Value the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics

Author: (USA) Daly (USA) Townsend Majer
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-03-01
Features: This book was initially a signal of the paradigm shift occurring in economics. It was first published in 1973 under the title Towards a Steady-State Economy. Faced with the problems of economic underdevelopment and unequal wealth distribution, sustained economic growth had long been regarded as the universal remedy. This book explores various explanations for the changing effectiveness of this remedy. In its initial conception, it sought to prove two things:
1. Economic development would ultimately be constrained by the universal and inevitable scarcity of environmental resources in both their sources and processing, as well as by the laws of thermodynamics, because the technical efficiency of resource utilization cannot be infinitely improved with increased investment.
2. The limitations on economic growth are closely tied to the daily choices people make regarding resource consumption/wealth accumulation/pollution patterns. To illustrate this unavoidable and universal scarcity issue, people initially examined the economy from the perspectives of ecological science, ethics, and whether it is morally justifiable. As a result, this collection of essays emerged, incorporating many diverse viewpoints and proposing the rationality of restoring a concept favored by classical economists from Malthus to Mill: that a steady-state economy is not only inevitable but also reasonable, given the unintended consequences caused by the 20th-century dogma that a healthy economy must be one of perpetual growth.