AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Wednesday 30 July 2008

Steady-State Economics is one of the most influential environmental books of the twentieth century, but Daly’s arguments were too revolutionary for mainstream economists. So, in 1988, he co-founded the International Society for Ecological Economics to provide a forum for other radicals blending economics and ecology. That same year, the World Bank hired Daly as part of an effort to green its image. While working on schemes to eliminate poverty in the South, Daly wondered why the Bank professed to favor sustainable development models for Third World countries, but not for the First World. After six years as a member of the Bank’s “loyal opposition of environmentalists,” he left his post in frustration to return to academia. In his parting address, he left his colleagues with a formula for sustainability: stop counting the consumption of natural capital as income; tax labor and income less, and resource extraction more; maximize the productivity of natural capital in the short run and invest in increasing its supply in the long run; and most contentiously, abandon the ideology of global economic integration through free trade, free capital mobility, and export-led growth. The Revolutionaries

A GNT creation ©2007–2012