 Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. I'm your host, Aristeed from Metabolism of Cities and in this podcast we interview researchers, thinkers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impacts in a socially just and context-specific way. On today's episode I am very fortunate to receive one of the researchers that has helped laying the foundation for most of my colleagues and people we have received on this podcast work, as well as Pines. He has co-developed and used two essential analogies that are essential for many concepts that we see today which are let's say post-growth, de-growth, circular economy and these analogies are mainly steady-state economics and ecological economics. My guest today is Herman Deli, which is a emeritus professor at the University of Maryland. He was a senior economist at the World Bank for six years and we'll spend a minute to discuss about that and he was the the author of steady-state economics but also the editor of the all-star anthology towards a steady-state economy with all-star authors such as George F. Rogen, Boulding, Schumacher, Meadows and so many others. He is also the co-founder of the academic journal Ecological Economics and he has received countless awards that I cannot list them all here because there are just too many. So without that being said, welcome Herman to to this podcast and thank you very much for your time. Thank you Aristides. It's good to be with you. Of course everybody knows you so perhaps I'll just change this question to how do you generally present yourself to colleagues or to a conference? Well I suppose I'm known mainly as an ecological economist or somebody who's worked in steady-state economics but I feel and to be fair and honest I have to say that I started out life as a neoclassical growth economist that was so I had to change my mind and so I tell them you know that my original idea was I would like to increase I was to fight poverty through economics and economic efficiency and that and it was only gradually that I became dissatisfied with what I learned in ecological economics what what I I mean with what I learned at standard neoclassical economics uh where did that dissatisfaction come from? I suppose it came partly from uh well largely from being a student of Nicholas Georgeski Rogan who had also made a break with standard neoclassical economics. It came also from reading Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring which opened my eyes to many inner relations between the economy and the natural ecosystem and it also came from teaching economics in northeast Brazil which is sort of the poorest region of the western hemisphere and witnessing their problems of population growth and resource and environmental balance and uh and the and the fact that economics really had very little to say about those things oh I'll add one more thing about introducing myself when um as an undergraduate I uh I liked humanities and ethics and philosophy and I liked science and like many many practically all undergraduates I had to choose a major you know which way was I going to go I couldn't do both so I didn't um I didn't really want to give up either one either the humanities or sciences and it seemed to me then that the social sciences were in between and I could keep both to some degree and economics looked like the most useful to me at least of the social scientists so I chose economics because I thought it had one foot in the world of philosophy and ethics and the other foot in the world of science and biology and physics well that turned out to be wrong that was a mistake as I went on with economics I found out that it had both feet in the air I mean but there was and so that became sort of correcting my sophomore era was sort of became my life's work over a period of time it seems that this critique uh exists still today so even young undergraduates or post-graduates of economics still are dissatisfied with these with very similar actually critiques of a neoclassical economics and from what I read and and and so one of your initial published work where you said you were trying to fight poverty in some context I think at the very beginning you worked on on Mexico and even the Uruguayan economy and I can imagine that you saw perhaps economy as a way as an activist perhaps as an activist movement or a way to to to yourself be an agent into alleviating poverty at poverty first and then environmental degradation or yes that's exactly true I uh I was looking for a way to be useful in the world and it seemed to me that growing up in Texas and having some familiarity with Mexico and Latin America I saw poverty there and of course in Texas too and they thought well it would be a good thing to uh economics is supposed to be about wealth and the distribution of wealth and that would be a good subject to to help me fulfill some my little uh hope for a road in the in the world and so that's what led me into into and connected me with uh to begin with with Latin America yes so so you said just before you always had this desire to to see many topics or many disciplines at the same time and you had to choose economy although one of your very early articles the on economics as a life science you already seem to bridge uh life sciences and social sciences and economic sciences and from what I read in the in the book of Tim Jackson you were somewhere in Brazil when you handed in the where you mailed actually the the the first draft to the the Journal of Political Economy um and it was published more or less at the same time as the speech of Robert Kennedy on on post growth and on the the criticism of of growth back in the day um so and if I understand well one of the the the people that's also inspired Robert Kennedy was uh Rachel Rachel Carson uh Galbraith and and these elements did you see was there a such a small movement or was there like a an exciting time at a short period of time where post growth was actually even in politics uh and and that pushed you more or less to to write this uh this article well uh I think so yes um I wrote I started out writing that article I've just had just been interested in biology for a long time and it seemed to me that uh as we might talk about later there there are many parallel ideas in economics and and they're both fundamentally deal with a life science with life the life process that within skin life process for biology the outside skin life process for ecology and the relation so that that idea was what I tried to to flesh out um just as an aside writing that article when I was teaching in northeast brazil you know I I guess I have to explain to this was back in 60 66 67 at that time that was before computers and when you wrote things you wrote them out longhand and before you submitted them you had to get them tight and send it so that was a bit of a problem uh there in northeast brazil because I was writing in english and none of the secretaries knew english and so they but but they were very you know they tried and they gave me a manuscript tried to copy it and I had to go through it make hand copies so it was I submitted something which is a bit messy and and it was actually uh to my surprise accepted and so that was good and I remember the the editor at the time told me that one of the main referees was uh frank knight a very famous economist and and his comment was I don't think it would disgrace the jpe to publish this that's quite a compliment I can imagine but but there was something else your question that I think I forgot yeah it was a bit um it must have been quite um quite exciting to live in this tiny sliver of time where even in politics uh post growth was actually that's right that's right this was the time in which number one I could publish in the jpe I can't publish there anymore also I could publish in 73 in the american economic review can't do that anymore and in the university of chicago's journal economic development cultural change I could publish there that I don't think would work anymore so there was this period in the early 70s and to where I thought there was a real opening and um so that was encouraging and that was a period in which you know my professor mr george escargan he was elected a distinguished fellow of the american economics association so on the basis really of his of his past work in mathematical economics and