Herman Daly

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In Daly's neat and compelling formulation, ozone depletion, the death of fish stocks, runaway population growth--the whole congeries of environmental degradations--are showing economic conventional wisdom up as self-contradictory: 'We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.' The reason? The world economy is far larger with respect to the biosphere than it was during the age of the classical economists.

'The old textbooks saw an economy as a circular flow of value from households to firms back to households, via production and consumption,' he explains. 'They abstracted out the environment completely, and that wasn't stupid at a time when economies were small compared to ecosytems. But now, with growth having gone on for so long we're actually spending our natural capital. It's reached an insane point.'

Classical economics also abstracted the human being into homo economicus--economic man, a creature defined primarily as a pursuer of self-interest. But for Daly no economy can serve human beings if economics refuses to see the need for cooperative endeavor and the building of a collective good--community, in a word. At the same time, as Daly writes in For the Common Good, 'it is important to think of the community served by the economy as enduring indefinitely through time....The industrial economy is only a part of what Wendell Berry has called the Great Economy--the economy that sustains the total web of life and everything that depends on the land.

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