Toward a steady-state economy

by Herman E. Daly

Book by

Genres: Economics, Ecology

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1973

About the author

Dr. Herman Edward Daly is an American 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. He is closely associated with theories of a Steady state economy.

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

He is also a recipient of an Honorary Right Livelihood Award, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Sophie Prize (Norway), the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute and was chosen as Man of the Year 2008 by Adbusters magazine.

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.

Reviews

[Connor Stack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of these essays are extremely boring, and I was going to give up and give it one star until I started hopping around to whatever looked interesting. There are some good ideas here, but nothing I didn't already agree with. The main message is "we need to think long-term and growth can't go on forever." There's not a lot of guidance on how to achieve that, but it's probably through lots of centralized control on the economy. The only specific solution I liked was cap-and-trade on all non-renewable resources, which involves centralized control but keeps the benefits of competition.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the ideas and concepts interesting and still applicable. Be warned, that as an over 40 year old book, some particulars are way off.