[ He redefined economics, forging a way forward that does not
include the destruction of our environment for economic gain]
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HERMAN DALY: A ECONOMIST WHO FUTURE ECONOMISTS — AND SOCIETIES —
WILL DARE NOT IGNORE  
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Sam Pizzigati
November 8, 2022
Counterpunch
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_ He redefined economics, forging a way forward that does not include
the destruction of our environment for economic gain _

Herman Daly teaching at Vanderbilt University in 1969. Arguing
against economic growth, he said, was like poking “a big hornets’
nest with a short stick.”Credit..., The Daly Family

 

Great thinkers, down through the ages, have regularly had to watch the
movers and shakers of their epochs shrug off their core insights. One
of our contemporary great thinkers who suffered that fate — the
84-year-old economist Herman Daly — died just last week.

Daly did not, to be sure, go totally unrecognized
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In 1996, he won the “alternate Nobel Prize,” Sweden’s annual
Right Livelihood Award.

“Herman Daly redefined economics, forging a way forward that does
not include the destruction of our environment for economic gain,”
Ole von Uexkull, Right Livelihood’s executive director, noted
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Daly passed.

But Daly’s death has, by and large, gone unnoticed. No obit has so
far appeared in the _New York Times_ or _Washington Post_ or any
other major mass publication.

Despite this media disinterest, Daly most certainly _does_ figure to
get much more attention in the years ahead. Why? The life’s work of
this University of Maryland emeritus professor just happens to
directly link the two supreme  challenges of our time: environmental
collapse and economic inequality.

Herman Daly pioneered the discipline of ecological economics. He gave
us a vision — in works always
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clear, conceptually compelling” — of a “steady state economy”
that featured
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and qualitative improvement instead of perpetual growth” sure to
overload and overwhelm our environment.

We need, Daly believed, to reject “having ever more” and revolve
our lives instead around having _enough_, and that means sharing, a
virtue today, he observed
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“class warfare.” But real “class warfare,” Daly noted a decade
ago, “will not result from sharing, but from the greed of elites who
promote growth because they capture nearly all of the benefits from
it, while ‘sharing’ only the costs.”

And how could we arrive at a “steady state,” at an economy that
develops _qualitatively_, not _quantitatively_? At one point,
Daly spelled out [[link removed]] a
“top 10” list of policies to move us forward in that direction.
High on that list: a call to limit the range of inequality by setting
both a minimum _and_ a maximum income.

Daly first advocated for this coupling in his 1991 book _Steady-State
Economics_. He contrasted his “min-max” to the conventional
economics notion that the poor don’t get hurt when the rich get
richer and may actually end up benefiting from the expenditures
wealthy people make.

“I argue to the contrary,” Daly wrote in his 1996 book _Beyond
Growth_, “that there is a limit to the total material production
that the ecosystem can support, and that it would be clearly unjust
for 99 percent of the limited total product to go to only one person.
I conclude, therefore, that there must implicitly be some maximum
personal income.”

What maximum would be most appropriate?

“A range of inequality permitting a factor-of-ten range difference
between the richest and poorest would serve the need for legitimate
differences in rewards and incentives,” Daly explained, “while
respecting the fact that we are persons-in-community, not isolated,
atomistic individuals.”

“No one is arguing for an invidious, forced equality,” he added.
“A factor of ten in inequality would be justified by real
differences in effort and diligence and would provide sufficient
incentive to call forth these qualities.”

But Daly didn’t see anything “sacred about a factor of ten” and
felt a factor of twenty could serve just fine. And he saw the Income
Equity Act proposed by then Minnesota congressman Martin Sabo —
legislation that would limit the tax deduction a corporation could
take for executive compensation to no more than 25 times the income of
the corporation’s lowest-paid worker — as a step in the right
direction.

A point of reference: Last year, the Economic Policy
Institute reports
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American corporate CEOs averaged _399 times_ the pay of our
nation’s typical workers.

_Sam Pizzigati__ writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy
Studies. __His latest book: __The Case for a Maximum Wage_
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Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: __The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970_
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Stories Press). _

Note: Obituaries appeared in both the New York Times and Washington
Post after publication of this article.

* Herman Daly
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* economists
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* ecological solutions
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* Income Inequality
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