statistical methods and so on so but that wouldn't happen again today so so that there was a period in which there wasn't open and so my idea and those of many of the people I worked with and colleagues was this uh we don't need something new we can stay within the discipline of economics and redirect it and that's what we really wanted to do we didn't want to form a splinter group and and be marginalized we wanted to influence the mainstream and so we tried but the change that we wanted was just too big the pill was too big for the mainstream to swallow and so we were we were marginalized and and started our own journal ecological economics our own society the international society for ecological economics it had to be international because there were too few people and uh and that was um and that was how I think sort of got started in that way so there are many things I'm curious already about all of this why do you think so it seemed that there was you said there was an opening um did you do do you know why it was there a closing as well did did you see it like a creative moment where it was okay we're gonna diverge and from now on the we can no longer influence mainstream but we need to build a body of science on our own uh and compete with it somehow um I that's a good question I uh I guess what happened well I can tell you a story that doesn't really answer your question but I think it it indirectly it does um where I really realized the difference was when I worked for the World Bank and I went to the World Bank it was later it was 1988 and I think it was in 92 that the World Bank every year or so the World Bank comes out with a world development report in which they study something and and sort of give it up to all the countries you know well this was the first time that they were ever going to tackle the subject of uh environment and develop sustainable development you know this was the Brundtland Commission report made sustainable development they regurg and everybody had to do sustainable development even though no one knew what it meant and so this was the World Bank's attempt to uh to do that because the United Nations has sort of almost mandated it well I was not on the team that wrote the report because I was in a different area but I was on the committee that reviewed the successive drafts of the report and made comments so I and this to me was the most important thing in in the bank at the time and so I was very eager to do it and uh the first draft landed on my desk and I yearly read it and the first pages that came across the diagram and the title of the diagram was the relation of the economy to the environment and uh what was the diagram there was a right a rectangle with an arrow coming in and the rectangle was labeled economy and the arrow coming in from the left labeled inputs and an arrow exiting to the right labeled outputs and that was the picture of the relation of the of the economy to the environment and um so I wrote some comments on that I said well this is a good this is a good beginning we've got we've got the economy but there's no environment you know the the inputs are coming from nowhere the outputs are going nowhere and uh we need to view the economy as a subsystem of a larger system the environment the ecosystem the biosphere and uh if we do that then we could say what are these input these inputs represent depletion and that's a cost and we have to consider it the outputs represent the pollution outputs back to the environment represent pollution and that's a cost we have to consider it and then we have to talk about the possibilities of recycling waste outputs uh to inputs what are the limits of recycling how far can we go in that direction and we have to look at the fundamental input to to the total environment biosphere of solar energy the solar flux and the exiting of the heat uh what controls that balance and how hot this is a world have to get before uh before it reestablishes uh and uh an equilibrium and on and on like that many and so this this is what we should really do well later on uh the second revision comes through and I look at it and the second revision shows the same picture only this time the rectangle has a larger rectangle drawn around it like a picture frame uh with no label no change in the discussion no change in the text it was the basically the same they simply ignored you know so I said the same thing over again you know in a slightly more emphatic way and and then the third revision came across my desk no more diagram they had omitted the whole idea of drawing a picture of the relation of the economy to the environment it was too difficult it was too difficult to swallow it was too big a pill to swallow why because once you draw the economy as a subsystem of a larger system well the larger system is finite non-growing materially closed you threaten yourself with questions to which you do not have a good answer namely how big can the subsystem be relative to the total system what limits it you know so for and how how long can growth continue of the subsystem exactly what is growing well the world bank is devoted to growth that's its reason to be and so that was a question that could not be dealt with because I mean they're not stupid they know the basic facts that I just outlined but they're not stupid either about what the world bank is for and so there was just no way to to do that so I think somewhere along the line that's what limp that's what killed the the progress I mean that kind of realization that hey this is really serious if you can't grow forever or can't keep on growing how what are we going to do about poverty oh my god we're going to have to redistribute and share that's that's that's politically impossible what are we going to do about population growth oh we're going to have to have a policy of some sort oh well that's impossible uh what are we going to do but well about about all the environmental destruction that we how are we going to re uh fix the damage we've done to the environment well we're going to have to lower consumption of resources particularly fossil fuels well that's so I think that just killed it at the intellectual political level at a more personal level I was teaching at Louisiana State University I got along just fine there for 15 years and but over that time towards the end the I was moving in one direction you know economics is a life science limit so for it and the rest of the department was moving in the opposite direction more classically you know because that's that's what's valued by the profession so the difference got so great that I could no longer really um have a graduate student because you have to have five members of the committee approve a dissertation and you know uh I couldn't I couldn't put together that and so it was so I thought it was very unfair and I was unhappy with the way they treated some of my students so that was when I uh began to look around and and shortly after that moved to the world bank yeah I can imagine as you say so perhaps at the very beginning everybody was excited at least with the analogy and how far we can go with this analogy and how creative we can we can or how we can be inspired by life sciences and as soon as we got to the practicalities of thing and to the policy making of things and to the politics of what it implies to say that economics are a life science and if we should therefore apply quotas and all that then everybody backed off immediately saying whoa whoa whoa perhaps this is way too much for us to to understand and to put into practice yes I think that's exactly it and um you know and then there was the I guess to put another shine another light on it the world bank wanted to fight poverty and you know so did I and uh and this was saying oh you made this is really going to be a lot harder you're what you're saying is going to make fighting poverty a lot harder you know are you are you against poor are you in favor keeping people poor you know why don't you want growth you there there must be something wrong wrong with you uh you're anti-human and so forth so that kind of thing came out too and um so of course you have this diagram at the at this article on economics as a life science where you compare a living organism to economics with an ableism catabolism and then production and consumption with inputs and outputs and of