IF there is one person on this year’s GG2 Power List whose influence has become truly global, it’s the Cambridge economist, Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. Ever since he published his landmark review, The Economics of Diversity, he has been deluged with invitations from governments, universities and organisations and individuals from all over the world inviting him to come and speak to them about his efforts to change the very “grammar” of economic planning.
To put it simply, he believes that when governments plan projects such as dams, airports, roads, ports and the like, the consequences on nature shouldn’t just be a last minute add on but be at the heart of all economic thinking.
He also says that GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is no longer an adequate measure of what is good for a country. Instead, what a government needs to be concerned about is the impact of development on natural resources such as rivers, oceans and forests. His radical recommendation is that the world should set up something like the United Nations to protect and preserve nature.
“Put simply: without nature, there would be no life,” emphasised Dasgupta. “The economics of biodiversity is therefore the economics of nature. But nature’s resilience is being severely eroded, with biodiversity declining faster than at any time in human history.”
At the rate nature is being degraded, “we require 1.6 earths to maintain the world’s current living standards”.
He said: “I have one very important recommendation, which is we now need a global Marshall Plan for nature – like the Marshall Plan post Second World War to revive European economies.”
Nature is so important that Dasgupta thinks it should be taught to school children from the earliest age: “In fact, the review is ending with a plea to have nature studies as part of the permanent education of our children – from the beginning, absolutely. From early Montessori as it were. And then as they grow up, I don’t think it should be stopped. It should be compulsory, like how languages have to be compulsory.”
In January 2023, one of the highest honours in the UK – Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire – was bestowed on Dasgupta “for services to economics and to the natural environment”.
There are said to be only about 120 people who have been given this honour, among them “national treasure” Sir David Attenborough. Dasgupta is also likely to receive his accolade from King Charles.
“I approve of him,” quipped Dasgupta, 80, who is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College at the university.
The King “is an environmentalist,” added the economist, who has a knighthood from 2002.
“The honours of Knight or Dame Grand Cross are the highest level awards that can be made in the Order of the British Empire,” explained a Cabinet Office spokesman, who added that “the award dates back to 1917”.
“The recipient will normally have demonstrated outstanding achievement or service such as to warrant their already being made a dame or knight. Subsequently, they will have gone on to demonstrate further outstanding achievement or service which merits additional recognition. This additional service will usually have included a substantial element of public service. Very few Grand Cross awards are made – a maximum of two per honours list and often fewer.”
Dasgupta’s review was commissioned by the treasury in 2019 when Philip (now Lord) Hammond was the chancellor of the exchequer. It was launched in February 2021 at the Royal Society in London.
“I was not so much interested in influencing the treasury as much as influencing the concerned citizen,” said Dasgupta, stressing, “My reader is the concerned citizen.”
Prince Charles, as he was then, agreed with the review’s conclusions: “It is sheer madness to continue on this path. Sir Partha Dasgupta’s seminal review is a call to action that we must heed, for it falls on our watch and we must not fail.”
The full review is 610 pages. As it is very technical, Dasgupta has described it as “professorial”. He said his findings had to convince national and global decision makers, which they appear to have done. For the layman there is a 103-page summary.
Cambridge University Press is publishing the review as a book in the summer. Even though the review is available in full on the treasury website, Dasgupta said “quite a number of people actually prefer to have a book to read. I’ve added another 70-80 pages of material in the form of boxes for graduate students, so it will be even longer.”
The treasury is making sure that Dasgupta’s message is not lost in translation. The English original is now available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
During the pandemic, Dasgupta did some 200 Zoom meetings with people in Bangladesh, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Canada and other countries. He engaged “not only with professionals from environmental and development charities, government departments, international organisations, scientific associations, think tanks, academic journals, literary magazines, research institutes, business schools, and groups representing indigenous people; but numerically even more, with financiers, bankers, farmers, ecologists, legal scholars, politicians, environmentalists, agronomists, statisticians, journalists, clerics, Earth scientists, and national and international civil servants”.
He told Power List: “I couldn’t go anywhere during the pandemic since I’ve been very cautious. You know, as my age, I don’t want to go around travelling like crazy and giving lectures. I can do it from Zoom. Yes, I received a hell of a lot of invitations. I just said no to going to Japan. I should be going to Stockholm in May. The UK embassy in Stockholm will be one of my hosts. The other is the Stockholm School of Economics, which is a business school.”
One invitation he did accept earlier this year was to Chile which holds an annual festival of ideas called Congreso Futuro. It’s the largest science, knowledge, and innovation gathering in Latin America, “bringing the public into contact with the brilliant minds that are creating future”.
