On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us
Jul 2025 · Random House
Ebook
288
Pages
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About this ebook
'The most important person you've never heard of' - The New York Times
'Partha Dasgupta provides the compass we urgently need... by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves.’ - David Attenborough
'This is the best book in economics for a general reader since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.' - Paul R Ehrlich
‘Imagine a football team which measures its success only on the basis of the goals it scores and doesn’t count the goals it concedes. That football team could be losing right through without recognising it...’
For as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture.
The models and metrics tells us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. However, this doesn't account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. For centuries we have been using it as if it were both, but we know now, more than ever, that our demand on the natural world is unsustainable. It's no longer sufficient to only see part of the picture; it's time that our economic models show us the whole thing.
In On Natural Capital, renowned Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal and groundbreaking new approach to economics. Challenging everything that has come before, he asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else?
An urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics, On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.
'Partha Dasgupta provides the compass we urgently need... by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves.’ - David Attenborough
'This is the best book in economics for a general reader since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.' - Paul R Ehrlich
‘Imagine a football team which measures its success only on the basis of the goals it scores and doesn’t count the goals it concedes. That football team could be losing right through without recognising it...’
For as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture.
The models and metrics tells us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. However, this doesn't account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. For centuries we have been using it as if it were both, but we know now, more than ever, that our demand on the natural world is unsustainable. It's no longer sufficient to only see part of the picture; it's time that our economic models show us the whole thing.
In On Natural Capital, renowned Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal and groundbreaking new approach to economics. Challenging everything that has come before, he asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else?
An urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics, On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.
About the author
Partha Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded the 2021 Kew International Medal of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and in 2022 was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire by King Charles III for ‘services to economics and the natural environment’.
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