“… economists do not see the problem of pollution as one of eliminating it, but of finding the “optimum” amount of pollution, allowing for the costs, as well as the benefits, of pollution abatement. To most scientists, by contrast, the problems of pollution are purely technical...

Environmental economics has typically adopted two approaches to the demonstration of the optimal level of pollution. The first superimposes a marginal pollution cost (MPC) function on the traditional model of the profit maximising firm and demonstrates that Pareto optimality requires the output...

Richard Quandt has recently noted an increasing tendency on the part of professional economists to introspect their work and activities. Whether this trend derives from some existential angst brought on by a feeling that the marginal social return from the n th journal article does not differ...