ABSTRACT
The previous Chapters have tried to look at what most people in past environmental debates have considered "noneconomic" aspects of individual and social life from a strictly economic point of view. The argument has been that the QOL is as much a part of our economic welfare as anything else is or can be. In the process of developing that argument and trying to develop measures of the economic value of the QOL, some highly abstract theoretical and statistical analysis was necessary. The difficult, abstract nature, and tenuousness of some of that argument may have obscured the central hypotheses and tentative conclusion which have emerged. in this Chapter we draw together those hypotheses and conclusions and discuss their importance for the way we think about economic growth and economic well being. We will present these results as bold assertions intended to encourage more debate, discussion, theoretical analysis and empirical testing.
