What Every Conservation Biologist Should Know about Economic Theory

What Every Conservation Biologist Should Know about Economic Theory - GOWDY - 2010 - Conservation Biology - Wiley Online Library: "The last century has seen the ascendance of a core economic model, which we will refer to as Walrasian economics. This model is driven by the psychological assumptions that humans act only in a self-referential and narrowly rational way and that production can be described as a self-contained circular flow between firms and households. These assumptions have critical implications for the way economics is used to inform conservation biology. Yet the Walrasian model is inconsistent with a large body of empirical evidence about actual human behavior, and it violates a number of basic physical laws. Research in behavioral science and neuroscience shows that humans are uniquely social animals and not self-centered rational economic beings."