January/February 1995
Utne Reader
Herman Daly is turning economics inside out by putting earth and
its diminishing natural resources, instead of 'economic man' and
market relations, at the center of the field. In For the Common
Good and other books, Daly traces the ways in which
environmental degradation is changing the meaning of growth and
other key ideas of 'the dismal science.' A research scholar at the
University of Maryland and a former World Bank officer, Daly gives
a compelling theoretical edge to the tenets of environmental
faith.
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'I'm no genius,' says economist Herman Daly, '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.'
This modest self-assessment aside, many who know his work are
convinced that Daly's way of asking naive, honest questions--in
four books and more than one hundred articles--amounts to a kind of
reverse Copernican revolution in economics--a revolution that, to
quote one reviewer of Daly's For the Common Good (1989,
written with John B. Cobb Jr.), '[puts] the earth and its
inhabitants back at the center of the economic universe.'
A former professor at Louisiana State University, a six-year
employee of the World Bank (with which he parted more or less
amicably--'I was tired of the pomposity,' he says), and currently a
research scholar at the University of Maryland, the 56-year-old
Daly brings the careful, fluent lucidity of an experienced teacher
to his exposition of what's wrong with what some have called 'the
dismal science.' What's wrong are some of the most basic
assumptions of economics.
'For the last two hundred years,' he says, 'the dominant goal
has been to make economies grow. We've finessed everything else,
including justice, telling ourselves that we'll just grow more and
then there'll be more justice. But we are on a collision course
with biophysical reality.'