Envisioning a successful steady-state economy
First online: 1 October 2018
Herman
Daly
Herman
Daly is Emeritus Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland.
Previously he was Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Environment Department,
and before that Alumni Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University. He
is the author of Beyond
Growth (Beacon Press,
1996), and From Uneconomic Growth to a
Steady–State Economy (Island
Press, 2014). He was co-founder and Associate Editor of the journal, Ecological Economics (Elsevier).
An
earlier short version of this essay was published in Daly 2014.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DOI: 10.3197/jps.2018.3.1.21
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Daly, H. 2016. 'Envisioning a Successful Steady-State Economy'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 3(1): 21–33.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2018.3.1.21
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
There are two interacting types
of argument for a steady-state economy: its biopyhsical necessity, and its
ethical desirability. The first argument is made in terms of the finitude,
entropy, and physical maintenance requirements of “dissipative structures”
(populations of human bodies and their exosomatic extensions). The second
argument considers that the evolution of the human species is now
purpose-driven, no longer random, if indeed it ever was. Purpose introduces
value judgments of right and wrong regarding how our economy should relate to
the rest of creation – judgments ignored by both neoclassical economics and
neo-Darwinist naturalism.
It
helps to consider a prior question: how do you envision a successful Planet
Earth without continuous growth? That is easy to envision because it exists!
The Earth as a whole does not grow in physical dimensions. Yet it changes
qualitatively, it evolves and develops. Total matter on Earth cycles, but does
not grow. Energy from the sun flows through the earth coming in as low-entropy
radiant energy, and exiting as high-entropy heat. But the solar flow is not
growing. Nearly all life is powered by this entropic throughput of solar
energy. There is birth and death, production and depreciation. New things
evolve; old things go extinct. There is continual change. But the Earth is not
growing.
The
economy is a subsystem of the Earth. Imagine that the economy grows to
encompass the entire earth. Then the economy would have to conform to the
behavior mode of the Earth. Namely, it could no longer grow, and would have to
live on a constant solar flow, approximating a steady state – an exceedingly
large steady state to be sure, well beyond optimal scale. The economy would
have taken over the management of the entire ecosystem – every amoeba, every
molecule, and every photon would be allocated according to human purposes and
priced accordingly. All ‘externalities’ would be internalized, and nothing
could any longer be external to the all-encompassing economy. The information
and management problem would be astronomical – central planning raised to the thousandth
power! Long before such total takeover and complexity, the human economy and
the civilization it supports would have collapsed.
To
arrive at a vision that promises success we must discard some dead-end dreams –
especially the just-mentioned dream of internalizing all biospheric
relationships into the monetary accounts of the economy. To keep the economy
manageable we must limit its physical scale relative to the containing
ecosystem. The way to do that is to leave a large part of the ecosphere alone,
to limit our absorption of it into the economic subsystem – to keep a large
part of the earth ecosystem in
natura – as a source
for low-entropy matter/energy inputs and as a sink for high-entropy waste, and
as a provider of life-support services, including services to non human
species. Laissez faire takes on a new meaning – it is the ecosystem that must
be left alone to manage itself and evolve by its own rules, while the economy
is carefully constrained in aggregate scale to stay within the limits imposed
by the ecosystem. Environmental sources and sinks necessarily must be used to
support life and production, but the rate of use must remain within the
regenerative and absorptive capacities of the ecosystem. The metabolic
throughput from nature cannot keep growing. Limiting the physical throughput to
sustainable levels will, by lowering supply, effectively internalize the
external costs of excessive scale. Resulting higher resource prices will
improve the microeconomic efficiency of allocation.
Every
encroachment of the economy into the ecosystem is a physical transformation of
ecosystem into economy. Growth means less habitat for other species, with loss
both of their instrumental value to the ecosystem, and the intrinsic value of
their own sentient life. Clearly, in addition to a maximum scale of the economy
relative to the ecosystem, there is also an optimal scale (much smaller),
beyond which growth becomes uneconomic in the literal sense that it increases
environmental and social costs faster than production benefits. We fail to
recognize the uneconomic nature of growth beyond this point because we measure
only production benefits and fail to measure environmental and social costs. We
ignore the fact that ‘illth’ is a negative joint product with wealth. Examples
of illth are everywhere, even if usually unmeasured in national accounts, and
include: climate change from excess carbon in the atmosphere, radioactive
wastes and risks of nuclear power, biodiversity loss, depleted mines,
deforestation, eroded topsoil, dry wells, rivers, and aquifers, sea-level rise,
the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gyres of plastic trash in the oceans, the
ozone hole, exhausting and dangerous labor, and the unrepayable debt from
trying to push growth in the symbolic financial sector beyond what is possible
in the real sector.
