ECONOCLAST TRANSCRIPT

JOSH FARLEY (University of Vermont economist):  Herman was absolutely very clear that there is no economics without ethics.   

ROB DIETZ (author ENOUGH IS ENOUGH):  He had a way to put things simply, but it came from keen insight that, frankly, nobody else in his field was looking at or espousing.  

SZANDRA KOVES (Hungary, president, European Society for Ecological economics): The world is the way it is because this is the only way we believe it can be. 

Economic growth is our secular global religion. We’ve been true believers for nearly a century.

Nations worship at the altar of GDP, the  Gross Domestic Product, the monetary value of goods and services they produce.

PETER VICTOR (Canadian economist and Daly biographer): And the usual assumption is that as GDP grows, the economy is doing better.

The Gospel of Growth rests on a theory of human nature scholars call Homo Economicus, Economic Man.

KATE RAWORTH (British economist): We started with a character of humanity as rational economic man, money in your hand, ego in your heart, calculator in his head, nature at his feet.  The goal was endless growth.

GAYA HERRINGTON (Dutch economist):  So they're maximizers, they never have enough, they're never satisfied. 

Ah, but what if humans aren’t so rational?  

What if they are driven by unconscious impulses and  manipulated by marketing,  swimming like fish in a sea of commercials?   

What if eternal economic growth is a hollow Golden Calf? 

What if it isn’t delivering the happiness it promises? 

What if it’s impossible in a finite world? 

And what if it’s actually making things worse?

Herman Daly asked those questions, dissecting the weaknesses in our economic Gospel in a way no one else had, and sparking an awakening even more relevant today.

Exponential Growth song–Alan Atkisson 

Fades out  “Exponential Growth…oh there’s trouble in this world from all the exponential growth…”

Herman Daly was an unlikely heretic.  He grew up middle-class in Houston, Texas in the 1940s and 50s, and worked in his father’s hardware store until finishing high school.

VICTOR: Herman was a very religious person, and you could trace that back easily to his close relationship with his mother, who took him to church every Sunday, and he enjoyed that very much. 

Stricken by polio at the age of 8, he lost the use of one arm.  

Despite verbal abuse from classmates, Daly overcame his disability.  

After high school, he studied economics at Rice and Vanderbilt Universities.

VICTOR: He was a well-trained conventional economist. He was very much influenced, however, by one very famous economist called Nicholas Georgescu-Roegan, who was his professor, who introduced him to the importance of understanding the laws of physics.  

Including the laws of Thermodynamics

FARLEY:  And the laws of thermodynamics tell us that when you burn a barrel of oil you lose the useful energy…it becomes carbon dioxide. It becomes a pollutant.

FARLEY: So the laws of thermodynamics made it very clear that an economic system cannot continue to grow forever on a finite planet.

Useful resources become more costly to obtain and dispose of without damage to the Earth.

Yet we cannot live without producing and consuming them.

DALY : So the question is to do it at a scale and a level at which the larger biosphere can absorb, reconstitute, and tolerate. And that's the limit which we have not yet learned to incorporate into our economic thinking.  

After college, Daly taught in poverty-stricken rural Brazil. He was dismayed by the social injustice and ecological destruction he saw there.

Herman married Marcia Damasceno, a Brazilian woman.  She would be his partner and his mentor for the rest of his life.  

They raised two daughters, Terri and Karen.

In 1968, Herman was hired to teach economics at Louisiana State University.  

DAVE BATKER (American economist and Daly student):  He was a dynamic teacher. I don't think there's a student that disliked Herman.  You knew you were just getting these amazing ideas from him.   

LSU is in Baton Rouge, in a region called “Cancer Alley,” because of the health impacts of the petrochemical industries that line the Mississippi River from there to New Orleans.  

As in Brazil, Daly grew alarmed by what he witnessed in Louisiana.

He knew the profits from petrochemicals went to wealthy owners, while cancer killed the poor along the river.   

He grew more skeptical about how our economy worked, and the framework on which it was built.

These observations informed his lectures and his work outside the classroom.  

