Herman Daly

Herman Edward Daly (July 21, 1938 – October 28, 2022) was an American ecological and Georgist economist and professor at the School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park in the United States, best known for his time as a senior economist at the World Bank from 1988 to 1994. In 1996, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "defining a path of ecological economics that integrates the key elements of ethics, quality of life, environment and community."

Daly was born in Houston, Texas in 1938. Before joining the World Bank, Daly was a research associate at Yale University, and Alumni Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University.

Daly was Senior Economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, where he helped to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. While there, he was engaged in environmental operations work in Latin America. He is closely associated with theories of a steady-state economy. He was a co-founder and associate editor of the journal Ecological Economics.

In 1971, Daly was inspired by his professor, Nicholas Georgescu-Reogen, and promoted the Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which conceptualizes the economic process as consumption.

In 1989, Daly and John B. Cobb developed the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which they proposed as a more valid measure of socio-economic progress than gross domestic product.

Daly is a recipient of an Honorary Right Livelihood Award, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 1992 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, the Sophie Prize (Norway), the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute, and was chosen as Man of the Year 2008 by Adbusters magazine. He is widely credited with having originated the idea of uneconomic growth, though some credit this to Marilyn Waring who developed it more completely in her study of the UN System of National Accounts. In 2014, Daly was the recipient of the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on October 28, 2022, at the age of 84.

Daly was the editor of a long-lived and influential anthology, originally published in 1973 as Toward a Steady-State Economy, and twice revised (under different titles; see bibliography), in 1980 and 1993. Writers and topics in the original 1973 edition included:

• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen on The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
• Preston Cloud on mineral resources
• Paul R. Ehrlich and John Holdren on population
• Leon R. Kass on bioethics
• Kenneth E. Boulding on the "Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth"
• Garrett Hardin's 1968 article, "The Tragedy of the Commons"
• Daly on the steady-state economy
• Warren A. Johnson on the guaranteed income as an environmental measure
• Richard England and Barry Bluestone on ecology and social conflict
• William Ophuls on political economy ("Leviathan or oblivion?")
• E. F. Schumacher on Small Is Beautiful (title of his book, also published in 1973)
• Walter A. Weisskopf on economic growth versus existential balance
• Daly's essay, "Electric power, employment, and economic growth: a case study in growthmania"
• Jørgen Randers and Donella Meadows on the carrying capacity of the environment
• John B. Cobb on "ecology, ethics, and theology"
• C.S. Lewis on The Abolition of Man (an extract from his 1943 book of the same name)

Daly died on October 28, 2022, at the age of 84.