Growth
all the way to the very limit of carrying capacity has an unrecognized
political cost as well. Excess capacity is a necessary condition for freedom
and democracy. Living very close to the carrying capacity limit, as on a
submarine or spaceship, requires very strict discipline. On submarines and
spaceships we have a captain with absolute authority, not a democracy. If we
want democracy, we should not grow up to the limit of carrying capacity – better
to leave some slack – some margin of tolerance for the errors that freedom
entails.
The
spatial boundaries across which we measure migration, and within which we
measure natural increase (or decrease) are principally nation states. For some
purposes it is the natural increase of the globe as a whole that is most
relevant, and we can neglect migration, both international and
“inter-planetary”, even though the latter (e.g. terraforming Mars), while
non-existent, is hailed by some as the future solution to overpopulation.
The
Beatles musically longed for a “world without boundaries”, and we all know what
they meant – a world of human solidarity, peace, and cooperation. Conflicts and
war usually involve disputes over borders. So why not just get rid of these troublesome
boundaries? Let’s have globalization – deregulated trade, capital mobility, and
migration – only let’s bless them each with the adjective “free” rather than
“deregulated”. Economists assure us that this will lead to peace and prosperity
among rational utility-maximizing individuals, minimally governed by a
benevolent World Democracy, dedicated to the post-modern values of secularist
materialism, eloquently communicated in Esperanto. This vision has its serious
appeal to many, but not so much to me. The anomaly of this cosmopolitan
globalism, is that it is really individualism writ large – corporate feudalism
in a global commons. Economic and political boundaries are necessary to achieve
both national community, and a global federation of national communities living
in peace and ecological sustainability.
Boundaries
are both biologically and logically necessary. Skin and membranes are organic
boundaries. Within-skin versus outside-skin is a basic boundary condition for
life. The skin boundary must be permeable, but not too permeable. If nothing
enters or exits the organism it will soon die. If everything enters and exits,
then the organism is already dead and decaying. Life requires boundaries that
are neither completely closed nor completely open. A nation’s borders are in
many ways very different from the skin of an organism, yet neither permits
complete closure or complete openness. Both must be qualitatively and
quantitatively selective in what they admit and expel, if their separate
existence is to continue rather than be dissolved entropically into its
environment.
Logically
boundaries imply both inclusion and exclusion. A world without boundaries
includes everything and is often therefore thought to be warm and friendly. But
“everything” must include the cold and the unfriendly as well, or it is not
everything. Also, without boundaries, B can be both A and non-A, which makes
definition, contradiction, and analytical reasoning impossible. So both life
and logical thinking require boundaries. While “a world without boundaries” may
be a poetic expression of a desired unity, and while it is possible to reason
dialectically with overlapping boundaries, it is a major delusion to think that
boundaries are not necessary.
It is
understandable, yet ironic, that the most fundamental and dramatic boundary of
all – that separating the earth from outer space – made clear in the iconic
photo of the earth from the moon – seems to have led to a reaction against the
very concept of boundaries on our spherical planet, since it is so obviously
one whole and unified thing. Yet that beautiful and powerful vision of overall
unity hides a world of diversity and difference. And we live on the earth,
within that complex living diversity, not on the dead moon with no need for
life-defining boundaries.
We
need a non-growing economy that strives to maintain itself in a steady state
within the boundary of its optimum scale. How to do that? Basically it is as
simple (and difficult) as going on a diet. Cut the matter–energy throughput to
a sustainable level by cap–auction–trade and/or ecological tax reform (taxing
resource throughput – especially fossil fuels – rather than value added by
labor and capital). We should cap or tax fossil fuels first. Then redistribute
auction or eco-tax revenues by cutting income taxes for all, but first and
mainly for the poor. A policy of quantitative limits on throughput
(cap–auction–trade) raises resource prices and induces resource-saving
technologies. The quantitative cap will also block the erosion of resource
savings as induced efficiency makes resources effectively cheaper (the Jevons
effect). In addition, the auction will raise much revenue and make it possible
to tax value added (labor and capital) less, because in effect we will have
shifted the tax base to resource throughput. Value added is a good, so we
should stop taxing it. Depletion and pollution are bads, so we should tax them.