BATKER: He had a few conservative economists who liked him, who actually were very much appreciative of his view of ethics and the importance of ethics and did recognize resource limits and the conservation movement… 

He was also supported by LSU biologists who tried to protect regional wetlands from industrial assault.

Yet most of Daly’s own department shunned him.

BATKER: He was viewed as a heretic. One professor told me, if you do well under Herman, you're going to fail my class. 

Daly’s increasingly nonconformist ideas were in sharp contrast to his personal demeanor.

VICTOR:  He was so polite and generous with his time and was well known for always responding to complete strangers promptly and with good ideas and a caring approach. 

His early days at LSU were a tumultuous time in America.  

Students marched against the war in Vietnam.  

The Civil Rights Movement challenged racial injustice in the South and in the cities of the North. 

BATKER:  Herman did speak about racism specifically and how damaging it was. He lived that philosophy that academics are not meant just to be academics. They're meant to actually be involved with the communities and change things.  

The environment, too, was in crisis.  A river on fire in Cleveland.  Beaches slick with oil in California.  Cities clogged with cars and smog.  

In 1970, the first Earth Day brought 20 million people to the streets, demanding environmental protections.

Two  years later,  a best-selling book by a team of computer scientists from MIT was published.  

HERRINGTON:  The writers of The Limits to Growth were contemporaries, of course, of Herman Daly.  They built a global model called World 3 . And with that, they ran different scenarios for the world. So we had variables like population, industrial output, birth rate, well-being levels, a lot of variables.  

Influenced by Daly, they warned that ever-increasing resource use,industrial production, and pollution levels would overwhelm our life support systems.

Unless major changes were made, the world was headed for ecological and economic collapse within a century.

HERRINGTON:  So the choice is not whether we keep growing or not. It's whether the end of growth comes by design or disaster.. 

Recently, Gaya Herrington re-examined the forecasts in LIMITS TO GROWTH.

HERRINGTON:  I took just data that was mostly publicly available from the World Bank, for example.  And I put them right next to that particular variable in the scenarios of the limits to growth.  I did find a close alignment with empirical data. I have a background in econometrics, I worked in finance and as an economic policymaker for years,   I have never seen a model that was this accurate decades into the future. So that means that it's a useful model and we should heed its message.  

But despite those warnings, Daly realized that for most economists, nature was an afterthought. 

The dominant economic and political doctrine of our era, neoliberalism, pays little attention to either the environment or inequality.

DAVID MILLER (former mayor of Toronto): Neoliberalism is based on the economic idea of growth as being the goal, allied with the idea that let unfettered capitalism go and everything will be fine.  The consequences of those actions over the last 40 years are becoming really clear– incredible inequality of incomes and wealth, very serious and negative environmental impacts on the planet–climate change, biodiversity loss.  

Mainstream economics seeks to allocate resources to satisfy human preferences through continued growth in supply and demand. 

RAWORTH:  No mention of what's happening to the living world, no mention of the extremes of inequality in society. 

MILLER:  All of our economic rules are based on this assumption that the monetary economy is something separate from the planet.

In response, Daly developed ideas that would help launch a new discipline—ecological economics.

FARLEY:  Herman's core idea I think that's the most important was that the economy is a Subsystem of the planet. And really this is as radical a paradigm shift as Copernicus saying, the earth goes around the Sun. 

He expressed the idea in a simple diagram.

DALY : Once you draw that picture, it threatens you with questions to which you don't have a good answer. How big should the subsystem be relative to the total system? It's a question we don't want to ask.

Daly held that the scale of the economy—its physical size relative to our finite planet—could not be ignored. 

Indeed, scale had to be considered first: is our use of resources and production of waste–what Daly called “throughput,” sustainable over the long run? 

BATKER: Scale is the most important thing. For instance, if you’re beyond scale, if you don't have any salmon left, then distribution and allocation don't make any difference. 

Without taking that fact into account, Daly argued, the entire economic edifice was a house of cards, doomed to collapse.

Since the end of World War Two, we humans have consumed many times more resources than in all of previous history, crowding out other species. 

