Ecologies of Scale

Herman Daly; Benjamin Kunkel

INTRODUCTION TO DALY

If fidelity to GDP growth amounts to the religion of the modern world, then Herman Daly surely counts as a leading heretic. Arguably the preeminent figure in ecological economics, a field he did much to establish, and the author in his many works of perhaps the most fundamental and eloquently logical case against endless economic growth yet produced, Daly was born in 1938, in Houston, Texas. Then and now the headquarters of the US oil industry and epitome, after World War II, of unplanned urban sprawl, Houston fell victim in summer 2017 to Hurricane Harvey. The lumbering storm, bred on the climate-changed waters of the Gulf of Mexico, doused the city’s built-over wetlands and tangle of freeways in fifty inches of rain, at a cost of scores of lives and tens of billions of dollars. Prophets can’t expect hometown honours, but Houston in particular, among American cities, has flouted Daly’s warnings against what he calls ‘growthmania’ or, more neutrally, ‘growthism’. The irony—the heretic hailing from the citadel—took some time to ripen, as Daly explains below. Once he perceived that economic growth could not long continue without forfeiting its ecological basis and moral justification, he achieved a series of breakthroughs. Steady-State Economics (1977) rivals Keynes’s programme of full employment or Hayek’s free-market catallaxy in its visionary force, while exceeding either of these in the scale of its implications. But this was only so much abstract reasoning. Recognizing that GDP could not be displaced as a measure of social well-being and progress without some equally empirical alternative, Daly in 1989 proposed, in collaboration with the Whiteheadean philosopher John Cobb, an Index of Sustainable Human Welfare to assess the wealth of nations. More recently, he has insisted on the theoretical possibility and historical actuality of ‘uneconomic growth’, which ‘occurs when increases in production come at an expense in resources and well-being that is worth more than the items made’. The world today is faced with a pair of contradictory terrors: the economic fear that growth will soon come to an end, and the ecological fear that it will not. Daly has conceived a form of society removed from this perplex, though not any historical dynamic that would clear the path to it.

Ecologies of Scale

May I start by asking about your background—your upbringing and general formation. Did your parents care much about politics? Were there any influences that contributed to your ideas on ecology and economics?

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. My father had a little hardware store—he’d had to quit school around the eighth grade, at the start of the Great Depression. My mother had worked as a secretary, but the boss insisted she leave when she was pregnant with me; this was 1938. It was hard to make a profit from running a hardware store, so my parents were mostly concerned with making a living; larger questions weren’t really on their mind. I worked in the store through high school and college—I took my first degree at Rice University, in Houston. Most of the people who came in were carpenters, plumbers and so on. In a general way I supported the Democrats, because they seemed more in tune with the working class—the people I identified with from my family background and from working in the hardware store. My high school was on the edge of the richest part of town, and there were kids from all sorts of backgrounds, so I got a picture of the whole spectrum—the rich, the middle class and the poor. I didn’t really like the upper-class way of life. From my parents, there was the general influence of the church, of course, on moral issues.

What particular church was it?

Evangelical and Reformed—the denomination of Reinhold Niebuhr— subsequently merged with the Congregationalists to become the United Church of Christ. It was the church that German immigrants to Texas brought with them, and that was my mother’s family background. Even as a five-year-old, singing songs like, ‘Jesus loves the little children, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight’—you could look out at the world and see that this was not the way things were being done: ‘Why can’t I play with the black kids, then?’ So the realization that the way things are in the world wasn’t necessarily the way they should be came rather early. But it wasn’t from formal education—it was more from a Sunday School song.

Houston is an oil town, a boom town, where the population has exploded—it’s now the fourth biggest urban area in the United States. Do you think that had an influence on your thinking about growth and ecology?

The home of Enron, too. I got a solid dose of the new rich and the boom mentality, and felt a certain revulsion against that excess. But what influenced me more was travelling down through Mexico with a friend, after I graduated from high school—this was in the mid-fifties—and seeing the poverty there. A lot of the customers at the hardware store were Mexican and Central American, so I kept on practicing the Spanish I’d picked up when I got home. The experience of the poverty in Mexico, as well as in Texas, was what turned me on to economics. I thought it would be a useful thing to study—development as the cure for poverty.

Was it at Rice that you first encountered the classical political economists’ writings on the stationary state—Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill? These would have been part of the curriculum at the time, though I don’t think they would be now.

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INTRODUCTION TO DALY

Ecologies of Scale

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