Along
with a physical diet, we need a serious monetary diet for the obese financial
sector, specifically movement away from fractional reserve banking toward a
system of 100 percent reserve requirements. This would end the private banks’
alchemical privilege to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest.
Every dollar loaned would then be a dollar that someone previously saved,
restoring the classical balance between abstinence and investment. This balance
was abandoned by the Keynesian–neoclassical synthesis after the Great
Depression because it was thought to be a drag on growth, the new panacea. But
in the new era of uneconomic growth the classical discipline regains its
relevance. Investors must choose only the best projects, thereby improving the
quality of growth while limiting its quantity. This idea of 100 percent reserve
requirements on demand deposits was championed by the early Chicago School in
the 1930s, as well as by Irving Fisher of Yale, and probably first proposed in
1926 by Frederick Soddy, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and underground economist.
Also, a small, so-called ‘Tobin tax, on all financial trades would reduce
speculative and destabilizing short-term trading (including algorithm-based
computer trading on fraction of a second price differences) and raise
significant revenue.
What
about population growth? If I can manage to live for a few more years the world
population will have quadrupled in my lifetime (from 2 to 8 billion), and the
populations of other ‘dissipative structures’ (cars, houses, livestock, cell
phones, and so on) will have more than quadrupled. Limiting the populations of
artifacts by capping the metabolic throughput (“food supply”) that sustains
them seems a good policy. However, limiting food supply to humans is nature’s
harsh limit, Malthus’ positive check. There is also Malthus’ preventive check
(celibacy and late marriage), and the more palatable neo-Malthusian preventive
check of contraception. Contraceptives should be made easily available for
voluntary use everywhere.
More
people are better than fewer, but not if all are alive at the same time.
Population has a temporal as well as a spatial boundary. We should strive to
maximize the cumulative number of people ever to live over time in a condition
of sufficiency. That means no more people alive at the same time than could
enjoy a per capita resource availability that is enough for a good (not
luxurious) life, and sustainable for a long (not infinite) future. Exactly how
many people at exactly what per capita standard would that be? We do not know,
but we do know that it is not more people at a higher per capita consumption,
and that is enough to get started in the right direction. For a nation’s
population not to grow necessarily requires that births plus immigrants equal
deaths plus emigrants. A further condition, not logically necessary but
politically desirable, is that every birth be a wanted birth and every
immigrant a legal immigrant.
The
population problem should be considered from the point of view of all populations
of the human world – populations of both us humans and our things (cars,
houses, livestock, crops, cell phones, etc.) – in short, populations of all
“dissipative structures” engendered, bred, or built by humans. Both human
bodies and artifacts wear out and die. The populations of all organs that
support human life, and the enjoyment thereof, require a metabolic throughput
to counteract entropy and remain in an organized quasi-steady state. All of
these organs are capital equipment that support our lives. Endosomatic (within
skin) capital – heart, lungs, kidneys – supports our lives quite directly. Exosomatic
(outside skin) capital supports our lives indirectly, and consists both of
natural capital (e.g., photosynthesizing plants, structures comprising the
hydrologic cycle), and manmade capital (e.g., farms, factories, electric
grids).
In a
physical sense, the final product of the economic activity of converting nature
into ourselves and our stuff, and then using up or wearing out what we have
made, is waste (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971)[1]. Ultimately that is our “ecological
footprint”. What keeps this from being an idiotic activity–depleting and
polluting, grinding up the world into waste–is the fact that all these
populations of dissipative structures have the common purpose of supporting the
maintenance and enjoyment of life. As John Ruskin said, “there
is no wealth but life.”
Ownership
of endosomatic organs is equally distributed among individuals (absent
slavery), while the ownership of exosomatic organs is not, a fact giving rise
to social conflict. Control of these external organs may be democratic or
dictatorial. Our lungs are of little value without the complementary natural
capital of green plants and atmospheric stocks of oxygen. Owning one’s own
kidneys is not enough to support one’s life if one does not have access to
water from rivers, lakes, or rain, either because of scarcity or monopoly
ownership of the complementary exosomatic organ. Therefore all life-supporting
organs, including natural capital, form a unity with a common function,
regardless of whether they are located within the boundary of human skin or
outside that boundary.
