Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

This article examines the career of American economist Robert Dorfman (1916–2002), marked by pioneering work on linear programming in the 1950s, interdisciplinary research on water management in the 1960s, and contributions to environmental economics in the 1970s. It identifies his main...