FARLEY: Over our lifetimes we will use probably 90% of the fossil fuels that will ever be used in human history.  And recent studies show that human biomass alone outweighs all wild terrestrial vertebrates– birds, mammals, amphibians10 to 1.    If you add in our livestock, we outweigh all terrestrial vertebrates 25 to 1.  

For more than 30 years, some scientists have been measuring the “ecological footprint” of human activity.  

As both global population and consumer demand increase, they have concluded that the world economy is in “overshoot.” 

That means we are using more resources than the Earth can reproduce and discarding more waste than it can safely assimilate.  

BATKER: It's an important measure because it tells us we're consuming too much right now.  

Especially in rich countries.  Were every country to match the American level of consumption, we would need five Earths to sustain our standard of living. 

The signs of stress are everywhere.  

Plastics filling our oceans.  

Microplastics filling our bodies.  

Fertilizers and pesticides flowing from field to stream to sea, creating “dead zones” in parts of the  ocean. 

Species extinctions.  Continually rising annual temperatures, creating frequent catastrophic weather events—stronger hurricanes, massive wildfires, hundred year floods barely a decade apart.

Rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.

Long-term droughts.

Cities running out of fresh water or too hot for human habitation.

BATKER: Climate change is alive in every square inch that I work. Hurricanes are heavier in New Orleans, far larger. The impact is greater. We're going to have to abandon the coast if we don't slow down climate change.  

Daly was adamant. We can’t grow on like this. 

VICTOR:  And by about the late 60s, 1970, he had come to the view that economic growth could not continue forever and should not, and started writing about a steady-state economy.  

DIETZ:  At its simplest, a steady state economy is just one that achieves a stable size instead of growing year after year after year.  

DIETZ: Where I grew up, hunting was a very popular pastime fishing too. And I think people who are engaged in that sort of outdoor activity do tend to understand limits. You know you can't just take all of the fish out of the pond or the lake or the river because there won't be any next time.  

After studying economics and biology in college, Rob Dietz worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

DIETZ: And I ran into a colleague who had just written a book called "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train." And I read it and it was all based on the ideas of Herman Daly.  I ended up leaving my job at the Fish and Wildlife Service, essentially to run a little nonprofit that would promote his ideas, the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

DALY : That idea goes back to John Stuart Mill, who wrote very eloquently on the subject of the stationary state.  So the idea has been here for a long time.  *

But it was far less urgent when Mill, Adam Smith and David Ricardo developed their classical economic theories.  

The world in their day was empty, Daly observed—few people, little industry, vast open lands, plentiful resources. 

RAWORTH: What damage could we humans possibly do with our little use of Earth's resources and the little pollution we create?  

There was damage at that time , but it was local.  A countryside scarred with mines, rivers polluted by textile dyes.  Cities filled with deadly smog.  

Even then, critics like Mill warned that the march of industry would soon leave a world stripped of its beauty and charm.  

But now, Daly argued, we live in a full world, bursting at the seams with people and products, pollution and waste. 

DALY : And it's true. In the past, it really didn't matter. But in my lifetime, the world population has tripled. And the population of automobiles and houses and other things that make up the physical economy has grown by at least 12 fold, I'd say. So the world is no longer empty.  

BEGUM OZKAYNAK (Turkish economist):  We were feeling very much in this full world in Turkey. 

A crisis in Istanbul offers stark evidence of the difference. 

In 2013, Turkey’s government proposed to build a luxury shopping mall and a military barracks on one of the last open spaces in the city.  

OZKAYNAK;  Gezi Park was left on its own for years. So it was not even a nice park. But it was exactly one of the few left empty spaces which we need a lot. 

In the full world of Istanbul, the poor, who lived around Gezi park, stood to lose the last free place to take their children for recreation and relaxation.  

OZKAYNAK; Why do we have Erdogan's government having this park, the last green space, turned into a shopping mall? 

The answer, without doubt, was profit.More money can be made, creating more economic growth, from a shopping mall than a free public park.

Residents began to protest as soon as construction commenced.

OZKAYNAK: The park was occupied for several weeks.  

Chaos ensued as police attacked the protestors.  