Our
standard of living is traditionally measured by the ratio of manmade capital to
human beings–that is, the ratio of one kind of dissipative structure to another
kind. Human bodies are made and maintained overwhelmingly from renewable
resources, while capital equipment relies heavily on nonrenewable resources as
well. The rate of evolutionary change of endosomatic organs is exceedingly slow;
the rate of change of exosomatic organs has become very rapid. In fact the
collective evolution of the human species is now overwhelmingly centered on exosomatic
organs. We fly in airplanes and rockets, not with
wings of our own. This exosomatic evolution is goal-directed, not random. Its
driving purpose has become “economic growth,” and that growth has been achieved
largely by the depletion of the earth’s resources and pollution of its spaces.
Although
human evolution is now decidedly purpose-driven, we continue to be enthralled
by neo-Darwinist aversion to teleology and devotion to random processes.
Economic growth, by promising more for everyone, becomes the de
facto purpose, the social glue that keeps things from falling
apart. But what happens when growth becomes uneconomic, when it begins to
increase environmental and social costs faster than production benefits? How do
we know that this is not already the case? Studies suggest that it is.[2] If
one asks such questions, as Pope Francis is doing, one is usually told to talk
about something else, like space colonies on Mars, or unlimited energy from
cold fusion, or geo-engineering, or the wonders of globalization, and to
remember that all these glorious purposes require growth, in order to provide
still more growth in the future. Growth is the summum bonum – end
of discussion!
In
the light of these considerations, let us reconsider the idea of demographic
transition. By definition this is the transition from a human population
maintained by high birth rates equal to high death rates, to one maintained by
low birth rates equal to low death rates, and consequently from a population
with low average lifetimes to one with high average lifetimes. Statistically
such transitions have often been observed as standard of living increases. Many
studies have attempted to explain this correlation, and much hope has been
invested in it as an automatic cure for overpopulation. “Development is the
best contraceptive” is a related slogan, partly based in fact, and partly in
wishful thinking.
There
are a couple of thoughts I’d like to add to the discussion of demographic
transition. The first and most obvious one is that populations of artifacts can
undergo an analogous transition from high rates of production and depreciation
to low ones. The lower rates will maintain a constant population of
longer-lived, more durable artifacts. Our economy has a GDP-oriented focus on
maximizing production flows (birth rates of artifacts) that keeps us in the
pre-transition mode, giving rise to low product lifetimes, planned
obsolescence, and high resource throughput, with consequent environmental
destruction. The transition from a high maintenance throughput to a low one
applies to both human and artifact populations independently. From an
environmental perspective, lower throughput per unit of stock (longer human and
product lifetimes) is desirable in both cases, at least up to some distant
limit.
The
second thought I would like to add is a question: does the human demographic
transition, when induced by rising standard of living[3], as usually assumed, increase or decrease
the total load of all dissipative structures on the environment? Specifically,
if Indian fertility is to fall to the Swedish level, must Indian per capita
possession of artifacts (standard of living) rise to the Swedish level? If so,
would this not likely increase the total load (ecological footprint) of all
dissipative structures on the Indian environment, perhaps beyond capacity to
sustain the required throughput?
The
point of this speculation is to suggest that “solving” the population problem
by relying on the demographic transition to lower birth rates could impose a
larger burden on the environment, rather than the smaller burden hoped for[4]. Of course indirect reduction in
fertility by automatic correlation with rising standard of living is
politically easy, while direct fertility reduction is politically very
difficult. But what is politically easy may be environmentally ineffective.
Even
if we limit quantitative physical throughput (growth) it would still be
possible to experience qualitative improvement (development), thanks to
technological advance and to ethical improvement of our priorities. Some say
that we should not limit growth itself, but only stop bad growth and encourage
good growth. However, only if we limit total growth will we be forced to choose
good growth over bad. And furthermore, we can also have too much ‘good’ growth,
or as it is often called ‘green growth’. There is a limit to how many trees we
can plant as well as to how many cars we can make. Growth beyond optimal scale
is uneconomic growth, and we should stop the folly of continuing it.
If
you are an optimist regarding ‘soft’ technologies (for example, conservation,
solar) please have the courage of your convictions and join in advocating these
policies that will give incentive to the resource-saving technologies that you
believe are within reach. You may be right – I hope you are. Let us find out.
