"Green Economics": Turning Mainstream Thinking on Its Head

Thomas Prugh

A few years ago, a homeowner in Las Vegas—a place that gets maybe five inches of rainfall a year—was confronted by a water district inspector for running an illegal sprinkler in the middle of the day. The man became very angry. He said, "You people and all your stupid rules—you're trying to turn this place into a desert!"

Ideas about how the world works that don't accord with reality can be unhelpful. That's especially true about mainstream economics, which is based in part on ideas that made a lot of sense at some point in the last 250 years but that have outlived their time and usefulness. These ideas—such as the reliance on GDP as the key index of general wellbeing—still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.

But in recent decades, economics theoreticians and researchers have suggested a variety of reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. My colleague Gary Gardner and I describe seven of these in Chapter 1 of the Worldwatch Institute's latest report, State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy:

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