Herman E. Daly: Steady-State Economics

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PLOWBOY: You traveled to Brazil to teach economics?

DALY: Yes, I worked in that nation's northeastern state of Ceará ... an underdeveloped area which is sort of the Appalachia of Brazil. The economics students from this region always lost out in competition for American scholarships, so the Ford Foundation sent me there to help them "catch up".

PLOWBOY: While you were in Ceará, did you teach standard growth economics?

DALY: Yes, until the students at the university in Fortaleza went on strike . . . not against growth economics, but for their own national political reasons. When that happened, I suddenly had two free months . . . and decided to devote the time to a population research project in northeast Brazil. I soon learned that my study topic was hardly an academic abstraction. In that part of the world, one can almost see the population explosion in action! And—after observing hordes and hordes of hungry, uncared-for children—I was no longer impressed with the much-touted figures concerning Brazil's rising Gross National Product.

You see, according to standard economics, a prosperous growth economy should provide enough wealth for everyone to have an adequate share . . . but that certainly wasn't the case in Brazil. And one of the main reasons the poor weren't sharing in their country's increased industrial expansion was that their population was growing too rapidly. Worse yet, that growth actually benefited Brazil's upper class . . . since it provided the wealthy people with an almost unlimited supply of low-wage labor!

PLOWBOY: That must have been quite a shocking lesson for you to learn. What happened next?

DALY: When I came back from my two years in Brazil, I spent a lot of time studying the population problem. I began to realize that if there is a limit to the number of human bodies that can be supported on earth, there has to be a similar limit to the number of sustainable artifacts and commodities available ... in other words there must be a limit to economic growth.

My interest in such concepts led to my working for a year as a research associate at Yale University's Economic Growth Center. I suppose I was an “ungracious guest"—because I started writing against economic growth while I was on the Growth Center's payroll—but the experience proved to be a great learning opportunity for me. I came under the influence of physicists, ecologists, and biologists ... as well as important economists like Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Eventually, I came to realize that economics is actually a branch of biology: that is, a science that focuses on all of our "outside the skin" life processes, which are dominated by commodities of exchange.

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