despite apparently recognizing natural limits. Dasgupta ignores long-standing problems with capital theory and social cost–benefit analysis. Rather than a scientific review of biodiversity economics he offers impossible to achieve valuation, based on old flawed theories and methods, embedded in an unsavoury political economy.

摘要

达斯古普塔评论这是为自然金融化辩护的最新尝试，但还有更多。它代表了将资本和财富积累的概念全面应用于人类和非人类存在的各个方面的一个高点。揭开论点、矛盾和潜在动机中的缺陷需要理解和切穿专业语言、新古典经济模型、数学和修辞。我们为 Dasgupta 的生物多样性经济学提供了重要的指导和解构，并揭示了它的真正目标。将严重的生物多样性丧失视为资产管理和人口规模的问题是避免质疑经济增长的盲目性，尽管显然认识到自然限制，但经济增长仍然没有受到挑战和去政治化。Dasgupta 忽略了资本理论和社会成本效益分析的长期问题。他提供的不是对生物多样性经济学的科学评论，而是基于旧的有缺陷的理论和方法，嵌入在令人讨厌的政治经济中，不可能实现估值。