(clamming, crabbing, and shell collecting)--which totaled 220 million participa- 

 tion days in 1975--was excluded. 



Total expenditures on recreational fishing were $15.2 billion in 1975. 

 This is a poor measure of net social benefits conferred by the fish or the 

 wetlands habitat, but it is a good barometer of (changes in) the number of jobs 

 supported by recreation purchases. The willingness-to-sell an angling day minus 

 the cost of an angling day is one useful measure of the benefits conferred by 

 the activity. In 1971, the average willingness-to-sell a saltwater angling day 

 was $74.47; the average cost for an angling day was only $10.77. 



31. Shabman, L.A., and S.S. Batie. 1978. Economic value of natural coastal 

 wetlands: a critique. Coastal Zone Management Journal 4(3) :231-245. 



The authors give an excellent critique of the work of Gosselink, Odum, and 

 Pope (see reference [9]) and Pope and Gosselink (reference [7]) on imputing 

 values to the preservation benefits of tidal marshes. The ecosystem life support 

 system function performed by wetlands really invokes an energy theory of value. 

 Single-factor theories of value have been used by various economists. Perhaps 

 the most famous of these is Marx's labor theory of value in which the value of 

 various goods and services is determined by the labor content of the commodity. 

 Fixed coefficient, closed, linear activity models with a single factor input have 

 been analyzed in detail to show the existence of a set of equilibrium prices that 

 clear every market. However, the purpose of these complicated demonstrations 

 is didactic; they show the remarkable power of the price mechanism to effectively 

 allocate resources in the absence of any relation between the quantity supplied 

 and the marginal social cost of producing goods and services. 



Shabman and Batie point out that the appropriate technique for estimating 

 wetlands preservation benefits is to estimate the net producer and consumer 

 surplus for each and every wetland function and then estimate the net aggregate 

 social surplus from the ensemble of values attached to the individual functions. 

 The aggregate social surplus will not necessarily be a simple additive, linear 

 function of the social surplus of the individual functions. There are some 

 important omissions from the Shabman-Batie critique. There are really two 

 single-factor theories of value presented in the work of Gosselink, Odum, and 

 Pope. When Gosselink, Odum, and Pope impute the entire value of the commercial 

 harvest of some species to the marsh, they are really using a land theory (more 

 precisely, an areal -extent-of-land-surface) of value. The inconsistency in the 

 two theories is neatly resolved; Gosselink, Odum, and Pope ([9]) and Pope and 

 Gosselink ([8]) favor the theory that gives the highest preservation benefits. 

 The really important flaw in the Shabman-Batie critique is that it takes no 

 cognizance of the work of Gosselink, Odum, and Pope as rhetoric. Many economic 

 arguments are rhetorical. The rhetoric is usually not aimed at first year 

 graduate students in economics. As a piece of persuasive rhetoric, the single- 

 factor theories used to impute wetlands preservations benefits have some 

 strengths, but they also have some weaknesses. For example, it is impossible 

 to consistently discuss the loss of environmentally sound jobs from the 

 diminishing commercial harvests that are contingent on the existence of wetland 

 habitat if all of the value of the commercial harvest is imputed to the wetland 

 and none is imputed to the labor input. 



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