Review of the book "Population, Economic Development, and the Environment" (K. Lindahl-Kiessling, H. Landberg, eds)

In the 1970s and 1980s, many social scientists in the areas of population, economy, and environment occupied themselves with qualifying the rigid Limits to Growth model in which the world goes crashing, to use the metaphor of environmental economist Anthony Fisher, blindly into the wall of resource depletion. Thus, for example, the 1986 US National Academy of Sciences study found no reason to believe that population pressure would improve or worsen the allocation of depletable resources over time, but warned, with prescience, that population posed possibly serious problems in the allocation of renewable natural resources, which basically includes the environment as sink. In the 1990s, it would appear, many social scientists are occupied with qualifying the optimism of the equally rigid "exemptionalist" wing of neoclassical economics...