Background
D.’ARGE, Ralph Clair was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
D.’ARGE, Ralph Clair was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
Bachelor of Science (Agriculture Economics) California State University, Chico, 1963. Master of Science (Agriculture Economics), Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy Cornell University, 1965, 1967, 1969.
Assistant Professor of Economics, University New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1967-1969. Visiting Scholar, Resources for the Future, Washington, District of Columbia, 1972. Professor of Economics, University California Riverside, 1972-1974.
Scholar, Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy, 1974.
John South. Bugas Distinguished Professor of Economics, University Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, since 1974. Managing Editor, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, since 1973.
Association Editor, National Advisory Council, National Resource J., 1974-1981, since 1981. Editorial Board, Journal of Economic Issues, 1973-1976.
At Cornell University, I became interested in water and other natural resource problems. There seemed to be a substantial void between economic models and biological-physical principles. Foreign the next ten years, my research focussed on discovering methods of connecting economic methodology with concepts
and models from the physical and biological sciences.
Early research efforts were concentrated on water resources planning models embodying benefitcost analysis and engineering design. This led to involvement in a large-scale interdisciplinary effort to develop a more holistic planning methodology, later identified as ‘Technical Com’. At the same time, I became interested in linking pure welfare models with physical principles and co-developed with Kneese and Ayres the first general equilibrium-welfare model explicitly including conservation and matterenergy.
Shortly thereafter I developed the first linkage between economic growth models and concepts of pollution and conservation and introduced the ‘spaceship theorem’.
A secondary but continuing interest in international trade theory led me to explore how pollution may influence patterns of international trade and also to examine the problem of transport-frontier pollution. During this period, Kneese and I thought that the field of resource economics had matured and broadened enough to sustain a scientific journal, so we founded Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. After completing studies on the stratosphere and conducting research on neutrality of environmental laws and property rights, I became interested in pricing the environment and estimating monetary values of public goods in general.
This interest led to a substantial ongoing research effort on techniques to reveal preferences for nonmarket goods, including the ‘contingent valuation method’. Finally, my interest continues on problems of managing the global commons which most recently involved the carbon dioxide problem.