Sublime

the dominance of the economist’s perspective on the world has only spread, even into the language of public life. In hospitals and clinics worldwide, patients and doctors have been recast as customers and service-providers. In fields and forests on every continent, economists are calculating the monetary value of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem se

ecological economist Peter Victor

a knowledge economy.

‘Let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest,’ wrote the seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon.40 That perspective was echoed by W. Arthur Lewis, founder of development economics, in his 1949 book Economics: Man and His Material Means, which set out to study ‘the ways in which mankind tries to wre

economist Adam Smith,

adding that it is the “second derivative”—the changes in the rate of growth of a company’s sales—that really tell a venture investor whether to back it.