Herman Daly

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Herman Daly is an ecological economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States.

He was Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, where he helped to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. While there, he was engaged in environmental operations work in Latin America.

Before joining the World Bank, Daly was Alumni Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University. He is a co-founder and associate editor of the journal, Ecological Economics.

His interest in economic development, population, resources, ecological economics, and the environment has resulted in over a hundred articles as well as numerous books, including Steady-State Economics (1977; 1991), Valuing the Earth (1993), Beyond Growth (1996), and Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999). He is co-author with theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. of For the Common Good (1989; 1994) which received the Grawemeyer Award for ideas for improving World Order. Daly has also written an economics textbook with Joshua Farley entitled Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (2003).

He is also a recipient of a Honorary Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize), the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Sophie Prize (Norway) and the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute.

He is widely credited with having originated the idea of uneconomic growth, though some credit this to Marilyn Waring who developed it more completely in her study of the UN System of National Accounts.

[edit] Quotes

“If you’ve eaten poison, you must get rid of the substances that are making you ill. Let us then, apply the stomach pump to the doctrines of economic growth that we have been forced-fed for decades.”

“We cannot have too many people alive simultaneously lest we destroy carrying capacity and thereby reduce the number of lives possible in all subsequent time periods.”

“Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by physicians (pro-growth advocates) who attempt to treat the sickness with unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited production. We do not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage.”

“Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”