Struck by a tear gas canister, Berkin Elvan, a 14-year old boy, fell into a coma. He never recovered.

A million people filled the park for his funeral. 

The protests continued, and more protestors were killed.  Yet the demonstrations grew larger.

Finally, after months of conflict, the government backed down.

OZKAYNAK:  I would say it was a success case because the park is still there.  *

A full world, Daly argued, demanded different economic priorities.

DIETZ:  And Herman was great at proposing very logical policies. And so Herman would say, limit throughput to a sustainable scale. And you can do that various ways.

DALY : One is that prices have to include all external costs. If we can internalize all the external costs into prices by means of taxes, that's a big help.  

DALY: People will pay more for their gasoline. And they will therefore be more careful about trips and about their miles per gallon and so forth, which is good.  *

To stay within Earth’s boundaries and reduce consumption, Daly argued for a maximum income as well as a minimum wage.

While the rich enjoy material abundance that would have been the envy of Caesar, many of the world’s people lack sufficient food and shelter.

INGE ROPKE (Danish economist): Herman was very clear about this point that in a limited world you cannot solve problems of poverty by just growing all the time. 

Daly went further. He argued that belief in continuous growth allowed wealthy elites to ignore and oppose anti-poverty measures.

DALY:  And mainly, I think, we've now entered into a sort of phase where growth has become almost an idol. It's the solution to all of our problems. We have poverty. What are we going to do? We're going to grow. We can't share because that's politically and morally difficult.  

HERRINGTON:  And  that means that the wealthy have to give up some of what they have. And I think that link between ecological limits and the social aspect of inequality, that I think is what got the Limits to Growth and also Herman Daly's work, so much criticism. 

In a world compelled to limit growth, output must be distributed more evenly, lest great inequity lead to misery and conflict. 

ROPKE:  Because when we are so rich and can buy so many things, it's because other people produce them under horrible conditions elsewhere in the world.It's also because other people are digging out the minerals in mines elsewhere in the world under very difficult conditions. And they are putting the electronics together in sweatshops and so on for very low wages.  

Alan Atkisson song–”Whole Lotta Shoppin’  

KATIA VLADIMIROVA (sustainable fashion expert): I was shopping in my 20s like there was no tomorrow…Shopping time for me was the time when you could relax, when you could try out different outfits and imagine yourself beautiful for different occasions…So it was a very attractive pastime for me. 

Until Katia saw a film that broke her heart. 

It was the story of a clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than a thousand people.

KATIA: After watching that, I could never once go into a fast fashion shop to buy anything for myself. 

Instead, she immersed herself in a study of the worldwide impacts of clothing production.

KATIA: The latest data we have for Europe is that consumers in Europe, on average, buy 42 garments per year. 

Americans and Australians buy even more.

Online sales and marketing multiply those numbers as sweatshops churn out the clothes, making them almost too cheap to pass up.

KATIA:  Low quality. Yeah, but, you know, who cares? You're just going to wear it once or twice. Many of our garments today are discarded, not because they're worn out, but because we don't want them anymore and they're still in perfectly wearable conditions, some still with tags.  

Despite the prevalence of thrift stores, few of these garments find new owners.

KATIA:The highest number of clothes locally redistributed within a city by the charity that received it is 3% of the volume received. 

The rest are sent in huge bundles to poor countries, where a few are resold, but most end up in landfills.

KATIA: Those landfills are huge. They get washed down to the ocean.

Only when our economy is both sustainable and fair,  Daly maintained, will the function of markets to allocate scarce resources prove truly useful.

FARLEY: And Herman said that markets actually are terrible for questions of scale and for questions of distribution. But they're pretty good for questions of taste. If I like apples more than oranges, the price signal is not a bad way of figuring out how many apples and oranges our society should produce.  

Daly’s ideas, presented in several books, began to strike a chord, even with other economists.

RAWORTH:  Yes, yes, yes, yes, this makes sense. Why have I never heard of it? Why wasn't this the first lecture I was given? The boom in your head when you encounter an idea that makes sense! And it can totally change your life and the direction of your life. And it totally changed mine. 