If you turn out to be wrong, there is really no downside, because it was still
necessary to limit throughput and consequently the ‘hard’ resource-intensive
technologies (for example, fossil fuel, nuclear) that are currently pushing
uneconomic growth.
Our
strategy so far has been to seek efficiency first in order to avoid frugality –
to keep the throughput growing. But ‘efficiency first’ leads us to the Jevons
paradox – we just consume more of the resources whose efficiency we have increased,
thereby partially or even totally cancelling the initial reduction in quantity
of resource used. If we impose ‘frugality first’ (caps on basic resource
throughput), then we will get ‘efficiency second’ as an induced adaptation to
frugality, avoiding the Jevons paradox. Blocking the Jevons paradox is an
advantage of the cap– auction–trade system over eco-taxes, although taxes have
the advantage of being administratively simpler. Both will work.
Is
this vision of a developing but non-growing economy not more appealing and
realistic than the deceptive dream of an economy based on continuous growth?
Who, in the light of biophysical reality, can remain committed to the
growth-forever vision? Apparently our decision-making elites can. They have
figured out how to keep the dwindling extra benefits of growth for themselves,
while ‘sharing’ the exploding extra costs with the poor, the future, and other
species. The elite-owned media, the corporate-funded think tanks, and the kept
economists of high academia, Wall Street, and the World Bank, all sing hymns to
growth in perfect unison, deceiving average citizens, and perhaps themselves.
Their commitment is not to maximize the cumulative number of people ever to
live at a sufficient standard of consumption for a good life for all. Rather,
it is to maximize the standard of resource consumption for a small minority of
the present generation, and let the costs fall on the poor, the future, and
other species.
Some
of the elite do not realize the cost of their behavior and will change once
they are made aware. Others, I suspect, are already quite aware and do not
care. The former can be persuaded by argument; the latter require repentance
and conversion – or revolution, as Marxists would argue. Probably this line of
division in some way runs through each of us rather than only between us.
Intellectual confusion is real and we need better understanding, but that is
not the whole story. The elite may already understand that growth has become
uneconomic. But they have adapted by learning how to keep the dwindling extra
benefits of growth, while ‘sharing’ the rising extra costs.
Indeed
why not, if we believe that Creation is just a purposeless happenstance, the
random consequence of multiplying infinitesimal probabilities by an infinite
number of trials, as taught by the reigning worldview of naturalism? I say
Creation with a capital ‘C’ advisedly, certainly not in denial of the
established facts of evolution, but rather in protest to the metaphysical
naturalism widespread among the intelligentsia, that all is purposeless
happenstance. It is hard to imagine, under such a vision, from where the elite,
or anyone else, would get the inspiration to care for Creation, which of course
naturalists would have to call by a different name, say, ‘Randomdom’. Imagine
calling on people to work hard and sacrifice to save ‘Randomdom’ – the blind
result of Epicurus’ atoms swirling and swerving in the void! Intellectual
confusion is real, but the moral nihilism logically entailed by the naturalistic
scientism uncritically accepted by so many, may be the bigger problem.
The
working hypothesis of scientific materialism, because it is so fruitful and
widely accepted, is also constantly tempted to imperially morph into an
Ultimate Metaphysics – albeit a metaphysics of Chance. However, explaining
everything by chance is close to having no explanation at all. Simply adding
Darwinian natural selection to Mendelian random mutation does not really
mitigate the dominance of chance, because the selective criteria of
environmental conditions (other organisms and geophysical surroundings) is
also considered to be a random product of chance. Mutations provide random
change in the genetic menu from which natural selection picks according to
adaptive survival odds determined by a randomly changing environment. Many of
us would insist that purpose is also causative in the physical world, and is
non-random. Given purpose, change in the environment is not entirely random,
and given modern genetics even mutation is no longer entirely random. However,
a historical animus against teleology of any kind leads Neo-Darwinsts to affirm
that purpose or free will is reducible to deterministic biophysics, and that
any direct subjective experience of purpose , or reasoned decision-making in
pursuit of a purpose, is an “illusory epiphenomenon.” It is hard to square
empiricism with such a cavalier rejection of our most immediate and direct
experience, that of purpose. If reason and purpose are illusory, then so is
policy. Logically Neo-Darwinist biologists must be even more laissez–fairethan
Neo-Classical economists. Economists at least recognize purpose as causative,
but traditionally refuse to pass ethical judgment (the individual consumer’s
purposes are sovereign). Biologists, or at least Neo-Darwinist materialists,
deny the independent causality of purpose and therefore must consider it
meaningless to pass ethical judgment on “choices” that from their perspective
could not have been otherwise.
