[Marxism] A kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics

[Barry Brooks <durable@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.utne.com/1995-01-01/HermanDaly.aspx

Herman Daly is turning economics inside out
by putting earth and its diminishing natural
resources, instead of 'economic man' and
market relations, at the center of the field.
In For the Common Good and other books, Daly
traces the ways in which environmental
degradation is changing the meaning of growth
and other key ideas of 'the dismal science.'
A research scholar at the University of
Maryland and a former World Bank officer,
Daly gives a compelling theoretical edge to
the tenets of environmental faith.

'I'm no genius,' says economist Herman Daly,
'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.'

This modest self-assessment aside, many who
know his work are convinced that Daly's way
of asking naive, honest questions--in four
books and more than one hundred
articles--amounts to a kind of reverse
Copernican revolution in economics--a
revolution that, to quote one reviewer of
Daly's For the Common Good (1989, written
with John B. Cobb Jr.), '[puts] the earth and
its inhabitants back at the center of the
economic universe.'

A former professor at Louisiana State
University, a six-year employee of the World
Bank (with which he parted more or less
amicably--'I was tired of the pomposity,' he
says), and currently a research scholar at
the University of Maryland, the 56-year-old
Daly brings the careful, fluent lucidity of
an experienced teacher to his exposition of
what's wrong with what some have called 'the
dismal science.' What's wrong are some of the
most basic assumptions of economics.

'For the last two hundred years,' he says,
'the dominant goal has been to make economies
grow. We've finessed everything else,
including justice, telling ourselves that
we'll just grow more and then there'll be
more justice. But we are on a collision
course with biophysical reality.'

Daly's neat and compelling formulation, ozone
depletion, the death of fish stocks, runaway
population growth--the whole congeries of
environmental degradations--are showing
economic conventional wisdom up as
self-contradictory: 'We say we need to clean
up the environment; to clean up the
environment we need to be richer. But maybe
getting richer is actually making us poorer.'
The reason? The world economy is far larger
with respect to the biosphere than it was
during the age of the classical economists.

'The old textbooks saw an economy as a
circular flow of value from households to
firms back to households, via production and
consumption,' he explains. 'They abstracted
out the environment completely, and that
wasn't stupid at a time when economies were
small compared to ecosystems. But now, with
growth having gone on for so long we're
actually spending our natural capital. It's
reached an insane point.'

Classical economics also abstracted the human
being into homo economics--economic man, a
creature defined primarily as a pursuer of
self-interest. But for Daly no economy can
serve human beings if economics refuses to
see the need for cooperative endeavor and the
building of a collective good--community, in
a word. At the same time, as Daly writes in
For the Common Good, 'it is important to
think of the community served by the economy
as enduring indefinitely through time....The
industrial economy is only a part of what
Wendell Berry has called the Great
Economy--the economy that sustains the total
web of life and everything that depends on
the land.



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