Daly was critical of GDP as a measure of economic progress. 

Yet how might we know if an economy is sustainable, fair and productive of positive wellbeing?  

With colleagues, he developed an alternative to GDP, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. 

VICTOR [02:07:09:05 - 02:07:45:14] They started off with consumption, so that's very mainstream. Consumption was considered good.  *

Then they added unmeasured benefits such as the value of unpaid housework or leisure time, while subtracting the costs of illness, pollution, crime, long commutes, accidents and other failures.   

Economic growth, it must be admitted, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty, and extended their lives.  

In poor countries, growth still makes life better.  

DALY : The difficulty is that beyond some point what we call economic growth, increase in GNP, will not make us richer. It will in fact make us poorer because it will increase costs faster than it increases benefit.

BATKER:  So say you're selling 50 million more cigarettes to people. Well, obviously the GDP is going up but people are not actually better off. They're suffering with greater cancer.  We have to spend public money on cancer treatment, et cetera. 

Defensive expenditures to counter these negative consequences of past  growth make up an ever-larger share of GDP.

MILLER: For example if there's a wildfire in Los Angeles and thousands of people's houses burn down and you have to rebuild them, that becomes good for the economy because the you know the money paid to rebuild these houses is economic growth.

DALY :  That's why I like to think of limits in terms of increasing costs. And at some point the cost becomes greater at the margin than the benefit.

VICTOR: That shows that growth is uneconomic. In other words, it's doing more harm than good. And that term, uneconomic growth, is now increasingly used. 

DALY:  It's not a brick wall. We can go on paying a higher cost than things are worth for quite a while… But that doesn't mean to say that there's not also such a thing as a catastrophe limit, a point at which the system simply breaks. 

GDP song from Alan Atkission–’ “He completely missed the reef ahead and now 10,000 birds are dead…But GDP is rising, GDP is rising.. Bye bye bye, dollars in the sky, la la la la la la… etc.” 

Yet conventional economists still say science will save us, allowing perpetual substitution of new resources for those we run out of.  

DALY: They look at technology and say, "See, we've done this. We've gone to the moon… Look at all the things we can do. Nothing's impossible. There's no limit. 

Of course, some of this has happened.  

For example, the Green Revolution prevented famines, but with unintended consequences.

Wind and solar energy are replacing coal and oil.

DIETZ: I’ve often thought that progressives are a little bit delusional about economic growth. They think, oh, we'll just sub in some solar panels and some wind turbines for the fossil fuel infrastructure, and then we'll keep growing. 

The problem is that the new technologies all come with new costs, including the mining of many rare minerals.

FARLEY:  We know empirically that this actually tends to lead to more and more resources being used. And in fact the biggest surge in demand for fossil fuels or for electricity in the US and probably globally is the result of artificial intelligence.  

VICTOR: And it's also said that if you allow the economy to grow, then you can afford to clean up the pollution, or you can afford to put in pollution control devices, and so you can still have the growth and reduce the externalities.  

Yet, this has seldom been the case.  We have reduced air and water pollution in many places, but the loss of biodiversity and climate change continue unabated.

VICTOR: The economy, as it grows, draws in more materials from the surrounding environment, draws in more energy, and produces more waste, even with some recycling of the materials. 

Daly also argued that many of our natural resources would do more good if left where they were.  

Mature forests, for example, retain water to prevent flooding and store carbon to reduce climate change.  

Ecological economists often refer to such benefits as “Natural Capital” or “ecosystem services” and some even ascribe monetary value to them.

BATKER: Ecosystem goods and services, nature's gifts, are the things that come from nature that are of economic value… What if we had to pay for oxygen? Well, the GDP would go up, but we'd all be worse off if we had to pay for oxygen rather than getting it for free. 

MAKOMBORE:  Other ecosystem services might not be that visible like cultural ecosystem services, how we love going into nature and finding solace.

LIZAH MAKOMBORE (Zimbabwean economist): The three goals, sustainable scale, redistribution and efficient allocation spoke to some of the tensions I had seen in the Western education that I had received.

