By Max Kummerow
Sir David Attenborough remarked in a 2011 presidential lecture to the Royal Society that “every environmental and social problem is made more difficult and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more people.” Wherever women’s status has improved and societies modernized, he said, birth rates have fallen. He begged his audience to “talk about population.”
By Herman Daly
Disaggregating reported GDP growth to reveal the differences in growth by income class, as per the Schumer-Heinrich Bill, is a good idea. After all, telling us, say, that average income grew by 4% is not nearly as informative as telling us that the richest ten percent received the entire growth increment while the bottom ten percent suffered a decline in income.
Herman Daly explains how we can use prices now as tools for rationing a fixed predetermined flow of resources, rather than determining the volume of resources taken from nature, or the physical scale of the economic subsystem.
Herman Daly offers an original take on the tired debate of “too many people vs. too much consumption” — a spot-on reframing of a critical issue.
Valuation of ecosystem services is an important, but insufficient, step toward achieving a sustainable economy.
The assumption that a bigger economy must always make us richer is pure confusion.