Among those who attended the gatherings was one Dr Christina Jayne Colclough, founder of “The Why Not Lab”, which specialises in the “future of workers and the politics of technology”.
She tweeted: “I was so fortunate to meet and spend time with Sir Dasgupta in Chile recently at the Congreso Futuro. His work is inspiring governments to reimagine their models for productivity calculations. Hurrah.”
Dasgupta spoke about the trip during which his hosts were anxious to learn from him and also show him something of their country.
“Well, that was a lot of fun, really very nice indeed,” he said.
His wife, Carol, was also invited. “That was very gracious of them.”
Chile is just one of many countries in the world which has taken his review to heart and intends adopting some of his recommendations. For a start it has set up an organisation to gather statistical information on Chile’s natural resources.
One of Dasgupta’s talks was in Santiago, where he was based during his 10-day trip. The British embassy was also involved because Chile was marking the 200th anniversary of a friendship treaty with the UK.
He was hosted by the government of Chile which had “created a new department called the ‘Committee for Natural Capital’ – like the Office of National Statistics in this country. They would be providing statistics about the state of the environment in the country and be part of their government planning apparatus. They would be part of the finance ministry and the president signed the decree while I was there. I was invited to the signing ceremony and I gave a little talk and met cabinet ministers and so forth. Then I spoke to the committee itself in the afternoon, and had a session with them. They made me work hard,” he joked.
Then followed a trip of a lifetime when he could observe the effects of climate change. “Carol and I were flown to Patagonia on the southern tip of the country. We went to King George Island. It’s a field station for glaciologists, scientists and some biologists now because they’re discovering all sorts of new insects and so forth as the ice recedes. So that was quite something. We went on a two-hour boat trip and went next to the glaciers. That was huge. That was very impressive. And Antarctica was breathtaking.”
Three years ago, just before the start of the pandemic, Dasgupta spent a month in New Zealand which has also set up a department to monitor its natural resources.
The issues raised in his review are being discussed by many governments but they are focusing on what is relevant to them, he said. “Some have rain forests or are mountainous, some have deserts or grasslands.”
He is happy to let his review speaks for itself. He certainly does not believe in hectoring governments and telling them what they should or shouldn’t do.
“The issue is whether governments throughout the world will work with it,” he speculated. “I don’t know what India plans to do or China or, never mind, Russia. These are key players.”
He accepted that the review, which was being studied by governments around the world, had taken on a life of its own.
“Because it’s a global report review, I wasn’t targeting any particular country,” he pointed out. “There are illustrations for many countries, obviously. Pretty much every country has faced these dilemmas. And there are studies in many of those countries which I knew of. These illustrations are from different regions, not so much countries, but regions that are ecological zones.
“The review has taken on a life of its own because the time was right. People have been very worried about the loss of biodiversity. For example, Attenborough’s programmes about the loss of species have been hugely influential. They were all descriptions of what’s going on. They were extraordinarily powerful images. But there wasn’t a language you could use to say, ‘Well, what do we do? How do we think about daily life? How do we think about economic life?’
“The review taken on a life of its own because I wasn’t writing a manual. I wasn’t writing a book of instructions. I wasn’t finger wagging saying what you should do. My work has been in not instructing people what to do. I don’t believe in pontificating. People should make up their own mind. What they want from an economist is a scientific, professional approach to life and the problems of resource allocation.”
He set out his approach: “It’s more a grammar. It’s providing a language for thinking about nature as an economist, so people can run with it and do what they want with it. Farmers can take it, businessmen can, investors can. It’s not meant for any particular person. I wasn’t writing it for the (UK) treasury – although they commissioned it.”
Dasgupta was born in Dacca (now Dhaka) on 17 November, 1942, into an Indian academic family, graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1965, completed his PhD there in 1968, and returned to the university in 1985 as professor of economics after stints at the LSE in London and Stanford in California. He retired in 2010 because Cambridge has “a 67-year-old retirement thing” but he remains “very active”.
His father, Amiya Kumar Dasgupta, who has been hailed by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as “one of the founding fathers of modern economics in India”, greatly influenced his son.
“My father was a real scholar,” said Dasgupta. “What I learned from my father was to think logically based on evidence. He was truly an intellectual.”
“My overarching aim is the reconstruction of economics to include nature as an ingredient,” said Dasgupta. “Truly sustainable economic growth and development means recognising that our long-term prosperity relies on rebalancing our demand on nature’s goods and services with its capacity to supply them.”
Dasgupta argues that the species extinction crisis we face – of our own making – is undermining the “productivity, resilience and adaptability of nature. This, in turn, has put our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing at serious risk.”
“Nature is our home,” he said. “Good economics demands we manage it better.”
