ABSTRACT
How does the “old economics” of natural resources differ from the “new economics”? The old economics was mostly economics. The new economics is mostly politics. The agonizing question confronting the new economics has troubled political theorists from the time of the Hebrew prophets to this very day: How shall society be organized so that the preferences of the morally or aesthetically sensitive minority will triumph? Where majorities are rarely mobilized, the question may be rephrased to ask how our good minority may prevail over their bad minority. If only a superior few truly love the remote and virgin wilderness, for instance, how may this opportunity for solitary communion with nature be preserved against hostile masses or rival elites? The new economics of natural resources appears to be designed to answer this question indirectly without quite raising it to a conscious level.
