Product Description
Named one of a hundred "visionaries who could change your life" by the Utne Reader, Herman Daly has probably been the most prominent advocate of the need for a change in economic thinking in response to environmental crisis. An iconoclast economis t 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 won a wide and growing reputation among a wide array of environmentalists, inside and outside the academy. In a book that will generate controversy, Daly turns his attention to the major environmental debate surrounding "sustainable development." Daly argues that the idea of sustainable development--which has become a catchword of environmentalism and international finance--is being used in ways that are vacuous, certainly wrong, and probably dangerous. The necessary solutions turn out to be muc h more radical than people suppose. This is a crucial updating of a major economist's work, and mandatory reading for people engaged in the debates about the environment. "Daly is turning economics inside out by putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field . . . a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics."--Utne Reader

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 11 reviews)

profitandentropy.com by Doctor Richard (Newton,, MA, United States)

5 Stars
May 14, 2009
I cannot learn from the book what are Professor Daly's scientific or economic "creds", but he seems quite assured and at ease in this material. The current financial crisis makes this book very relevant, since it discusses how an economy resembles a thermodynamic system, presently run wild. It does not however address our thesis that profit in an economic system is analogous to increasing entropy in a thermodynamic system. Profitandentropy.com offers a paper that teaches enough thermodynamics to argue that this is the case - and explains that increasing entropy is more like waste than like fuel. Economists are not scientifically educated enough even to the level of a "physics for poets" course to realize that what they study is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, just as is the rest of reality. The equilibrium of supply and demand in economics mimics the Newtonian balance of action-and-reaction, which we show is an inadequate model to explain economics. The expanding economy that was driven by value-less, derivative profits sent the system into thermo-economic equilibrium. Please visit profitandentropy.com

2009 - Still up to date by H. Laurent (Switzerland)

5 Stars
January 07, 2009
I read this book in 2009! This book is very useful even if it was written 10 years ago. This is not always easy to grasp and understand all info, but it gives pertinent point of views especially during the current financial crisis. Mr. Daly is a pioneer and a genius! I highly recommend this book if you would like to understand the current financial and economic crisis or if you want to discover a different path than the Economical growth.

Outstanding work, Daly's predictions have come to pass 10 years later by Sisu (Oakland, CA United States)

5 Stars
September 08, 2007
I've read a *lot* of economics books in recent years, some good, some not. But Daly's is really in a class by itself for seeing the big picture and explaining it clearly: traditional economics is broken. Neoclassical economics today is like high energy physics: all the trusty laws that held so true in normal energy physics, or 19th and 20th century economies, mysteriously start to fail us. I love the simple, yet compelling logic of Daly's insight: take the existing neoclassical model of economics--the circular flow of income between households and firms--and then draw a box around it, to acknowledge that the world is of finite size. Once you do that, analyze however you wish...the recognition of a finite world leads inexorably to the notion of an optimum size for the national and global economy. I like how Daly uses tools from mainstream economics to make the point: we all remember from Microeconomics that every firm has an optimal size, based on the size of the overall economy. Economics has the notion of limits to growth embedded already, we just need collectively to apply that logic without flinching. Something that impressed me was how Daly in 1997 used his intellectual model to forecast the concentration of asset ownership in the U.S., with the consequence of increasing class disparity and declining real wages for the middle class. That would have seemed like outlandish poppycock in the mid-90s, but now in 2007, lo and behold, it's coming to pass (per the CIA and the Economic Policy Institute, and BLS.gov statistics) for all the reasons Daly outlined 10 years ago. The man is onto something, and policymakers would do well to listen to him. Even better, I think, is that reading between the lines of Daly's book there is a real and believable message of hope. The world of the future that acknowledges limits, and embraces development over growth (think "quality" not "quantity" of the economy as the goal) is a better place than the world we live in today. Instead of the world becoming a planetary Los Angeles or Hong Kong, where life is crowded, expensive, polluted and mean, what I took away from Daly's book was a clear intellectual architecture for a world that is beautiful, full of possibilities for interesting life work, and full of hope and things to look forward to. I sincerely hope that Daly's vision helps shape the world my daughter grows up in.

Surprising Religious Angle from Serious Economist by Erik D. Curren (Staunton, VA)

4 Stars
April 14, 2006
This book is well worth reading for Daly's explanation of "ecological economics." Rather than looking at the economy as a system existing in a vacuum, where an infinite amount of exchanges are possible to create an infinite amount of economic growth--as neo-classical economists believe--Daly places the economy within the physical environment. This environment of course is a place of limits: limits on raw materials and limits on places to store pollution. Thus, Daly shows that the economy must observe limits too. Common sense, right? Yet, our whole economy is premised on the opposite idea, that we can just keep growing forever. Think of compound interest and then move on from there and you get the idea of how pervasive growth is in our economic mindset today. Offering an alternative is what makes Daly's theory radical. But the bonus in the book comes at the very end, where Daly offers economics (rightly understood with limits) as the intermediary between the physical world and religious belief. The latter, Daly believes, is necessary to offer humans the inspiration we need to radically change our current society and save our species. Some parts of the text are rough going, but if you're not an economist you can skim them to get to Daly's truly novel integration of heart and head.

Good enough by Andrew Foote (Manhattan, NY United States)

4 Stars
March 11, 2005
this book is good enough to get a good view of how SD is going and should go. Though much has changed since this book has been published. Globalization has taken SD in directions that were not previously predicted.

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