S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup

Sigfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup was born in Langenberg, Germany in 1906. After doing his masters work in Illinois, he returned to Bonn to get his PhD in 1931. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany for the United States, arriving at UC Berkeley and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1938.

He died in 1980 at the Men's Faculty Club.

Career highlights:

Wantrup's work on the institutions of natural resource management is neither well-known nor widely cited.

2008 Wantrup Fellow, David Zetland, has a series of blog posts at aguanomics that point out the relevance (and even prescience) of his opinions on the importance of institutions with respect to natural resources.

Of particular interest is Wantrup's notion of three decision levels: At the highest level is basic law (e.g., the constitution), which affects the second-level decisions on how to form institutions (e.g., water organizations). These institutions—in turn—affect third-level decisions of how to allocate water (e.g., among crops or within an urban sector). Wantrup points out that economists who critique decisions at the third level are perhaps missing the importance of constraints or influence coming from the second level. His critique, which dates from the 1960s, is still relevant—economists still spend most of their time on optimal decisions without taking institutions into account. In taking his institutional approach, Wantrup discussed and integrated common property, the impacts of tenure rights on conservation, the Precautionary Principle, conservation land use planning, and the importance of endangered species and biodiversity.

Wantrup derived criteria for sustainability that included the "Safe Minimum Standard" (the threshold below which loss is catastrophic), irreversibility, and unknown future probability (Option Value). He also wrote on the “Extramarket Values” of collective goods.

Ciriacy-Wantrup left a sizable bequest to the University of California that is used to fund the "S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowships in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy," which are awarded according to the following criteria:

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