The overwhelming majority of people in the world, even those living in coastal areas, have never seen a coral reef in real life. Some may have seen it on TV or in print media, but most people are aware of them only by name.

That's why the economic argument is a good way to communicate the importance of these resources. Someone who has never left Kentucky in their entire life may not care about The Grand Barrier Reef in Australia, but they may care about the global economic impact of losing it.

Dead wrong. Putting a price tag on something will allow to value that thing against others. Then you loose all the intangible values such as : beauty, the fact that corals are vital to some species, etc. So, if you estimate the value of coral, then you can say that it's less valuable than something else. I can follow you if you compute the price in terms "price to build" instead of "value", that is : how much euros do you need to rebuild the coral reef.

Same argument with fresh water : some people think that if you put a price on it, then people will be more careful when using it. That value price. Now, let's compute how much it takes to clean water (in a way it doesn't taste the chemicals used to clean it).

Nevertheless, teaching people to appreciate the value of things by reducing these to an amount of money is absolutely destroying the so-many-axis-of-values one may envision for one simple thing... It's blinding people to the richness of what they may encounter.

How much dollars are you worth ?

And what is to stop anybody from extending the economic argument to that very person in Kentucky. "This fella has an economic value of X... We could get on just fine without him/her". This is already being done to an extent with companies buying "dead peasant" life insurance on their employees [1].

The point is that is that people along with the environment and the species we share it with have value that is outside of their economic contributions.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/is-there-a-dead-peasant-life-...

What's wrong with putting an economic "value" on a human life? It is something we all implicitly and explicitly do every do. Implicitly, by deciding how much money to spend on increasing our own safety (e.g., how much extra to pay for a safer car). Explicitly, by things like insurance as you mentioned.

Burying your head in the sand and refusing to understand that the world is full of trade-offs, which can most easily be expressed via economics, doesn't help at all.

It's because they are most easily expressed via economics, but a far cry from most accurately expressed that way.

Because most of us already have a value system that wants to protect human life. But many people's values around money is more weighty than around protecting other things in our environment. So it is easier to piggy-back on existing values when possible than convince people to adopt new ones.

Isn't it the problem? They may care because of the $$$. We should care about our planet because is where we live! Harming any part of the ecosystem has more impact that only the money, and there are some problems that we cannot predict in advance.

I've been saying it for years, but: The only political issue that matters is education. Everything else is tactical.

A nation's education system should be responsible for raising the next generation of citizens, propagating our national identity and cultural values to the next generation while imbuing them with the ability to think critically to ward off corrupting ideas. Successful nations, especially empires like the US, needs a common world view to glue citizens together... social cohesion, progress, and economic success go hand in hand.

In contrast, our dismal K-12 system is built to churn out 20th century factory employees rather than educated 21st century citizens. We treat school like a glorified day care rather than a vital cultural institution, leading to a tremendously wasteful and inefficient K-college system. It's ludicrous that most Americans would fail our citizenship test... which requires getting 6 out of 10 multiple-choice questions right. Ludicrous.

Whose cultural values would be taught? I'd guess that the majority of the US doesn't share your particular social values, not to mention how much those values have changed over the last 20 years (e.g. on things like gay marriage as an obvious example).

Regarding values: An emphasis would be placed on Constitutional values, with an intentional focus on ambiguity and how the Constitution has/has not changed over time. Slavery and civil rights would be a fascinating topic to cover through this lens.

The goal should be training new citizens to be unbiased critical thinkers by exposing them to a flood of new ideas while teachers emphasize socratic questioning, debate, communication skills, research, and related skills (eg statistics). Disagreement is absolutely fine, that's the American way... as long as students have the tools and mindset to effectively research and debate new ideas, with the humbleness to change positions.

Ideally, education also would involve a mandatory exchange program to expose students to other lifestyles and subcultures while continuing to work through their school program.

Really? The current US education system seems to "churn out" fewer people with useful vocational skills ("20th century factory employees") than ever before.

Yep, we've seen years of cut-backs on the vocational side because parents believe their kids must go to college... so we're left with a system designed for the era of straight-out-of-highschool vocational workers, operating in a parental environment that sees college as an absolute necessity, and labor market where most of those degrees equate to expensive GEDs.

Terribly inefficient. The whole system warrants refactoring.

K-12, tradeschools, internships/apprenticeships, college, med/law schools, adult retraining, enlistment, officer training... it's a ball of spaghetti. We need to review each component and the overall system through the lens of modern societal and economic needs.

I'm going to guess that someone who has never left Kentucky has enough local environmental concerns -- fracking, flooding, tornadoes, for starters -- to not care one bit about a coral reef somewhere, no matter what some economist values it at.

If you estimate the value of everything at "priceless," then it's impossible to make decisions which necessarily involve tradeoffs. Quantification lends specificity to complex systems.

Ok, them if someone probes your value is negative, because for example you have an average job but also you are sick and the cost to keep you alive are high. Them we should get rid of you. Because economically you are not viable.

You cannot make decision based on your economic value. Should we destroy an animal race just because we think their economic value is low? What about the side effects we don't know? what about everybody has the same rights? what about fucking up the environment in some countries because they are poor? What about the poor child that wont have access to proper education? We just don't care because their economic value is low?

Right, things/animals/people have value beyond their economic value. And to make decisions, we need to quantify in some way what this value is. To see this, consider a risk/cost curve for an environmental cleanup:

$100k : 1000 micromorts

$300k : 100 micromorts

$500k : 10 micromorts

$1m : 8 micromorts

$2m : 6 micromorts

$10m : 4 micromorts

$1b : 2 micromorts

$100b : 0.5 micromorts

Practically speaking, there is a need to make decisions which involve tradeoffs between money and other forms of value. Making these kinds of decisions rationally means quantifying non-economic forms of value.

Also, as more food for thought, consider the death penalty, in which a society deems that the true "value" of a person -- distinct from their economic value -- is negative.