When
contemplating the meaninglessness implicit (and increasingly explicit) in their
materialist cosmology, some scientists seem to flinch, and look for optimism
somewhere within their materialism. They invent the hypothesis of infinitely
many (unobservable) universes in which life may outlive our universe. They were
led to this extraordinary idea in order to escape the implications of the
anthropic principle—which argues that for life to have come about by chance in
our single universe would require far too many just-so coincidences. To
preserve the idea of chance as reasonable cause, and thereby escape any notion
of Creator, they argue that although these coincidences are indeed
overwhelmingly improbable in a single universe, they would surely happen if
there were infinitely many universes. And of course our universe is obviously
the one in which the improbable events all happened. If you don’t believe that
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you can claim that infinitely many monkeys tapping
away at infinitely many typewriters had to hit upon it someday.
Such
a Metaphysics of Chance precludes explanation of some basic facts: first, that
there is something rather than nothing; second, the just-right physical
“coincidences” set forth in the anthropic principle; third, the “spontaneous
generation” of first life from inanimate matter before evolution can get started;
fourth, the creation of an incredible amount of specified information in the
genome of all the irreducibly complex living creatures that grew from the
relatively simple information in the first living thing (neglecting that random
change destroys rather than creates information); fifth, the emergence of
self-consciousness and rational thought itself (if my thoughts are ultimately
the product of random change, why believe any of them, including this one?);
and sixth, the innate human perception of right and wrong, of good and bad,
which would be meaningless in a purely material world. Explaining these facts
“by chance” strains credulity even more than “by miracle”.
It
seems that a sustainable steady-state economy, as a policy of Creation care,
will not get far in a world dominated by naturalism. Naturalism denies the
premises underlying policy of any kind, namely that our purposes are causative
in the physical world, that Creation is not random, that our reason is capable
of understanding its order, and that we can distinguish good from bad. There
are many political roadblocks to a steady-state economy, but the most
fundamental barrier is the metaphysical dogma of naturalism that logically, but
blindly, aborts the possibility of policy of any kind.
[1] Waste is too neutral a term. In fact
annual production of goods that accumulate into a stock of wealth requires the
joint production of “bads” that accumulate into a stock of “illth”. The
negative terms are absent from the indexes of economics textbooks, and
unsubtracted in national accounts. A stock of wealth requires the joint
production of “bads” that accumulate into a stock of “illth”. The negative
terms are absent from the indexes of economics textbooks, and unsubtracted in
national accounts.
[2] See concepts of Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare, Genuine Progress Indicator, Global Footprint (Daly, 2015).
More recently The Lancet Commision on Pollution and Health finds that the
financial costs from pollution are some $4.6 trillion annually, about 6.2% of
the global economy (Landrigan et al 2017). If annual growth in Gross World Product
is around 2.2%, and cost due to pollution is 6.2%, then with reasonable
accounting we would have a net financial decline of some 4% annually. If that
financial decline represents welfare loss, and it surely does since we are
talking about reduced health and life expectancy, then the benefits of
production growth are being more than cancelled out by the costs of the
pollution generated by that growth. In other words, so-called “economic” growth
has become uneconomic at the present margin. So far that seems to have escaped
the notice of most economists!
[3] An earlier writer, defined standard of
living as “the number of desires that take precedence in the individual choice over
the effective desire for offspring” (Carver, 1924. p. 34) , thus anticipating
the basic idea of the demographic transition.
[4] This is an empirical question. Is fertility
being reduced to make room mainly for cars and refrigerators, or for parks and
leisure?
Carver,
T. N., 1924. The
economy of human energy, New York: Macmillan
Daly,
H. 2014, From uneconomic growth to a
steady-state economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Daly,
H., 2015. Economics for a full world,
[online] Available at:
<http://www.greattransition.org/publication/economics-for-a-full-world>
[Accessed 20 August 2018].
Georgescu-Roegen,
N., 1971. The entropy law and the economic process, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press
Landrigan,
P.J. et al., 2017. The Lancet commission on pollution and health [e-journal]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(17)32345-0