> There is 0 value given to the experience of visiting a natural space or to forests which take thousands of years to grow which quite literally could not be reconstructed for any amount of money (for example) ... we need something more at a philosophical level from economics than we are getting.
This is a different kind of problem than you think. It's not that we don't value it, it's that the value is diffuse. Every person in the area values the forest an average of $100, there are a million people in the area, therefore the value of the forest "should" be a hundred million dollars.
The problem is that the government has to fill a budget hole and there is a logging company that would pay ten million dollars to log the forest. The government could also get the same money by reducing the defense budget, or replacing some government employees with less expensive contractors, or replacing corporate income tax with VAT so international corporations have to pay their taxes, but all of those groups have better lobbyists than the public at large. So the public (and the forest) loses.
But the problem wasn't that we couldn't calculate the value, it was that knowingly destroying ninety million dollars in value in order to have ten million somewhere else is a thing that happens when you have a collective action problem like that, because the value destroyed is spread across a million people and none of them have enough incentive or power as an individual to stand up and stop it.
So the problem isn't the valuation, it's how do we solve the collective action problem?
This is a different kind of problem than you think. It's not that we don't value it, it's that the value is diffuse. Every person in the area values the forest an average of $100, there are a million people in the area, therefore the value of the forest "should" be a hundred million dollars.
The problem is that the government has to fill a budget hole and there is a logging company that would pay ten million dollars to log the forest. The government could also get the same money by reducing the defense budget, or replacing some government employees with less expensive contractors, or replacing corporate income tax with VAT so international corporations have to pay their taxes, but all of those groups have better lobbyists than the public at large. So the public (and the forest) loses.
But the problem wasn't that we couldn't calculate the value, it was that knowingly destroying ninety million dollars in value in order to have ten million somewhere else is a thing that happens when you have a collective action problem like that, because the value destroyed is spread across a million people and none of them have enough incentive or power as an individual to stand up and stop it.
So the problem isn't the valuation, it's how do we solve the collective action problem?