Saturday, November 12, 2022

Herman Daly, 84, Who Challenged the Economic Gospel of Growth, Dies

Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and progress was fundamentally, and dangerously, flawed because it ignored its associated costs, especially the depletion of natural resources and the pollution it engenders, died on Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. He was 84.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by a brain hemorrhage, his daughter Karen Daly Junker said.

Dr. Daly, an ecological economist, was almost surely his field's chief popularizer through his more than a dozen books and many journal articles, his faculty positions at the University of Maryland and, earlier, Louisiana State University, and his somewhat incongruous six-year stint at the World Bank.

Although he was branded a heretic for his theories — or, worse, ignored — among traditional economists, he had plenty of adherents, who saw him as prophetic for anticipating climate change's increasingly harmful impact and the vast sums of money needed to address it.

"His ideas are really relevant now, unlike most other economists, whose ideas tend to lose relevance as time passes and circumstances change," Peter A. Victor, an ecological economist and the author of the 2021 biography "Herman Daly's Economics for a Full World," said in a phone interview...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/business/economy/herman-daly-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

No comments:

Post a Comment