By 1988, Daly’s ideas attracted the attention of Robert Goodland, the environmental director of the World Bank.  He invited Daly to work there. 

DALY: I went to the World Bank because I thought the World Bank was really going to take seriously environmental issues and condition its growth policies on environmental capacities and recognize costs and build them in.  

For the World Bank, Daly reviewed development projects being proposed for poor countries.

VICTOR: But he would bring to bear on his review the strong linkage between the environmental consequences of projects and the economic benefits and social impacts of the project. 

Daly’s former student, Dave Batker, joined him at the Bank.

BATKER: Herman, of course, was hugely controversial in the World Bank. People were angry at him, especially at the top. 

With his unassuming personality and gentle Texas drawl, Daly  was a Southern gentleman.  But he could fiercely defend his values.  

BATKER: He was actually very blunt and very clear with what he felt was the truth of the matter  and he did not cower at the World Bank when the top people got angry at him and threatened to fire him or anything else. 

Still, Daly resigned from the Bank after six years.  Though he had changed some policies regarding such development projects as giant power dams, he faced too much resistance to be truly effective.

Yet his final speech filled the bank’s auditorium.

BATKER:  It was an amazing speech of how the world bank should reorient and do a better job. And the crowd was electrified.  

But Daly didn’t know where he would go when he left the Bank.  

VICTOR: At that point, Herman, although he was a well-established academic with an international reputation,  couldn't get a tenured position in an American university.

He finished his academic career at the University of Maryland, as a professor of public policy instead of economics.

June 2025.  Twelve  hundred people, many of them economists, gather in Norway to challenge the sacred canons of the Gospel of Growth. 

Daly’s ideas, while still under attack from  mainstream economists, are now taken seriously by many activists, academics and even some religious leaders. 

BATKER:  Herman had a real influence on religious institutions…so I think it is likely that he had an influence on Pope Francis, because Latin American clergy knew him well. 

Trained in business economics, Szandra Koves was responsible for European Union funds that came to Hungary for social development.  

KOVES:  I want to save the world. I want to make sure that people live in a nice environment.

But she began to have doubts about whether her work was accomplishing that.

KOVES:  So I started asking myself, is what we're calling development, is that really leading us anywhere?  And why do we believe that people in marginal positions and really difficult positions will be better off if we build a motorway in the middle of their village?  

Those questions led her back to the university. 

KOVES:  And this is where I met Herman Daly and other ecological economists and their thoughts. I gave up my previous life, and I decided that's all I want to do. I want to spend my life kind of advancing this field because this is what I believe is the only way forward.

Herman Daly’s concepts have been revised and expanded in various ways.  

Kate Raworth’s understanding of them led her to a concept she calls Donut Economics, using a symbol representing both the requirements of scale and of distribution. 

RAWORTH: The Earth system scientists have drawn an outer circle, an outer limit beyond which we can't go, I'm going to draw an inner limit, which is human rights. The inner limit that every person has a claim to using Earth's resources to meet their fundamental needs of health, food, water, housing, education, energy, transport. So I drew a circle within the circle.  And so I'm completely channeling Herman in that image.  

Many younger economists, especially in Europe, now advocate De-Growth in rich countries, a necessity when poor nations still need growth to eliminate dire poverty.

KOVES: What we're saying is that we need to stop thinking only in terms of growth. And feel safe enough to actually imagine a different world, a world where it's not just about growth. 

And yet, if we produce less, won’t that result in more unemployment, as many economists claim?

VICTOR: The simple answer to that is to share out the work more evenly by having a reduced work week or work year. And that comes with advantages, such as giving people more time, discretionary time, to spend with family and friends, to participate in sport, to do art, whatever they want. 

It's a tradeoff worth considering.  Some studies find that Americans are working more and are less happy today than they were when their incomes were only one third as large.  

KOVES:  There are so many needs that we're not actually attending to. *

HERRINGTON:  We are selfish when our basic needs are unmet. But once they are, like food, shelter, those kind of things, we actually get much more altruistic and curious and playful than this Homo Economicus could ever be. And that's great news if you want to stay within planetary boundaries, because our needs can be satisfied.