course this is something that me and my colleagues working on urban metabolism looking in cities as living organisms we have very similar diagrams and very similar analogies and of course over time so urban metabolism wise was used by Marx at the very beginning let's say or the metaphor of metabolism uh then it was used by schools of sociologies it was used by abel woolman by many different people to mean different processes as well of of cities and phenomena of cities and so i'm wondering at uh what did you find so appealing in this comparison between this life organism and the economy i mean you could say that it is a life system but there is also an analogy to it so i can you said also the importance what is the importance of analogies within science how did you see that and why do you think was was it so important to to start making analogies yeah um well i don't know i guess i just always liked analogies uh in fact some some psychologists even consider the ability to recognize analogies to be one of the criteria of intelligence so you're a bow leverage yeah and um well it just seemed to be evident to me well let's see where shall i put it well go back go well here you you're very kind to invite me on this program to talk about the circular metabolism and it's rather an ungracious of me to criticize the very concept of circular oh please do please do but this is uh this was something that i think is important because you know words matter and uh how how did we get started really with ecological economics well the first thing if you go back to the standard economics textbook the neoclassical first chapter what do you get you show them the circular flow diagram firms and households firms produce goods for households households consume the goods households supply factors of production to the firms and it goes around and around and around and george eski rogan called it a circular merry-go-round you know nothing comes in from the outside there's no need of resources nothing exits to the outside there's no need for waste of resources it just goes around and around well okay i'm you could say when that was when that uh neoclassical economics developed the world was the economy was very small relative to the biosphere and so it made some sense to consider resources and the rest of the biosphere that's basically infinite i mean resources were not scarce uh waste absorption capacity was not scarce economics is really interested in scarce and what scarce and how to use it best so so abstracting from what was not scarce and that was defensible uh i think it was wrong but it was still defensible well then you when you have a period of growth you know uh when something grows it gets bigger it's kind of bolding emphasized and the economy got bigger and uh you know when i was born and back in 1938 the world population was uh i think it was two billion and now it's right at eight almost eight billion so the world population has quadrupled in my lifetime you know i don't think that's ever happened before in a single lifetime and uh i don't think it'll it's likely to happen again so hopefully so you see you see this tremendous so now we we no longer live in an empty world it wasn't only population of course that quadrupled i mean i mean energy consumption even vastly more than quadrupled and and consumption of all materials went up by enormous amounts i don't have the numbers before me now but it's but but the point is the world moved from relatively empty to relatively full and what used to be the limiting factor in production namely capital and late and labor well we increased the population we had a whole lot more late labor became not so limiting capital we accumulated became not so limiting the flow of resources and the absorptive capacity of the environment became the limiting factors but economics did not recognize that i mean we still kept on with the old cob digress production function production as a function of capital and labor no resources involved at all the measurement in gdp we kept on considering natural resources in c2 in the ground as of zero value the the only value we counted of natural resources with the labor and capital cost of extracting them so with admiral consistency both macro and microeconomics ignored nature and the natural envelope that contains the economy was by implication we continued to think of that as infinite and not scarce and so that's um i i think was is the thing that we have to change and and it is changing people are i mean people are not stupid they're recognizing this and we're we're paying the cost and that brings brings us but economics is still and at the theoretical level in the textbooks it's still very slow to bring that into the picture and and so to to counter this omission of of nature you proposed well you you base your work a bit on steward mill's work to to propose steady state economics whereas you say it is a constant stock of people and physical wealth um could you perhaps explain why you think this macroeconomic policy would contain us in the the dangers of overshooting but also serving societal needs simultaneously yeah i i guess my first thought on that subject which really occurred to me more well um i saw the steady state i in john steward mill i've read john steward mill as an undergraduate and it just kind of went in one ear and out the other i didn't but then when i was in northeast brazil i i really saw the importance of the rapid growth of population at that time um it slowed down a lot since then but at that time it was you know over three percent and and there was real problem distribution and and the uh and it was the poor class that was having the large number of children the rich class packed practice contraception so you had a differential fertility that was quite large which meant that uh you had a super abundant supply of labor at low wages and a great reinforcement to the to the capitalist system in the inequality and distribution anyway all of those things occurred and i said well so i said let i began to look at the demography to think more about demography in the study demography and naturally came very early across the demographers model of a stationary population and i said well this is this is rather interesting the stationary population the way the way they define it uh and it had many many many nice features about it um and then two things i said well we have not only a population of human bodies which are physical but we have populations of extensions of human bodies which are also physical you know well uh cars and bicycles are an extension of our legs you know this uh computers an extension of our brains and eyes and ears and so forth but all these are physical things and so they have uh birth rates that is production rates and they have death rates uh the pre physical depreciation rates so you have once again the biological and within skin and outside skin you have what applies to the population of humans applies very much to the population of extensions of humans the physical population and so if you're going to have a steady state if you're not going to grow forever and have a steady state so then you have to have birth rates equal to death rates uh well uh you can have birth rates equal to death rates at a high level of births and deaths or at a low level of births and death and it makes a big difference because if it's if it's at a low level of births and deaths then you have long life expectancy if it's at a high level you have short life expectancy similar thing with artifacts commodities wealth if if you have a if you have an equal production and depreciation rates at high levels and you have short lifetimes and durability and so forth well that's looking at it from the point of view of maintaining the stocks in a steady state uh our economy based on g and p maximization g and p is a flow and so you want to maximize the flow that is maximized production uh that sort of leads you into short life expectancy and other odd things so i begin to worry about that anyway i'm sorry i'm rattling on here let me turn it back to you to straighten out the conversation here no no i think well i wanted to to understand you know so what what was so appealing to you into the steady stage economics because of course it starts with stocks and flows even if that is an economic process it's also an ecological process so even if