Name: Beyond Growth
ISBN: 9780807047095

Beyond Growth

Herman Daly is probably the most prominent advocate of the need for a change in economic thinking in response to environmental crisis. an iconoclast economist who has worked as a renegade insider at the World Bank in recent years, Daly has argued for overturning some basic economic assumptions. He has a wide and growing reputation among environmentalists, both inside and outside the academy. Daly argues that if sustainable development means anything at this historical moment, it demands that we conceive of the economy as part of the ecosystem and, as a result, give up on the ideal of economic growth. We need a global understanding of developing welfare that does not entail expansion. These simple ideas turn out to be fundamentally radical concepts, and basic ideas about economic theory, poverty, trade, and population have to be discarded or rethought, as Daly shows in careful, accessible detail. These are questions with enormous practical consequences. Daly argues that there is a real fight to control the meaning of "sustainable development," and that conventional economists and development thinkers are trying to water down its meaning to further their own ends. Beyond Growth is an argument that will turn the debate around.

What Hacker News says

jointpdfJul 2020

The first sentence of the link I posted accounts for opportunity cost: “An optimal decision is a decision that leads to at least as good a known or expected outcome as all other available decision options.”

And there is much, much more than opportunity cost that makes decision theory difficult. However, the basic definition of expected value (e.g. both risk and reward)—and decision making on the basis of it (e.g. cost-benefit analysis)—is so universally useful that I believe every living creature relies on this concept in some way or another (even if things are decided for them via evolutionary fitness—which we probably shouldn’t let happen to us as a civilization).

As for your question, I reject the premise that there exists a binary choice between “focus all the effort on...reducing CO2 right now” vs. having “enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides” (an idea I’d also reject as frankly absurd—how will money and tech address a 50% species extinction rate?). Speaking of which, there are many classes of things that defy the concept of market value or utility—like the existence of species—which is where this framework can fall down. We can’t recognize their value as infinite without reaching absurdities (like I dunno, destroying everything else in the universe to preserve toucans or something). But preserving the future inhabitability of the planet for humans and other living beings is clearly of such high aggregate value that it is rational to devote significant effort towards mitigation (beginning with the actions that have the highest benefit/cost ratio).

By the way, I highly recommend the book “Beyond Growth” by Herman Daly as an introduction to ecological economics and the failure of GDP as a measure of progress.

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abefortasOct 2009

I would have responded earlier if I had noticed this.

You're right that it's not quite a necessity. It's concievable that population growth could continue, albeit at a very slow rate, until people are ready to colonize space. I don't doubt that humans will figure out how to do that-- if they survive long enough.

But it seems likely to me, maybe even obvious, that at the current rate of growth people are going to commit evolutionary suicide long before that becomes possible. This because the earth is very limited and recently economic growth has been really fast. In addition to the Club of Rome stuff recommended above, check out: Capitalism Nature Socialism, a pretty good journal which often discusses these issues, and Beyond Growth by Herman Daly.

Edit: note that it was I who upvoted your comment.

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dredmorbiusAug 2016

You're hitting on a pretty interesting concept here. There's been an awful lot of ink spilt on the increased (and generally characterised as over-specialisation) of academic studies. "An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing."

Contrasting with earlier times -- generally prior to the Industrial Revolution, though somewhere between the 19th and 20th century seems to be where the shift occurred -- I'm wondering what the factors are.

Preindustrial societies couldn't support a great many independent researchers, and those almost always had specific patronage (with its own sets of advantages and pitfalls). The goal was to become known as "that clever person" without much limitation as to what it was you were clever about.

The fruit hung lower. There's much been made of areas in which obvious principles were waiting to be plucked.

In a professional research environment, there are many curious path-dependent and self-reinforcing tendencies. "Publish or perish" means you must publish even where you've got little to report. The fact of publishing is often more important than the content. We have those who've published hundreds or thousands of papers, and dozens or hundreds of books (Asimov comes to mind). And those who've published two, but revolutionised thought (Wittgenstein).

Organisation and regimentation of inquiry tends to lead to a cloistering of concepts. An institution or discipline is started with a specific point in mind.

There's the close-mindedness of specific disciplines, one instance noted by Herman Daly in a recent book review, pointing to a footnote in his book Beyond Growth:

"I sent MIT Press, at their solicitation, a collection of essays on sustainable development, an earlier incarnation of this book. They sent it out for review, and on the basis of three positive reviews, wrote a contract to publish, subject to my doing further editing work. This I did, and sent in the revised manuscript. Some months later I was informed that a distinguished economist on their editorial advisory committee was not happy with the book and wanted more reviews. Did the distinguished economist have specific criticisms? No, I was told, he had not read the manuscript, but just wanted more reviews as a matter of procedure. Not to worry, MIT Press was still committed to publishing the book. So they sent the manuscript out for two more reviews. One was positive, the other was extremely negative. That made a total of five reviewers, all of MIT Press's own choosing, of which four said publish, and one said do not publish. The negative review "trumped" the four positive reviews, and the press broke its contract. The basic thrust of the negative review, leaving aside ad hominem irrelevancies, was "That is not the right way to look at it." All of this was the more surprising because I had recently published a collection with MIT Press that was well received (Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, ed. H. Daly and K. Townsend [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993])."

H. Daly, Beyond Growth, fn. 5 on p. 225.

Mentioned in Daly's review of Collision Course:

"It is also refreshing to me that MIT Press published her book. This indicates the welcome likelihood that some anonymous member of the MIT department of economics no longer has a veto over the decisions of the MIT Press."

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-02/collision-cours...

A rather striking instance of Plank's observation that "Science advances one funeral at a time". (Or non-funereal loss of veto power, possibly.)

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