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1938–2022 United States
Herman Edward Daly (July 21, 1938 – October 28, 2022) was an American ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park.
United States Academics Economists Also known as: Herman Daly, Herman Edward Daly
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The cosmology of scientific materialism … considers the cosmos an absurd accident, and life within it to be no more than another accident.
There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.
Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.
Organisms cannot survive in a medium consisting of their own final outputs. Neither can economies.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.
to Herman Daly in: Tristan Clark (2007)
Even if we can never quantify [satisfaction or happiness]... as precisely as we currently quantify GNP,... perhaps it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
I'm no genius, and others can outwork me. What I do is ask the naive, honest questions, and then I’m not satisfied until I get the answers.
Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.
Steady-State Economics (1977)
If economic reality is actually so complex that it can only be described by complicated mathematical models that add epicycles to epicycles and externalities to externalities, then the reality should be simplified.
Once we have replaced the basic premise of “more is better” with the much sounder axiom that “enough is best,” the social and technical problems of moving to a steady state become solvable, perhaps even trivial.
It is imaginable that someday we will discover how to create materials from nothing, how to achieve perpetual motion, how to reverse time’s arrow, and so on. But to take such science-fiction miracles as a basis for economic policy would be absurd.
Economists have focused too much on the economy’s circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract. Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an ever larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and digesting it more thoroughly.
Herman E. Daly (2008)
The optimal scale of the economy is smaller, the greater (a) the degree of complementarity between natural and man-made capital; (b) our desire for direct experience of nature; and (c) our estimate of both the intrinsic and instrumental value of other species. The smaller the optimal scale of the economy, the sooner its physical growth becomes uneconomic.
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