uh there were um um parallelism between life sciences and economics it wasn't well formulated in these terms so i was quite interested to to figure out you know you also mentioned that there is also these three factors that we should always consider in steady states uh economics but also in any type of economy such as um scale distribution and allocation um and of course this brings out not only a macroeconomic um quota or how much we should consume but also how well it is distributed and to whom so i think what you bring here with uh steady state economics is and perhaps also john steward mill also mentioned that back in the day it's still an increase of well-being and an increase of the good life within some limits of course and also stay within the planetary boundaries yeah exactly that was uh kind of the big distinction between john steward mill and the other classical economists who also thought of the of a steady state economy and the uh you know um adam smith and david ricardo and smith they they also thought that steady state would be a natural result of the laws of economics the law of diminishing returns iron law of wages the law of differential rent you put all that together and it and the landlord class unproductively absorbs the surplus and you stop growing and and your wages your working class goes down to subsistence wage and so it looks like a pretty lousy world and they and they thought so they did not like the idea of a stationary state john steward mill recognized the limits and he said well you know uh if we're not if we're not going to totally override nature and and every every wildflower plowed up as a weed in the name of improved agriculture then then you have to come to terms with the idea of non-grocer studies and he of course made said that doesn't need to be bad because we redirect our energies away from all of this crampling and on everything and growing growing to qualitative improvement of life to true development as opposed to growth so that qualitative improvement replaces quantitative increase as as our mode of progress and and he thought that would be a much better world and that struck me as quite a reasonable a reasonable thing to pursue and I really enjoyed the the moment where you discuss about distribution so saying that we we could have quotas or caps in terms of both depletion or pollution quotas and caps let's say and ideally it should be the state that then distributes it to individuals or to private companies which I don't I don't know whether it would ever be a good idea that it is private people having these quotas and then selling them to to other people so I think there is the only reasonable way is still to to have it being owned by the public but then I wanted also to ask you is there an interesting link that we could do linking depletion and pollution together because often we we can put a price into depletion quotas because we know how much is available more or less but for pollution ones well you know it's especially for atmospheric pollution well now with the 1.5 degrees and how much carbon we have left we could have a price there but you know would it be interesting to systemically join pollution and depletion simultaneously absolutely and this is what I think this is a big difference between ecological economics with the concept that bolding introduced one kind of throughput which is basically metabolism again you know the the food the digestion and the waste the throughput flow so that can that physically connects the pollution with pollution so that if you if you limit the pollution then in a gross aggregate sense you're also limiting pollution and if you limit pollution and in the gross sense you're also limiting depletion of course there's plenty of room for qualitative difference say one doesn't perfectly control the other but in a corollary of that I believe is that for policy purposes sometimes it's easier to try to limit depletion and sometimes it's easier to limit pollution in general I think it's easier to limit depletion because depletion is more concentrated there are fewer mines and wells than there are smokestacks and garbage can so it's just physically easier and that's the point of lower entropy in the flow so it's easier so that's that's one thing now there was something else I wanted to add to that well was it that's one of the problems in getting old as you forget what I'm going to say oh well I guess earlier you you talked about the scale distribution and allocation that just to tie that in scale I originally defined in terms of the stocks of people and artifacts and capital following the classical economists you could also find scale you could say that scale is defined in terms of the flows the throughput flow necessary or no the the throughput flow that the environment can support but on the both the depletion and the pollution side what is the maximum let's say our optimal throughput and then the stocks grow to whatever level can be supported that is probably a more operational definition I think than than constant stocks because flows are easier to measure than stocks and I think it's and it's the flows that directly influence the environment so I I think that that's what should be done also I've come over the years or actually from rather early on and then I backed away from it the the idea that that you should limit quantity rather than try to try to fix quantity rather than price I mean the ecosystem doesn't care about prices it cares about quantities and so if you fix the quantity then that's ecologically safer now there's going to be errors and omissions if you fix the quantity then given a demand curve you're also going to fix the price but the demand curve shifts around all the time so they're going to be errors and omissions from estimating demand well let the errors and omissions work themselves out in price changes because that doesn't really affect the biosphere whereas quantity changes do so fixing and and furthermore I think it's much safer to fix quantities and let let a kind of market system determine the price because if you go directly with the price and to increase efficiency then you also get the Jeven's paradox where resulting increases in the efficiency from higher prices may cause increased use of the resource rather than lesser use so for those reasons I I think we should go into the direction of and that's why I like cap auction trade system better than tax severance taxes or carbon tax but I've far waffled on that back and forth because I do recognize that people say well you know the severance that the tax on carbon is much easier than the than the auction cap auction trade system all you have to do is is change the algebraic sign of the the police and quotas and you're there okay that's a good argument I accept the weight of that and so maybe it's maybe it's a necessary intermediate step to go first for price control fixing price and trying to control quantity by limiting the price but ultimately I don't think that's going to work because you've got a whole monetary system that can counteract the price you you put a price on carbon you make carbon more expensive and then the Fed turns around through quantitative easing and finances the very tax increase that you you've labeled I mean that could happen so so that's an area where there's a lot of room for debate and discussion and an experiment I think but I do favor I do I do favor the quantity limit yeah well as you say ecosystems do not have price let's say are not basing anything on price but there is in steady-stake economics and perhaps this has changed over the over the years uh you have the second half of of the of this whole um let's say I don't know if it's a theory or an analogy works on population um and while as we've said I think population is now stabilizing we don't know at what it's going to stabilize if it's going to be 10 billions less or more but let's say it's it's getting more stable we're not going to see the same type of increase we saw over the last century and so I'm wondering um or I can imagine back in the day and perhaps still today this might be a more polarizing uh parts of of the steady-state economics uh I wonder I wonder how do you how do you respond to critiques or how did you um I can imagine when you were in northern northern western Brazil you saw elements that were in favor of population well not