Prof Herman Daly is one of the founding fathers of the emerging discipline of ‘ecological economics’. He has long argued that to achieve genuine sustainability, the global community should be transitioning to a ‘steady-state’ economy based on ecological principles derived from biophysical reality.
In 2014 Daly added a prestigious Blue Planet Prize to his list of international accolades. His Blue Planet acceptance speech, Economics for a Full World,1 contains a fine summary of Daly’s award-winning economic philosophy. The essay below is a response to that speech in which I compare Prof Daly’s steady-state ecological economics to the growth-oriented neoliberal economics that currently dominates mainstream thinking – of possible interest to anyone curious about the contemporary roots of humanity’s self-destructive development trajectory. Continue reading On Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World: Biosocial context and future prospects