Economics describes costs but not values

At our core, we understand that we cannot adequately understand the importance of everything in economic terms.  As a case in point, consider large public parks like Grant Park in Chicago or Central Park in New York City.  Given their location, either would make amazing economic development opportunities, and would fetch prices well above their value as open space.  Businesses would love to incorporate retail outlets into them, urban dwellers would equally welcome the opportunity to live within their boundaries, and cash-strapped cities might have interest in increased tax revenue that could come from developing large portions of them.

But that doesn't happen.

Yes, softball leagues pay permit fees to play in them, and entities like Shakespeare in the Park in New York develop venues within them, but generally, they are large open spaces with public art and a commons that requires no entry fee.  Residents of a city access them freely, bearing only to cost of getting to them.  These parks define major cities and everything that surrounds them, providing a platform from which the city displays itself to the world.

We can look at a space like Central Park and extrapolate the economic value  (as Appleseed, Inc. did for Central Park Conservancy in 2009).  Accountants and economists can document the direct revenue from retail and venues within the park with little dispute dispute.  However, studies often look well beyond those straightforward economic impacts and include real estate value, additional spending by visitors at neighboring businesses, and even public health improvement resulting from the activity available at the park.  We consider the attraction that large public spaces have for tourists and young professionals and that value to a city.  Invariably, we use economic analysis as a rearview mirror to justify something we intuitively know...

We like open space.

We crave it.  We spend ninety percent of our life indoors, and whenever we can, we like to see trees, and flowers, and walk somewhere without a predominance of concrete and steel.  A Nature Conservancy study found a majority of all Americans prefer National Parks to man-made tourist attractions for family vacations.  Our wiring pushes us to live within an outdoor world, and try as we might to perfect the indoors, we find ourselves looking regularly to mimic (poorly) the value of the outdoors.

As we move forward looking to maintain and improve quality of life for the nine billion people who will inhabit this planet, we must remember that although economics does an outstanding job of helping us to distribute scarce resources, it does - at best - and average job of truly reflecting that which we define as important.  Our great urban green spaces serve as an example of decisions made because we know they are right, justified after-the-fact through economic analysis, but which at their core just make sense.

I hope that we find the strength to recognize the value of this type of decision making as equal ...or even superior... to decisions based solely on economic merit.