This book is not intended to be a new version of my earlier book, The Costs of Economic Growth, although some of the arguments which first appeared in that essay cannot be left out of the present volume without leaving gaps in the development of its thesis. It goes without saying, however, that the present work, like the first, departs from the economist's conventional treatment of social welfare which tends to the conclusion that economic growth would indeed raise social welfare in the absence of those effects which are classified in the literature as 'external diseconomies'