The Sustainable Development Theory: A Critical Approach, Volume 1

This book argues that the theory of sustainable development lost some of its rigor because of two main reasons. The first manifests itself as an inflation of concepts that hampers the correct understanding of sustainability's essence. The second one consists of a departure from the traditional scientific sources of the classicists and, in part, neoclassicists. Exploiting relevant areas of their works, the authors outline the theoretical framework necessary to promote a healthy version of sustainability. Of utmost interest prove to be areas such as: the formation process of natural prices and natural rate of interest; placing growth before employment and placing production before distribution, consumption, and social justice.

The main idea of the book consists of a call for breaking away from the impure forms of the theory of sustainable development and its reconstruction through the reconciliation with the laws of healthy growth as they are highlighted in the works of thefounders. The authors make the case for an approach to sustainable development that is holistic, macroeconomic, and institutionalist, where social, ecological, and economic components are reconciled. This work presents a fresh perspective in the context of current works on sustainability, serving as an accessible research resource and public policy decision guide.

Auteur

Ion Pohoa is Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania.

Delia-Elena Diaconau is Research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania.

Vladimir-Mihai Crupenschi is Associate Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania.

Contenu

Introduction

Chapter I: The avatars of sustainability: A necessary prolegomenon

I.1. Why is it important to look back to the founders?

I.2. Sustainable development: everything and nothing

I.3. How do we understand the Brundtland Report?

I.4. What is sustainability? The sustainability-durability-resilience kit.

Chapter II: Classical insights in support of sustainability

II.1. Work division and human cooperation fundamental determinants

II.2. Social harmony in an economically stratified world.

II.3. The institutionalism of economic order at the classics:

II.3.1. Job description for the invisible hand

II.3.2. Informal institutions of an open economy: money, market, and property.

II.4. Work, accumulation and profit in the preface to the economy of happiness. The exception of the happy abstinence of J.S. Mill

II.5. Competition in the free market and the origin of bubble-free GDP.

II.6. Does economic geography matter? Ricardo and Malthus: the physical limits of development

II.7. Moral responsibility in Adam Smith's language

Conclusion: An Adamist economy: a sustainable vision.

Chapter III: How sustainable are the neoclassics?

III.1. Sustainability does not agree with:

1.1. Homo economicus rationalis and his environmental void

1.2. The supply and demand pendulum with limitless resources: A macro economy for an ideal world.

III.2. Fulcrums:

2.1. Pareto or what each generation deserves

2.2. Two sentences from Walras:

2.2.1. There are no ideal sustainability models

2.2.2. Economic efficiency is nothing if it is not social as well

2.3. Drifts towards environment sustainability: A. Marshall, A.C. Pigou Conclusion: Neoclassical macroeconomics: lacking sustainability

Chapter IV: The social strain: reversed causalities and the risk of weakening the lesson on sustainability

IV.1. When social peace undermines the logic of sustainability IV.2. The anti-social heresy of anti-economism

IV.3. Reassigning the development paradigm in the area of distributive justice

IV.3.1. Distribution before production: The workplace promise

IV.3.2. Pikettism or the pathos of quantitative levelling

IV.4. Market social economy of sustainability

Conclusions: Redistributive justice: a Trojan horse of unsustainability

Chapter V: Founder benchmarks in environmental economics

V.1. Whose land is the mother of wealth? What means the physiocracy today?

V.2. Why is the classical Marxist preoccupied with pollution and resource exhaustion?

V.3. The reasonable pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus

V.4. Marshall and Pigou: The pollutant has to pay.

Conclusions: The environment as an implicit preoccupation of economic growth

Chapter VI: Decrease a logical inadequacy

VI.1. Between hypocrisy and law-like necessity

VI.2. Is Mill a predecessor of decrease?

VI.3. The seductive logic of decrease: Nicolae Georgescu-Roegen VI.4. Happiness through decreasing

VI.5. Towards a new consumption dialectic

Chapter VII: Validation of the classics: Long term sustainability

VII.1. Schumpeter, Kuznets, Davos. A new face of creative destruction

VII.2. Evidence of classical lesson confirmation <...