or you know birth control or um or um you know limiting let's say uh giving birth preserve um you know I don't know how we call them in English but uh contraception pills and all of that um do you still and you also mentioned that Kenneth Boulding had another way to to propose of limiting population more redistributive in such how do you see that in the in contemporary times this issue of population yeah you're quite right to raise that it's uh it is a difficult and controversial area it's also an area where the environment the whole environmental movement has changed uh because it started one of the very first things in in the I guess 1970 or late 60s uh was a zero population growth as a movement and um so so the early environmental movement put principal emphasis on population growth and then then it dropped out it said no uh they were criticized by that they were told that they were uh you know anti anti human and so forth and also of course it's very difficult how they're difficult problems you know how do you how do you do it what's what's the way and um and then and then the immigration question came along well population can grow either by uh births greater than deaths or by in migrants greater than out migrants and so the the United States uh at least considers itself a a nation of immigrants we can come back to that exactly what that means or should mean and uh and that this was very much opposed to the whole history of the United States and our progress and our values of being welcoming and so all of that uh really put the damper on any consideration of population and of course then a more reasonable in my opinion notion was that hey we've got the demographic transition as a natural as a sociological phenomenon when people uh get richer they tend to have fewer children I mean there's a substitution effect going on here people substitute cars and refrigerators for children as as they get richer and that increases their standard of living and that's what standard of living really means is is more cars and refrigerators and that sort of goes along with fewer children because you have to get the money from somewhere okay those um I think that's kind of what happened and what pushed and then there was well encapsulated in the slogan which was was heard uh um development is the best contraceptive you know just don't think don't think about population think only about increase and you'll get you'll get population control as a bonus you don't have to deal with directly well this is this was the idea and it's still I think very much part part of the degrowth movement they they don't want to talk about it at all and particularly the immigration side I think that's going to change you can take that as a prediction but it hasn't changed yet um okay I'm rattling on because this is this is a difficult area um the bolding plan now that was that's an interesting thing I was interested in that both from the point of view of population bolding realized very soon after he'd said it I think that this was uh this was a non-starter politically it wasn't going to go anywhere in terms of a way of controlling population people just reacted very badly towards even those who favored some form of population limitation interestingly at the same time I mean just just think for a minute about the logic of the control program he was asking the question how do you um if populate if the society wants to limit its population growth its size or if you want to reduce the population like China was trying to do what's the best way to do it how can you do it in a way that you really control aggregate births with an equality in the right to reproduce in an efficient way that reflects individually and so bolding said well you know in his logical sort of mind thinking well one way you can do you could figure out what is what is the number of births that gives you uh population stability given the death rate whatever the death rate structure is uh how many births per well 2.1 is you know sort of what it will be okay so you give every every couple every woman because women are the limiting factor uh that many rights to reproduce so you've distributed equally this new asset right to reproduce you've treated everyone equally in terms of distribution but people are not equal in terms of their desire to have children or their ability to have children so you've allowed you then allow for people who cannot have children or don't want to have children to give or sell or exchange their right to reproduce with someone else who wants to have more yeah so you respect allocative efficiency at the same time that you have focus first on distributive equity distributive equity so in a way it goes right back to this scale distribution allocation first you set the scale what's the number of population well it's 2.1 children first we'll give you a constant population at at the level let's say you want so you fix the scale first then you say well who who owns this right well we'll distribute it equally everybody who can use the right owns the same amount and then so that takes care of distribution equity of this and then the third efficiency of allocation you recognize the differences in desires and ability to have children and allow reallocation of the distributed rights in that way okay that's exactly the logic behind the cap auction trade system which is applied to commodities or resources rather than to birth licenses so to me it was very interesting that boldings logic applied very excellently I think to to the questions of resource limitation and it would apply to population limitation if people accepted it more well people don't want it they're not ready for it it's not part of the culture that it's very risque to to kind of propose that I can imagine that yeah it is already back in but you know then you say but you look at china for example you know china they they decided that for a while at least they back off from it now but that they wanted to really seriously live in the population so they went to a one child system one child that means you don't have any brothers or sisters you don't have any uncles aunts or cousins that's a massive social change and and I would think something like boulding system was would would not be nearly so drastic in terms of its but people people have a real antipathy towards any connection between a market and reproduction they don't they look at it as buying and selling children you know as opposed to you know buying and selling a legal right to reproduce and so that's that really puts a block on it now as I it's I mean there's a lot of things I don't understand and here's here's another one which is given the the large antipathy towards anything like a connection between markets and and reproduction implicit in boldings plan look at what's actually happening in the world right now at least in my country you have young women from elite colleges selling over on the market young men selling sperm for money you have doctors combining the sperm in the oven for a fee in vitro implanting it into the rented womb of a surrogate mother to carry out the gestation of a child now that is a far more drastic imposition of the market and prices into reproduction than building so you tell me I mean what's going on here I I don't I have trouble putting the two things together in practical terms for the time being I think it makes sense pragmatically to say no one should not push something like the bolding plan on reproduction because for right now at least things are moving in the right direction increase increase education of women and development is lowering the birth rate okay let's let's let that happen and let's stick with the neo the neo Malthusian view which is contraception I mean you know Malthus Malthus was against contraception as a as a preacher in the Anglican church and he said you have late marriage that's the way to control part of late marriage in continents outside of marriage well the neo Malthusians Francis place and others came along he said no no that's never going to work what you want is early marriage and contraception within marriage and so that that debate still continues today indeed I must say I can't help it you know I come from Texas which is right on the on the border with Mexico in Texas right now abortion is being outlawed even though it's constitutionally guaranteed within the United