Herman daly biography

A memorial service will be held celebrating the life of Herman Daly on Saturday, November 12, at 4 p. Herman Daly passed away on October 28 at the age of 84 in Richmond, Virginia, of an inoperable brain hemorrhage caused by a fall. Though Herman was an exceptional human being whose moral values, respectfulness, humility, warmth, kindness, and caring nature made a deep impact on those who knew him, we focus here on his contributions to the field of ecological economics and to the advancement of the socially just sustainability transition upon which our future depends.

There he met his influential mentor Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen — who was then writing his famous book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process Georgescu-Roegen, — from which Daly learned how crucial it is to consider the material and energetic basis of economic processes. His writing skills and mastery of metaphor and analogy made those contributions widely accessible.

Though his contributions have to date been largely ignored by both mainstream economics and policy makers, he had a profound on many other academics and activists around the world. Just one year after earning his PhD, he wrote Economics as a Life Science , helping to lay the foundations for ecological economics decades before the field was even named.

He recognized the impossibility of endless economic growth on a finite planet and our dependence on natural systems for our survival. He discussed the concepts of the steady state economy and social metabolism. He stressed that the economy and human cultures are evolving systems while mathematical analysis—the foundation of mainstream economics— is ill-suited to understanding the dynamics of evolutionary change.

He presciently addressed the problem of climate change. He further developed these profound challenges to mainstream economics and many more throughout the remainder of his career. Herman may be best known for his iconic image representing the pre-analytic vision of ecological economics: the human economy embedded in our finite planet, which provides all raw materials and most of the energy flows required for all economic production, and into which all our wastes are expelled.

Herman daly steady-state economy

As we transitioned from an empty world of small human populations with low levels of consumption into the full world of today, the economy did not expand into a void, but rather into our finite global ecosystem, displacing ecosystems in the process and degrading the life sustaining ecological functions upon which all species depend.

This is in jarring contrast to the vision of mainstream economists and most policy makers of an exponentially growing economy. A master of metaphor and analogy, he likened the economic problem to that of loading a boat with cargo.