Daly’s heirs also advocate place-based ecological transformation and policies to build local economic self-reliance.  

That’s a response to the growing problems of globalization, a concern Daly shared.

DALY:  Now there are some benefits to it for sure but the idea of economics is always count the cost. And I think we've gone way too far in this direction.  

VLADIMIROVA: I think the biggest hope lies within our cities and our communities. And I've been working a lot with the city of Geneva. They even included fashion overconsumption in their climate strategy.

MILLER:  I think this is a moment when people are looking for clear thinking and real solutions. And it's a moment where the ideas of Herman Daly are exceptionally relevant.

David Miller is the former mayor of Toronto, Canada’s largest city.

DAVID MILLER: I studied economics as my first degree before I became a lawyer.  I so much wish I had known about Herman when I was studying. 

Miller is now a leader of C40, an organization including a hundred of world’ greatest cities and their mayors, working together to fight global warming. Growth is not their priority.

MILLER:  You have to deliver real services that benefit real people in a real way today.   You have to provide public transit. You need to provide housing, you need to provide parks. You need to ensure the air is clean so your citizens are healthy. They care about green space. They care about trees. 

Campaigning on quality of life issues instead of growth, Miller was elected twice, receiving 60 percent of the vote.

Cities are laboratories for Daly’s ideas and similar ones.  They can experiment in ways that national governments usually cannot.  

Amsterdam, for example, is turning Kate Raworth’s donut economics into practical policies.

MILLER: They're in effect trying to create a whole new set of economic indicators …They're going to help us define what this might look like at a bigger scale.  But there's a very direct line from Herman's analysis to the concrete steps they're undertaking that are changing public policy literally as we speak.

In the deepest sense, perhaps, reforming our economy is a moral challenge.

DALY:  The obstacles to a steady state economy I think are not really so much technical or economic in the technical sense. I think they're almost religious in terms of our commitments and our basic idolatries. 

VLADIMIROVA: Women know about the negative impacts of fashion, but yet they continue to shop.  The more we find out about it, the more it's becoming a moral issue. How can you close your eyes at something that is so horrible in the world just to get your dopamine fix for a second? 

ROLDAN MURADIAN (Brazilian political scientist):  Personally, I think that in the long run, we need a moral transformation, a transformation of the moral philosophy that is underlying public decisions. And it has happened several times in human history   

The end of slavery is one of many examples.  It began as a moral imperative.

MURADIAN: I think that the next revolution is exactly to acknowledge that the other species have rights to live.

DALY:  Despair is a sin but it would be foolish to be optimistic. I mean the objective conditions are such that easy optimism is quite silly and unless we have a kind of religious grounding for hope, then I think we're going to just fall into this easy optimism which is shallow and is going to fall apart. 

Song:  Alan Atkission “Sustainability”   “Like a boat that takes us home, like a star that leads us on.  Sustainability…”

Herman Daly died in 2022, but he will not be forgotten soon.  For some, the heretic has become a hero.

FARLEY: If we had adopted his ideas in 1968, when he first started developing these things, we'd live in a much more desirable world right now. So he was at least 50 years ahead of his time. 

BATKER: His long-term legacy is a new paradigm in Economics, which is more beneficial to people and other species in our planet, more sustainable than the growth paradigm. 

Ironically, an idea expressed by Milton Friedman, an economist with views far different from Daly’s, brings hope to those who seek a fundamental transformation of our economy.

RAWORTH: But here’s what Milton Friedman said, and this is the quote that inspires me. He said, "Only a crisis, actual or perceived, brings about real change. And when that crisis occurs, people turn to the ideas that are lying around." 

The crisis is already here, but the ideas are too, waiting to be picked up.  

Will we apply them in time? 

JOSH FARLEY:  I really do think that Herman laid the foundation for an absolutely essential change in our economy. *

RAWORTH: We are still on the way. We're still not there. But this is the way we must go. *

Alan Atkisson song “Sustainability” Sustainability, We can  save the things we love before they’re gone, may the beauty of the earth go on and on, for generations…