States and the contraception because they plan parenthood which mainly pushes contraception and abortion only abortion as a as a backup if necessary they're trying to defund planned parenthood in the state of Texas my home state across the border in Mexico which traditionally was much more Catholic and pro-natalist they just they just accepted legalization of abortion so I mean the world changes in ways which I cannot predict at all and so I have to be have to be a little well let's just wait and see what happens I don't know what's going to work out on that the other thing I guess I could say is that it is possible to to reduce population growth I mean China proved that they were willing to pay the price Japan also proved it without any drastic imposition from the top after world war two Japan lowered its popular its birth rate by just social pressure just it was just I mean nobody decreed it but it was just decided socially collectively somehow that you don't have more than two children and the and the pressure was very great socially so anyway I don't I don't know what's going to happen on that yeah I can imagine this is such a thorny topic and I think for most of people within the de gross movement or in many other movements the it's a matter of prior making priorities and as you said with the current way things are working out it seems that first we should work on equity in terms of resource use or affluence and then only ever consider population as as a topic to to act upon because today you know we really there is just a slow percentage of people that are damaging or over consuming the planet or some companies and you know we would be far more efficient when you said as well beforehand on the depletion quotas to act upon a small amount of people rather than the entire population on population I guess as the words then today in terms of priority that that seems to be far more efficient I would say yeah yeah I certainly agree with you that we would we have to work on well certainly in the United States for example the problem is much more one of over consumption than of over population so that's what we need to tackle first if and also the countries that have let's say a population development are the ones that are consuming the less so you know there's a very imbalanced question whereas you know steady-state economics if we were to apply steady-state economics per country let's say yeah it would be very interesting to see how you know thus these physical stocks both in terms of you know physicals in terms of resources but also in of population how the imbalance happens within the planet and well within a national economy rather than at a global economy yes I've never had the courage to think of a global steady-state system I've only thought of it in in the national in national terms and with the hope that uh if it if you can make it work in in a nation then that can be copied and eventually become global global in the sense of all all nations independently moving towards their own system of maintaining population as opposed to a of a world government trying to control world population that that I see as a chimera but I the other thing I suppose I would still say that one one should think about population not only from the point of view of the desire of parents to have children being fulfilled but also from the point of view of the welfare of the child being born you know I think most of us would say well you know it's uh although the rich are messing up the world uh from the point of view of the child it's sort of better to be born rich than to be born poor and if you're going to be born poor uh maybe fewer fewer births of the poor might have something you might say something in favor of that not only for the point of view of the child which I think is very important but I think there are very few parents anywhere who have already had three or four children and are poor who actually want more and so this I think we should really focus very much on the Planned Parenthood contraception you know movement I mean put aside bolding's plan for a while let's just talk about purely voluntary contraception for with the consequence of lowering population where people actually want fewer births which I think is quite prevalent in many parts of the world yeah of course the choice is not always there in many contexts that's the whole difficulty in the situation well that is what I saw in northeast Brazil which I'll just go back for just a second there uh there's the the lower class at the time I emphasize this was in the 1960s it's much different now although there's still a big difference in terms of class fertility the lower class was having on average like eight children the upper class on average maybe four okay so this meant that it was hard to see how wages were ever going to rise with this kind of situation and in fact you go back to Marx well you know in uh I guess the word proletariat as used by Marx proletariat Marx by for Marx had meant the working class non non owners of the means of production who must sell their labor power to the capitalist in order to live you go back before Marx into latin uh pro proletariado comes from pro proling which means children so the proletariat was the class that was useful to the roman republic for the purpose of having children to do the dirty work yeah and the upper class the patricians they you know they practice contraception or whatever but the but you couldn't that wouldn't work for well I saw I saw remnants of that in northeast brazil in the sense that you know who who were the there were some people who were in favor well let me back up the only population control that was being recommended by anyone was voluntary family planning through the uh banistar familiar group in that time in in brazil who was opposing banistar familiar which was just voluntary family planning well there was the catholic church which was rather split on the subject but officially they they were against contraception there was the oligarchy which had an interest in cheap labor you know there it doesn't do for foxes to advocate small families for rabbits you know you want to keep keep who you're exploiting and then there was a kind of collectivist nationalist ethos which is more understandable that country is greatest which has the most people and in particular in brazil with the settling of the amazon brazil has always felt that this was this was very vulnerable to being taken over because of its underpopulated area that people from the rest of the world would take over the amazon and indeed there were proposals that the state of israel should be formed in the amazon well that didn't fly but other people have made all sorts of proposals for sort of the am using the amazon as if it were common property for the world to decide how to use the brazilians don't like that a bit and so they wanted to populate it and and so that was part of the reason well i'm i've talked too much about that so let me just back let me just turn it over to you to follow in other ways no no i mean it's uh you know we we always go back to this discussion and so there is not a i don't know how to answer it that's why i was curious to know how you've been responding to it over the years i want to um to perhaps continue with this uh element because you mentioned how back in the 70s population was uh was a hot topic with uh also one of the persons that contributed to to the book towards the state economy uh paul eric was a population bomb and all of that and i'm wondering how this book perhaps forged your um interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity because you had so many experts coming from different fields uh and well you of course said that you always were curious from different disciplines and you always wanted to bring them together perhaps to make sense for economy so i'm wondering how you know how the the birth of ecological economics came about this interdisciplinary slash sometimes trans disciplinary field that that really looks at the interdependence between human economy and inconsistence uh how did how did this was it through discussions how did this uh you decided to to work on this and to develop this uh journal and then society as well yeah um well that's a good question because that book that you met that anthology which includes all of us i used that that was uh my