How Many People Can Earth Support in Comfort? [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Partha Dasgupta | Contemporary economics is mostly unconcerned with distortions to individual incentives that lead to population and consumption overshoots. Currently the overshoot would appear to be in consumption in the rich world and fertility in the poor world. In this lecture Professor Dasgupta will trace those distortions to an absence of adequate property rights to the biosphere and to the fact that human preferences are socially embedded. Those distortions also encourage technological advancements to be rapacious in the use of Nature’s resources, thus exacerbating the problems. Using global assessments of the biosphere’s capacity to provide humanity with the demands we make of it, he will provide crude estimates of the size of the global population that Earth can support in comfort under foreseeable technologies and institutions. Partha Dasgupta, was born in Dhaka (at that time in India) and educated in Varanasi (Matriculation 1958 from Rajghat Besant Scho