Herman E. Daly

Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.

— Herman E. Daly

I'm no genius, and others can outwork me. What I do is ask the naive, honest questions, and then I’m not satisfied until I get the answers.

— Herman E. Daly

The optimal scale of the economy is smaller, the greater (a) the degree of complementarity between natural and man-made capital; (b) our desire for direct experience of nature; and (c) our estimate of both the intrinsic and instrumental value of other species. The smaller the optimal scale of the economy, the sooner its physical growth becomes uneconomic.

— Herman E. Daly

Even if we can never quantify [satisfaction or happiness]... as precisely as we currently quantify GNP,... perhaps it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

— Herman E. Daly

The cosmology of scientific materialism … considers the cosmos an absurd accident, and life within it to be no more than another accident.

— Herman E. Daly

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

— Herman E. Daly

Economists have focused too much on the economy’s circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract. Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an ever larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and digesting it more thoroughly.

— Herman E. Daly

Once we have replaced the basic premise of “more is better” with the much sounder axiom that “enough is best,” the social and technical problems of moving to a steady state become solvable, perhaps even trivial.

— Herman E. Daly

If economic reality is actually so complex that it can only be described by complicated mathematical models that add epicycles to epicycles and externalities to externalities, then the reality should be simplified.

— Herman E. Daly

Organisms cannot survive in a medium consisting of their own final outputs. Neither can economies.

— Herman E. Daly

It is imaginable that someday we will discover how to create materials from nothing, how to achieve perpetual motion, how to reverse time’s arrow, and so on. But to take such science-fiction miracles as a basis for economic policy would be absurd.

— Herman E. Daly

Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.

— Herman E. Daly

There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

— Herman E. Daly

We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. In this time we have come to believe that all our major economic ills – from unemployment and poverty to overpopulation and even environmental degradation – can be solved by more growth. And if the global economy existed in a void perhaps that would be true. But it does not.

— Herman E. Daly

Instead the economy is a subsystem of the finite biosphere that supports it. When the economy’s expansion encroaches too much on the surrounding biosphere, we begin to sacrifice natural capital (animals, plants, minerals and fossil fuels) that is worth more than the manmade capital (roads, factories, appliances) added by ‘growth’.

— Herman E. Daly

The notion of a steady state has meant different things at different times in history. To the traditional or classical economist, the steady state takes the biophysical dimensions of the planet — including population and available resources — as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective conditions.

— Herman E. Daly