basic teaching uh document i used that in teaching and uh uh the way that came about to my mind what what motivated me was a kind of a vision which somehow i had picked up partly from well from interest in ethics and religion and also interest in science um was what i i think in the book in the book in the introduction there's something called the ends mean spectrum which i start out at the top well it started started with ultimate means what you know what is what is that which is good which does not derive its goodness from being instrumental to some other good which is sort of the maximum good things serve it it doesn't it is that which is being served that's the criterion by which you by which you decide whether a hierarchy of other good things you know ethics is sort of putting good things in order what comes first what comes second what comes third uh well something that something has to go in first place you know if you have priorities and so that's the that's sort of the vision though the ultimate end we can only see that dimly but we can't come up with a ethical ordering of intermediate ends unless we have some perception however vague of a more ultimate end that they're serving so i think that's the problem with ethics so i'll put that at the top of the ends for me that's the service then on that basis you get a ranking of intermediate ends good things which you want to serve which economics and then in the middle then you have uh then let's go down to the bottom what about what about means what is it that's going to serve that in what's what's the ultimate means what do you need to satisfy any end in human life what is that which we use up in order to satisfy our ends but cannot ourselves create what do we take as given and and have to use up to set well it's low entropy matter energy it's the laws of thermodynamics at the basis of the of the thing so the big question then i mean to look at it in a huge way is how do you use the low entropy matter energy ultimate means so as best to serve the ultimate end in the spectrum well that's such a huge question nobody we can't think about it so you break it up into parts you use the low entropy matter energy you convert that into intermediate means into into machines and commodities and things that serve your ends so you have technology as the conversion of low entropy matter energy ultimate means intermediate means that can directly serve our needs so we then the application of the relationship between those intermediate means and our intermediate ends is i call political economy that's where economics comes in allocation distributions scale and then at the ultimate ultimate end the question of ranking our hierarchies of intermediate ends which intermediate ends do you emphasize first that's the question of ethics and so okay that vision then of that ends means spectrum was the organizational principle of that anthology because one section dealt with the the means and the ultimate ultimate means and then you know and then another section with the ultimate end and so far as people can say much about it and then the other was economics so that was the that was the attempt to pull that together you know of course it was it was not i mean it was not a complete neat separation into the three parts there were some overlaps and some things that maybe didn't fit as well as they should have but that was the idea behind that and of course making it an anthology i was not capable of dealing with such a big a big topic all by myself and so that was why i really wanted an anthology and i would really want to choose people who i think had had made contributions in that area and that was that was that was what went on in there and i used that for a long time at teaching and students seemed to like it and how did that translate into the journal or the field of ecological economics well was it step by step or how was it a happy accident or what were the behind the curtains well you know i guess it was partly uh what was going on is i was not of course the only person thinking along these lines and that way there were many other people who had you know you mentioned earlier who had been dissatisfied with the way economics was going and wanted to bring in ethics or technical matters and and uh and particularly ecology so i guess one very fortuitous thing while i was at lsu this was the uh they have a coastal studies institute which has um some ecologists and and they just and they hired a young energy ecologist robert kistanza came to lsu and bob kistanza had been a student of ht odum in the energy school and there was another ecologist there uh john day who had also been a student of odum who was at lsu and these and and uh so we formed a little group which uh saw saw the importance of bringing ecology and economics together you know and because you could ecologists have sort of long been kind of playing the game of let's pretend man doesn't exist and look at the ecosystem and how it behaves by itself and economists had been playing the game let's pretend that nature doesn't exist and just look at man and we we just all all of us and many other people i guess you know came to the conclusion this was not the right way to do it and we needed to bring these two together and so we started that and in particular kistanza and i said well we need a society and a journal and and we found a like-minded person in Juan Martínez Salier in Spain who had independently been thinking in this for a long time and uh and bob had contacts with sweden uh unmarie unmarie yansen and ben ui yansen and others in sweden and so that bob and so that little group really was the nucleus which began to form the journal ecological economics and um and and the society and as i said before it had to be international because there were so few of us in each each nation and then later on we uh as it grew then there began to develop national subunits you know so you had the europe or the european the us the canadian the brazilian and and so that's been a development from there um and we were very very fortunate i must say because uh i think i one really has to give a whole lot of credit to bob kistanza for not only his his intellect but uh his energy his entrepreneurial energy and and putting these kind of things together and uh and so that i think it and then there were a whole lot of other people who came in and and over the years uh contributed to to this and again going back the other way of course there was a tremendous we all drew from the writings of kenneth bolding georgiasco rogan and i and also from galbert john kenneth galbert you mentioned earlier and uh and ht odum and the energy the energy theorists so all of that kind of came together and we said this makes a whole lot more sense than neoplasical economics and and and by that time we had sort of realized that we were not going to have a great influence on neoclassical economics itself so we're going to go in a separate way um i asked around asking what were some questions some good questions i should ask you uh from the ecological economics movement but also from other people that uh that we discuss and i received a question from julia stanburger she's an ecological economist herself sure and she said um what is perhaps your proudest moments in terms of kick starting ecological economics as a field what you regret and perhaps what you have done differently in hindsight uh well um i think if well we've already talked about the the concept of economics as a life science and the uh allocation distribution and scale question and um things like that and um well in a way although i was totally unsuccessful i'm sort of proud of making the effort for six years to influence the world bank uh you know i mean it's we really uh need to not just preach to the choir but try to uh deal with the world and and i must say that within the world bank there were some excellent people i mean my uh mentor and colleague there robert the late robert goodland um i think accomplished a number of things in the in the environmental direction within the bank but as far as i can tell those have not survived uh maybe they will be revived and maybe things are leaving the bank uh but it basically the six years i spent there i thought we were making progress for a while and there were some things i was proud of but it didn't really work out uh what were the other