Wantrup's Work 1

I am a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, but I didn't know who Wantrup was when I applied for this position. I have been doing some reading, and, in the following few days, I will tell you about his academic work. In this 1971 paper [PDF], he applies a safety first philosophy to managing natural resources:

Suffice it to say that the objectives of environmental policy can often be compared to the objectives of an insurance policy against serious losses that resist quantitative measurement. There the objective is not to maximize a definite quantitative net economic yield but to choose premium payments and benefits in such a way that maximum possible losses are minimized. As a special case of this strategy, "a safe minimum standard" is frequently a valid and relevant criterion for conservation policy.

[snip]

The emphasis of this approach is on avoiding overuse rather than on achieving optimum use, on establishing base levels rather than on locating peaks, on not entering dead-end streets and on keeping direction rather than on computing the shortest distance, and on mobility and adaptability of productive factors rather than on their optimum combinations. This approach does not pretend to establish criteria for optimizing social welfare. But it offers effective direction signals turn by turn for public actions in environmental policy to increase social welfare.

Readers may (or may not) be surprised to know that economics is not taught that way these days (at least not where I got my PhD). Instead, we are taught how to "optimally exploit" natural resources. And some people would say that the conditions of many of our natural resources has suffered from our exercise of these techniques.

Bottom Line: Listen to Wantrup -- Manage your natural resources with caution.