John de Graaf’s latest film, Econoclast: Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth, is a short, earnest, and intense tribute to a tall, soft-spoken, and rather non-confrontational man. It is much deserved. Daly, who passed away at the age of 84 in 2022, was a quietly persistent advocate of reframing economic thinking in terms of ecological priorities. While he was not the only modern thinker to reject the mantra of growth and seek instead to promote a “steady-state” ideal, he was one of the very few trained economists able to see past the expansive materialism of his own profession and attempt to practice economic thinking in a more humble register. It’s both appropriate and curious that this stolid, distinctly un-radical polio survivor (it cost him his left arm as a child) found himself, through the 1970s and 1980s, associating with environmental radicals and non-comformists of many types: because it was they, and not those who formed the majority of the economics profession (most of whom treated Daly rather dismissively), who were able to see the problem of growth.
Of course, all organisms—both biological and social—grow; development towards the fulfillment of one’s creation, towards one’s telos, is both inevitable and a natural good. But when human technology and human hubris, combined with the profit motive, generate the tools and the incentives to grow far beyond the environmental context of one’s creation, and find ways to warp or exploit the resources within that context which made possible one’s own creation and maintenance in the first place, you’re not just taking action which is wicked, you’re taking actions which are actually, when one looks at the math correctly, unprofitable. In his wonderful book with the theologian John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Daly laid out this argument multiple times, particularly when he discussed the difference between oikonomia or household management, the root of our whole concept of “economics,” on the one hand, and chrēmatistikē or capital accumulation—in other words, the pursuit of increase regardless of whatever economic goods or practices those increases would impact—on the other:
The problem can be phrased as:
When is it economically rational to kill the good that lays golden eggs?” Any exploited species (fish, timber, etc.) managed on a sustained-yield basis is like a goose that lays golden eggs in perpetuity. Folk wisdom says never kill it. Present-value maximization, however, says to kill it under certain circumstances, namely when the rate of growth of money in the bank is greater than the reproduction rate of the exploited species (and the cost of capture relative to the price is not prohibitive). The owner of the goose has two alternatives: keep the goose and sell the golden eggs in perpetuity; kill the goose, sell it, and put the money gained in the bank and earn interest in perpetuity. If the interest income stream is higher than the golden egg income stream, then kill the goose. Alternatively, the equivalent calculation in terms of present value would be to discount the income stream of the golden eggs at the rate of interest, and if that discounted sum is less than the price you could get for the cooked goose today, then you kill the goose. Of course, the fact that individual capitalists are made better off by killing the goose and putting their money in a faster growing asset does not alter the fact that society has lost a perpetual stream of golden eggs (For the Common Good, 2nd ed., pp. 155-156).
To a fan of humanitas like myself, there is something odd with attempting to capture moral truths while speaking the language of economics—but it is undeniable that there is, for those who have ears to hear, a real power in the work of someone like Daly, who was able to articulate an economic vision premised upon qualitative development not quantitative growth. For him, matters of fairness, humility, and justice could be, and should be, elaborated in reference to the oikonomia of our planet: the stabilizing of resource stocks and flows, the limitation of derivative and other predictive and speculative markets, the management of industrial development. All of that sounds like a recipe for ecosystem-wide governmental regulations, and Daly did, for a time, work for the World Bank. But as de Graaf’s film lays out clearly, he ultimately parted ways with that global institution, in part because he simply couldn’t see how assumptions about global economic integration wouldn’t in part end up justifying a leveling approach to economic development that would prevent the kind of limits which his own ecological approach presumed as necessary.
Daly’s sense of sustainability made little room for those who assumed the eternal plasticity of production, for those who thought a natural capital stock (say, farmland) could always be replicated with a different one (say, laboratories in which food can be grown in a test-tube). In a 1990 article, one of his most important pieces of scholarly writing, Daly laid out three guidelines for any kind of growth or development to be sustainable over the long term: renewable resources must be appropriated no faster than they can be regenerated; the wastes generated from that appropriation cannot be greater than the ability of the surrounding environment to naturally assimilate them; and non-renewable resources should be used no faster than renewable substitutes can be developed to replace them. Imagine how different the carbon-intense industries—transportation, housing, agriculture, and more—we depend upon today would be different if Daly’s words had been taken seriously!
Well, thankfully there are people like filmmaker John de Graaf who are still taking the ideas of gone-but-not-forgotten prophets like Daly seriously. Thank you for this short film, John, and for keeping reminders of those who push back against the gospel of growth available for all to see.