questions so what were you proud of what you would regret in developing this community and perhaps what you have done what you would have done differently in hindsight yeah i guess um in terms of the name well we've already talked about that i won't go back i suppose um you know one thing i i suppose i regret but not entirely is that um you know when you disagree i i've noticed this i i had a student uh who had a remarkable capacity for disagreeing without getting mad and he would be you know just just the nicest person and but totally in disagreement on something but not the least bit angry now i have never been able to do that when i when i have a fundamental disagreement my temperature rises i tend to i tend to get angry and that's that's a defect i suppose that's a character defect but if i could um if i can you know uh figure out a way to uh to have been a little less abrasive and not gotten so angry in some discussions uh i i would do that on the other hand i'm not sorry i i mean you do have to push be a little pushy sometimes because well for example take georgiaski rogan his critique of production and the production function particularly of of robert solo and stiglitz and so forth he made that a very reasoned uh critique they simply ignored it they just did not reply they ignored it for 20 years 20 years and and so i i did get mad about that and i did you know sort of instigate try you know become rather aggressive aggressive and say look here you know you really deserved you really have an obligation to make some effort to answer this and so i mean that's that debate still going on people are still discussing that now but um but i guess if i could have just uh i think it's a very great personal quality to be able to disagree strongly because we have very big issues of difference in the world without getting angry and i'm i'm still trying to improve on that regard and um yeah sorry go on uh and i uh well you were gonna ask some other questions so let me let me back off and let you bring no i was just i was just wondering um well the last bit of her question was as well what do you think is the most important now and you also uh in the the chapter that you sent me gave me a how steady state economics is positions with some current policies uh one bottom up which would be the growth and one more top down that might be circular economy so i'm wondering in all of this complexity how if you had to pinpoint some elements to move forward what do you think is the most important topic or subject to to move forward well these are these things you take steady state economics you take circular economy degrowth i guess the dumb economics and all these things have a have sort of a common insight and we all ought to really be working together and uh and so in particular you know there's the uh the degrowth and the steady state i like uh brian check uh he's suggested the what well let's just take the slogan uh degrowth to a steady state you know because the degrowth people they don't believe in degrowth forever they're not stupid uh and the steady state we're not advocating steady state at an at an excessive current level that can't possibly be maintained we're not stupid either and so you know i think we we should uh you know come together recognize whatever differences i think there's a complementarity there because the degrowth is more of a theoretical policy orientation starting from classical economics and and and dealing with the problems of growth on the ground whereas the as i understand it the degrowth movement is more of a grassroots movement that started out from the real problems of growth and and is uh sort of working its way up to an understanding of of theory and policy uh so you know there's there's lots of room for collaboration and and so i hope that happens that's one of my hopes and in the meantime we have to you know argue with each other about terminology and things you know like i i don't like circular because the economy is really not circular and so i'm just going to be stubborn about that but while recognizing that people who use that term you know they they advocate a lot of very good policies that i agree with so yeah if they're not circular for the right purpose or a goal as well it's not uh as if it's gonna help i mean it's agnostic to growth sometimes circular economy so that doesn't help with the cause to be honest right right um so herman i i've already took a lot of time uh of you i'd like to to finish with two questions i generally ask which is do you have any project for the end of this year in terms of writing in terms of reading something that you want to work on for for this uh for this end of the year and perhaps do you have any good books or or movies or articles that you would like to suggest oh well um you know i'm i'm i'm retired and uh i do try to sometimes write some more i do keep you know occasionally writing little things i don't have any big projects because my my life expectancy is is not that long but um uh and i must confess to you that very often i write something i'm work i work on i'm gonna write it and then i go back and read something that i wrote 20 years ago on the same topic and i i think gee what i said 20 years ago is better so maybe it's time for me not to uh not to to do that as for books yeah i'm just um i'm happy to say thursday i don't know if you can see this economy station in french yeah french translation of my 2014 book which i was very pleased to see and the thing i'll mention uh that i it's not my work it it's partly it's reflecting me but uh i don't know if you can see let me see that ah yes his life and ideas yeah the uh herman daly's economics for a full world his life and ideas by peter victor so it's a kind of a biography it is a biography but it's mainly focusing on ideas and development of ideas and things rather than personal foibles and uh and things of that nature so i think he's peter has done a very nice job of taking a number of trees that i and others have tried to plant and putting them together in a forest in a way that makes more sense and peter victor is just you know is a very excellent uh canadian ecological economist and has made many kinds of bizarre those are the two things that i'll mention um have i seen any good movies or things well you know on tv i want the david attenborough series on the you know for a long time david attenborough just showed pretty animals and didn't worry about didn't seem to be too worried but but you know now he's become very worried and and he all of the beauty of nature that he loves and has presented for so long he's really quite worried about it and he not only uh you know talks about the economic problems but also includes population even the population uh because uh well just one more point on that contested subject i recently uh saw some interesting figures you know the i can't remember now the exact numbers but the um got this from um um the biomass of total biomass of vertebrates in the world something like 90 percent over 90 percent now is human biomass plus the biomass of cattle and pigs and chickens that we immediately turn into our own biomass very quickly so this is real anthropocentrism this concentration of pulling together all some such a large percentage of the biomass of all vertebrates you know into just the human sphere so i think we're we're faced with again the population question we're going to have to in some way reduce the physical size of the human niche within the overall ecosystem and that will be a very difficult thing to do and uh you know i hope we hope we're able to one other thing i'll say uh that i that's impressed me very much recently was uh Pope Francis uh encyclical Laudato Si i thought that was really quite good of course he omitted population issues but everything else about it i thought was really wonderful and uh so i i thought that was very good well thank you so much for taking so much time to have this conversation with me to get some insights and behind the scenes of all of your work and all of the collaborators that you managed to have over those years so thanks so much for Herman for all of your time thank you RC i really appreciate your good questions thank you and thanks everyone for listening until the end we'll see you on the next episode continuing discussing about these complex topics thanks everyone we'll see you soon