Next September marks the 50th anniversary of Carson’s Silent Spring, and next October marks 40 years since the Limits to Growth report, but environmental threats are greater than ever before. This paper suggests that inadequate action over environment after half a century points to political and social constraints on collective action on environment as being the main obstacle to reacting to environmental threats. This may help explain the inadequacies of the market-based policies which dominate the agenda, both on environmental policy and elsewhere. These policies are based on an inadequate individualist logic. Furthermore, they continue to be maintained during an economic crisis which the economics discipline has neither predicted nor seems able to explain. This may draw the adequacy of orthodox economics to explain aggregate behaviour into question. The paper re-visits critiques of orthodox economics with a view to developing an alternative research agenda. The rational- choice models ubiquitous throughout economics were devised for substitution, and are inapplicable to situations where surpluses are unavailable for trade. The orthodox treatment also confuses objective and subjective approaches and the resultant problems of aggregation render it unable to adequately derive public policy from its methodological individualism. Nonetheless, the questions which economics claims to address remain, and are seldom directly engaged with by political researchers. What this paper proposes is a research agenda investigating the political economy of allocation, linking institutional economics with Hirsch’s concept of social scarcity. The paper then considers possible allocation mechanisms for socially scarce resources, and suggests potential corresponding political principles. This agenda would help synthesise often disparate research, and yield a stronger influence on policy agendas such as environment. References: Hirsch F. (1976) Social Limits to Growth, Harvard University Press
