Herman Daly

By Sara L. Austin, EdD

Herman Daly is emeritus professor of the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He earned his Ph.D from Vanderbilt University. Daly served as Senior Economist for the World Bank’s Environment Department. With collaborator John B. Cobb, he designed the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which they recommended as a better metric of economic health or growth than Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which fails to recognize key markers of economic health.

He is perhaps best known for his work as an ecological and Georgist economist, and as editor of Toward a Steady-State Economy, a seminal anthology published first in 1973, and revised in both 1980 and 1993. He has received a number of awards for his work, including the Blue Planet Prize, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science, the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and the Right Livelihood Award. In 2008, Adbusters magazine named him their Man of the Year.

His published works include a textbook, now in its second printing, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications, many books, and numerous articles, such as Economics for a Full World, published in 2015. He has also published academic essays about his research and work, including From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy.

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